Paul McCartney Seeks New Image (1971)

 Paul McCartney Seeks New Image

By Judith Simmons

El Paso Herald Post

September 18, 1971

    The group watching the blaring roundabout in the Blackpool amusement park could have been any family on holiday, but the chap in the old jeans and white T-shirt was Paul McCartney, and the woman in a green maternity smock holding his arm was his wife Linda. She is expecting a baby in the autumn.

     With them were Linda's blonde daughter by her previous marriage, Heather, seven, and Paul and Linda's daughter Mary, who will be two this month. Mary has her mother's fair coloring and the large blue-gray, guileless eyes, which helped her father become the most loved of the four Beatles.

     Paul reminisced on the scene and the events of the holiday. "It was nice to be in Blackpool, having a bit of pleasure. We found a good little hotel where we weren't recognized. We got chucked out of a restaurant. We were told we could not be served because we were not properly dressed. Linda told the chap he was a fool, and we left."

     The caution he acquired with the group's breakup is apparently shed now. At 28, he is building a life and career with Linda, who is the same age. They are recording and composing together. Linda, like Paul, now sees experience in terms of song. He said, "This Blackpool trip gave me an idea for a song. I'm composing a tune in the raucous rhythm of the roundabout."

     The new band, the McCartneys' guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell, often rehearse at the McCartneys' isolated farmhouse home in West Scotland. Paul is fanatical that no one should interrupt him. He said, "I made my name as a musician-composer, and I have got to have a place where I can concentrate on that side of my work without other aspects of my life intruding. We are trying to make a life the way we want it, be what we want to be, not what other people want us to be.

     "I don't want my children automatically striking poses when they see a photographer. Get the message. If people think I'm a crabby old thing, it's too bad. 

    "Three years ago, we stopped playing Beatles. The relationship between me and the others today is good, but I want to shed my Beatles contract."

     And Paul's idea for the future? "I've got lots of plans. For one thing, I have film rights in Rupert the Bear, and I shall be starting on that. I want to have the old kind of band, not to do it big, but just make music, play little places. Just play around. 

    "People on the group scene, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, all started just as music makers, but a whole big scene grew out of it, and we lost our personal privacy. I want to get it back. I hope it works that way. Well, anyway, we'll try."

Not Your Average Millionaires (1981)

The McCartney family in 1981 

 

Not Your Average Millionaires

By David Lewin

The Toronto Star

September 6, 1981

    Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney are a nice average couple with rather more than average achievements. They have four kids, three houses, and enough money in the bank to buy and sell your average millionaire 40 times over.

     At 39, McCartney is worth, to be precise, $40 million, and another couple of million rolls in like the sea every year.  Mr. McCartney writes songs. He is the most successful music maker in history. 100 million LPs sold. 100 million singles. Mrs. McCartney takes photographs, is a key member of her husband's group Wings, and makes cartoon films. She is also a mother, bringing up a family of young children who will inherit the vast family fortune.

     Paul and Linda McCartney are both aware of the problems that such an inheritance can bring. Their children are aged between 18 and three and a half. The youngest is a boy, James Louis. The other three are girls: Heather, 18, from Linda's first marriage; Mary, 11; and Stella, 9. The children have one bedroom, but not each, just between them in the four-room cottage on the farm in Sussex, which is their main home. 

    Paul McCartney said, "We may have to build a third bedroom now because our youngest is a boy, but we have deliberately kept them in one room because I want a close family, just as I had when I was growing up in Liverpool. I don't want a mansion where I have to telephone from the East Wing to make an appointment to see my kids in the West Wing. 

    "Of course, they are going to get a lot of money, but Linda and I are trying as much as possible to make their growing up an ordinary one. We don't have a chauffeur, and I drive my youngest kids to the local primary school. We don't send them to be privately educated, and they get 50 cents pocket money a week, just about enough to buy a packet of crisps.

