Paul McCartney (94 page)

But the real answer seems to have been the caring side of him, passed on by his mother, that selfless nurse and midwife, and so much in play during the three years of Linda’s illness. When his old Liverpool friend Joe Flannery asked what had drawn him to Heather, he put it very simply: ‘I looked at her leg and went “A-ah.”’

‘I’ve just got a leg missing. I’ve still got my heart’

To all appearances, he remained in deepest mourning for Linda and concerned only with ensuring she would not be forgotten. One of his first acts after her death was to divide $2 million between New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, at both of which she had received impressive long-term care, on condition that if the money were spent on research no animals would be used. He made it known that he remained totally committed to her crusade for vegetarianism and would use his name to oppose animal cruelty wherever it was found–as proof, writing to India’s prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to protest against that country’s illegal export and slaughter of cows for the leather industry.

Outside bodies were creating their own Linda memorials, if not funded then personally vetted by him. At the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, a Linda McCartney cancer treatment centre was nearing completion; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was to mount an exhibition of her photographs; her artist friend Brian Clarke had created a 62-foot-long stained glass window in her memory for permanent exhibition at the Corning Glass Museum in New York.

After the Albert Hall rock spectacular, the classical world, to which Paul now firmly belonged, paid its own tribute. In July 1999, Charterhouse school in Surrey was the setting for A Garland for Linda, a recital of ten specially-written pieces by composers such as John Tavener, David Matthews and the newly-dubbed Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, together with a new McCartney one, entitled ‘Nova’. Proceeds from the performance and the album which followed went to a cancer charity, the Garland Appeal.

Everything he did in public proclaimed that Linda had been the love of his life and that no one could ever take her place. The fact remained that he was the world’s most eligible widower, his 57 years no obstacle to women of any age. There was a flurry of tabloid speculation when the (married) textile designer Sue Timney–who’d been a good friend of Linda’s–was noticed paying regular visits to Peasmarsh. Paul put out a terse statement that they were merely working together on an exhibition of Linda’s photographs and that suggestions of anything more were ‘scurrilous’ and ‘mean-spirited’.

Heather Mills, meanwhile, seemed back on her own very different trajectory–and already spoken for. The day after the Pride of Britain awards, she’d travelled to Cambodia with the Duchess of Kent to make a television documentary on its landmine problem with British director and anthropologist Chris Terrill.

She was wont to say that, disability or no, every man she met wanted to marry her within a week. Actually, it was ten days into the trip, aboard a fishing boat on the Mekong River, when Terrill proposed to her. She replied with one word: ‘When?’

The two showed off Heather’s engagement ring on Esther Rantzen’s television show, for which they’d made the Cambodia film, and set their wedding for 8 August. With just a week to go, after Terrill had had his stag night, Heather told him she was going to meet her sister, Fiona, who’d flown in from Greece for the ceremony. He never saw her again.

In a sequel to her autobiography, published after her life had changed beyond recognition, she would describe making a casual arrangement with Paul to meet up in America, going there with her sister, Fiona, and contacting him from an hotel near his summer home in Amagansett, Long Island. As the sisters lay on the beach, she recalled, he joined them by boat–not the luxury yacht they expected but a tiny Sunfish dinghy with a multicoloured sail.

By this account, he and Heather spent the next few days together, with Fiona playing gooseberry. His wooing of her began in earnest when he brought his guitar to the beach and serenaded her as they sat together on a lifeguard’s high-level observation-chair. However, in future divorce papers, she would say she’d gone to America with him so that he could show her his property in Pintail Lane.

That autumn, they began a clandestine affair, conducted mainly in Rye, the small, rather literary seaside town a couple of miles from Peasmarsh. There Paul owned a cottage named The Forecastle, once occupied by Radclyffe Hall, the first openly lesbian novelist (who sometimes used the pseudonym ‘John’), and her lover, Una Troubridge.

From September 1999 to January 2000, he and Heather spent several nights a week at The Forecastle, which they nicknamed Lizzie because of its Elizabethan half-timbering. There also were trysts at a London hotel where he would have the most luxurious suite specially prepared for them. On 31 October, she arrived to find he’d had it filled with Hallowe’en pumpkins and lanterns.

Heather still seemed to have no idea of his magnitude as a recording artiste. Her sister, Fiona, owned a small record label named Coda and to publicise her campaign on behalf of amputees she planned to release a single of herself talking about it, backed by some kind of music. ‘I was thinking of gospel singers but I couldn’t find any,’ she would recall. ‘So I asked Paul if he knew anyone and he said ,“I’ll do it.”’

The result was ‘Voice’, a kind of disco rap for which he provided a highly-polished dance track and backup vocal to Heather’s spoken plea for amputees to be treated as real people. On the accompanying video, she did a sexy dance in her white trousers, which ended with her kicking off her prosthetic leg.

Fleet Street first scented something early in November when she and Fiona attended the Guy Fawkes Night party Paul always threw at Peasmarsh, both of them staying over for two nights in a cottage on the estate and Heather hiding her face from photographers as she left. By this time, too, there was a CD and video around in which he seemed to be ‘doing a Wings’ with her.

Paul promptly issued a statement denying any romantic interest in either sister: ‘Because I work with these ladies does not mean I have anything more than a business relationship with them. I will continue to work with Heather Mills on the record project and even though this story of romance is not true, I hope it will bring attention to her efforts for the disabled worldwide.’

A statement on Heather’s behalf repeated that they were together only on ‘Voice’: ‘She needed a backing vocalist and that is where Paul McCartney came in.’ Paul attended the single’s launch party on 22 November (coincidentally the thirty-first anniversary of the Beatles’ White Album) but took care to be photographed only with Fiona.

Like all older men who take much younger lovers, he felt rejuvenated and energised and told himself the age difference was irrelevant. Although never a sporty type, apart from horse-riding, he resolutely joined Heather in the vigorous outdoor activities her disability hadn’t curtailed. On their first skiing holiday together, he asked her, ‘How fast can you go?’

‘Ninety-three kilometres an hour,’ she replied.

‘You’d better go first then,’ Paul laughed, little imagining how she would take him at his word.

The affair gave a further boost to the work ethic he’d all but lost during the year after Linda’s death. During the last quarter of 1999, he put out both a new pop and a new classical album and gave his first live show since he’d shared a stage with her.

The pop album, released in October, was Run Devil Run, named after a ‘funky’ pharmacy he’d seen in Atlanta, Georgia, which sold potions to ward off the evil eye. Made back at Abbey Road, it was mostly cover versions of old rock and skiffle hits including some long-forgotten ones like Charlie Gracie’s ‘Fabulous’ and the Vipers’ ‘No Other Baby’, played with the euphoric spontaneity of long-ago Beatles sessions. But grief still glimmered in a new song, ‘Try Not to Cry’: ‘All day, I try to be a man/ Help me to do it, show me the plan’.

Then in November came Working Classical, a collection of his past pop hits, plus three new compositions in the Standing Stone mould, arranged by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett and Jonathan Tunick and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Its title was a typical McCartney pun, but still slyly suggestive of his triumph; the working-class Liverpool lad who’d conquered classical music as completely as he had rock ‘n’ roll.

There recently had been a further surge of Beatlemania in Britain with the re-release of the Yellow Submarine animated film and soundtrack album. To promote Run Devil Run–and round off the twentieth century–Paul decided to give a live show in Liverpool: not at the Empire this time but in some intimate venue redolent of Beatle times past. His first choice was the flat in Gambier Terrace which John and Stu Sutcliffe had shared as art students. Then his PR, Geoff Baker, suggested the facsimile Cavern, opened in 1984 to replace the original subterranean ‘home of the Beatles’, filled in to make way for a car park in 1973.

Paul was initially unenthusiastic, pointing out that the new Cavern was located on the wrong side of Mathew Street as well as eight feet deeper underground with modern refinements like a front and back stage–and an alcohol licence. He relented after assurances from the present owner, Bill Heckle, that it still retained its old postal address, some of the bricks from the original structure were to be found in it and its back stage was only 12 feet away from the buried one the Beatles had trod.

After he announced the gig on BBC1’s Michael Parkinson show, there were around one million applications for the 300 seats available. Some women in Liverpool were reported to be offering sexual favours in return for a ticket.

