Paul McCartney (100 page)

It was a further sign of his commitment to a worthwhile cause and wholehearted support of his wife. Yet many viewers were disconcerted to see Paul McCartney bracketed with run-of-the-mill celebs like Sir Alex Ferguson and Eamonn Holmes, and sitting silent on his high stool as Heather chattered unstoppably to the presenter, Chris Tarrant.

‘You don’t say a lot, do you, Paul?’ Tarrant said at one point, not entirely joking.

‘She could not afford to sue all the newspapers she would like to’

The apogee of Heather’s television career in a positive sense was her appearance on BBC1’s prestigious Question Time in February 2005. She was the kind of left-field activist with whom the programme occasionally varied its parade of heavyweight politicians and journalists, and the idea of Paul being there even by proxy guaranteed a bumper audience. Unawed by fellow panellists who included the Tory shadow Defence Secretary Nicholas Soames, the Liberal Democrat Scottish affairs spokesman John Thurso and the controversial black MP Diane Abbott, she aired her plentiful views on current issues such as Prince Charles’s engagement to Camilla Parker-Bowles, Britain’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics and the recent ban on fox hunting.

In the BBC’s advance publicity, she was said–yet again–to have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for her relief work in former Yugoslavia. Russell Miller had attempted to verify this claim for his Sunday Times article but nominees for Nobel prizes, unlike those for Oscars or Grammys, are not announced and the existing laureates who form the judging panel are sworn to absolute confidentiality. ‘With the best will in the world,’ Miller concluded, ‘it is hard to believe these worthies had heard of Heather in 1995.’

One indisputably genuine honour, held jointly with Paul in recognition of their work for Adopt-A-Minefield, was that of United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. Unfortunately, goodwill was not something she generated much of nowadays.

In the media, questions about her life before she met Paul had given way to outrage at her supposedly detrimental effects on him–all very much what Linda had suffered during the Seventies. She was thought to have cheapened the classiest of pop stars by pressuring him into appearing on brassy TV shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, persuading him to dye his hair and have plastic surgery (a plastic surgeon in California instanced the level of his earlobes as irrefutable proof that he’d ‘had work done’), even making him change the order of the Lennon–McCartney credit on the Back in the U.S. album. And if all that wasn’t enough for the female columnists who were her principal assailants, why did she have to cling so possessively to his arm whenever they appeared in public?

She had also been widely blamed for Paul’s sacking of Geoff Baker after 15 years as his loyal (and highly effective) PR man. Baker was said to loathe her for the damage she’d done to his carefully-nurtured McCartney image while she felt threatened by his closeness to Paul; a bond sealed by their shared enthusiasm for pot.

Baker took his dismissal in a gentlemanly spirit, forbearing to sell his memoirs to any of the tabloids who bid for them or utter a word against Paul or Heather in public. He had been a journalist before entering PR and now returned to his old profession as editor of Golf Course News magazine with a brief to ‘sex it up’. This allowed him to give some vent to his feelings, albeit to a niche audience; the first cover under his editorship showed a Heather lookalike with a golf ball wedged in her cleavage.

As they had been trained to do since infancy, Mary, Stella, James and Heather McCartney made no public comment about their stepmother any more than on other aspects of Paul’s life. But there were constant press stories from unnamed ‘insiders’ and ‘sources’ about their common dislike of Heather, dismay at her seemingly illimitable influence over him and anger at how, no longer content with amputees and landmines, she seemed intent on usurping their mother’s place in the field of animal rights.

She had become not only a patron of Linda’s beloved PETA organisation, but was the face of its current advertising campaign against the clothing trade’s use of dog and cat fur (slogan: ‘If you wouldn’t wear your dog, please don’t wear any fur’). In addition, Paul had introduced her to Viva!, the vegetarian pressure group to whose founder, Juliet Gellatley, he had presented the first Linda McCartney Award at that fateful Dorchester Hotel ceremony in 1999. Recently, she and Gellatley had appeared together at Oxford University’s renowned Union debating society, showing horrific film footage of dogs being skinned to make fur collars and cuffs.

