Paul McCartney (99 page)

His estate in Kintyre was even more rife with memories of Linda and, anyway, its remoteness and solitude held little attraction for the urban-minded, hyperactive Heather. The local people had received a foretaste of the way things now stood when a memorial garden to Linda was opened in Campbeltown, whose streets she loved to wander with her camera. The centrepiece was a statue of her, cuddling one of the lambs that had converted Paul and her to vegetarianism. Paul paid for the statue but did not attend its unveiling as he was performing in Mexico City.

A group of local citizens, headed by the town veterinarian, had started a fund to build an art gallery in Linda’s memory, expecting that, too, would receive his support. But none came, so the project was abandoned.

With Heather, the media glare had switched to the blizzards of money she’d supposedly walked into. She was said to have alienated Paul’s children even further by refusing to sign a prenuptial agreement setting out what she would receive in the event of divorce, thereby posing a potential threat to their inheritance. In fact, just before the wedding, he’d written her a letter with a ballpark figure for such a settlement, should the marriage fail. But in an interview with Vanity Fair, she maintained that she’d offered to sign a pre-nup, ‘to prove I love him for him’, but he wouldn’t let her. ‘I believe every woman should have a reserve [of money] because you never know what will happen in life. I’ll never be dependent on Paul.’

Just the same, he continued to treat her with an extraordinary largesse, starting her on an annual allowance of £360,000 in April 2003, handing her a joint credit card on his account at the exclusive Coutts bank, giving her jewellery worth £264,000 in 2004 and altering his will in her favour. On top of that, she had received a lump sum of £250,000 in December 2002 and another a year later to help her keep up her donations to charity.

Paul would later maintain that he considered their marriage to be ‘for ever’, though its volatility caused him a nagging uncertainty from the beginning. They had stopped using contraception on their honeymoon, hoping to start a family despite Heather’s previous two ectopic pregnancies. She suffered a miscarriage in 2002 but they persevered and in February the following year she fell pregnant again.

Between March and June, he was on a 33-concert European tour, once again accompanied by Heather and including two venues he’d never imagined. On 10 May, he performed inside Rome’s Colosseum for 400 people who’d paid £1000 each to support Adopt-A-Landmine and hear ‘The Fool on the Hill’ and ‘Band on the Run’ echo around 2000-year-old terraces where crowds had once watched Christians being torn to pieces by lions. The next night, he played outside the Colosseum walls to 500,000 people massed in the Fori Imperiali, with whom he finally had to plead to stop demanding encores and go home.

Two weeks later, in Moscow’s Red Square, he was greeted by an ecstatic young multitude for whom pop music was no longer a cultural crime. Beforehand, he and a red trouser-suited Heather were given a guided tour of the Kremlin by President Vladimir Putin, to whom Paul in return gave a private recital of ‘Let It Be’. The closest John and Yoko had ever come to a Russian leader on their peace campaigns in the Sixties was sending Leonid Brezhnev an acorn.

Heather was certainly there each night when he came offstage, but not just to say ‘You were wonderful, darling.’ Band members who’d never dare suggest he change a semiquaver were amazed to see him paying close attention as she gave him notes on his performance. ‘Yeah, don’t be surprised because she does,’ he told an American reporter. ‘She knows music and she has a good ear and she has input.’

In Britain by now, her past was no longer just fodder for prurient tabloids but the stuff of serious investigative journalism. On 7 May, Channel 4 had aired a documentary entitled The Real Mrs McCartney, made up of interviews with various figures from her earlier days whose cumulative effect could hardly have been more damaging to her and embarrassing to Paul.

Alfie Karmal, the businessman to whom she’d been briefly married, called her ‘a compulsive liar’ to the point where he’d persuaded her to consult a therapist. Karmal’s sister, Donna, described her as ‘very destructive… She’s like a praying mantis when it comes to men. She uses her sexual charms quite brilliantly and they are the ones who are hurt.’

Her late mother’s boyfriend, the actor Charles Stapley, repeated what he’d already told the Mail On Sunday, that she was ‘a fantasist’. The programme-makers also tracked down a woman named Ros Ashton who’d introduced her into the circle of wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen headed by Ashton’s former lover, Adnan Khashoggi. ‘Heather’s ambition,’ said Ashton, ‘was to meet a wealthy man, either Arab, English, French, Spanish, whatever would give her wealth and status.’ Paul’s lawyers had vainly tried to stop the broadcast, which predictably set off a further round of stories in the newspapers. He still firmly refused to believe any of them, bolstered by the many messages of support on Heather’s website.