     "When people come and visit us in the country, they tend to drive past our cottage the first time because they're looking for a bigger house. They think ours must belong to the gardener. The children go out visiting sometimes and come home and say,  'Daddy, our friend's parents must be rich. You should see how big a house they have got.'"

     The McCartney approach to money is typified by a recent trip they made to the south of France. They flew to Nice as tourists. Then they chartered a private jet to get back in time to have dinner with the family. "Money should make you free," said Linda McCartney. "So we don't waste it, but we use it when it is necessary."

     Linda McCartney was wearing a white jacket, a pair of faded blue jeans and yellow socks; her millions self-evidently don't go on clothes. "The jacket I got free from a film I appeared in," she said. "The socks are the most expensive item. They cost $2. The jeans cost less. They aren't designer-made."

     Paul McCartney wore a gray jacket, gray socks, and white trousers; he would be the despair of any boutique owner.

     I asked him whether having so much money blunted ambition. He thought for a moment and said, "Probably. Well, really, the answer has to be 'Yes, it does.' When we started, the Beatles used to say, 'Let's write a house,' then we'd say 'Let's write a car,' and finally it was 'Let's write a swimming pool.' But when you have got your houses and your cars and your swimming pool, there isn't much else to write. For me, music is a hobby, as the actress said to the bishop. 

    "I like it, so I'll go on doing it. If I stopped, I'd do woodwork. My goals now? Oh, happiness, the kids, stuff like that."

     Whatever happens, the royalties from his music will keep right on rolling in. "But we have no trust fund for the children," said Linda McCartney. "That would put too much pressure on them. Of course, they have expectations, but the important thing is for them to get their value structure right and not use the money as a crutch. It is difficult, but it can be done if we keep things as ordinary as possible."

     The McCartneys are different in temperament. Linda McCartney said, "We are opposites in fact. I am not intellectual. Paul is. I am the calming influence. In fact, I'm rather dull, falling asleep sometimes right after supper.  Paul stimulates me. I wait. He moves.

     "Of course, we have rows because at first, when we were married, I had an identity problem. Paul's life was the Beatles, and when they broke up, I had to make a new life for myself in England."

     Paul said, "There were moments when our marriage might not have worked. I'm not the charming Paul of my public image, and if someone knocks something I have written, which I think should be a masterpiece, I can be shattered."

     How do they resolve their fights? "In bed," said Paul. His wife hit him. Then she said, "My domain is the house. I don't mean doing the housework, but having it my way at home. Paul's domain is his work. Super stardom doesn't turn me on. Really, I'm very ordinary. I hope that doesn't hold Paul back. I want the marriage to last."

     It has for 12 years, the longest of any of the Beatles. Paul McCartney looked at his wife and said, "I can see us both growing old gracefully, but Linda won't be alone. I'll be around, and with her too."

The Liberation of Paul McCartney (1971)

 The Top of Pop

By Lillian Roxon

Daily News

September 5, 1971

    Poor Paul McCartney. One year the prettiest face in rock and roll. This year, the man everyone loves to hate. Everyone's at him. His old friend and workmate John Lennon has a nasty song about him in his new album. His old girlfriend and housemate Fran Schwartz has 20 pages about him in her just-finished and still very hush-hush book. His most devoted fans get into fights with him, and now Rock Liberation has chosen him as its next big target.

     Rock Liberation? Oh yes! If you think women's liberation is heavy, wait till Rock Lib gets really steamed up this fall. It was Rock Lib that staged that big party in the street outside Bob Dylan's house on his birthday this summer. Not that he was there or anything, but he sure as hell heard about it. And the next thing we know, there he was, liberated as all get out, up on stage at the Bangladesh concert with George Harrison, singing all his old songs and pouring money into the pockets of the poor and needy. Incredible.

     Maybe Rock Lib has nothing to do with it at all, but you can't blame them for feeling encouraged. So flushed with success, they have now turned to Paul, not early enough to get him to Madison Square Garden, alas, but still. 

