Paul maintained a typically upbeat exterior as the climactic hearing approached. ‘I’m going through great struggles but I’m feeling pretty good,’ he said. ‘I have a lot of good support, particularly from my family… There is a tunnel and there is light and I will get there.’
Actually, the stresses of 2007 had contributed to his only recorded health problem since 1973 (that ‘bronchial spasm’ from the Nigerian heat and too many cigarettes while making Band on the Run). In November, feeling vaguely unwell, he’d consulted a Harley Street cardiologist, who discovered an obstruction in the blood-flow to his heart. Unknown to anyone outside his family, he’d undergone a coronary angioplasty, in which a fine tube, or stent, is threaded into the aorta via the groin, then inflated like a balloon to disperse the build-up of fat.
The procedure had been completely successful, with no lingering after-effects: he was well enough to perform at London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in December and to appear with Kylie Minogue on Jools Holland’s BBC2 New Year special. When the story finally got out, he minimised what had been a potentially grave condition, writing on his website that he hadn’t had surgery–only ‘tests for a minor irregularity’–and was ‘feeling fine… and enjoying all the sympathy’.
The divorce hearing began on 11 February 2008, in court number 34 of the Royal Courts of Justice and, like its two preludes, was closed to the press and public. At its outset the judge, Mr Justice Bennett, warned sternly that any further leaks could result in prosecution for contempt of court. It still risked turning into a litigational sieve, thanks to Heather’s libel actions against the Daily Mail and Evening Standard (for printing the leaked claims from her cross-petition) which were due to start in open court any time now. And if either side in the divorce appealed against Bennett’s judgement, that, too, could be fully reported.
In addition to the Prince of Wales’s solicitor, Fiona Shackleton, Paul’s courtroom team comprised Nicholas Mostyn QC–known as ‘Mr Payout’ for his success on behalf of wives suing affluent husbands–and a junior counsel, Timothy Bishop. But Heather was no longer represented by Anthony Julius, Shackleton’s highly effective opponent in the Charles–Diana divorce. She had dismissed Julius after the failure to reach a private settlement at the preliminary hearings–and now faced a bill of around £2 million, for which his firm, Mishcon de Reya, was on the point of suing her.
Instead, she chose to conduct her own case, supported by what British law in such situations terms ‘McKenzie Friends’: her sister, Fiona, a British solicitor named Michael Rosen and an American attorney, Michael Shilub. So, as well as being cross-examined by Paul’s barristers, she would be directly cross-examining him.
Her claim amounted to around £125 million, far outstripping Charles and Diana and almost tripling insurance magnate John Charman’s recent £48 million payout to his wife, Beverly, to date the largest divorce settlement in British legal history. She estimated her ‘reasonable needs’ for herself and Beatrice as £3.25 million per year. These included £499,000 for holidays, £125,000 for clothes, £30,000 for ‘equestrian activities’ (although she no longer rode), £39,000 for wine (although she did not drink alcohol), £43,000 for a driver, £627,000 for charitable donations, £73,000 for a business staff and £39,000 for helicopter flights to and from hospitals. The most important component was round-the-clock security for Beatrice, on which she claimed to have already spent almost £350,000 from her own pocket and estimated at £542,000 per year in the future.
As well as her present homes in Hove and Pean’s Wood, she claimed two American ones of Paul’s: 11 Pintail Lane, Amagansett, and the ‘Heather House’ in Beverly Hills, which she said had always been promised to her. She was seeking £8–12 million to buy a home in London, £3 million to buy a property in New York and £500,000–£750,000 to buy an office in Brighton, plus title to the houses Paul had provided for her sister, Fiona, and cousin, Sonya. In all, that would give her seven fully-staffed properties with full-time housekeepers costing £645,000 annually. She further asked the court to ‘place a significant monetary value on compensation for loss of earnings, contribution [to his career] and [his] conduct’.
Paul had come back with an offer worth around £15 million, giving her Angel’s Rest, the Hove seafront property, Pean’s Wood, the inland one, and both the Fiona and Sonya houses. He would also pay ‘a balancing lump sum’ on condition that ‘certain art’ (the paintings by him that adorned Angel’s Rest) was returned to him. His provision for Beatrice, over and above her school fees, health insurance and ‘reasonable extras’, would be £35,000 per year plus £20,000 for a nanny, to continue until she was 17 or finished secondary education, whichever came sooner, and the security costs for her and her mother for two years at a limit of £150,000 per year.