On 30 August, Stella McCartney was married to the magazine publisher Alasdhair Willis. Stella’s choice of the Isle of Bute as a venue–just a few miles east of Kintyre–seemed a tacit assurance that the McCartneys hadn’t completely forsaken the Scottish Highlands. The guests included Madonna, Kate Moss and Liv Tyler and the secrecy beforehand and security on the day were even fiercer than at Paul’s Irish nuptials the previous year. Afterwards, a photographer caught him with seven-months-pregnant Heather in an atypical ungainly posture, off-balance and grimacing weirdly: the first bad picture in his entire life.

It would not be his only first that summer. The evening of 19 September found him having dinner in a Soho restaurant with his publicist Geoff Baker and his PA John Hammel. London at that time was being treated to the spectacle of the American illusionist David Blaine undergoing a 44-day fast while shut inside a perspex capsule suspended beside Tower Bridge. After dinner, Paul and his two aides joined the curious, often mocking spectators whom Blaine’s stunt were attracting around the clock.

An Evening Standard photographer, Kevin Wheal, had been tipped off about the visit by Geoff Baker. As Paul arrived, Baker called Wheal over for a ‘snatched’ picture like 10,000 others he’d endured without demur. But this time, he pushed Wheal away, shouting, ‘Fuck off! I’ve come to see this stupid cunt [the fasting David Blaine] and you are not going to take a picture of me tonight.’ He then rounded on Baker and told him he was fired.

The fracas did not end there. There was a scuffle between Wheal and John Hammel, after which both lodged complaints of assault (though nothing came of them). A bystander asked Paul if he could shake his hand and was also told to ‘fuck off’. A police officer called to the scene found him ‘rather drunk and very abusive’.

Afterwards, he tried to laugh off the episode as just a high-spirited boys’ night out while Geoff Baker insisted he hadn’t really been fired and that he, not Paul, had been the worse for drink. The fact remained that at 61, the shining exception to drunken, yobbish rock stars had apparently started behaving like the very worst of them. The fan he’d told to fuck off, 32-year-old Vaseem Adnan, was widely quoted: ‘I feel insulted, belittled and aggrieved. He is an extremely cheap man for doing that.’

He and Heather spent the final weeks of her pregnancy at his London house, 7 Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, which she had by now had completely redecorated and which was handily located just around the corner from the St John and St Elizabeth private hospital. There on 28 October she was safely delivered of a seven-pound girl by Caesarian section. Paul’s fourth child received the names Beatrice after Heather’s deceased mother and Milly after his stalwart Liverpool aunt.

The early summer of 2004 was devoted to a European tour whose 14 outdoor venues included St Petersburg’s Palace Square, in front of the Russian tsars’ old winter palace. It was his three thousandth stage performance since his debut with the Quarrymen at the New Clubmoor Hall in 1957, when he’d got sticky fingers and mucked up his solo in ‘Guitar Boogie’.

The tour finale was an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival–another first, but this time of a more positive kind. He’d somehow missed out on all the great Sixties pop festivals like Monterey, Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, and always felt a bit inferior to other rock giants as a result. In fact, he’d offered to play Glastonbury in 2003, but the prime Saturday-night spot on its Pyramid Stage had already been claimed by Radiohead.

His appearance, on 26 June, caused a bigger than usual bout of pre-show nerves. The festival’s younger competition included Muse, Morrissey, Sister Sledge, Joss Stone and PJ Harvey, and Oasis were to headline on the Pyramid Stage the night before he did. During the run-up, someone asked how he was preparing for the event; he answered wryly that he’d been preparing for it all his life.

Glastonbury weather is traditionally atrocious and Paul came onstage after a day of torrential rain which had turned the Somerset farmland to a swamp. He still drew a capacity crowd of 120,000 which stood fast throughout the further squalls that punctuated his set, waving banners so numerous, he would recall, ‘it looked like the Battle of Agincourt’.