    In what must have been more than a casual coincidence, the day the Liberators chose to shake up the former Beatle was also the day the women of New York chose for their second annual mass march up Fifth Avenue. What I think the rock people were trying to tell us was that they are all kinds of oppression, and that it is probably better to be born female than to have to listen to another Paul McCartney solo effort. 

    In any case, there they all were at 79th and Park, where the McCartneys sometimes stay when in town, waving placards and making speeches designed to goad Paul like Dylan back into the land of the living. It was no use telling them it's not nice to parade noisily outside people's homes, and that besides Paul is getting a band together with the talented and beautiful Denny Laine.

    It was no use pointing out that anyone truly interested in liberating rock might do better to use that energy promoting new, fresh artists instead of trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to old ones. It was no use because Rock Lib does have a point. Paul has been snotty and isolated. If musical aristocrats like Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts could come out of their isolation to back Howlin Wolf in one of the most magnificent and important albums of the year, the London Hall and Wolf Sessions, then it's hard to see what Paul has been trying to prove all alone there in Scotland. The sooner he's liberated, if you ask me, the better

Paul and the fam in Holland

 August 19, 1976 

The traveling family

 August 11, 1981 -  Heathrow Airport 

Rude Studio

 July 20, 1971 

By the way -- you can see the Rude Studio sign on display right now at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio 

Enjoying the Jamaican sun

 

The Girl Who Pesters Me (1971)

Paul and Heather on the farm in June 1971 

 I am posting another story about the incident between Paul and Carolyn Mitchell.  And again, I am going to remind you all to be kind about what you say because Carolyn has been known to visit this site.   Reminder: This occurred 55 years ago—this didn't just happen.  Carolyn was a 24-year-old girl and was finding her way in the world.   She did a reckless and stupid thing by going to Paul's farm in Scotland.  She deserved to be treated poorly by Paul.  Whatever Paul said to her was justified.  

However, many fans at that time came to the UK from America and other countries to see the Beatles and ended up staying for an extended period.  No one would ever have told Lizzie Bravo she was a crazed stalker, and she did the same thing -- she came to the UK from Brazil and lived there for many years to see John Lennon.  As an adult, Carolyn has admitted that she was in the wrong.  She regretted all her actions.  And yet I know that many of you will say in the comments how she was a crazy stalker.  You will insult her and lump her in with John's murderer because she made a very bad decision 55 years ago.  

At the end of the day, Paul and his family were not hurt, Carolyn came to regret the entire ordeal, and it is part of the history of the time.   

I recommend anyone who wants to read about Carolyn's time in the UK as a Beatles fan to locate her book, All My Lovin' 

The Girl Who Pesters Me

By Alisdar Buchan

Daily Record

July 2, 1971

    Former Beatle Paul McCartney spoke bitterly yesterday of the girl fans who still make his life misery.

     In particular, he spoke of a 24-year-old American girl called Carolyn Mitchell. Carolyn is a tall blonde Mormon from Salt Lake City, Utah. She is also a Beatles fanatic who has shadowed the group's ex-members for two years, and she also happens to be accusing Paul McCartney of breaking her finger and making her nose bleed. 

    Carolyn claims that her former idol assaulted her as she sat on a hill overlooking his farm at Campbellton, Argyle.  But Paul, 29 denies the attack. He says that Carolyn left unharmed after he had told her bluntly to go at the farm yesterday. 

    He said, "For years now, I've been asking her politely, pleading with her to leave me and my family alone. She refuses to recognize that I am married with a family, and when I saw her sitting looking down on us, that was the end. This time, I told her to go away, and not politely.

     "I admit it, I was rude. You've got to understand, when you tell girls like her to push off, it's as though you had jilted them. Maybe she would have liked me to assault her. Obviously, when I told her to push off, something snapped.

     "The words I used were very rough, but there was no rough stuff. Whatever happened must have happened after she left here."

     When he spoke to me outside his farm high in the hills above Campbelltown, Paul denied that he did not want to speak to any of his fans.  He said, "I don't mind fans, but I object when they become fanatics, you know, the movie scene where you look out the window and see the spy in a trench coat under the lamppost? Then the next night, then the next night after, until you start to go psycho? Well, that's what it's been like for the past two years.

     "There are one or two girls like this. I have one who writes all the time from America, like she's my wife. She calls herself 'Paula McCartney'. She writes and says, 'I got the money', and 'Thanks for the new record', and 'I will be over when I can'.

     "Look, I don't mind talking to genuine fans. There were a couple of American girls here recently, and they were okay. We had a very nice, friendly talk together."

     The millionaire idol of millions explained how he had changed the direction of his pop career and his attitude toward young girl fans. "It's all right for Tom Jones doing that bit at the end of his act, where he goes and shakes hands and kisses the girls in the front row, but I have made it clear that that's not what I want to do.

     "I haven't been part of that for over three years. Even if I wanted to go around making love to other girls, which I don't, I couldn't. I am married with a family, and I'm very happy."

     Yesterday, Carolyn, who says she came to Scotland for a holiday, described her two years as the Beatles' number one fan. She said, "I know and have spoken to all the Beatles. At first, Paul was very friendly, but now he just won't speak to me.

     "I came over to England two years ago to be near the Beatles. I've seen them at Apple HQ and at their homes. I was never invited in, but spoke to them at the door," she said.

     She added, "Since Paul got married, he has changed completely. She (Paul's wife, Linda) has changed him. She's very possessive."

     Then Carolyn, who was writing a book on the Beatles from a fan's point of view, told of the walk which ended her liking for the Liverpool pop star. She said she had not gone to Campbelltown with the intention of speaking to Paul. She added, "I had gone up to the farm next to Paul's and sat on the hillside watching him farm from a distance. Paul came out of the house and drove up in his Land Rover. He jumped out and began shouting and swearing. I don't remember much about what happened, but my nose was bleeding, and my hand began to swell."

     A Campbelltown police spokesman confirmed that a complaint had been made and that a report would be sent to the prosecutor's office in due course,

McBeardy on the loose

 May 12, 1971

Mother and daughter

 Heather and Linda McCartney at a birthday party for Denny Laine.  I have shared this photo in black and white in the past and there was a lot of discussion about if that is really Heather.  So I am going to share the back of this photo with you as well.   Denny's birthday is October 29.  When I turn the back of the photo upside down, it looks like it is stamped to have been printed "Nov 76."  While the date written is 1976-1977 -- it had to have been taken at Denny's birthday party in 1976 which makes Heather 13 going on 14 in December. 

Taking off

 April 1971 

Family Wedding

 

April 27, 1981 

Back at Heathrow

March 25, 1971 
 

Living in a Home in the Heart of the Country

 

Tracks posted these photographs on Facebook with the following text:

Two previously unseen snapshot photographs taken at High Park Farm, the Mull of Kintyre farm owned by Paul McCartney. The images were captured shortly before Wings departed for their Wings University Tour in February 1972 and offer a rare, candid glimpse into life at the farm.

One photograph shows Denny Laine (left), Henry McCullough (centre) and Paul McCartney (right) relaxing outside a stone outbuilding, surrounded by several of McCartney’s dogs and puppies.

The second photograph features Paul’s adopted daughter Heather McCartney together with his daughters Mary McCartney and Stella McCartney, alongside Henry McCullough’s daughter Jesse McCullough, seated in the fields with the family’s pets.

Both photographs come directly from the estate of Henry McCullough and have not previously been published. Preserved within his personal archive, they provide an authentic and intimate glimpse into the relaxed environment surrounding Paul McCartney and those close to him at his Kintyre farm during this formative period.

The Cavendish Zoo

 February 1976

Home for the Holidays

 December 1975

My files say that these photos were taken in the Hamptons with Linda's family 

Materinty clothes

 

Remember

 November 5, 1970 

Ready to Ram On

October 7, 1970 - New York City