His lawyers claimed this was not a case where marital assets should be shared because of the wife’s contribution to the husband’s success. He had been enormously wealthy before meeting Heather and their relationship of only short duration. Indeed, one of the bones of contention was whether they had cohabited for four years or six. According to Heather, they had begun to do so when Paul bought Angel’s Rest in March 2000, whereas he said it had not been until their marriage in June 2002.
Each side accused the other of misconduct and leaking the sensational claims in Heather’s cross-petition which had found their way onto news agency fax machines in October 2006. She stood by her accusations that Paul had treated her abusively and/or violently, abused drugs and alcohol, been jealous and possessive and insensitive towards her disability and failed to provide her with proper security and protection from the media. He countered that her ‘leaks, lies and breaches of confidentiality’ since their separation had been part of ‘a concerted campaign to portray herself as a victim and him as a hypocrite and a monster’ and were in themselves tantamount to an act of violence.
Crowds massed in the Strand for each of the hearing’s five days. Heather arrived in a black 4x4 with blacked-out windows, preceded by a white van which was used to block photographers as she disembarked. With her, she brought an entourage of five: her three ‘McKenzie Friends’, plus a Hollywood beautician and her personal trainer, Ben Amigoni.
Paul by very deliberate contrast had no visible security, strolling in through the Gothic front entrance with a smile and a wave or thumbs-up.
Wearing a pinstripe trouser-suit and peach-coloured shirt, Heather opened her case by showing Mr Justice Bennett a short video film of the photographers who pursued her, often in atrociously-driven high-speed vehicles like those which had harried Princess Diana to death in a Parisian underpass. At the film’s end, however, it was a paparazzo who suffered a car crash. Alas, that would be a metaphor for much of her subsequent performance in the witness box.
Her contention was that when she met Paul, her modelling, charity campaigning, TV presenting and public speaking had made her almost his equal as a celebrity (in proof of which she carried a large folder marked ‘fan mail’). She’d also been independently wealthy from her autobiography and sponsorship deals with a penthouse flat in London’s Piccadilly, two cars, a driver and assets worth £2–3 million. One year, she’d once earned $1 million for just 14 days’ work. Paul’s attitude to her during their marriage, she said, had been one of ‘constriction’ and her career had declined as a result. She thus merited compensation for ‘loss of career opportunity’ and ‘commensurate with being the wife of and the mother of the child of an icon’.
Cross-examined by his silky QC, Nicholas Mostyn, she amended the tally of her pre-Paul assets, saying the £2–3 million had been money in the bank. She was asked for corroborative bank statements but could not produce any, explaining that as much as 90 per cent of her earnings had gone directly to the charities she supported. Again, there was no paperwork, such as effusive letters of gratitude, to prove it.
In a sworn affidavit before the hearing, she’d claimed she had to continue using her own money after marrying Paul but that he made her turn down ‘99 per cent’ of the business opportunities she received, on the grounds they were just attempts to cash in on his name. ‘When I was asked to design clothes, create a food line, write books, make a video, write music or do photography, Paul would almost always say something like “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Stella does that or Mary does that or Heather [his adopted daughter] used to do that or Linda did that.”’
In April 2001, she alleged, he’d vetoed a £1 million contract for her to model brassieres for Marks & Spencer. However, the only documentary evidence was an e-mail from an advertising man that made no mention of money, and Paul testified that he doubted whether it really had been worth as much as that. He said they’d discussed the M&S offer but agreed that, at a time when they were just starting a relationship, it would be inappropriate for her to start modelling bras, though he wouldn’t have stood in her way if she’d insisted.
An even larger business opportunity he’d allegedly denied her was a series of television ads for McDonald’s, promoting new vegetarian options in their restaurants. But a McDonald’s executive testified the project had stalled because of ‘her personal inability to be accessible as was necessary’.
In terms of her public profile, she said, Paul had ‘put a stop to my dream of hosting the biggest TV show in the world and what would have been a huge and lucrative career-move for me’. In November 2005, she’d been asked to become a regular stand-in for Larry King on his hugely-watched CNN programme. Paul, she claimed, allowed her to present one show but then said she’d be ‘a bad mother’ if she did the two or three per week that were proposed because they would take her away from six-month-old Beatrice. He’d then ‘dragged’ her and Beatrice around America on his current tour.
