A producer friend of Paul’s, a fellow Liverpudlian and pupil at the Inny, was later to recall him confiding rather wistfully what he’d hoped from his second wife. ‘He said that now he was older, all he wanted was someone to be there every night when he came offstage and say, “You were wonderful, darling.”’ On that score alone, he could hardly have made a worse choice.
True to her promise on their engagement, Heather did not style herself Lady McCartney; rather, she became Heather Mills McCartney, to distinguish her from Paul’s daughter and also signify that she was still a celebrity and a person in her own right (though the point might have been more forcibly made if she’d continued as Heather Mills).
The Mills McCartney name was immediately employed on a new American edition of her 1995 autobiography, Out on a Limb. Now retitled A Single Step, it contained four brief extra chapters and an epilogue covering the remarkable turn her life had taken since. However, there were some omissions, notably her engagement to the TV director Chris Terrill and her dumping of Terrill on their wedding-eve to go off to be with Paul on Long Island.
The book ended at Castle Leslie on a note of rosy optimism: ‘Maybe I’m finally learning to slow down… Now that I am finally going to settle down with my fella of a lifetime, I want to have time to enjoy it.’
As Paul wound up the second instalment of his Driving America tour in late 2002, Heather was doing an intensive round of media interviews to promote A Single Step and Adopt-A-Minefield (to which she had pledged its royalties). And somehow, it was she not he who kept grabbing the headlines.
Back in Britain, the tabloids were by now in full cry after her. The Sun had published her wedding picture alongside one of her as its topless ‘Page Three Girl’ during the 1980s. The Mail On Sunday had gotten to Charles Stapley, an actor with whom her mother had lived after leaving her father (and who’d been in the TV soap Crossroads when Paul wrote its theme music). According to Stapley, Heather lived in a ‘confused fantasy world’ and her descriptions of sleeping rough among alcoholic, incontinent tramps under the Waterloo arches, for which she largely blamed him, were ‘exaggerated’.
Now America’s top magazines and news shows offered her a chance to bite back. And by now she had some ammunition for her complaints about tabloid ‘lies’. The Sunday Mirror had recently run a story about her supposed investigation by Britain’s Charity Commissioners over the way relief funds for the Gujarat earthquake victims in 2001 had been handled. The Mirror had been forced to withdraw the allegation and was about to pay damages which, she told New York magazine, would ‘drain them of all funds’. (Hardly: they paid £50,000.)
To New York magazine’s interviewer, Andrew Goldman, she refuted the many stories in the British press about how Paul’s children disliked and mistrusted her. She spoke to her namesake Heather every day, she said, and got on so ‘brilliantly’ with Stella that Stella had recently put out a press release saying so. Goldman later checked with the Stella McCartney company PR and was told that Stella never discussed family matters and no such release could have been issued.
True to form, her two most important television interviews left sharply conflicting impressions. The first was with ABC’s Barbara Walters, who’d been so captivated by her in London two years earlier as to make comparisons with Princess Diana. Now, Walters recalls, she was a prima donna who arrived with a PA–her sister Fiona–and a female bodyguard, was ‘impossible’ with the show’s producers and complained even about the temperature of her glass of water.
Paul had accompanied her to the studio, and watched the interview take place, some of it in terms less than flattering to him. ‘I am married to the most famous man in the world and that is very unfortunate for me… This is a man who has had his own way his entire life. When you become famous at 19, it’s sometimes hard to listen to other people’s opinions.’
This time around, Walters reverted to her usual tough inquisitorial mode. But when she tried to broach some of the issues raised by the British press, she found ‘a whole other side’ to the open, charming interviewee she remembered. Afterwards, she complained to her producer how ‘tough’ Heather had been, not realising Paul was in earshot. ‘I like tough women,’ he said.
