(June 18, 1962 - July 9, 1965) (divorced) (1 child)
SEE was the scion of a wealthy New York family. He attended the exclusive Riverdale school and graduated from Princeton. In 1960, he went to Tucson to take up postgraduate work in geology and cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona.
It was there that, at a frat party, he met 19-year-old Linda Eastman, an art-history student. They had an instantaneous and passionate romance, married, and in 1963, Linda gave birth to their first child, Heather Louise.
See was a rugged, powerfully built man; handsome, athletic and intelligent with, friends say, a compensating gentleness.
“He was a throwback in some ways to Victorian adventurers,” said an English friend.
“He was scholarly and intellectually disciplined but he could also be muscular in his approach to things. He once offered to fight a duel over some girlfriend or other. It was the kind of gesture he made.”
THE marriage was not to last. See virtually abandoned his family for an entire year while he went on an expedition in Africa. When he returned, he was shocked to find his wife and child had moved back East.
“It was while he was traveling that Linda made up her mind to divorce him,” said Martin Luis, one of See’s oldest friends. “He was hurt and upset when he returned and found that they had upped and gone. He followed her back East to her family there to see if he could win her back, but it was no use.”
In later years, Linda spoke little of her first marriage. “I grew up,” she once said of her divorce. “My life began again with this new sense of freedom.” See moved in with a friend, Jonathan Kress, and immersed himself in his work. But he was never able to get the love of his life out of his system.
MEANWHILE, in 1967, Linda met Paul McCartney.
When Linda married McCartney, See made a fateful and poignant decision to allow the Beatle to adopt Heather. He believed she should be allowed to settle into a new family unhindered by divided loyalties.
Yet See continued to see Linda, Paul and Heather occasionally over the years. He vacationed at their estate in Scotland, and they met socially in New York; the McCartneys eventually bought a 150-acre estate in Tucson a few miles from See’s ranch.
DESPITE his simple, nomadic existence, friends say See never stopped agonizing over his decision to allow McCartney to adopt Heather — until, a little over 10 years ago, fate intervened to offer him a chance to rescue his relationship with her.
Heather had always been a troubled child — isolated among her peers and unsuccessful academically. As a teenager she drifted from menial job to menial job despite her family’s vast wealth. In her 20s, a crisis put her in a psychiatric clinic in southern England.
She has admitted only that she was treated for depression.
See intervened to save her sanity — and arguably her life. He took her with him on a long field study to live with the Huichol and Tarahumara tribes of Central America. She has said that for the first time in her life she felt liberated.
The bond between daughter and father seemed fixed for good.
When Linda McCartney died from breast cancer on the McCartneys’ Tucson ranch two years ago, Heather broke the news to See and they turned to each other for comfort.