@idontwanttospoiltheparty / idontwanttospoiltheparty.tumblr.com
"Paul McCartney Doesn't Really Want to Stop the Show" by David Remnick for The New Yorker (11 October 2021).
Like wtf was that about?? Like why? Who does that??
An anecdote from the next door neighbor at Forthlin Road:
"Quite frankly, if Paul's mother had been alive, there would have been no Beatles as far as Paul was concerned. She'd never have stood for that row. The lady was a real stickler, very much a You-do-as-I-say kind of person. She was the dominant factor next door - there was no nonsense with Mrs. McCartney. She'd never have allowed it, all that argy-bargy. Jim offered to buy her a washing machine once, but she wouldn't have one because she thought it was somehow immoral. So you can imagine what she'd have thought to that row."
-McCartney by Chris Salewicz (1986)
“Everybody was quite confident that Paul would pass the eleven-plus – for Mum and Dad thought of him as the brains of the family. And of course, he didn’t let us down, because he was a natural at exams. When I passed in my turn, it was so unexpected, apparently, that Mum burst out crying – I think the idea that she had two “intelligent” sons was too much for her! They say sensitivity often goes with intelligence and certainly I’d say this was true of Paul. Although on the surface he tried to give the impression that he was a fairly tough, swashbuckling, mildly-tearaway character, underneath there was a great deal of thoughtfulness and real tenderness.” - Mike McCartney, Woman Magazine, Saturday, August 21, 1965.
Mum was a working nurse. There wasn’t a lot of money around – and she was half the family pay packet. My reaction was: ‘How are we going to get by without her money?’ When I think back on it, I think, ‘Oh God, what? Did I really say that?’ It was a terrible, logical thought which was preceded by the normal feelings of grief. It was very tough to take.
Paul McCartney, Yesterday and Today
Eight years later, Mike looked back with candour on these first few days, reflecting how he and Paul both felt the important thing was to show their cousins they weren’t ‘softies’. He referred to his brother’s comment about the money – ‘Paul made some flippant remark which sounded pretty callous at the time’ – however he also added:
Paul was far more affected by Mum’s death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he seemed like a hermit. He wasn’t very nice to live with at this period, I remember. He became completely wrapped up in himself and didn’t want people breaking in on his life.
Portrait Of Paul, by Mike McCartney, Woman magazine, 21 August 1965.
Mark Lewisohn, Tune In
Q: How much of your success was motivated by trying to do him proud?
PAUL McCARTNEY: Quite a lot of it. And I was certainly able to in his case. I wasn’t with my mom, unfortunately. She died before I sort of did anything. She never really got to see any success. Well, who says she didn’t? I like to think that [she did].
Q: You lost both your mom and Linda to breast cancer. What comes up for you when you think of that?
PAUL McCARTNEY: Yeah, terrible. When Linda was ill it triggered memories [of] my mom — I tried to put it in the back of my mind because we were always hoping that [Linda] wouldn’t die. So I blanked ’em out. One particular one: My dad used to say to my mom when she’d get tired, “Why don’t you go upstairs and have 40 winks?” And you better believe I never said that to Linda. I’d say, “Do you want to nap?” I never used the expression “40 winks.” You get superstitious in those circumstances. So yeah, there were all too many echoes of it, really.
#I am not in fact constantly thinking about how John not knowing Paul before his mother died vs. Paul seeing John have a breakdown over Julia set them up to Be Like That
umm you cannot just leave this in the tag and not elaborate for the ppl?? thx!
the way I just scrolled through my ENTIRE dms with @phoneybeatlemania because I swear I sent this to her once but alas
OKAY so I could probably write multiple essays about this, but I think a pillar of John and Paul's relationship is the fact that John tended to wear his damage on his sleeve whereas Paul has always preferred burying his problems and this particular perfect storm ultimately led to a good portion of those two's specific dysfunction.