The other crucial TV booking, on 30 October, was CNN’s Larry King Live. A year ago, she had appeared with Paul, coming in only for the final segment and keeping a respectfully low profile. Now she faced a solo hour with King whose persona was that of some old-time city editor who stood no bullshit from anyone.
Yet he was surprisingly easy on her, accepting her assertion that A Single Step was a wholly different book from Out on a Limb because of its ‘many more chapters’, and greeting the story of a neglected, brutalised and sexually-exploited childhood told in its early pages with none of the scepticism now being voiced elsewhere. Once again, Heather reprised its most shocking episode: how, aged seven, she and a school friend had been kidnapped by their swimming teacher and imprisoned for three days in his flat, Heather being forced to watch him masturbate while the friend suffered actual sexual abuse.
To the catalogue of family nightmares, she added one previously unheard: that her mother had lost a leg at the very same age she’d lost hers, but that it had ‘re-attached’; and that even while her mother was on crutches, her father still beat her up or pushed her into boiling hot baths.
‘Did you ever prostitute yourself?’ was King’s most searching question, in reference to the time she claimed to have lived on the streets.
‘No, never,’ Heather replied. ‘Never.’
The talk then turned to her self-designed prosthetic left leg, ‘which’, she suddenly said, ‘I’ll pop off if you don’t mind.’ With that, she performed the trick she so often did in amputee-wards, handing the detached limb to King, then baring her stump and inviting him to feel it. ‘Wow! Does that not turn Paul off?’ he asked as he did so. She repeated that, disability or no, every man she’d ever met had proposed to her inside a week.
Such a display would have appalled the squeamish British, but America loved it. ‘You’re a gutsy broad, Heather,’ King told her, so enamoured that she became his stand-in on the show a few months later. To give her appearance maximum impact, Paul fixed for her to interview the normally reclusive screen legend Paul Newman.
Since The Beatles Anthology, things between Paul and Yoko had gone very quiet. Anyone who asked him how they got on nowadays (as Larry King had) received only diplomatic soufflé-speak: ‘We don’t not get on. But you know, it’s like some people you may not be destined to become good buddies with. I don’t kind of ring up… “Hey, Yoko, what’s happening, babe?”’
But, as was all too evident, they didn’t fall over themselves to be in each other’s company, even when they happened to be in the same place at the same time–even if that place happened to be Liverpool. The previous July, Paul had been there to greet the Queen, as she stopped off on her Golden Jubilee tour of Britain, and show her round his exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. Yoko had been there to open the new terminal at the just-renamed John Lennon Airport.
It was an unprecedented honour: no airport in Britain had been named after a person before, and none has been since. With it went the first municipal statue of a Beatle erected in Liverpool, a seven-and-a-half-foot figure of John surveying the check-in hall. The airport logo borrowed an apposite line from ‘Imagine’: ‘above us only sky’.
Some questioned why the honour hadn’t been shared with Paul, who’d done so much for Liverpool, or else given to the Beatles collectively. The city rather feebly responded that its purpose was ‘to celebrate an entire life’, but Paul gave no sign of feeling snubbed–on the contrary, was all in favour of the rebrand.
A different issue with Yoko hung in the air, one about which he felt as strongly now as when it had arisen in 1995. During the compilation of the second Anthology CD, he’d asked for the Lennon–McCartney credit on ‘Yesterday’ to be reversed since he’d written and recorded it without any input from John. George and Ringo made no objection but Yoko vetoed the idea, so he’d dropped it.
For all his oceanic fame, it still galled him that half ‘Yesterday’s’ royalties went to John’s estate and that on one statement he’d seen, Yoko earned more from it than he did. Nor could it any longer be argued that he benefited in the same way from John’s compositions in which he’d had no part. A 1997 Lennon compilation had included ‘Give Peace a Chance’, which John had written and recorded with Yoko during their 1969 Montreal bed-in but, because Beatle rules still applied, had always borne the Lennon–McCartney label. Now the ‘McCartney’ had disappeared.
