Paul McCartney (95 page)

It was an odd coincidence that he should already have a Heather in his life and as the second one claimed more and more of his attention, the first suddenly had urgent need of him.

On 19 March, Linda’s ex-husband, Joseph Melville See, who may or may not have inspired ‘Get Back’ and ‘Dear Boy’, committed suicide near his home in Arizona. The once indefatigable geologist and explorer had lately fallen into a depression, taking up with another woman while continuing to live with his long-time partner, Beverly Wilk, and obsessively reading the Bible and the works of Ernest Hemingway, his lifelong role model. Even his suicide replicated Hemingway’s: a shotgun blast on the eve of his sixty-second birthday.

Losing her biological father–a man she’d only lately come to know and appreciate–just two years after losing her mother was a devastating blow to the already fragile Heather McCartney. In America, there was a spate of tabloid headlines about ‘Linda’s ex’; even reports that, because a shotgun had been involved, the local police were launching a murder investigation.

When Paul and Linda became an item in 1968–the year of Heather Mills’s birth–the backlash from his envious fans had been highly unpleasant. But Heather was to experience nothing of the kind, at least not yet. People were glad he’d found someone else, albeit rather rapidly, and thought his surprising choice looked nice and would be good for him.

The media were another matter. Not content with the life story Heather had provided ready-made–running away from home at 13 to join a fun fair, shoplifting and sleeping in a cardboard box–Britain’s tabloid press began to take a more searching and increasingly less benevolent look at their former ‘Model of Courage’.

They soon discovered that the modelling career, so cruelly blighted by her accident, had not been in the glamorous haute couture sphere inhabited by Stella McCartney but the more downmarket one of lingerie catalogues and topless glamour poses. For one period, not mentioned in her autobiography, she’d worked as a ‘party girl’ for the entertainment of wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen like the Saudi Arabian billionaire Adnan Khashoggi.

Fearing the exposé was imminent, Heather pre-empted it by telling Paul she was about to be falsely labelled ‘a high-class hooker’–a moment which, she later said, was ‘as bad as losing my leg’. But ‘he listened to everything and said it didn’t make the slightest difference to our relationship’.

It proved just the beginning of what he would have to listen to. For now that she shared his limelight, people began popping up all over the place to contradict the harrowing, heroic story she had told in Out on a Limb or add unwelcome footnotes to it.

Her mother, Beatrice, was dead, but when the tabloids tracked down her father, Mark, he vehemently denied tyrannising and brutalising her during her childhood as she’d claimed. Even more forthcoming was Alfie Karmal, the older man to whom she’d been briefly married at the end of the Eighties. According to Karmal, the rot quickly set in when ‘I began to realise she had difficulty telling the truth. She told me a lot about her past that turned out to be embellished or else fantasy. She told me so many fibs that if she’d said it was raining, I would have checked.’

Among her television colleagues, she polarised opinion, some regarding her as an unbearable egotist and diva, others extolling her courage, determination and generosity. One day, she appeared on the Richard & Judy show alongside a mother and father making the latest of many fruitless appeals to their runaway, drug-addicted teenage daughter to return home. Heather chipped in, offering the runaway a refuge for three months and support in kicking her heroin habit. That successfully accomplished, she found her a job at a leisure-centre, turning her life around completely.

Linda, the WASP-y New Yorker, had got on easily with Paul’s family from the start, but Heather, the working-class fellow northerner, proved a less comfortable fit. At the New Year/Millennium party, she’d arrived in an ostentatious white (fun) fur coat and matching Cossack hat which she declined to remove and–according to his cousin, Mike Robbins–spent most of the evening sitting apart from the revelry in the kitchen.

Nor were his children as happy about the relationship as had been reported–especially not James and Heather, who was only five years older than her namesake. All of them felt it was way too soon after their mother’s death. Mary, the eldest, and most protective of Paul, feared he was falling victim to a ruthless opportunist. Only Stella felt they should give the newcomer a chance, remembering how desolate he had been for months after Linda’s death.