Paul denied ever suggesting she was ‘a bad mother’: he’d been sceptical about the idea because of negative reviews she’d received when she stood in for Larry King in 2004, interviewing Paul Newman. Nonetheless, in return for her company on the tour, he’d agreed to spend three months in Los Angeles to see how things worked out. King’s verbal offer had not turned into a contract and, anyway, they’d both decided that, for Beatrice’s sake, they didn’t want to relocate to LA. Heather, he said, had never mentioned the matter again–something she vigorously disputed in her cross-examination of him.
To complete the litany of selfishness, her affidavit said that Paul had ‘turned down many opportunities to help my charities’ and his ‘refusal to commit’ had made his appearances on behalf of a charity much less effective than they might have been. Further, he ‘often promised to make financial contributions to charities, but later refused to follow it through’.
However, in court she admitted that he’d donated £150,000 to her personal charity, the Heather Mills Health Trust, soon after they’d first met and that two cash gifts from him totalling half a million pounds had been partly to allow her to keep contributing to charities. She accepted his QC’s estimate that between 2001 and 2005 his direct or indirect contributions to Adopt-A-Minefield–from organising and performing at fund-raisers to wearing red ‘No More Minefields’ T-shirts throughout his Back in the World tour–had been worth around £3.5 million to the campaign.
By her own account, she’d been an ‘exceptional’ wife who’d rescued him from a morass of mourning for Linda, enabled him to ‘communicate better’ with his children (especially her namesake Heather) and given him back his confidence as a performer. She’d helped him write songs and accompanied him on all his tours at his insistence, contributing to their set-design and lighting, even suggesting he should wear an acrylic fingernail on his left (strumming) hand to prevent wear and tear on the real one. She had been, in her own words, ‘his full time wife, mother, lover, confidante, business partner and psychologist’.
Paul acknowledged that she’d comforted him in the aftermath of Linda’s death, just as his family and friends had done, but denied that he’d lost his confidence, that she’d encouraged him to return to touring or had any creative input into the lighting or stage-sets at his shows. A live album DVD which listed her as ‘artistic co-ordinator’ had, he said, merely been ‘a favour to her, a romantic gesture’.
She claimed that, from being a millionairess when she met Paul, her earning capacity was now zero, thanks to the ‘vilification’ she had suffered in the media. She had attempted a return to public speaking, at which she claimed once to have earned £10–25,000 per hour, but found no takers. Her current assets amounted to some £7.8 million and were shrinking rapidly; in recent months, she’d spent £184,463 just on private planes and helicopters.
Her closest cross-examination of Paul thus concerned the exact size of his fortune, which independent accountants had estimated at around £400 million but which she continued to maintain was more than double that. He said his art collection of works by Picasso, Renoir, de Kooning and many other masters was worth around £25 million. She then tried to read out a report she’d commissioned from a firm of art-valuers which appraised it at £70 million. When Mostyn objected that no prior permission for the report had been given, the judge disallowed it, but she continued–as lawyers say–to ‘press’ him on the subject. He told the judge that the collection had been acquired before he met Heather and he wanted to keep all of it.
There was a further clash over the 30 of his own artworks he’d hung in their Hove love-nest, Angel’s Rest, where Heather now lived alone. She claimed them as hers but he wanted them back–all but two that he’d given her, ‘the flower photographs’ and ‘the Isle of Man stamp design’–in order to leave them in trust for Beatrice and his other children.
If Heather accused him of fiscal fibbing, he accused her of something rather more serious. Evidence was given that on 2 November 2005, she had e-mailed MPL’s financial director, Paul Winn, about the riverside apartment at Thames Reach, west London, that Paul had enabled her to acquire as an office. The e-mail asked for £480,000 to be paid into her bank account ‘to clear the amount outstanding on the [Thames Reach] mortgage’, which Winn refused to do without proof that such a mortgage existed. Under cross-examination, Heather admitted there never had been a mortgage on the property, saying she must have got into a muddle and confused it with another one. Paul’s counsel was having none of this and accused her of ‘a fraudulent attempt’ to extract money from MPL.
Her claim of £542,000 per year for security for Beatrice and herself contrasted with what Paul had spent on his own protection in 2005–£125,908 in the UK and £264,000 in America. In an affidavit, he said that before their marriage, he’d generally had a ‘limited, low-key’ security presence. ‘There were never any bodyguards at Peasmarsh. The general farm employees kept a look-out for anything suspicious. There was virtually no security at Cavendish Avenue. At the office complex in New York, there would be one guard on the door… There was an off-duty police officer who provided night cover when I was in Long Island and on trips to and from the airport. There was no permanent close protection during this period… unless I was on tour or attending high-profile events. That was how I had lived with my first wife and our four children.’
But after Beatrice’s birth, Heather had begun ‘demanding increasingly stridently far more security to protect her from what she regarded as press intrusion. She did not suggest she needed [it] for her or Beatrice’s personal safety. Rather, her aim was to erect a barrier between her and the photographers…’ In essence, he said she had the same attitude to the paparazzi as Princess Diana and many other celebrities less battle-hardened than himself, basking in the camera-flashes at one moment, complaining of ‘intrusion’ the next.
Since their separation, he continued, ‘I have, to my great relief, been able to revert to the security arrangements which were in force for most of my “celebrity” life… There are no bodyguards. The only person with me on a permanent basis is my PA, John Hammel, who has been with me for 30 years. The court will be aware that Heather now maintains several members of staff including a driver and a personal trainer. Mr Hammel is with me only during the day or when I am working in the evenings. I am alone at night (apart from when Beatrice is with me).’
His real concern in resisting ‘Heather’s demands for bodyguards 24 hours a day is our daughter. Unless on tour, my older children had very little security. They all attended state schools. It is not healthy for a child to have security 24/7. It sets them apart from their peers and makes them an object of curiosity and, at times, ridicule. Such children live in gilded cages. I do not want this for Beatrice. She needs as normal an upbringing as possible.’
The hearing did not end on Friday, 15 February, as scheduled, but had to continue into a second week. When the court rose that afternoon, a middle-aged fan named Joe approached Paul, asking him to autograph a copy of the Beatles’ White Album, but was refused. On persisting with his request, he was turned away by… security.
Later, he also approached Heather, who had no hesitation in writing ‘To Joe, lots of love, Heather Mills’ in the proffered autograph-book. The small PR victory was rounded off when she heard what had just happened with Paul. ‘That’s a pity,’ she said, making sure her voice carried as far as possible. ‘You’re the sort of person who has made him what he is today.’
Mr Justice Bennett’s judgement, covering 58 pages, was e-mailed to both parties in advance–more than likely by Apple computer–then read out in the High Court in their presence on Monday 18 February. It began on a highly positive note for Heather, calling her ‘a strong-willed and determined [but] kindly person, devoted to her charitable causes [who had] conducted her own case with a steely yet courteous determination’. But there the compliments ended.
Paul, on the other hand, received only praise for the ‘balanced’ way he had given evidence. He had expressed himself ‘moderately, though at times with justifiable irritation’, Bennett observed. He had been ‘consistent, accurate and honest’.
But the same could not be said of Heather. ‘Having watched and listened to her give evidence, having studied the documents and given in her favour every allowance for the enormous strain she must have been under (and in conducting her own case), I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall, she was a less than impressive witness.’
The judge described her claim of having been worth £2–3 million when she met Paul as ‘wholly exaggerated’. Her tax returns showed that in that year, 1999, her gross turnover from modelling and acting had been £42,000 and from public speaking, £6000. Far from ‘losing business opportunities’ after they got together, her income as Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife had substantially increased.
The judgement quoted instances where Paul had been ‘supportive of or furthered’ her career and also cited ‘compelling evidence that no one tells her what to do’. He had not ‘dragged her on his tours’; she had gone of her own free will because she liked the excitement and attention, but had not made any artistic contribution to them. For her to suggest she had been his business partner was ‘make believe’. To claim she had been his ‘psychologist’, giving him back his confidence and motivation to perform, was ‘typical of her make believe’.
The harshest words were reserved for her e-mail to MPL’s finance director, requesting £480,000 to ‘clear the mortgage’ on an unmortgaged apartment in Thames Reach that Paul had provided for her. While not using the word ‘fraudulent’, like Paul’s QC, the judge said her explanation had ‘a hollow ring’ and the episode was ‘distinctly distasteful’ and damaging to her overall credibility.
