Why Macca refused to let her tell her own story

Sitting in her cluttered, flagstoned kitchen at Woodlands in East Sussex, the boar-infested estate her husband had owned since the Sixties, Linda McCartney and I nursed mugs of tea. The McCartneys lived a bohemian life there, surrounded by falling-apart furniture, guitars, horses and mud. In a cosy side room with a smoking wood fire, there was a Van Gogh. We’d met a few times before and always had a good laugh – Linda was open and kind.

It was 1991 and I was there to discuss writing her autobiography. I’d suggested a title Linda adored – ‘Mac the Wife’ – and we scribbled an outline for a book that would trawl her childhood and teenage years, wade through the Beatles and Wings eras and review her roles as wife and mother. But Linda said Paul would have the last word, and he did. She sounded tearful when she called to tell me he ‘wasn’t going to let [her] do the book’ after all.

She never told me why, and we never got round to discussing it before she died.

Paul’s former publicist Geoff Baker, an old Fleet Street mucker, later shed some light. ‘It was Paul being a control freak,’ said Geoff. ‘He gets a bit confused sometimes and loses sight of what counts.

‘When Linda told him she wanted to do it, he lost his rag.’

I gathered it was along the lines of, ‘There’s only one f ****** star in this family.’ No one but Linda could tell Linda’s story, so it will never be told. Maybe that’s what Paul wanted. But if he truly believed there was only one star in his family, he was wrong.