Paul McCartney and Pyewacket, the black cat of Cavendish Avenue

Cavendish Avenue, number 7, St. John's Wood, northwest London. An upright piano in the main sitting room, a high gate kept locked for security since 1965, black-and-white domestic photographs taken by Linda Eastman before she traded her surname for that of the musician who lived inside the house. In several of those photographs, on the windowsill of the first-floor studio, a short-haired black cat with yellow eyes appears. Her name was Pyewacket. She is one of the least publicized and best-documented animals in the ex-Beatle's home life.

The choice of name was neither random nor spontaneous. Pyewacket was the name of the Siamese cat in the film Bell, Book and Candle (1958), directed by Richard Quine and starring Kim Novak and James Stewart. A romantic comedy with a modern witch, released only a few years after Vertigo, in which the same actress had a cat as a magical familiar. For a couple steeped in music and film, as Paul and Linda McCartney were by the late sixties, the cinephile nod was natural. They named a real black cat after a fictional Siamese.

The Cavendish Avenue house

Paul McCartney bought the Cavendish Avenue house in 1965 for roughly 40,000 pounds, a high figure for the period and a very high one for a musician of 23. It was a three-story Victorian town house with a back garden, built around 1850, in an elegant residential area about a five-minute walk from Abbey Road Studios. The reasoning was prosaic, according to Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (1997): being able to walk to the studio.

The house filled with animals fairly quickly. There were dogs, chiefly the famous Old English Sheepdog Martha, immortalized in Martha My Dear on the White Album. Later came a Border Collie named Lucky, and horses at the High Park farm in Scotland. And there were cats. Pyewacket was probably the first to live with the couple once Linda settled in at Cavendish Avenue after marrying Paul in March 1969.

The cat appears in domestic photographs taken by Linda in the early seventies, some reproduced in the posthumous book Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era (1992) and in later photography collections. In all of them she shares space with the family without special treatment: sitting on the bed, on the windowsill, on the breakfast table. She was a house cat, not a show animal.

What was Pyewacket like?

Interviews and photographs allow a fairly precise profile. She was a short-haired cat, completely black, with intense yellow eyes that deepened with age. No white markings. Medium-sized, adult weight probably between 8 and 10 lb (3.5 to 4.5 kg) judging from comparative images. She had no pedigree. She was a domestic shorthair, the most widespread type of cat in Britain and one of the best adapted to London urban life.

Genetically, uniform black depends on the B allele (dense eumelanin) and the absence of the agouti modifier (no underlying tabby pattern). In the British feline population, the incidence of fully black cats runs around 15 percent. The intense yellow of the eyes comes from a combination of iris pigmentation well documented in black cats of European origin.

Linda McCartney's photographs, made by a professional trained in the sixties New York rock scene, show Pyewacket at various times of day and in different rooms. The cat seems to have had free run of the house, including the back garden. Her behavior, according to Paul's comments in nineties interviews, was typical of an adult spayed female: long hours of sleep, brief bursts of activity at dawn and dusk, a fondness for high surfaces.

Pyewacket and living with dogs

Martha the sheepdog and Pyewacket sharing Cavendish Avenue at the same time gives one of the more interesting data points of the period. The cohabitation between cat and large dog worked, according to Linda's descriptions in family correspondence, with the expected logic: the dog respected the cat, the cat established her territory in high places the dog could not reach. The cat set the hierarchy, as usually happens.

This is information that still helps any owner thinking about introducing an adult cat into a home with a peaceable dog. The Cavendish Avenue model worked because the cat predated the dog or arrived very young before the dog became too dominant, because there was enough physical space for separate resting zones, and because the humans did not force interactions. McCartney mentions it in passing in seventies interviews for Q Magazine as a matter of "letting them negotiate between themselves".

The name and pop culture

The origin of the name is worth returning to because it captures the cultural moment in which it was chosen. Bell, Book and Candle (1958) had been a moderate success, a minor-genre film against the major works of the era. But its Siamese cat, also called Pyewacket, became famous for his imposing build (a large adult Seal Point) and for a scene in which Kim Novak invokes magical powers over him.

The name Pyewacket also had a folkloric root. Pyewacket was one of the names of the familiar demons that the English witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, in the seventeenth century, attributed to the women he accused. The screenwriters' choice of the name was a learned nod. The McCartneys' later choice was a nod to the nod. For a black London cat in the psychedelic culture of the late sixties, it fit without effort.

This layer of references shows up in many of the names the couple gave their animals. Martha was not Martha by chance alone; she was Martha in honor (according to Paul, in a 1986 Q Magazine interview) of a great-aunt. The Scottish horses carried names taken from traditional songs. Pyewacket was no exception. It was a pattern.

The offspring

Unspayed female cats in urban households can produce litters, and at least one litter of Pyewacket's is documented in Linda's private correspondence. McCartney gave kittens to friends in the London music circle of the late sixties and early seventies. The specific names of the recipients have not been made public, and historical caution recommends not speculating.

Giving away puppies and kittens was common in that circle and that era, partly because early spaying and neutering was not as widespread or socially normalized as it is now. By current standards, the decision not to spay and to allow litters at home does not hold up from an animal-welfare angle. In the timeline of events, though, it simply reflects the customs of 1970s England.

What role did Pyewacket play in McCartney's public image?

Very little, compared with the musician's other animals. Martha the sheepdog had a song dedicated to her on the White Album. The High Park horses appeared on solo album covers and in publicity photographs. Pyewacket lived and died in the private sphere, outside the musician's public mythology. We know her mostly through Linda's domestic photos and scattered mentions in late interviews.

That absence of public capitalization is, paradoxically, what makes her interesting to domestic historians of the Beatle and post-Beatle period. She was a real cat in a real house, not a symbol. Linda McCartney, a rigorous photographer and public defender of animal rights (founder of the Linda McCartney Foods vegetarian line in 1991), documented Pyewacket's life as she documented everything that entered the house, without posing and without choreography.

The breed, in perspective

It bears repeating that Pyewacket had no pedigree. For a project about cats, that point deserves comment. The domestic shorthair is the most widespread feline population in Britain and continental Europe, with high genetic variability and relatively few hereditary conditions compared with closed pedigree breeds (Persians, Scottish Folds, Sphynx).

Average documented lifespan in British studies: 12 to 16 years with standard care, up to 18 or 19 with a supervised diet, spaying, and indoor living. Frequent conditions: chronic kidney disease in old age, hyperthyroidism from around age 10, obesity if the diet goes unmanaged. None of these is specific to the domestic shorthair; they are the conditions of the general adult feline population.

The profile fits the little we know of Pyewacket's end. The cat lived at Cavendish Avenue to an advanced age (accounts point to more than fifteen years, with no confirmed exact date). She died in the eighties without much public attention. The McCartneys did not announce her passing. That is consistent with their general treatment of the animal: part of the house, not part of the public character.

The verifiable record

Detail	Confirmation
Origin of the name	The film Bell, Book and Candle (1958)
Residence	Cavendish Avenue 7, St. John's Wood, London
Bought by Paul McCartney	1965
Appearance in photographs	Documented, Linda McCartney archive
Morphology	Short hair, uniform black, yellow eyes
Breed	Domestic shorthair, no pedigree
Documented litters	At least one, kittens given to friends

Pyewacket sits in a long line of musicians who kept cats, a private animal in a house better known for its piano and its proximity to Abbey Road. The documentation we have is almost entirely Linda's, which is fitting for a cat who never became a symbol.