Based on that, my pet theory is that them both being hit by the same tragedy, the loss of their mother, likely represented a point of comparison between the two, in terms of their personality and specific reactions to loss, that may have led both of them to faulty conclusions:
John, in immense pain after Julia's death, probably thought of himself as very broken, whereas Paul, to him, appeared to be "getting on with it fine" and thus John might have imagined Paul to be much more put together than him, meaning: a) Paul would be available to do more emotional labour for John and b) Paul would be more likely to leave John because "Who could stay for someone this broken?"
On the other hand, Paul would probably think that if John wasn't capable of keeping his pain at bay, as Paul was, that meant perhaps John inherently needed more support and Paul was not entitled to ask for any.*
The fact that John didn't know Paul at all before Mary died, would've probably exacerbated this even more, because, according to Mike in the Davies bio, Paul was noticeably affected by his mother's death, but without being able to witness a stark before-after effect, it would've been difficult for John to fully assess how deep an impact Mary's death had. Paul, on the other hand, got a first row seat to John's breakdown and would've thus been acutely attuned to just how much Julia's death messed his friend up.
*HUGE ASIDE INCOMING: Bear in mind, however, that the two also seemed to process grief very differently. Just because Paul thinks he's helping, by, for instance dragging John back to Quarrymen rehearsals, encouraging everyone to do Magical Mystery Tour, doesn't mean he in fact is. That's not to say I think Paul was being selfish at all. Consider that on the day of John's murder, Paul went to the studio, or that, according to Mike, it was Mary's death that drove Paul to obsessively practice playing guitar; and now consider that John tended to step away from music in his darkest moments, falling into pits of low productivity as his mental health declined. Paul's efforts were sincere, in my personal opinion, they were just not particularly geared toward John's typical modus operandi. (Though, perhaps also consider that John did return to the Quarrymen and did carry on as a Beatle after losing Stu, so maybe Paul wasn't wrong for assuming his encouragement to "get back to work" would help after Brian died)
“McCartney added in a new interview with BBC Radio that he was much more open with his grief for his wife than his father was when he lost his mom, who passed away from the same disease when the musician was just a teen.”
‘I think I cried for about a year on and off,’ McCartney says of mourning Linda. “You expect to see them walk in, this person you love, because you are so used to them. I cried a lot. It was almost embarrassing except it seemed the only thing to do.’
The rocker recalls a much different way of coping in his family when his mom Mary died of breast cancer at age 47.
“We had no idea what my mum had died of because no one talked about it,” McCartney said. "She just died. The worse thing about that was everyone was very stoic, everyone kept a stiff upper lip and then one evening you’d hear my dad crying in the next room. It was tragic because we’d never heard him cry,’ he added. ‘It was a quiet private kind of grief.’
————-
“My mother’s death broke my Dad up. That was the worst thing for me, hearing my Dad cry. I’d never heard him cry before. It was a terrible blow to the family. You grow up real quick, because you never expect to hear your parents crying. You expect to see women crying, or kids in the playground, or even yourself crying—and you can explain all that. But when it’s your dad, then you know something’s really wrong and it shakes your faith in everything. But I was determined not to let it affect me. I carried on. I learnt to put a shell around me at that age. There was none of this sitting at home crying – that would be recommended now, but not then. That became a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too. We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn’t talk about – but we could laugh about it, because each of us had gone through it. It wasn’t OK for anyone else. We could both laugh at death—but only on the surface. John went through hell, but young people don’t show grief—they’d rather not. Occasionally, once or twice in later years, it would hit in. We’d be sitting around and we’d have a cry together; not often, but it was good.”
Paul discusses his mother’s death summarized here and here.
I feel a bit weird writing this, as Mary wasn’t famous and didn’t ask for her life (or death) to be examined, but Spitz’s Beatles biography has a very different timeline from the normal story, so I just wanted to get it all written down in one place so it’s more straight in my head.
What do you mean about pretending Mary McCartney’s illness was normal? V curious! :)
Oh, I just mean that the circumstances around Mary's death are, in my observation, often talked about in vague terms of "he lost his mother as a boy to cancer. Sad no? :(" that gloss over the specific parts of Mary's story that are very messed up (Paul and Mike not being told why she died or that she was sick, being the biggest thing here).