He ruled Paul’s fortune to be around £400 million, that the couple had begun cohabiting in 2002, not 2000, and that the wealth Paul had built up between then and now amounted to approximately £39.6 million. On that basis, he awarded Heather a lump sum of £14 million plus £2.5 million to buy a London home to help rebuild her professional life (which he expressed confidence she could do by adopting ‘a less confrontational attitude to the media’).
That made £16.5 million, just above what Paul had offered prior to the hearing. Taking her two existing homes into account, she would have assets of around £23.4 million, or more than £700 for every hour she had spent with him. He would also pay £35,000 a year for Beatrice’s expenses over and above her education and childcare.
The judgement ended with a warning to other litigants who might feel tempted to represent themselves as Heather had: ‘This case is a paradigm example of an applicant failing to put a rational and logical case and failing to assist the court in its quasi-inquisitorial role to reach a fair result.’
Throughout the hearing, Paul had shown very obvious regard for Fiona Shackleton, the solicitor masterminding his case. Known among her male colleagues as ‘the Steel Magnolia’, she was a highly attractive woman with a blonde mane very like Princess Diana’s which, fortunately, never had to be dulled by a barrister’s grey wig.
Well before winning him such a favourable result–in cash terms, less than her former client the Prince of Wales paid Diana–Shackleton had aroused Heather’s ire. Now as the proceeding broke up, she seized one of the courtroom’s full water-jugs and tipped it over the solicitor’s golden head. The gesture rather misfired, for Shackleton laughed it off and (like Diana) looked just as good with water-slicked hair as with a coiffure.
Having cut the most conventional of figures to this point, Mr Justice Bennett made a highly novel proposal: that rather than remain confidential in the usual way, his judgement should appear in full on the Royal Courts of Justice website. Paul agreed at once, even though it would reveal the most intimate details of his private life and finances. Of far more importance to him was the vindication it contained.
He left the court through the rear entrance, accompanied by a dampened but smiling Steel Magnolia, shouting to journalists, ‘All will be revealed.’ Then Heather emerged from the front door into thickets of microphones to announce she would appeal against making the judgement public; it would compromise Beatrice’s safety by disclosing things like the name of her school, and was ‘against everything to do with human rights’.
While hailing the result as ‘incredible’ for her, she claimed to have faced prejudice for conducting her own case, that the judge’s mind had been made up in advance and Fiona Shackleton had handled Paul’s case ‘in the worst manner you could ever imagine… She called me many, many names before meeting me, when I was in a wheelchair… she is not a very nice person’. The £35,000 per year for Beatrice outside education and childcare was cited as very much less than ‘incredible’. ‘She is obviously meant to travel B-class while her father travels A-class.’
Both parties had been legally bound not to speak publicly about the case without permission from the other. Heather now rehashed parts of it nonetheless, still insisting that Paul was worth £850 not £400 million, that they’d cohabited for six years not four, and that, apart from one interview with GMTV, she’d already ‘stayed quiet’ for 18 months (Hello! magazine, the Extra TV show and a second GMTV appearance having evidently slipped her mind). She even dragged in their former log cabin love-nest at Peasmarsh, which she accused him of demolishing from spite, although it had been by order of the local planning authority.
Her loyal sister Fiona also spoke to reporters, claiming that all the negative stories about her had been orchestrated by Paul and adding, ‘I can’t believe a man could be so low.’ For corroboration, she jogged the hacks’ memory about the litigation he’d brought to this same place in 1971 to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership: ‘He sued his three best friends, remember.’
The next day, three judges in the Court of Appeal supported Mr Justice Bennett’s decision to make his judgement public on the court website (where it remains for the edification of posterity). Four months hence, a decree nisi would be granted in the case of McCartney vs. McCartney, allowing headline-writers throughout the English-speaking world to say it had been a long and winding road through the divorce courts, but they’d finally agreed to let it be.
Paul’s relief at finally reaching the end of the tunnel was tempered by sadness, both for himself and someone he had come to care about. On 3 March, Nancy Shevell’s brother, Jon, a fellow executive in the family trucking firm, was found dead in his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, apparently from a drugs overdose, aged 50.
And on 24 March, Neil Aspinall died in New York, aged 66. Tragically soon after laying aside his Apple burden, he had been diagnosed with lung cancer that proved terminal. Paul had paid for him to have the best available medical care and, despite the pressures of the divorce, had flown over to see him and, just once more, say ‘Ta, la’.