Throughout the summer of 2000, he and Heather continued to be seen together, mostly in pursuance of her charity work. Like her, he signed up to Adopt-A-Minefield, the organisation which both campaigned against the use of landmines and carried out the dangerous work of clearance. They were joint hosts for Adopt-A-Minefield’s UK launch at the BAFTA awards, using Paul’s song ‘Hope of Deliverance’ as a soundtrack.

In September they both appeared at a United Nations conference on landmines in Geneva. Paul delivered an opening address with all the relevant statistics at his fingertips–26,000 adults and 8000 children killed by landmines each year, 11 governments and 30 rebel groups still using them–then called Heather to the podium. That same month, she was with him at the wedding of his Auntie Gin’s granddaughter, Susan Harris, in Wallasey, when he insisted on personally chauffeuring the bride to the church.

Early in October, Heather was the subject of ITV’s Stars in Their Lives, a knock-off of the famous This Is Your Life. Paul had agreed to do a surprise walk-on to talk about her work; instead, he used his appearance to confirm at long last that their relationship was serious. Heather herself professed to have had no idea he fancied her until after one of their ‘prim and proper’ meetings about her charity. ‘I felt these eyes on my back and I thought “He’s eyeing up my bum.”’

‘And I was,’ Paul said.

‘I love him,’ Heather told presenter Carol Vorderman, who then turned to Paul.

‘Yeah, I love her, too,’ he responded, defusing it ever so slightly with some mock sentimental air-violin.

From that moment, a minor British celebrity changed into a major international one. American television’s top current affairs show, 20/20, immediately sent its star presenter, Barbara Walters, to London to report on the romance and interview Heather. The resulting programme, titled Heather’s Journey, began with the video she and Paul had made for her amputees campaign–the sexy dance, to his backing-track, that ended with her kicking off her false leg.

Walters introduced her as someone whose life read ‘like a soap opera’: ‘a child of the streets’ who became ‘a sought-after international model until a freak accident robbed her of her leg’. Once more, she recounted that nightmare childhood and teenage flight from home; there was a visit to the scene of her accident in 1993 and film of her comforting and encouraging child landmine victims ‘like Princess Diana before her’. Altogether, one of the most rigorous of American interviewers was utterly captivated.

‘I’ve just got a leg missing,’ she told Walters. ‘I’ve still got my heart.’

The dawn of the twenty-first century found Beatlemania flourishing more than ever. In November 2000, the book version of The Beatles Anthology, a lavishly-produced coffee-table hardback containing the interviews from the television series plus 120 rare photos, was a bestseller around the world. That same month, Apple put out a compilation of their number one singles from 1963 to 1970 (all except ‘Please Please Me’) simply entitled 1, which itself performed the same feat in 34 countries and went on to become America’s top-selling album of the new decade.

The London Sunday Times Rich List gazetted Paul as pop music’s first dollar billionaire and on course to be its first sterling one by 2001, thanks jointly to earnings of £175 million from the 1 album and his inheritance from Linda. Heather would later claim he told her he was worth well north of £800 million, though a High Court judge would ultimately set the total at less than half that.

He still had more money than he could ever conceivably spend. Others in that situation, having tired of all sensory pleasures, find satisfaction in small acts of frugality–the US press magnate William Randolph Hearst having meals served on paper plates or the oil billionaire John Paul Getty installing a payphone in the vestibule of his British mansion, Sutton Place.

Paul could be enormously generous, not only to hospitals, his family and home city but to people from deep in his past. One such was Horst Fascher, the Hamburg heavy who’d watched over the Beatles during their stints on the Reeperbahn and still ran a replica Star-Club there.

In 1994, he received an SOS from Fascher, whose 11-month-old daughter, Sophie-Louise, had been diagnosed with a serious heart defect. He flew the child and her parents to London, then brought a team of specialists from New York to operate on her at Great Ormond Street Hospital, picking up a bill of around $200,000. When his biographer, Barry Miles, was found to have a torn retina, he arranged for Miles to see Britain’s top eye specialist, provided a limo to take him to the appointment and paid for all the subsequent treatment.

Yet he could also have his John Paul Getty moments. Miles happened to be at MPL when news of the 1 album’s monster success came in. ‘Some of the staff opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. But Paul got quite grumpy with them for being so extravagant.’

