Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (71 page)

One of Linda’s dying wishes was that Paul should be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in his own right, and this happened in March 1999 when Paul was carried in on a wave of sympathy for his loss. Stella McCartney attended the New York ceremony with her father wearing a white T-shirt printed with the words ‘ABOUT FUCKING TIME!’ The following month, on 3 April, Dad became a granddad when Mary Donald (
née
McCartney) gave birth to a son named Arthur. Sir Paul showed off his grandson at the Royal Albert Hall two weeks later during a rock concert in Linda’s memory. ‘He said, “Look, he was born between Easter and Passover, so that’s perfect, because he’s Jewish, because his grandmother is Jewish,”’ reports Danny Field, who visited Paul’s box and was surprised by what he heard the star say, because Linda had shown no interest in her Jewishness. ‘Linda would never have said that.’ Meanwhile, Chrissie Hynde confided in Danny that Paul had laid down the law to her about the line-up for the concert, wanting different acts. ‘No one wants to be around him when he’s not smiling,’ a chastened Chrissie told Danny after a difficult meeting with the great man.

The curator, Wolfgang Suttner, also found Sir Paul in uncompromising mood as final preparations were made for the long-planned show of paintings at the Lÿz Art Forum in Siegen, Germany. Generally, Suttner had found Paul easy to deal with on the project. The musician agreed that the cost of the show shouldn’t fall on the taxpayers of Westphalia, saying he would pay for the transportation and insurance of his pictures. Sir Paul was punctual for meetings and Suttner learned that McCartney’s word was his bond. ‘What Paul said happened. If Paul said, “I’m there,” he was there. That was fantastic.’ Reliability is often considered to be a characteristically German virtue and it is one that Paul appreciated. ‘He told me once, “I love to be punctual, and you Germans are so efficient.”’ It also helped that Paul had a little of the language, actually less than one might think considering he studied German in school and spent part of his youth in Hamburg, but enough to be polite. ‘He likes Germany … He told me it’s his second best market in the world after the USA, and one of the best countries to tour.’ Also, Germans didn’t resent his wealth, as Paul sometimes felt the English did.

In the build-up to the art show, Suttner found how sensitive Sir Paul was to criticism. The curator had asked an academic, Professor Gundolf Winter, to look through Paul’s pictures with a view to writing an essay for the catalogue, but Paul didn’t like what the professor wrote. ‘He said a lot of wonderful things about the pictures, but he also said Paul would never have a position in art history,’ says Suttner. ‘He’s a good painter but not a worldwide [artist]. At that time he was not happy about this. He told us: “No, I don’t want the show! … I won’t come.” He was a little bit pissed off.’ At times like this, Paul forgot his invented persona as the humble, unknown English painter Paul Miller and reminded Wolfy that he was Sir Paul McCartney, former member of the Beatles! What’s more, he was the Beatle responsible for the iconic jacket designs for
Sgt. Pepper
, the
White Album
and
Abbey Road
, so he knew a thing or two about art. Professor Winter’s essay was quietly dropped from the catalogue, replaced with a more complimentary one by Christoph Tannert.

Having sent his artist friend Brian Clarke ahead to make sure everything was in
ordnung
, as the Germans say, Paul arrived in Siegen on the eve of his show, requesting last-minute changes just when Wolfy and his team were exhausted. ‘He is never getting tired. He costs you a lot of strength.’ A large number of press turned up for the opening the next day, 30 April 1999, Paul effortlessly charming the journalists, and posing patiently for the photographers. Then the doors opened to the public. Typically, a show at the Lÿz Art Forum attracted 4,000 people during its run. Approximately 45,000 people came to see Paul McCartney’s paintings.

As to the quality of Paul’s art, opinion was divided. The waspish British critic Brian Sewell was profoundly unimpressed:

Paul McCartney’s paintings are a self-indulgent impertinence so far from art that the art critic has no suitable words for them - they are, indeed, beneath criticism. They may have some private and personal value as therapy, but exposed to the public gaze they betray his arrogance and vanity … he is not a painter.

The less demanding viewer could find things to enjoy in the work of this enthusiastic amateur: a modest, dream-like quality at least. On the scale of rock star painters, of which they are many, Paul comes fractionally above Bob Dylan (who is very bad), but below Joni Mitchell, who is quite good.

RUN DEVIL RUN

Two months later, Sir Paul attended an awards show at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he had once celebrated the release of
A Hard Day’s Night
and, later in the Sixties, had an acrimonious business meeting with Allen Klein. This time he pitched up at the hotel with a host of celebrities to support the
Daily Mirror
newspaper’s Pride of Britain Awards, whereby the paper recognised people who had ‘made a difference’ in various ways, including by acts of bravery. It was a coup to have lured Sir Paul out of mourning for the event. Little had been seen of him in public during the 13 months since Linda died. Paul was so inactive that MPL had just recorded a £368,979 annual loss ($564,537). He came to the Dorchester on 20 May 1999 primarily to remember Linda, by presenting an award in her name to a campaigning vegetarian friend of theirs, Juliet Gellatley.

