Shout! (84 page)

Linda died in April 1998 at the McCartneys’ ranch near Tucson, Arizona, a retreat whose existence had been kept secret from all but their closest friends and associates. In a misguided attempt to preserve the ranch’s incognito, Paul’s spokespeople initially announced that Linda had died several hundred miles to the west, in Santa Barbara, California. The truth emerged only when Santa Barbara’s municipal authority began asking why the death had not been registered with them.

It was barely seven months since Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a Paris car crash, unleashing a wave of hysterical mourning throughout Britain. An appetite still remained for a blonde-haired female martyr, and Linda McCartney perfectly fit that bill. Forgetting their old hostility, the media extolled her campaigns for vegetarianism and animal rights in much the same terms as Diana’s for AIDS and land-mine victims. For a brief, surreal moment, she became a kind of mini–People’s Princess, lauded with the same crazy disproportion as she had formerly been denigrated.

For Paul, paradoxically, losing Linda meant stepping back into limelight brighter than any he had known for more than a decade. Rock, as a rule, tends to create widows; here was the music’s first A-list widower. For the first time ever he showed pain and vulnerability to the world, which in turn responded with an affection greater than any he had received in all his previous decades of relentless winning. To one interviewer he recalled how he had comforted Linda’s final hours by making her picture them both riding their favorite horses through their favorite countryside. To another he revealed that, in twenty-nine years of marriage, they had never spent a single night apart.

Two memorial services for Linda were held, one in London, the other in New York. It might have been expected that the widow of Paul’s oldest
friend and still much-missed partner might have been asked to the New York service, especially after the reconciliation he had so publicly proclaimed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony four years earlier. But Yoko was excluded from the list. An additional memorial was a Linda McCartney solo album, compiled by Paul in an obvious attempt to win her the musical credibility she’d been denied in her lifetime. Entitled
Wide Prairie
, it brought together various Linda vocal tracks from the Wings era, including “Cook of the House.” Though it was widely and earnestly reviewed, not even the most ardently pro-McCartney critic could find much more to say than “nice try.”

But the period of mourning was to end rather abruptly. Early in 1999, Paul began to be seen in public with thirty-two-year-old Heather Mills, a prominent figure in the now interdependent worlds of show business and charity. Though initially he smiled away their meetings as pure coincidence, the subterfuge was short-lived. That summer, while Heather was being interviewed on a TV talk show, Paul made a “surprise” appearance, took her hand, and announced that they were in love.

His new love’s background was, to say the least, an unusual one. Born and raised on Tyneside, she was a self-confessed juvenile delinquent who claimed to have fled from a violent, tyrannical father to work on a fairground on London’s Clapham Common and live rough “under the arches” at Waterloo station before turning her looks and spectacular figure to account as a glamour model and playmate of the Arab billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. As a teenager, she had been arrested for stealing jewelry, but had been let off with probation owing to her troubled family circumstances.

Her autobiography,
Step by Step
, recounted further traumatic youthful experiences—among them, being held prisoner as a seven-year-old by a pedophile swimming teacher and being almost murdered by a knife-wielding lesbian flatmate. She made an early first marriage, to a Middlesex businessman named Alfie Karmal, who had encouraged her to progress from Soho club waitress to pinup, a career in which she would later claim to earn as much as two hundred thousand pounds per year. She became pregnant but lost the baby through an ectopic pregnancy and, not long afterward, left Karmal for a Slovenian ski instructor. At the age of twenty-five, she was run over by a police motorcyclist
who had been hurrying to a so-called emergency involving Diana, Princess of Wales. Her left foot was almost severed, and surgeons had no choice but to amputate the leg just below the knee.

Whatever might subsequently be said of Heather, no one could deny her courage or unstoppable determination. She designed her own prosthetic leg, with which she was soon able to run, dance, even ski with the same freedom she had before her accident. She would recall with hilarity how, on one early ascent in a ski lift, her prosthetic leg came loose and sailed down the slopes below with the ski still attached to it. Nor could her spirit be dampened even by the crushing advice of a female social worker immediately after she lost her leg. “You’ll have to face it, dear,” the social worker told her. “You’re never going to be attractive to men again.”

