Paul McCartney (103 page)

Through all their fights and feuds, Aspinall had retained the liking and trust of each one and, even more impressively, gotten along with all their wives. As their de facto manager during the multiple lawsuits following their break-up, he had suffered stress that brought on two heart attacks (after the second of which he awoke to see John’s ghost standing beside his bed). And never once by word or gesture had he betrayed their confidence, collectively or individually.

As scheduler of their reissues and repackagings, he had been criticised for not supplying as many as their fans demanded–though the final decision in such matters didn’t rest with him but the two ex-Beatles and two widows who constituted his board of directors. But what he did put out in their name was of unfailing quality and classiness, like the 1 album, the recent film of George’s Concert for Bangladesh and, most notably, The Beatles Anthology.

The last project he’d overseen was the Love musical, a Beatle-themed Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, which George had first suggested to the Cirque’s French-Canadian founder, Guy Laliberté, in 2000. Sir George Martin, the natural choice as its musical director, now suffered from severe hearing problems and in his place other Apple executives had suggested the British DJ-mixer Fatboy Slim. But Aspinall had insisted on having Martin, with his son, Giles, to help him.

The result was a brilliant soundtrack that mixed and matched long-familiar Beatles songs to produce fascinating new effects, Paul’s guitar intro to ‘Blackbird’ for instance segueing into ‘Yesterday’, and the Gothic melodrama of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ into ‘Julia’, John’s broken-hearted hymnlet for his lost mother. In between were snatches of the four’s studio chatter; those droll, offhand Scouse voices in mega-decibel sound, somehow even more affecting than the music.

The production, in a purpose-built theatre at Vegas’s Mirage hotel, required a public display of friendliness between Paul and Yoko, for they both were heavily involved in its rehearsals and previews. Its first night on 30 June 2006 saw the largest ever public assembly of the Beatles’ so often dysfunctional ‘family’: Paul, Ringo, Yoko, Olivia Harrison, Barbara [Starr], John’s first wife, Cynthia, his two sons, Julian and Sean, George’s son, Dhani, and Paul’s brother, Mike. The show was rapturously greeted, as were the family when they took a bow afterwards. Paul requested ‘a special round of applause for John and George’.

In fact, Aspinall had not decided to move on; he had been forced out of Apple because of his firm resistance to anything that he believed would cheapen the Beatles brand. The breaking-point, ironically, had been a proposal to make their catalogue available through Apple Inc.’s iTunes.

After his 46 years of service, Aspinall was treated far from generously. The single token of appreciation came from Paul, to whom he’d always been less close than to George and John. It was a solid gold wristwatch whose bulk humorously suggested the gold pocket watches traditionally presented to long-serving employees up north. Its two-word inscription combined the baby word for ‘thank you’ with the fondest of Liverpool endearments: ‘Ta, la’.

Paul’s motto during the past months had been a saying of Winston Churchill’s: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going’. Amazingly, therefore, the spring of 2007 found him with a new album ready for release. Its title was a message he sometimes saw flash up on his mobile phone which also suggested the epic content of his cerebral microchip: Memory Almost Full.

Throughout the Beatles’ recording career, they stayed with EMI, the company which had signed them at a minuscule royalty rate in 1962. Since going solo, Paul had tried other record-labels but finally returned to the place where his partnership with John had reached its apotheosis and which was situated so conveniently around the corner from his London home.

However, EMI nowadays was very different from the mighty bureaucratic organisation that once had seemed almost like an alternative BBC. It had signally failed to meet the challenges of the computer age in which record-sales from stores were massively reduced by digital downloads; having recently announced record losses, it was about to be bought by a private equity group, Terra Firma.

Before the sale took place, Paul jumped ship–taking all his solo song-copyrights with him–but landing with none of the conventional record companies eager to sign him. The colossal Starbucks coffee bar chain had recently set up its own record label, initially for making compilations of tracks licensed from outside. He was to become Hear Music’s first contract artiste and Memory Almost Full its first original release.

Some of the album had been recorded before Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, when he was still writing love songs to Heather rather than stern letters about misappropriated bottles of cleaning fluid. Two stayed on the tracklist: ‘Gratitude’ (for ending his ‘cold and lonely nights’ when he was ‘living with a memory’) and ‘See Your Sunshine’ (‘Step out in front of me, baby/ They want you in the front line’).

