Poor Linda Eastman McCartney. She had won the heart of Paul, the world’s most eligible bachelor, but married life was turning out to less than idyllic. Way less, in fact.
She was stuck in a rural farmhouse in Scotland, tasked with the care and feeding of a newborn and a seven-year-old daughter from her first marriage. Her husband was a depressed, drunk layabout who seldom got out of bed until the afternoon. Paul had stopped shaving, and his personal hygiene was non-existent.
“Here I am living on a stone floor, carrying water in buckets, and I’m married to a drunk who won’t take a bath.” Linda told a longtime friend. It was not the life Paul’s female fans imagined she was living.
McCartney was mourning the breakup of the Beatles. Sunk in self-pity, he wasn’t writing songs and went for days without picking up a guitar. But as fall turned to winter in 1969, Linda finally lost patience. “She was yelling at him to get off his ass and be a man, already,” the friend recalls in Paul McCartney: A Life, an engaging new biography by Peter Ames Carlin.[...]