Paul at this stage still seemed every inch the loyal and protective husband. In February 2005, he wrote a lengthy ‘note’ to the many supporters Heather still had via her website, dealing with ‘the cruel suggestions that flow from these [journalists’] pens’ point by point.

He admitted ‘colouring’ his hair, but said he’d been doing so ‘with varying degrees of success’ for years before Heather’s advent. Nor had he undergone plastic surgery at her behest, no matter what might be said about the orientation of his earlobes. His desire to reverse the Lennon–McCartney credit likewise dated from 1995, four years before he’d met her, and, anyway, was ‘something I don’t have a problem with any more’.

Geoff Baker’s firing likewise had been nothing to do with her, but the result of a growing ‘instability’ on Baker’s part, which had come to a head with the David Blaine incident. Their appearances on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? had been a joint decision, one Paul claimed to have thoroughly enjoyed. ‘It’s an insult to my intelligence to imagine me being coerced into something like that.’

Heather gripped his arm not out of possessiveness but because floor-surfaces could be slippery and someone with a prosthetic leg often needed ‘a little help from a friend… One of the most shocking recent statements,’ he continued, ‘was that “the best thing that ever happened to her was losing her leg”. Imagine losing a leg and dealing with it as bravely as Heather has done, and having to read that on top of it!’ Finally, the reports of his children disliking and resenting her were pure calumny. ‘In fact, we get on great and anyone who knows our family can see that for themselves.’

On 2 July, he headlined at Live 8, a giant international concert to mark the twentieth anniversary of Live Aid and send a message to the current G8 summit of Western leaders that famine remained a pressing world problem. The show was staged simultaneously in London’s Hyde Park and at nine other venues and featured 150 bands, totalling 1250 musicians, with guest appearances by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the founder of the Microsoft corporation, Bill Gates. Paul, in Hyde Park, provided the overture with ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, backed by U2, and its finale with ‘Hey Jude’.

There, too, in the backstage VIP area, came the first public sign that his wife and grown-up children did not get on quite as ‘great’ as he’d claimed. At one moment, Stella was seen to turn pointedly away from Heather as if unwilling to speak to her father in her presence or run the risk of being photographed with her.

Stella and her siblings could take comfort from the fact that, after barely three years, the marriage was looking far from idyllic. Whereas disagreements between Paul and their mother had been few and far between, and generally kept private, his rows with Heather were frequent, angry shouting matches in front of them or embarrassed employees.

Still, he continued to show her great generosity over and above the £360,000 per year annual allowance and the Coutts joint credit card. In 2002 and 2003, he had made her two cash gifts totalling £500,000 which enabled her to purchase a luxurious riverside apartment in the Thames Reach complex in west London for use as an office. His largesse extended to members of her family: he took out a mortgage to buy her sister, and now PA, Fiona, a £421,000 house, and bought her cousin, Sonya, a £193,000 property in Southampton.

Characteristically, his first outward qualms about the relationship were expressed through music. In September 2005, he released a new album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, packaged with yet another dose of Beatley nostalgia. The cover was a black and white photo by his brother Michael of his schoolboy self in the backyard at 20 Forthlin Road (titled ‘Our Kid Through Mum’s Net Curtains’) sitting with his guitar under lines of washing pegged out by their diligent dad.

The producer was Nigel Godrich, a young British musician/engineer best-known for his close association with Radiohead. Unlike any other producer since George Martin, Godrich refused to be overawed by working with Paul McCartney, dismissing his stage band from the sessions, even daring to suggest some of his new songs weren’t quite up to standard and should be rethought.

Paul initially bridled at this ‘cheekiness’, but then accepted it. His reward was a commercial and critical success which spent 21 weeks in the US album charts, peaking at number six, and later was Grammy-nominated in four categories including Album of the Year.

Much of its impact came from a very noticeable lack of usual McCartney lightness and optimism. The tone was bleak and self-deprecating; the lyrics teemed with images of insecurity and confusion–getting hooked, hanging his head, running and hiding, biting his tongue, not knowing what to say. ‘Riding to Vanity Fair’, in particular, was like the premature epitaph to a relationship: ‘I was open to friendship/ But you didn’t seem to have any to spare/ While you were riding to Vanity Fair’.

