Heather McCartney Biography

Heather McCartney was born as Heather Louise See on December 31, 1962 in Tucson, Arizona. Her mother, Linda Eastman, was a photographer and her father, Joseph Melville See Jr., was a geologist and scion of a wealthy New York family.

Heather’s parents, who met in college, were married on June 18, 1962, but were increasingly unhappy due to their dissimilar lifestyles and divorced in June 1965, when she was just 18 months old.

Her music fan mother first met Paul McCartney of the Beatles fame at the Bag O'Nails club, where Georgie Fame was performing, on May 15, 1967, while on a photo assignment in London.

While the two kept meeting and were drawn to each other on various levels, her daughter Heather created another strong bond between them, since Paul had always liked and wanted children of his own.

Paul, who was impressed how Linda juggled her life as a single mom, insisted that she and Heather move to London to live with him, and when they did so, he devoted time to Heather. He not only played with her, recited her stories and drew cartoons with her, but also sang her to sleep at bedtime.

Her mother married Paul McCartney in a small civil ceremony at Marylebone Town Hall on March 12, 1969, and during this time, Heather was formally adopted by Paul. Her mother went on to have three children with her new husband: daughters Mary, born in 1969, and Stella, born in 1971, and son James, in 1977.

Her biological father, See, continued to visit her occasionally over the years and also vacationed with Linda, Paul and Heather at their estate in Scotland. While they also often met socially in New York, the McCartneys eventually bought a 150-acre estate in Tucson a few miles from See’s ranch.

Following in her mother’s footsteps, Heather began showing an interest in art from an early age and took up printing at the Photographers’ Workshop in Covent Garden. She won the Young Black and White Printer of the Year Award for a photo she called “Waterfall”, and eventually went on to art college, where she focused on pottery and design.

Being unsuccessful academically and isolated among her peers, Heather was a troubled child and drifted from one menial job to another despite her family’s vast wealth. In her twenties, she suffered from an emotional crisis which briefly put her in a psychiatric clinic in southern England and later admitted to being treated for depression.

During this period, See intervened to save her sanity, and arguably her life, by taking her on a long field study to live with the Huichol and Tarahumara tribes of Central America. She said to have felt liberated for the first time and became influenced by See, an expert on pre-Columbian art and a respected ethnographer, who photographed, filmed and wrote about indigenous cultures around the world.

On her return from Mexico, Heather McCartney moved to Arizona to live with her biological father before returning to England, where she began working as a potter. According to a 2013 report, she lived in a cottage on the Peasemarsh McCartney estate of her step-father in Sussex, England and generally maintained a low profile.

When she unveiled her own range of housewares, called the Heather McCartney Houseware Collection, at a trade fair in Atlanta, Georgia in 1999, her stepfather Paul made a rare public appearance in the US. The collection, which included kitchen and bathroom items, apart from cushions, candles, cutlery, clocks and rugs, was inspired by the art of ancient Mexican civilizations that Heather picked up from the Huichol and Tarahuma tribes.

Heather McCartney was still a child when she helped her mother Linda and adoptive father Paul with backing vocals on their only studio album Ram in 1971 as Paul resumed musical career after Beatles’ breakup. She provided backing vocals to the song “Monkberry Moon Delight”, the name of which, her adoptive father later explained, was derived from the way his young kids “used to call milk ‘monk’ for whatever reason”.

Much later in 1995, she again provided the backing vocals on the song “S.M.A.” from Paul’s unofficial album Oobu Joobu Part 10. The same year, when Paul and Yoko Ono collaborated on the song “Hiroshima, Sky Is Always Blue”, commemorating 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Heather and her step-siblings provided backing vocals and played the percussion.

She was credited with photography and painting on the Bolt of Apollo album by Black Sun Ensemble, a Tucson, Arizona, US–based psychedelic rock band. She was further credited for photography design on The Chinese Album (1998) by Spacehog, an alternative glam rock band by British ex-pats living in New York City.

She featured alongside The Beatles members in the film Let It Be (Limited Collector's Edition), which was recorded as a TV special in 1970, marking the ending of the career of the band. Her most recent musical credit was in NEW, the sixteenth solo studio album by her step father.

In 1995, Heather McCartney’s mother Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer, which metastasized to her liver, leading to her death at 56 on April 17, 1998 at the McCartney family ranch in Tucson, Arizona. See, her biological father, was found dead from a gunshot wound in the head at his home in Tucson, Arizona in March 2000, which detectives investigated from both suicide and murder angles.

During an interview she gave to a broadsheet years ago, she revealed to suffer from bouts of depression occasionally and acknowledged that she will probably never going to get married due to her illness. Interestingly, Gary Tibbs, a former bassist for Roxy Music and Adam and the Ants, was the only person she was openly associated with during the early 1980s, but her parents didn’t agree to the match.

While working with Donovan Leitch on Mary Hopkin’s 1968 Post Card album, Paul McCartney decided to entertain Heather with a nursery-rhyme styled tune he improvised using her name and was joined by Donovan and Hopkin. While he later released another song named "Heather" in his solo album Driving Rain, dedicated to his second wife, the rare 1968 "Heather" song was included in The Beatles bootleg No. 3 Abbey Road N.W.