Heather was seeing his generous side in excelsis. After a Christmas together at Lizzie, they left for a month-long holiday to India, staying in super-luxury hotels and converted maharajahs’ palaces. In Jaipur, Paul went off on his own and bought a £15,000 sapphire and diamond ring for her–then decided not to give it to her just yet.

They had only just returned to Britain when a severe earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat. Thousands of people were buried under collapsed buildings and had to have limbs amputated as a result. In Jaipur, as it happened, Heather had been shown a new, inexpensive type of artificial leg. She immediately rushed to the earthquake scene and arranged for a supply of ‘Jaipur legs’ to be provided.

From there, she joined Paul in Los Angeles where he was to record a new album with the producer David Kahne. The title, Driving Rain, seemed an odd choice as its theme was how Heather had rescued him from tempests of grief; the tracks included ‘Back in the Sunshine Again’ (‘You gave me the strength to get out of bed’), ‘Riding into Jaipur’ (‘Riding with my baby/ Oh, what a delight’) and ‘Heather’, identifying the two of them with Edward Lear’s ‘Owl and the Pussycat’ (‘I will dance to a runcible tune with the queen of my heart’).

Rather than use an hotel and be plagued by paparazzi, Paul rented the Beverly Hills home of Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, a secluded French-style mansion with the delightfully apt address of 9536 Heather Road. This they nicknamed ‘the Heather House’ and became so fond of it that Paul later bought it for just under $4 million, implying–so Heather would later claim–that he intended to make it over to her.

His largesse was balanced by caution; despite wanting to be with her, he didn’t want them to seem to be cohabiting. In May 2001, she received a loan of £800,000 from MPL to buy a luxurious seafront property named Angel’s Rest in Hove, the next-door town to Brighton, said to be so posh that its seagulls fly upside-down. There she was to live ostensibly by herself, though Paul would be there much of the time. With this in view, MPL loaned her an additional £150,000 for renovations, the total £950,000 to be repaid in easy instalments of £1000 per month. As she had nothing to hang on the walls, he shipped in 30 of his own paintings.

In the British press, impressive stories about Heather Mills continued to outweigh troubling ones. That April of 2001, in an interview to the Sunday Times, she variously claimed that the Blair government wanted to give her a peerage, that all the main British political parties were competing for her services as a Member of Parliament and that she’d recently backed out of a meeting with America’s ex-president Bill Clinton because she couldn’t be seen to endorse the Democratic party. She also let drop that she was rated the number one public speaker in the UK and seventh in the world.

Besotted with her though Paul was, he still wore his wedding ring and grieving for Linda remained a powerful element in his work. In May, he brought out Wingspan, a double CD of Wings’ greatest hits, accompanied by a documentary about their musical and marital partnership, filling in the conspicuous gap in his authorised biography. The producer was his daughter, Mary–now something of a celebrity after photographing Tony and Cherie Blair’s new baby son, Leo–and the director was her husband, Alistair Donald.

With Mary also acting as his interviewer, the tone was intimate, at times emotional, as he recalled the fun of having ‘my best mate, my wife, to sing along with’. Under her gentle coaxing, he also talked in detail for the first time about key episodes in Wings’ bumpy history, such as the defection of two key members on the eve of making Band on the Run and how he’d been ‘an idiot’ with the block of marijuana at Tokyo airport in 1980.

Linda likewise permeated Blackbird Singing, a collection of his song-lyrics and poems between 1965 and 1999, published by the renowned poetry imprint of Faber & Faber. She had always wanted such a book to appear and had lined up the leading British poet Adrian Mitchell to edit it as far back as 1991 when Mitchell had a guest spot on the Unplugged Tour.

There is a world of difference between a pop lyric embedded in voices and instruments–and so allowed all kinds of imperfection–and a poem alone and naked on the page. Paul had always been exceptional, along with John, Bob Dylan and a few others, in writing lyrics that read like poetry. No less a master than Allen Ginsberg considered ‘Eleanor Rigby’ ‘a hell of a poem’; J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books (a phenomenon often compared with the Beatles), cited the words to ‘Yesterday’ as a model of verbal economy and discipline; the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, whom he’d met at the Pride of Britain awards, opined that he’d be ‘an overwhelmingly popular choice’ as Poet Laureate.