During their appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Heather had mentioned his knowledge of English literature, little thinking it might be turned against her like this. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s great Christian parable, Vanity Fair is an array of merchandise which looks alluring from a distance but at close quarters proves worthless. And in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian novel of that name, the central female character, Becky Sharp, is a cynical, duplicitous social climber who ruthlessly uses her charms to fascinate and seduce older men.

In October, Faber & Faber published his first children’s book, High in the Clouds, written in collaboration with the noted children’s author Philip Ardagh and illustrated by Geoff Dunbar, the gifted animator of Rupert and the Frog Song. Its story touched all the pro-animal, pro-environment themes closest to Linda’s heart: a young squirrel sees his woodland home destroyed (and his mother killed) by developers’ bulldozers, then leads his friends on a quest for an animal Paradise bearing a strong resemblance to Peasmarsh.

Paul launched the book personally in the UK by reading its opening pages to an audience of children, then taking questions; in America, the first print-run was half a million.

The rest of 2005 was spent on an American stadium tour, promoting his new album literally to the skies. At his concert in Anaheim, California, on 12 November, one of its tracks, ‘English Tea’, together with a Beatles oldie, ‘Good Day Sunshine’, was beamed up to the Russian/American crew of the Mir space station.

Just now, anyway, there was other, more pressing trouble in the family. Two years earlier, Mike McCartney, then aged 60, had been accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old waitress during a party at a pub near his Cheshire home. The young woman claimed he’d groped her from behind while requesting more tempura prawns; he said he’d touched her merely in ‘a fatherly gesture of thanks’.

Seventeen months passed before Mike’s trial took place at Chester Crown Court, in February 2006. After three days, the judge halted the proceedings, ruling that sexual assault had not been proved, and castigating the Crown Prosecution Service for wasting public money on the case and for the long delay before the hearing. Acquitted ‘without a stain on his exemplary character’, Mike kept up his tradition of close-mouthedness about Paul, simply thanking ‘my big brother, who has been a rock of support during this attempt to soil our family’s name’.

Where campaigning at least was concerned, Paul and Heather still presented a united front. In March, accompanied by a BBC film crew, they flew to Canada to protest against the annual slaughter of harp seal pups off the coast of Newfoundland. Wearing matching orange thermal suits, they lay on an ice floe with one of the sad-eyed, mewing little creatures soon to be clubbed to death for its fluffy white fur. Afterwards, they went back onto Larry King Live to confront Newfoundland and Labrador’s state premier, Danny Williams, about the inhumanness of the hunt, seeming more a team than usual–for this time Paul managed to get several words in edgewise.

In April, Heather needed ‘revision surgery’ on the stump of her left leg to reattach muscle-tissue to the bone. She disappeared from view for some weeks, provoking a spate of press stories that the marriage was in trouble. Then she reappeared, saying she’d merely been hiding from photographers seeking pictures of her on crutches and any idea of a rift with Paul was ‘hilarious… of course we’re together. Paul and I are together a hundred per cent.’

A week later, on 17 May, they issued a joint statement that they were to separate. ‘Having tried exceptionally hard to make our relationship work given the daily pressures surrounding us, it is with sadness that we have both decided to go our separate ways. Our parting is an amicable one and both of us still care about each other very much, but have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a normal relationship with constant intrusions into our private lives, and we have actively tried to protect the privacy of our child…

‘We hope for the sake of our baby daughter that we will be given some space and time to get through this difficult period.’

A separate message from Paul on his website continued to defend Heather against those who’d always said she only married him for his money. ‘There is not an ounce of truth in this. She is a very generous person who spends most of her time trying to help others in greater need than herself. All the work she does is unpaid, so these stories are completely ridiculous and unfounded.’

Heather just then was in the midst of publicising her latest book, a self-help manual entitled Life Balance: The Essential Keys to a Lifetime of Wellbeing. Three days later, the Guardian magazine’s Life and Style section published a promotional Q&A with her which had already gone to press when the announcement was made: