John (photo By Mike Mitchell)
John (photo by Mike Mitchell)
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Bob Dylan: "I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one that I'm in awe of. He can do it all. And he's never let up. He's got the gift for melody, he's got the gift for rhythm, he can play any instrument. He can scream and shout as good as anyone, and he can sing a ballad as good as anyone. And his melodies are effortless, that's what you have to be in awe of.... he's just so damn effortless. I just wish he'd quit (laughs). Everything that comes out of his mouth is just framed in melody."
This is an absolutely amazing read for anyone interested in the Beatles or Paul McCartney!
They had to climb a scaffold board so these shots could get taken. I took a photograph where it almost looks like John is pushing Paul off, but he wasn’t doing that at all. In fact, John was hanging onto him for dear life. Paul was wearing leather shoes and at one point he slipped. I thought, “God, how would I tell my mum I had accidentally killed a Beatle?” – Tim Murray, a Mad Day Out photographer
Mary McCartney: Sir Paul, growing up a Beatle’s daughter and Linda, my mother
She has a Beatle for a dad and an impressive portfolio including celebrity subjects and a portrait of the Queen. But it’s Mary McCartney’s mother, Linda, who has had the most influence on her life. Here she reveals why
The Times, January 26 2019
When Mary McCartney was in her early twenties, she remembers phoning her mother, Linda, in Sussex, home to the McCartney family after life in the Beatles, and announcing, “I’ve decided I want to become a photographer.” Her mother immediately gave her a Leica R. It has been 20 years since Linda McCartney’s death from breast cancer, which devastated her husband and their four children, and yet that camera is beside Mary McCartney today, as if representing Linda’s presence in her daughter’s life.
In the past 20 years, Mary McCartney has gone from being initially unsure – “I didn’t know how to work with lights at the beginning” – to being one of the most successful female photographers in the UK. Like her mother, who was the first woman to shoot a cover for Rolling Stone magazine, she has photographed icons. These include the Queen. She has worked for magazines and advertising campaigns and, in the past few years, has gradually shifted her focus towards exhibitions, books and making films. She has, in many ways, followed the professional path trodden by Linda, an inspiration to her not only because she was an early activist for vegetarianism, but because of the nature of her work. As McCartney puts it, “Capturing memories in a moment.”
“At times I have been professionally pigeon-holed by people presuming that everything I’ve got within my career is because of my name,” McCartney says. “But that just isn’t realistic.
“No jobs or assignments have ever come because of that. I don’t dwell on it. But the challenge is that I’m close to my family. I don’t want not to be able to embrace that, but then I don’t want to be pigeon-holed as the daughter of Paul McCartney rather than Mary the photographer, with a new exhibition or a book. I’ve reached the point where I’m not shying away from it. It’s more how other people deal with it, rather than how I do.
“My mum was a professional photographer before she ever knew my dad, and that was how they met. A huge amount of her work was done years before she met him, but a certain number of people would still say that she’s a celebrity photographer who started when she married him, because of his connections. It’s understandable why it happens, but it’s a fine balance.”
I feel slightly guilty here because, when I first looked through McCartney’s impressive body of work, I did assume she got a few celebrity sittings over a lunch or two at the McCartneys’ kitchen table. What with her famous pa and her famous sister, the fashion designer Stella McCartney.
For the record, she says she does not have celebrities on a Rolodex. “A lot of the celebrity photographs I have done have been through being asked to do them. They’re not my friends or people I know. Maybe it is that people know I am not going to take advantage of them and try to get a photograph that is going to be sensationalised in some way. I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with my background. I wouldn’t particularly connect with someone as a celebrity, because I’m not an actress.”
We are in McCartney’s studio because she is about to publish a book of pictures called Paris Nude, an extraordinarily intimate nude study in black and white of a stand-up called Phyllis Wang, whom McCartney knew only vaguely before arriving in her apartment in Paris on a hot day last summer. The book came about after a happy misunderstanding in which McCartney asked Wang to model for a commercial project and signed her text “xxx”, taken by Wang as a request for her to pose for explicit shots. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up, they both had begun to think, “What a great idea!”
A few months later, McCartney was in Wang’s apartment asking her to take her knickers off, an embarrassing moment for photographer and subject that took a bit of working up to, via the jeans. “I was like, ‘You’re going to have to take the knickers off now.’ And they’re sort of pushed down the sofa. You can see them pushed in.”
By definition, the pictures are intimate. Wang is naked on the sofa, by the fireplace, writhing about in the shower and in the bath, where McCartney’s lens zooms in to swirling water so that the viewer looks on and is tempted to ask, blimey, is that a pair of buttocks there? Let’s not dwell on Wang’s reappearing lady garden. It is part of McCartney’s fascination with the female form and follows on neatly from her first exhibition, Off Pointe: a Photographic Study of the Royal Ballet After Hours, for which she photographed ballet dancers in real life, smoking fags, drinking Coke, going to the cash machine and, yes, having a bath. It is, McCartney says, intimacy with her subject that she craves. For the viewer, it is permitted voyeurism.
There is no doubt Mary McCartney gets people to do things for her that perhaps they might have previously ruled out. She shows me a book of her pictures called Twelfth Night, featuring Mark Rylance backstage in white tights and face make-up. “He just said, ‘Want to stay?’ And he never says that.
“I think I do meet people and then I’m intrigued, like, who is that real person? That if I got into their world more, my immediate perceptions might change.
“There is definitely a connection with my background. I think before I would shy away from it and go, ‘There is no connection.’ But now I kind of think, ‘Why am I so interested in that?’ It has to be something.”
In other words, being judged only as a McCartney and not as the person beyond the name informs her work. She wants the truth, the real story, and she wants the trust.
The family famously grew up in Sussex, the children riding ponies and attending comprehensive school. Twentieth-century legends flitted in and out of the house, hanging out by the Aga and eating Linda’s vegetarian food – so it’s not exactly Mum or Dad coming home from the accountancy firm and slogging to pay the mortgage. But in many ways, the children were protected from any notion of what their own celebrity meant to the world beyond them. “We used to live in a very close environment. We wouldn’t have a lot of staff around, so we would wash our own dishes. And when I rode, we used to brush and tack up the horse ourselves.
“I know it’s been documented over the years that we children are really normal, but it’s probably more about being real and human. Maybe it’s that we have values. If I stay with a friend, I strip the bed. I make sure that my children hang up their towels and don’t chuck them on the floor. They need to be good humans when they go out into the world and be nice to people, considerate.
“I think the fact I went to a comprehensive school means I have met lots of different types of people. I have a very close set of friends from when I was 12. Then I have a close set of friends from when I moved to London as a teenager and I’ve collected some new ones along the way. I think that implies that I haven’t changed dramatically from then, but I think I’ve developed over the years and grown in confidence and understanding.
“What it is for me is that my upbringing of being in a bit of fishbowl, being looked at and watched, means that very close relationships with my family and friends are so important. I kind of crave that [feeling] when I’m working. I like relationships.”
I was very interested in what McCartney would be like when the boot was on the other foot. For somebody who invites trust, how trusting can she be? The early signs in the lead-up to the production that is a photoshoot were ominous. The business of so many of us – journalist, photographer, assistants, make-up artist – being invited into McCartney’s world was not without discussion. Frankly, I was as nervous as she says she was when she arrived in Paris to photograph Wang with her kit off. “You look quite calm,” she says to me, smiling. Actually, I’m not that calm. But nobody frisked me at the door or grilled me about my questions. While she was upstairs getting ready, her dog, Paddy, sniffed around my legs.
McCartney is tiny in person. She is dressed in clothes by Stella, naturellement. She is a very generous model. “I don’t see the point of agreeing to have your picture taken and then being difficult,” she says. “It’s a collaboration. It must be intimidating to take a picture of a photographer, but then on the other hand you can collaborate more.”
While her style is very cool, she can also look a bit, well, chilly, something that often defines her sister in pictures (no doubt Stella is a poppet when she’s got her slippers on). However, she is very happy to smile to requests of “a bit warmer”. Actually, as it turns out, she’s homely, has an active role in her mother’s vegetarian food company, for which she has just made a film, cooks mountains of food for pleasure and loves Bake Off. Who knew? Those pesky perceptions again.
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The first defining moment of Mary McCartney’s life was leaving home for London. As the eldest of Paul’s three children with Linda (he adopted Heather, Linda’s child by another relationship), she was the first to leave. “When I arrived in London [being a McCartney] wasn’t really a thing. More was being a vegetarian. I probably defended myself on that more than anything else during that era. It’s exciting that is no longer the world.”
She worked first as a picture researcher before moving to edit her mother’s archive for an exhibition in New York. Seeing herself and her tastes reflected back at her in Linda’s photographs was empowering, she explains. “I’d always grown up watching her take pictures, and I was looking through these contact sheets and they were so inspiring and varied, like a diary. The biggest thing I like to do is capture memories and moments. I realised we had a very similar sensibility. Looking at these pictures I thought, ‘Oh my God, that is exactly how I am as well.’ ”
The gift of the Leica followed, consolidated by a technical course in how to use it and then a few years establishing herself, gaining confidence as she went along.
She made new friends, partied in Soho, the Groucho Club, the Colony Club, Gerry’s. “If you meet someone, you don’t immediately say who you are or what your background is. It’s only after time.”
The second defining moment of her life was when, aged 27, McCartney was faced with Linda’s diagnosis of breast cancer. “I hoped that she would get better, that there would be a different outcome,” she says sadly. “She got on with everything and she looked great. She had a sparkle in her eye the whole time. There are pictures that I took at the time that I thought, if she makes it through this, then I’ll publish them. But the fact that she didn’t means I won’t.”
On the way to the loo I spot a painting of Linda by Paul. She’s wearing a yellow blouse, sitting in a yellow armchair beside a yellow baby grand, which matches the colour of her hair. The pencil inscription on the mount reads, “All the love in the world to my Mary, love Dad. March 06.” It was a gift given eight years after Linda died. Elsewhere there is a beautiful photograph of a young Stella looking into her sister’s lens while enclosed in Linda’s arms. It seems such a poignant picture – perhaps one of those that have gone unpublished. “Afterwards, we all looked after each other,” McCartney explains, “and we all got through it the best we could.”
The loss is still there – it feels palpable – but she has a coping mechanism. “What I really tried to do was think of the positives of the situation. It was not a positive situation at all, but the things that I take from it are at least that I had time to spend with her, and I spent a lot of time with her through the last couple of years. We talked a lot, very openly, and we were really close.
“In that way I don’t have regrets, because that comforts me and I know that she was as comfortable as she could be.”
In 2015, McCartney exhibited her pictures next to those of her mother’s in a show called Mother Daughter at the Gagosian gallery in New York. It was a tribute to the person who had most profoundly shaped her life.
It is Linda’s character, her essence, that McCartney says she aspires to. “She was a really great character, really fun, great sense of humour. No one else like her. Funky, rebellious and didn’t care what people thought about her. I haven’t met many people like that. I used to think, ‘Does she actually mean it when she says she doesn’t care what people think?’ But I know she actually, really didn’t care. I think for anyone who loses someone they’re close to, it’s weirdly good to feel so sad, because it means you cared about the person that much. I think if someone had that much personality, they always stay with you to a degree, because you’ll be in certain situations and you’ll always be able to imagine what they’ll say. I try and hold on to that rather than thinking about some of the more distressing things.”
McCartney was 29 when Linda died. Towards the end of that same year she married Alistair Donald, her first husband, and by the following April of 1999, she became a mother herself. She concedes there might be a connection between losing a mother and having a child. “I don’t overthink those things, but it does seem likely. Other people I know who have lost a parent do often end up having a child soon after. I don’t really know what that connection is, but I feel like it is probably there.”
Her second son followed three and a half years later, but ultimately the marriage did not last. “I lost my mother, got married, had a baby. I think of it as a shame not to have stayed married … Relationships are the most intriguing thing to get right.”
In 2008, she had her third son with the director Simon Aboud, whom she married in 2010, and a fourth in 2011. “I didn’t plan to have a big family; I’m not a big planner. I like to have things develop as I move along.”
Three of her four boys are still at home. The eldest, Arthur, is 19 and at college. “I like mayhem,” she says. “I can be in a situation with a lot going on and I like it. I’m happy to have lots of conversations going on at the same time. I like things to be a bit messy, a bit unpredictable and not too preplanned.”
The children all appreciate their grandfather, “but it’s not something you really think about. At school they’ll do songs that have been written by Dad, so I think they’re very proud as well. For me, rather than it being, ‘Oh, my dad’s Paul McCartney,’ it’s more, ‘What an amazing artist he is,’ and how much he has achieved. How level-headed he is, and what a great relationship we have. It’s all those kinds of things. If I see a picture or hear something on the radio, I’m impressed [for him] rather than thinking, ‘Oh. I’m in this family.’ ”
Turning 50 in August is not meaningful to her, but she does admit maturity is. “I think I appreciate it all more now. I appreciate my relationship and my friends. I appreciate my career. I think that’s the thing. You don’t when you are younger. Now, it is what makes me happy. Like, I’ll be walking down the street and a song will come on and it will make me appreciate being alive.”
As I plan to leave for my journey home, McCartney asks, “Would you like to go to the loo?” Actually, yes, I say. I’ve got a long trip. She laughs at her mother-hen-ishness.
After I wash my hands, I turn to see a photograph propped up on the lavatory. Is that Barack Obama there with a smiling Sir Paul? And then I spot all the McCartneys with Michelle O on the end. Blow me down, it’s a McCartney/Obama line-up.
As I leave, one of McCartney’s oldest friends arrives. She too is very smiley.
“It was she who also made me become a photographer,” McCartney explains, “because when we were young, she’d take pictures of us all together and she’d chop our heads off.”
They’re doing a bit of admin. “Apparently being a photographer means you can vouch for a visa,” McCartney says, killer-heeled boots now kicked off her feet.
As she says, it’s all real, but it’s not normal.
Paris Nude by Mary McCartney is published by Heni on February 7