In November 2002, he released Back in the U.S., a double live album of the previous seven months’ American concerts. Nineteen of the Beatles songs on it, including ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Yesterday’, were credited to ‘Paul McCartney and John Lennon’. The result was the first public row with Yoko he’d ever had. Her spokesman, Elliott Mintz, accused him of ‘an attempt to rewrite history’ while her lawyer, Peter Shukat, warned of ‘legal recourse’ to undo his ‘ridiculous, absurd and petty’ act, though none was ever to materialise.
Media opinion overwhelmingly took Yoko’s side: a novelty in itself. Paul was criticised for small-mindedness, overweening vanity and tampering with a sacred treasure; ‘McCartney and Lennon’, one columnist wrote, sounded as unnatural as Hammerstein and Rodgers or Sullivan and Gilbert. Even Ringo weighed in against him, calling his action ‘underhand’. He himself affected surprise at the furore, protesting that he wasn’t trying to diminish John’s contribution to their partnership, just provide ‘correct labelling’. ‘The truth is that all this is much ado about nothing and there is no need for anyone to get their knickers in a twist.’
Ringo’s comment on the affair caused no rift between the two surviving Beatles, for on 29 November they appeared together in a memorial concert for George, organised by his widow, Olivia, at the Royal Albert Hall to mark the first anniversary of his death. The impressive stage-ensemble included both a symphony and an Indian orchestra, George’s sitar-teacher and mentor Ravi Shankar, his best friend Eric Clapton and his son Dhani, now the image of the shy lad Paul had brought into the Quarrymen in 1957.
Paul’s performance included his ukulele version of ‘Something’, segueing into a big production that exactly replicated the one on Abbey Road. He also played ‘For You Blue’, a little-remembered George track from the Let It Be/Get Back sessions in 1969.
On that score, at least, a long-standing McCartney grievance had finally been assuaged. Thirty-four years later, he still fumed over the way the album’s producer-salvager, Phil Spector, had drenched two of his finest tracks, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Let It Be’, in sickly orchestration and celestial choirs, and how his protests had been overridden by the other Beatles and Allen Klein. Now there was to be a remixed and remastered version, Let It Be… Naked, with ‘The Long and Winding Road’ scrubbed clean of Spector’s effects (‘Let It Be’ in its original hymn-like version had already appeared on Anthology 3).
Let It Be… Naked would go platinum in the US (and double platinum in Japan) in 2003, though many critics still preferred the overdubbed version. By that time, Phil Spector’s career as ‘Pop Music’s Svengali’ had come to a bloody end. He was about to go on trial for murder after the body of a young actress was found in his mock-medieval California mansion, shot in the mouth. In 2009, he would be convicted and sentenced to 19 years to life.
Bizarrely for someone who owned so many houses, Paul embarked on his second marriage with an accommodation problem. Heather, understandably, did not want to move into Blossom Wood Farm, the home he’d shared with Linda, where her presence still lingered in every comfortably shabby couch, well-used kitchen-utensil and invunerable chicken or duck out in the yard.
The newly-weds were living temporarily across the valley at Woodlands Farm, whose grounds contained an expansive lake. Here, at Heather’s behest, Paul was building a home totally unlike any he and Linda had created–a two-bedroom Norwegian-style log cabin. So anxious was he for them to move in that the build was being rushed through without the necessary permissions from the local planning authority. But thanks to luxurious extras like a gym annexe and a ‘lakeside pavilion’ for watching wildlife, it still was not finished.
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.
It was a further sign of his commitment to a worthwhile cause and wholehearted support of his wife. Yet many viewers were disconcerted to see Paul McCartney bracketed with run-of-the-mill celebs like Sir Alex Ferguson and Eamonn Holmes, and sitting silent on his high stool as Heather chattered unstoppably to the presenter, Chris Tarrant.
‘You don’t say a lot, do you, Paul?’ Tarrant said at one point, not entirely joking.