Paul McCartney’s Daughter Said Her Parents Were ‘Really Clever’ to Not Give Her Much Money
In his early 20s, Paul McCartney became one of the most famous people in the world, but his daughter Stella said she felt insulated from that. She knew he was a successful musician, but she was removed from the intense level of fame he’d experienced in the 1960s. Her parents deliberately raised her and her siblings away from it. She said that she appreciated this.
The former Beatle has five children
In 1969, McCartney married his first wife, Linda. She had a daughter, Heather, from a previous marriage, and McCartney adopted her. In 1969, they had a daughter, Mary. Linda gave birth to Stella in 1971 and a son, James, in 1977.
After Linda’s death in 1998, McCartney married Heather Mills in 2002. They divorced in 2008 and share a daughter, Beatrice. McCartney married Nancy Shevell in 2011, but they do not have children together.
Paul McCartney’s daughter Stella said her parents didn’t give her much spending money
By the time Stella was born, The Beatles had broken up. In McCartney’s decade with the group, he became a massive celebrity and accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. She said that her parents intentionally raised her in a down-to-earth manner. This meant they didn’t give her too much spending money.
“I’ve grown up in a family that doesn’t chuck stuff away,” Stella told Net-a-Porter. “And it sounds silly, but I didn’t have a huge amount of money as a kid. My mum and dad were really clever; I went to a comprehensive [school] and I wasn’t given a load of cash, so I would go to vintage and second-hand shops and markets to buy clothes.”
McCartney once spoke about his shock at the fact that John Lennon’s aunt gave him money for his birthday.
“Mine was a warm, comfortable childhood, not a rich upbringing,” he told The Washington Post in 1984. “His was richer than mine. Nobody knows that. John made himself out to be the big working class hero, but he was the least working class in the group. John had an auntie who gave him a hundred pounds one birthday; that’s still something I wouldn’t give my kids.”
In some ways, this may have influenced her future career as a fashion designer because it encouraged her to be creative with her clothes.
“I think that’s kind of the future, and I would encourage kids to rent clothes and buy second-hand because you don’t have to always go for that quick fix,” she said. “It’s way more exciting and cooler.”
Paul McCartney’s daughter Stella said she watched her dad recover from The Beatles
Though Stella said she grew up away from the fog of Beatlemania, she still saw the way the band had impacted her father. For a time after The Beatles broke up, he felt lost and depressed and drank heavily as a way to cope.
“It did occur to me, watching it, that we spent a lot of our childhood with Dad recovering from the turmoil and the breakup,” she told The New Yorker. “Can you imagine being such a critical part of that creation and then having it crumble? And, as children, we were part of a process in which our dad was mourning. It was not an easy thing for Dad, and it lasted for a lot longer than we probably knew.”
