Three letters written by Linda McCartney about husband Paul McCartney have been found and are to be sold at auction.
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Discovered by Linda’s friend and former housemate Miki Antony, the letters were written before she married the Beatle in 1969. They reveal her excitement about dating the star and how she was commissioned to photograph “groovy” bands of the day.
In June 1967, weeks after she had begun dating McCartney, Linda (then Linda Eastman) photocopied an American gossip column that featured a sentence about her. She sent it to Antony with a passage underlined that read: “They say Beatle Paul McCartney’s latest favourite femme is Linda Eastman, a Yankee Doodle fan-mag [photographer].”
Linda wrote on the back: “Thought you’d get a big laugh over the enclosed clipping. Have no idea where they picked up that lie, but it just shows how truthful newspapers are.”
Speaking with The Observer, Antony said he chuckled when he read it because he knew that it was in fact true. “She stayed with me when she first came to London,” he explained. “[She said] ‘Guess who I dated last night?…It was Paul McCartney, and we had this lovely evening.’
“She said Paul really liked white rabbits, and the next day she…bought a white rabbit and sent it to him. That night, she told me, he rang her up and said, ‘Thank you so much for the white rabbit, would you like to come out for dinner again?’ That’s how I knew they’d started dating. The rest is history.”
Linda and McCartney met at the Bag O’ Nails nightclub in London’s Soho in May 1967. They married in March 1969 and McCartney “cried for a year” after his wife’s death from cancer in 1998, aged just 56.
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Antony met Linda while she was studying at the University of Arizona.
He said: “She was a good friend for a year and a half. But then, of course, she went off into the Beatles world and that was it…She was lovely.”
In one letter, she wrote: “I quit my job at Town & Country magazine to become a freelance photographer – I’m doing very well – sell mainly to teen magazines ’cause most of my subjects are rock’n’roll groups – it’s so groovy – have photographed many English groups…The Stones were my favourite, went out with Mick Jagger, he’s really a terrific person, much to my surprise.”
The letters will be sold through Chiswick Auctions in London, which will include them in its Autographs sale on January 29, 2020.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney has shared two new songs, ‘Home Tonight’ and ‘In A Hurry’.
The tracks were recorded from the same sessions where McCartney recorded last year’s ‘Egypt Station.’ Both of the new releases were produced by Foo Fighters and Adeleproducer, Greg Kurstin.