“I could lose both my arms and both my legs,” Heather replied, “and I’d
still
be more attractive to men than you are.”

In fact, she was always to maintain that men were never turned off by her leg and that every one of her boyfriends had asked her to marry him “inside a week.” She was determinedly frank and open about the pros-thesis, showing it to any interviewer who wanted to see it, once even whipping it off and waving it under the nose of American radio talk-show host Larry King.

Following her accident, she tried to make a career as a television presenter, appearing on various regional programs but never winning any permanent spot. Her involvement in charity work began at the same time, drawing directly and indirectly on the traumas of her own past. She became a campaigner for the homeless, for amputees, and—like Diana, Princess of Wales—for the victims of land mines left behind by wars in Asia and Africa.

A television colleague of that era describes her as “one of the shrewdest and most calculating women I’ve ever met. Whatever misfortune is being talked about, Heather has suffered it—from homelessness to ectopic pregnancy. But I have to admire her. Once, after she’d appeared on
The Richard and Judy Show
with a homeless girl, she had the girl to stay with her for about two weeks, even though her current boyfriend was coming over to see her from New Zealand. The three of them were together in Heather’s house, plus her terrier.

“When she went to Cambodia to see land-mine victims with the Duchess of Kent, she met a girl who’d lost both arms and both legs.
Heather took the girl under her wing, and she’s now working in the Anglia Television newsroom.

“Her attitude was that in her life she’d sunk to the very bottom, so she deserved only the very best. And Paul McCartney was the ultimate notch on the bedpost.”

The new relationship had a galvanic effect on Paul, blowing away the clouds of sadness that had engulfed him since Linda’s death. To escape media harassment, he and Heather took to spending weekends at a borrowed cottage on the Cliveden estate in Berkshire—the famous scene of John Profumo’s first meeting with Christine Keeler, now transformed into a luxury hotel. Heather tempted him back to parties and even discos where—as one friend reported—“they danced together like a couple of teenagers.” As proof of her beneficial influence, he declared he had even given up using marijuana for her sake.

The announcement that they planned to marry brought a sharp change to this initially friendly perception of Heather. To be sure, the ructions surrounding Paul’s wedding to Linda, thirty years earlier, would sometimes seem mild by comparison. Heather was portrayed as an opportunistic gold-digger, out to stake her claim on a McCartney fortune that—after the phenomenal success of the Beatles’
1
album—was on course to make him pop’s first-ever billionaire. (To this charge, she made the somewhat surprising reply that if she’d been out for money alone, she would have gone for someone “richer than Paul.”)

The media pack quickly tracked down her former husband, Alfie Karmal, who did not need much persuasion to describe a “damaged” person who, he said, had left him without warning after their five-year relationship, trashing their home by way of farewell. The childhood friend with whom she claimed to have been held prisoner by the pedophile swimming teacher dismissed her account as “crap.” Her stepfather, John Stapley, said that her memories of fairground life on Clapham Common were likewise part of the “fantasy world” she had created from her past. It was whispered that even the best part of her career, her work for land-mine victims, derived merely from an ambition to be seen as a substitute Princess Diana. Fellow campaigners questioned her claims to have been appointed a United Nations ambassador for land mines and even to have been short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize. One of her former TV colleagues was surprised to see her on BBC2’s
Ready, Steady, Cook
program, claiming to have been a vegetarian
every bit as devout as Paul “for the past seventeen years.” “When I worked with her a few years back, her diet used to be almost all protein,” her ex-colleague says. “She used to tuck in to huge bits of steak.”

Most crucially, Paul’s children—particularly his three grown-up daughters—were said to be horrified by his choice of a former swimwear model to replace their mother (and one sharing the name of their mother’s oldest child to boot). Paul himself dropped his sunshine mask sufficiently to admit there were difficulties about Heather within the family and that she could be “bossy” at times, but at the same time made it clear that these factors had no effect on his resolve to make her the next Lady McCartney. From then on, he became as determined to win acceptance for Heather as he had once been to win it for Linda. So that nobody around him should mistake his wishes, he granted her a power and influence of which even Linda had never dreamed. At his concerts, Heather became the first person in history to give him critical notes on his performance—and have them earnestly listened to.