The assembled critics had been poised to file snappy pieces about old pop legends who didn’t know when to quit and the irrelevance of Sixties nostalgia to the twenty-first century. But by the end of ‘Hey Jude’, they were na-nah-nahing along with everyone else, some holding up mobile phones so that colleagues unlucky enough to be elsewhere could listen in.

‘Even those whose Glastos number in double figures,’ said the NME, ‘have never seen, heard or felt the love like the crowd on this night.’ The paper had meant to put Oasis on the cover of its next issue, but hurriedly substituted a picture of Paul. The Guardian found his hippy-oriented onstage patter embarrassing, but could not fault his music, concluding that ‘he could perform puppetry of the penis as long as he followed it with “Eleanor Rigby”’.

He was, by any measure, the world’s most beloved and sought-after entertainer. Yet when he shared a stage with his wife, the spotlight showed an increasing tendency to desert him. That autumn, the London Sunday Times Magazine initiated the most thorough investigation into Heather’s past thus far. The author was Russell Miller, a star contributor whom it had previously assigned to interview Paul about the Liverpool Oratorio.

As background, Miller attended the fourth annual Adopt-A-Minefield fund-raiser hosted by the McCartneys, which took place in October at LA’s Century Plaza hotel. The $1000-per-ticket gala brought out top Hollywood stars like Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jack Nicholson, Rosanna Arquette and Andy Garcia. Paul was to provide the entertainment with Neil Young. But from beginning to end, as Miller later wrote, ‘it was Heather’s show’.

A succession of opening speakers offered gushing tributes to her (‘Calling her my friend is a great honour…’; ‘I am totally awed by her kindness and love…’). Two giant screens showed film of her visiting amputee-hospitals in Cambodia. Then, stepping up to the lectern ‘with all the confidence of an international diplomat about to address the United Nations’, she delivered a lengthy address, variously invoking the names of Princess Diana, Vladimir Putin and Colin Powell, calling for a Democratic victory in the coming presidential election and chiding the assembled celebs (‘You people’, as she called them) for still not having put a woman in the White House.

She went on to hijack the charity auction that was supposed to have been conducted by the talk show host Jay Leno, first auctioning her own Valentino gown, then wresting the microphone away from Leno to invite bids for his underpants. In the goody-bags under every chair were a copy of her new autobiography, A Single Step, and a magazine containing a long interview with her.

Paul’s eventual performance with Neil Young provided some tangible return on the $1000 tickets–but, it was felt, not nearly enough. ‘I might not have put up the dough,’ one disgruntled guest remarked, ‘if I’d known there were going to be two hours of Mrs McCartney and only 45 minutes of her husband.’

Russell Miller’s Sunday Times Magazine article about Heather, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, was published the following month. It proved a devastatingly deadpan chronicle of ‘how this former model [had] managed to position herself between Princess Di and Mother Teresa in the spectrum of angels’, listing the men she’d allegedly bewitched and dumped before meeting Paul, the dubious company she’d sometimes kept, and the many times her version of events had been at odds with reality.

In particular, Miller looked at the early life of Dickensian hardship and sexual abuse that had supposedly engendered her desire to help others, finding discrepancies no one had picked up before. For example, the school friend with whom, as a seven-year-old, she claimed to have been imprisoned by a perverted swimming teacher called her account ‘wildly exaggerated’–indeed, was currently suing her for breach of privacy.

And the most dramatic, pitiable section of her CV now seemed blown apart with the efficiency of any landmine. According to both her autobiographies, she’d become a penniless teenage runaway at 13. However, Miller’s researches indicated that during the time when she was supposedly working for a travelling funfair and sleeping in a cardboard box she’d been attending school normally with her sister.

He ended by pointing out ‘the great irony of the fantasy life that Heather Mills McCartney has constructed for herself’:

With her brains, beauty, energy, ambition, courage and talent, she could surely have got where she is today without rewriting her life-story. She clawed her way out of an unhappy childhood, started out with nothing, shamelessly made use of her ability to bewitch men, turned a horrific accident to her advantage, became a minor celebrity in her own right and married Paul McCartney. The true story is just as remarkable as the fantasy.

That Christmas of 2004, Paul partnered her on a celebrity charity edition of the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, playing on behalf of Adopt-A-Minefield. Their Christmas Eve appearance ran out of time, so had to be continued on Christmas Day, and netted £32,000, enough to provide 1066 children with artificial limbs.