The newer material showed no scars from his recent travails, either in bitterness of tone or substandard performance. On the contrary, stress seemed to have sharpened his lyrics to the point where some definitely crossed over into poetry. ‘That Was Me’ evoked his boy-Beatle self, ‘sweating cobwebs under contract in the cellar on TV’. ‘The End of the End’ talked about his own death, when he wanted ‘jokes to be told… and stories of old to be rolled out like carpets/ That children have played on and laid on’.

On the day of its American release, 5 June, the album played continuously in Starbucks’ 13,500 establishments around the world (including 400 in China) and thereafter to a weekly latte-or espresso-sipping audience of around 4.4 million. It went top five in Britain, America and half a dozen other countries, and prompted a bout of Sgt. Pepper-y rune-reading. Another track, ‘You Tell Me’, mentioned the ‘bright red cardinal bird’ commonly found in both Arizona and Long Island where he’d spent some of his happiest times with Linda. The word went around that Memory Almost Full was a deliberate anagram of For My Soulmate LLM (Linda Louise McCartney).

On 30 June, the Love musical celebrated a year of sold-out performances in Las Vegas with a lavish party at the Mirage hotel. Neil Aspinall, the man who’d done most to make it happen, was left off the guest-list.

‘When Paul found out about it, he was livid,’ Aspinall’s widow, Suzy, recalls. ‘He phoned Neil and told him, “Never mind what anyone else says. You’re coming to that party with me.”’

The divorce action proper was set down for February 2008, but legal activity continued meantime. In June 2007, the combatants went before a local district judge in Sussex on the question of Beatrice’s custody. Paul feared that, in a spirit of vengefulness, Heather might be planning to take the little girl abroad, to America or her old stamping ground, Croatia. Now she gave assurances she had no such intentions.

After a three-day hearing, the judged agreed to a shared parenting arrangement whereby Beatrice would live with her mother but spend an equal amount of time with her father. Heather wanted her to be brought up in the Brighton area, but somewhere more secluded than busy and pap-plagued Hove. Paul therefore provided a further £3 million to buy them a second home in nearby Pean’s Wood, close to where Beatrice had been enrolled at her first (private) school, and guaranteed continuing payment of her school fees.

On 11 October they returned to the High Court for a mediation session with a different matrimonial judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, to try to set the parameters of Heather’s financial settlement. Security was even tighter than at the preliminary hearing in February. They arrived in separate cars at the rear of the building–Heather with a blanket covering her head–and used the judge’s private stairs to court number 13, where the noticeboard did not show their names or the judge’s and even the spyhole in the door had been blocked up.

But after legal argument variously reported to have lasted eight and ten hours, negotiations stalled yet again. The main reason was said to have been Paul’s insistence that Heather sign a confidentiality agreement preventing her from ever publicly talking or writing about their marriage.

The divorce proceedings being sub judice, she was legally constrained from commenting on it, and had managed to remain silent throughout the continuing deluge of press rumour and counter-rumour all that summer. Then on 30 October, the Sun ran a ‘Mucca’ story too far. It said that a ‘£10,000’ firework display she’d organised for Beatrice’s fourth birthday party in Pean’s Wood, two days earlier, had given her next-door-neighbour’s dog, Glow, a fatal heart attack and stampeded the 15 horses kept in an adjacent field.

Heather’s response was to volunteer for GMTV’s daily breakfast show, which made her its main item the next morning. With her she brought an album containing some of the 4400 newspaper articles she claimed had been published about her and video films she and her team had taken of omnipresent skulking paparazzi.

Encouraged by interviewer Fiona Phillips, she dissolved into tears as she reflected on ‘eighteen months of abuse… I’ve had a worse press than a paedophile or murderer… been called a whore and a liar… and I’ve done nothing but charity for 20 years’. She said she’d been ‘living in a prison’ and owed legal bills of £1.5 million, yet was still having to borrow money to hire security for herself and Beatrice that Paul ought to have been providing.

In addition to the death threats previously alleged by her sister Fiona, she claimed the police had warned of danger from an ‘underground movement’, presumably of resentful Paul fans. For Beatrice’s sake, she’d even considered suicide, ‘because if I’m dead, she’s safe. She can be with her father.’ As a victim of tabloid persecution, she bracketed herself not only with Princess Diana but Kate McCann, whose five-year-old daughter, Madeleine, had recently been kidnapped in Portugal and had disappeared without trace. On behalf of all such unfortunates, she added, she’d returned to campaigning mode and was organising a nationwide petition against media excesses to present to the European Parliament.