She on her side showed little of the meekness and deference he had always been used to from Linda. Early in 2002, staff at a Miami hotel reported overhearing a furious row between them, in which Paul allegedly shouted, “I don’t want to marry you any more.” A hotel team equipped with metal-detectors was then mobilized to search the bushes below their room after Heather had apparently hurled her fifteen-thousand-pound engagement ring through its open window. Heather’s explanation was that Paul and she had simply been “having a laugh” and playing catch with the ring.

The approaching nuptials brought further allegations of dissent and discontent among the McCartney children. Stella was reportedly furious at not having been asked to design Heather’s wedding dress, her soon-to-be stepmother considering her clothes “too tarty.” Instead, Heather announced, she would be creating her own Chantilly lace bridal gown with the help of London couturiers Avis and Brown. Mary McCartney, a rising portrait photographer—whose subjects had already included Tony and Cherie Blair—was said to feel equally slighted because she hadn’t been asked to do the wedding pictures.

The ceremony took place on June 11, in Glaslough, County Monaghan, the part of Ireland from which Paul’s maternal ancestors had originally sprung. Apart from the best man, his younger brother, Michael, it was a very different occasion from the simple register office
ceremony at which he’d married Linda in 1969. This time the cost was around one million pounds and the setting was Castle Leslie, a medieval pile whose eccentric owner, eighty-seven-year-old Sir Jack Leslie, was famous for performing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” in local pubs. Offers of £1.5 million from
Hello!
magazine and £1 million from
OK!
for exclusive photo access had both been refused: Instead, a single color shot of the newlyweds was issued to the media, with all reproduction fees paid to Heather’s principal charity interest, Adopt a Minefield U.K. The guests, including Eric Clapton, the Ringo Starrs, and Sir George Martin, were asked to donate one thousand pounds each to the charity in lieu of wedding presents.

Paul’s stepdaughter, Heather, and his son, James, were both significantly absent from the celebrations. Stella and Mary did attend, albeit with the kind of stuck-on smiles in which their father used to specialize as a Beatle. It would later be claimed that the new Lady McCartney had expressed willingness to sign a prenuptial agreement limiting her claim on Paul’s assets to twenty million pounds in the event of a divorce. But he had refused to consider it. Somewhat undermining the media-free atmosphere, the day’s events were filmed for inclusion in a documentary about the bridegroom’s ongoing American tour. With the slightly aggrieved tone that can flavor her public statements, Heather was to say that media attention—surely not unexpected either to her bridegroom or herself, and not always unwelcome—had made her wedding year “the worst of my life.”

After their honeymoon, the couple settled in Brighton, where Heather had already lived for some years. Reports soon began to emerge of a besottedly attentive new husband, preparing hummus sandwiches for her packed lunches, being a perfect host to her friends at dinner parties, and “dancing around the room like Fred Astaire.” In May 2003 Heather announced that she was pregnant.

To have written pop music’s equivalent of the works of Shakespeare, to be a billionaire, a knight of the realm, a national monument, the name of a rose, and still, after all these years, among the half-dozen most famous faces on the planet might be thought more than enough to satisfy the most ravenous ambition. But it seems not to satisfy Paul.

Despite the almost incalculable pile-up of achievement behind him, he still works at being a star as though he has everything to prove, still
churns out songs, still cracks the whip as unrelentingly over musicians and technicians at his recording sessions, still pushes, promotes, and hypes for all he’s worth, and gets miffed when there’s no phone call summoning him back on to
Top of the Pops
. The one-time master innovator scans the output of single-brain-cell rappers and ninth-hand boy bands hoping to pick up tips that will make his next product more appealing to modern teenagers. The all-time classic endlessly ponders and frets over how to be “contemporary.”