their automobile. Fifty teenage girls, screaming, ‘Paul,
we love you,’ burst past police, surrounded the newly-
weds and flung themselves on the car.”
And with that, McCartney, just 26, was suddenly
a man with not only a pregnant wife (Linda was four
months along at the ceremony) but also a 6-year-old
stepdaughter, Heather, whom he would later adopt.
Mary would arrive on August 29, nine days after the
Beatles’s final recording session as a group. She would
be followed by Stella in 1971 and James in 1977. If it
was a big adjustment for fans and would-be flames
who nursed hopes that Paul would maintain his
available-bachelor Beatle status, marriage and father-
hood came naturally. “My family had loads of kids,”
he once said of the large McCartney clan. “You were
always being handed a baby.”
The relationship among the four Beatles, mean-
while, was disintegrating. It was McCartney who
rallied the troops through January’s grueling Let It Be
recording, but his hopes that the Beatles’s electrify-
ing rooftop concert on Jan. 30 would lead to a return
to touring were overruled. He then shepherded the
group through the recording of Abbey Road. But as
things reached their breaking point soon after, due
in large part to McCartney’s efforts to install his
father-in-law as the Beatles’s manager, proceedings
became too painful to watch. Band meetings at that
time, McCartney recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016,
were “like seeing the death of your favorite pet.”
At the same time, Linda was feeling the hate from
sour-hearted fans. To escape, she and Paul packed up
their bags and, with Heather and newborn Mary in
tow, made their getaway to their farm in the Scottish
countryside. There they would raise their family amid
a menagerie of pets and farm animals. The family’s love
for the creatures accounted for the inventive vegetari-
PAUL
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