The performance on the evening of 14 December was filmed for MPL and broadcast over the Internet. For extra authenticity, Paul had asked the Cavern’s first and most celebrated DJ, Bob Wooler, to emcee as he had countless times for the Beatles in the old days. The dignified, meticulous Wooler had given them valuable tips about stagecraft and turned them on to American soul singers like Chan Romero, but had been left behind by the Epstein-led exodus to London, one of the saddest cases of wounded Liverpool eyes.

Now Paul’s affectionate greeting and offer of a comeback wiped away some of that old hurt. Unfortunately, Wooler had a chronic drink problem which a latter, accident-prone business partnership with the Beatles’ first manager, Allan Williams, had done little to help. Overcome with emotion and paralysed by nerves, he vanished into Mathew Street’s unchanged Grapes pub and never made it onstage that night.

Behind Paul were the superior ad hoc band from Run Devil Run: David Gilmour and Mick Green on guitars, Pete Wingfield on keyboards, Ian Paice on drums. Virtuosi though they were, they fluffed the simple intro to Gene Vincent’s ‘Blue Jean Bop’ and Paul held up an arm to stop them. ‘With this band,’ he said, ‘if we don’t get it right, we start again.’ Backstage opinion was divided as to whether it had been a genuine slip or a very McCartney bit of theatre.

On 31 December, he threw a big party at ‘Rembrandt’, his father’s old house on the Wirral, with the double object of bringing in the new millennium and introducing his children and Liverpool relations to Heather. Next morning, the pair were said by the News of the World to have looked ‘relaxed and happy’ as they left to attend a family New Year’s Day lunch.

‘Heather has been a rock for Paul since Linda’s death and it looks like he is finally starting to rebuild his life,’ an unnamed ‘source’ told the paper. ‘They were every bit the happy couple at the party and it’s a sign of their deep affection for each other that they wanted to celebrate the start of the millennium together.’

In the early hours of 30 December, a 33-year-old Liverpudlian named Michael Abram had broken into George’s Oxfordshire mansion, Friar Park, armed with a knife and a lump of statuary purloined from the garden. George had gone downstairs to investigate and in the ensuing struggle Abram had stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, equally impervious to his would-be pacifying cries of ‘Hare Krishna!’ and blows from a heavy lamp wielded by his wife, Olivia.

Before police came to their rescue, the couple both believed they were about to be murdered. Abram later claimed to have been possessed by George’s spirit and to be on ‘a mission’ to kill him.

Although George played down the attack, he’d suffered a punctured lung as well as being traumatised afresh after his recent cancer. For Paul, it was a chilling reminder of John’s murder by Mark David Chapman, another crazy on a supposed mission in the selfsame month 19 years earlier. Nor was it the only sign of the strides Britain had since taken to catch up America in random violence and malevolence. George’s neighbour, the writer John Mortimer, later recalled seeing carloads of people pass Friar Park’s front gate, cheering and applauding what Michael Abram had done.

The world’s media were still pressing Paul to admit his involvement with Heather Mills, but getting little joy from the old master of equivocation and soufflé-speak. In February 2000, he took his children to the exclusive Caribbean resort of Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands. On the day the children left for home, Heather flew in to join him for a further ten days. His publicist, Geoff Baker, refused to confirm the tryst had taken place and insisted the two were ‘just good friends’.

That pretence was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. In March, Heather gave up her five-bedroom house in King’s Somborne, Hampshire, and bought a property in Brighton–using the residue of £200,000 she’d received as compensation after her accident–in order to be nearer to Rye. Walking her dog on Brighton sea front, she sometimes passed the time of day with a fellow dog-walker whose name she never learned. It was Maggie McGivern, the most secret of Paul’s 1960s girlfriends. Neither woman had any inkling of the other’s connection with him.

That spring, Paul was forced to admit guardedly that he and Heather Mills were ‘an item’. He described Heather as ‘a very impressive woman’ and appealed to the paparazzi not to hound them ‘because that could wreck something’. The McCartney children were reportedly pleased with the news and Paul was said to have already introduced Heather to the Ringo Starrs over dinner.