Also, generally, I get the sense that because there's something "Disney-like" about Paul's "tragic backstory" – in the sense that it fits into children's story tropes for a parent to die of an illness around that age (as opposed to John, whose backstory, unless the only thing you know about him is that his mother died in a car accident, causes a much more visceral reaction of disgust in people learning about it, I would wager) – people tend to take it less seriously as a source of genuine trauma for him? This isn't helped by the fact that Paul himself hates talking about this kind of thing and consistently downplays hardships he's faced; he frequently draws a comparison between his and John's childhood, in order to emphasize how "normal" his upbringing was and also excuse any possible wrong-doings on John's part.
It's kind of interesting really, because John pretty much never bad-mouthed Mimi, and despite this she is still often centered in discussions over Why John Is Like This nowadays, but there's less effort put into looking at events from Paul's childhood and how they may have affected him later on, despite Paul not making a point of presenting them in a negative light.
Again, a part of this is on him. He's not the one who made an entire album about how his parents fucked him up and talked extensively about it. But there's more to all of this, and I wish it was given more attention, especially by biographers (the type obsessed with making child Paul out to be a moustache-twirling villain).
How did Mary McCartney have cancer? And when did Paul find out?
Hiya anon—apologies about the late response here, hope you still see my it though!
I was *very* confused when I first read this, because I thought you meant Pauls daughter Mary and I was like “what?? I haven’t heard about this!”. Eventually realised though that you were talking about the famous Mother Mary.
According to Beatles bible, Mary McCartney had breast cancer, and on October 31st 1956, just over a month from her 47th birthday, she died of an embolism following an operation to stop the cancer spreading. (x)
However, @delightfullyatomicfest points out in a post that there are some inconsistencies when it comes to the timeline of Marys illness and how Paul and Mike found out. Essentially though, in some biographies you’ll find that Marys cancer went undiagnosed until 1956, while in others you’ll find she was diagnosed in 1948/1950. OP makes some interesting points, and Id highly recommend giving their post a read for further information on this!
In Chris Salewicz’s biography, he writes of Mary being in agonising pain over the summer of 1956, after dropping Paul and Mike off at a scout summer camp:
It was on this return journey that the nagging ache that Mary had felt in her chest for some weeks suddenly erupted into shrill agony. So far, she and Jim had dismissed the small lump that had appeared on one of her breasts as just one more irritating symptom of the "change of life" that Mary, at forty-six, was beginning to undergo. But on that drive back to Allerton the pain she suddenly experienced was so intense that she had to lie down on the back seat of Olive's small car. With this physical hurt almost matched by an excoriating mental anguish caused by the fact that her worst secret fear was perhaps being realised, Mary went straight to bed as soon as the car pulled up outside their trim, terraced house at 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool 18. After a few hours, however, the pain subsided, and, with a nurse's distaste for symptoms of hypochondria, Mary stubbornly refused to mention it to any of the doctors she worked alongside.
But Mary's symptoms would not be ignored, and a few weeks after the boys' return from scout camp, twelve-year-old Michael surprised his mother one afternoon in his parents’ bedroom. Clutching a crucifix and a photograph of a relative who was a Catholic priest, Mary McCartney was quietly sobbing to herself: the pain was returning sporadically, each time with an increased anger.
Within a month, even Mary had run out of excuses for not seeking medical assistance. After an emergency consultation with a specialist, she was promptly admitted to Liverpool's Northern Hospital. Cancer of the breast was diagnosed: a mastectomy was immediately prescribed. Exploratory surgery, however, revealed that the cancer had spread far beyond the area where the symptoms had manifested themselves; it was decided that removal of her breast would accomplish little, if anything. The probings of the surgeon's scalpel, moreover, seemed to have unleashed the worst, final fury of the disease. Mary received the last rites and had rosary beads tied around her wrists. “I would have liked to have seen the boys growing up,” she whispered to Dill, her brother Bill's wife. Within a matter of hours of being admitted to Northern, Mary Patricia McCartney's life had ended. — McCartney: The Biography by Chris Salewicz (pg. 8-9)
By all accounts neither Paul or Mike knew about her cancer, with Paul stating in the anthology:
My mum dying when I was fourteen was the big shock in my teenage years. She died of cancer, I learnt later. I didn’t know then why she had died. […] When she died, I remember thinking, ‘You asshole, why did you do that? Why did you have to put your mum down?’ I think I’ve just about got over it now, doctor. (x)
Mike also said in a 2014 interview:
“We were the original Fab Four—Mum, Dad, Paul and me,” says Mike. “When she died, I blamed everyone, including God, until I slowly worked out why she died. I think the reason was for us to learn from her death and treasure every second of life.” — Interview with Mike McCartney, 2014 via @maclen100
Furthermore in Lewisohn's Tune In, he writes:
Mary McCartney had her 47th birthday on 29 September, receiving all the usual felicitations for ‘many happy returns’. She now knew otherwise. Around this time, amid discretion so great her two children knew nothing of it for a long time to come, she went into hospital for a mastectomy. Breast cancer had been diagnosed. Jim knew the score but adhered to Mary’s wish that Paul and Mike not be told: mum was the word. The closest either came to finding anything amiss was when Mike investigated a curious sound coming from his mother’s bedroom. ‘I could just hear this strange noise, it sounded like crying, so I went into her room and there she was doing her rosary beads. I said, “What’s wrong, Mum?” and she said [swiftly], “Nothing, son.” She knew what was happening.’ (pg. 152)
Paul and Mike may have been kept in the dark about her cancer diagnosis, but it does seem they were made aware of her illness given that they visited her in hospital shortly before she passed:
Despite instructions to rest, the day before she went into hospital she cleaned the house and washed and pressed her sons’ clothes. She wanted, she told her sister, to leave everything ready, “in case I don’t come back”.
The following day Paul and Michael went to see their mother after the operation. There was blood on the white sheets. “It was terrible,” Paul would remember. — Ray Connolly, 2013
"So when she got ill, she just got ill. And when she went to hospital, she was just in hospital for a short while. And it was all not spoken about it. And it wasn't until much later that I learned that she had, in fact, died of breast cancer. — Paul McCartney, NPR interview, 2001
Following their mothers death, they were sent to live with their aunt and uncle. In Salewicz biography, one of Pauls school teachers recalls see’s seeing him on the day of her passing:
It was Durband, who was Paul's form master for the three years leading up to his taking his O level GCEs, who in 1956 sent a letter around to the other teachers, suggesting tolerance of any sense of strangeness emanating from Paul McCartney. “He'd had a bad break, his mother had died. He did go through a bit of a rough patch then. I think it shattered him a lot; maybe it made him turn to other things, like practicing his guitar and getting away from the school environment, which was very academic. But his mother's death certainly didn't have the effect of making him become noticeably difficult. I vividly remember on the day it happened him coming into the class, in room thirty-two, and going to his desk, which always used to be under a window. He was still very nice, very polite, and always softly spoken…” (pg. 33-34)
Unfortunately, I haven’t come across any sources stating how either Paul or Mike found out about their mothers cancer—so I haven’t got an answer for that.
It does however seem that Paul learnt of her cancer diagnosis sometime in the years 1956 or 1957, given that Julia Lennon, Johns mother, knew of it:
Our kitchen was increasingly a practise arena for the small clubs and the talent contests that they were entering. When Mummy learned that Paul’s mother had died of breast cancer the previous year, she exhorted John to bring Paul home to eat. ‘That poor boy. He’s lost his mother.’ — Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon (p. 162)
Perhaps Paul ended up just sort of hearing it through the grapevine? Im not sure—but I hope this post was of some help anyway! And if anyone wants to add to it, please feel free to.