‘Heather’s GMTV rant’ (as it still lives on YouTube in three parts), especially her apparent identification with Kate McCann, brought a ferocious response from the organs she had denounced. In the forefront were the midweek female columnists known as ‘the Wednesday Witches’, whose unbridled bitchiness even turned the stomachs of some Fleet Street colleagues. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘an ugly form of public bullying… even by British tabloid standards, the nastiness has been extraordinary’.

Heather’s press spokesman, Phil Hall, had not been consulted before the GMTV appearance and now resigned, stressing they were still ‘mates’. In Hall’s place, she engaged as her ‘world spokesperson’ Michele Elyzabeth, a New Yorker of purportedly noble French ancestry who combined PR with marketing a range of beauty produces like ‘caviar facials’ and her own ‘Comtesse Michele Elyzabeth’ champagne.

Not that spokespeople for Heather Mills McCartney were kept very busy at present. The following week, she gave a long interview to Hello! magazine, accusing Paul of being mean. ‘This is a man who hangs on to his money. He wouldn’t be as rich if he didn’t.’ She also mentioned the confidentiality agreement she was allegedly being pressured to sign and her insistence on retaining the right to tell her story. ‘He wants me gagged and they won’t give me a divorce until I’m gagged.’

Then, speaking by video link to America’s Extra TV show, she attacked Stella McCartney with whom, she said, she had ‘tried and tried’ to form a relationship without success. ‘Every week, [Stella] tried to break up our marriage. She was so jealous. She wasn’t interested in her dad’s happiness. I can’t protect her any longer. She’s done some evil, evil things.’ Now Stella was supposedly afraid the divorce would eat into her and her siblings’ inheritance from Paul and that Heather would get ‘all the planes and the diamonds’.

Extra received a bonus not vouchsafed to GMTV or Hello! Heather claimed to possess damaging material about someone she did not name, stored in a safe. ‘I’m protecting that party because I still care about that party… but if it’s going to carry on, I’m going to have to tell all the truth.’

As a finale, via her worldwide spokeswoman Michele Elyzabeth, she renewed her attack on Stella, for the first time giving chapter and verse on her stepdaughter’s supposed hostility. When buying Stella McCartney clothes, she’d been allowed a discount of only 10 per cent. And when she’d wanted to put Stella McCartney perfume into the goody-bags for an Adopt-A-Minefield fund-raiser, Stella had turned down her request.

No word of response came from Paul, who had escaped to his Long Island home some time previously. But even there he was no longer safe from paparazzi. A couple of days after Heather’s GMTV appearance, a zoom lens caught him in East Hampton, kissing a dark-haired woman in the front of a parked car. From then on, his wife’s media meltdowns were pushed off the front pages by:

MACCA AND THE MARRIED MILLIONAIRESS

MACCA SMACKER WITH A MARRIED CRACKER

BEACH STROLLS, BREAKFAST AND TENDER KISSES

The ‘married cracker’ was quickly unmasked as 47-year-old Nancy Shevell, a wealthy businesswoman whom Paul had known socially for some years past. With her lawyer husband, Bruce Blakeman, she belonged to the circle of affluent city people with summer homes in the Hamptons that he’d met through his Eastman in-laws and often barbecued or sailed with. Now they found themselves in the same boat: Nancy had recently separated from Blakeman after 23 years of marriage.

She and Linda had been good friends with much in common though, unlike the Eastmans, Nancy did not hide her Jewishness behind WASP-y gentility. She had grown up in New Jersey where her father, Mike Shevell, a self-made man in the Lee Eastman mould, founded the trucking company New England Motor Freight or NEMF (just one letter different from the Beatles’ first management, NEMS Enterprises).

After attending Arizona State University, a generation after Linda, she’d joined the family firm and risen rapidly in the male-dominated trucking world to vice-president at NEMF and member of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. By a delicious irony, her second cousin was the television journalist Barbara Walters, whose 2002 interview with Heather produced one of the divorce claims against Paul which had been so mysteriously leaked to the press.