Towards the end of the ceremony, Heather Mills strode on stage, a good-looking woman of 31, wearing an eye-catching, red, translucent top. With large, shapely breasts, a wide, inviting smile, and a flirtatious toss of her thick blonde hair, she was what Paul might once have termed ‘a right little raver’. Speaking in a strong northern accent, Heather explained to the audience that she was at the Dorchester to introduce a friend of hers, student Helen Smith, who had shown fortitude in coping with the loss of both her legs, an arm and a hand due to septicaemia. Although it was not immediately obvious, Ms Mills was herself an amputee, wearing a prosthetic leg. A slight stiffness in her walk was the only sign of the disability.

‘Who’s that?’ Paul asked Piers Morgan, Editor of the
Mirror
.

‘That’s Heather Mills,’ replied the journalist, briefing Sir Paul on someone who was a minor celebrity in the tabloid world: the plucky model who’d lost a leg in a road accident and now raised money for charity.

‘She’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’

Heather travelled to Cambodia after the Dorchester show. When she returned home she discovered that Sir Paul had telephoned and left a message for her: ‘It’s Paul McCartney here. I’d like to talk to you about the charity work.’ He meant the Heather Mills Health Trust, an organisation Heather advertised in the back of her newly published autobiography,
Out on a Limb
. Although Heather did charitable work, and tended to talk casually about ‘my charity’, she hadn’t yet registered the trust with the Charity Commission, as organisations with an income over £5,000 ($7,650) are obliged to do in England before they can properly call themselves a charity. Heather’s organisation received a windfall 30 times this amount when, in August 1999, Paul invited the charity worker to his office and gave her a cheque for £150,000 (£229,500), which she gratefully accepted for the trust. But she didn’t get around to registering the Trust as a charity for a further seven months.

As she left MPL that summer day, Heather noticed Sir Paul was admiring her backside. He hadn’t looked with lust at a woman since Linda died. He felt guilty doing so, then told himself Linda wouldn’t mind. Indeed, he convinced himself that Lin was sending him messages via the wildlife on the Sussex estate: ‘… there were strange metaphysical occurrences that seemed to mean something. Animal noises. Bird noises. You’d ask yourself a question under the stars and, like, there’d be like an owl in the valley going
whoo-whoo-whoo.’
In short, he had decided to date Heather Mills.

In contrast to her predecessors, Jane Asher and Linda Eastman, but in common with Paul himself, Heather had been raised in the working-class north of England. Born Heather Anne Mills on 12 January 1968 - that is, between
Magical Mystery Tour
and the Beatles’
White Album
- Heather was the middle child of John and Bernice Mills, with an older brother named Shane and a younger sister, Fiona, to whom she was close. Dad was a soldier, living in Aldershot when Heather was born, and her life prior to meeting Paul was troubled, eventful and slightly mysterious.

Family life started to fall apart in the mid-1970s when Mum was involved in a car accident. During her convalescence, Heather and Fiona were taken into care. Heather came to look back on the children’s home as preferable to life with her dad, whom she disliked intensely. When Mum came out of hospital, the reunited family moved to a council estate near Washington, Tyne and Wear, where Heather claims Dad hit Mum, and that she and another girl were abducted by a man who kept them prisoners in his flat, fondled Heather and masturbated himself, until the girls were rescued by police.
⁶⁰
Mum then left home, to live with an actor named Charles Stapley, leaving the children with their father.

When she was ten, Heather was caught shoplifting. The police let her off with a warning. Dad seemed unconcerned about her thieving, but flew into rages if the house wasn’t in order, lashing out at the kids. Heather decided her father was a madman. Around the time she was 13, John Mills was imprisoned for fraud, with the result that the children went to live with their mother and Charles Stapley in Clapham, South London. Heather claims she ran away from this home at 14 to join the fair on Clapham Common; she started sleeping rough under railway arches, mixing with drug addicts, rent boys and prostitutes. Then she got a Saturday job with a jeweller, from whom she stole. Heather was arrested, taken to court and given a probationary sentence for theft. A precocious teenager who dressed provocatively, Heather next strayed into the fringes of the sex industry, finding employment around the age of 16 in a Soho hostess club; that is, a red-light district bar where men are encouraged by semi-clad women to spend extortionate amounts on drink. She didn’t work as a hostess herself. When she went for the interview she showed herself to be so naive, apparently, that the boss put her to work as a regular barmaid. Nonetheless, our heroine entered the seedy side of Soho, which exists alongside the smart offices of creative types like Paul McCartney, whose building was just around the corner on Soho Square.

Paul was promoting
Press to Play
when Heather met her first husband in a Soho bar named Bananas. Alfred Karmal, who went by the name Alfie, was ten years Heather’s senior, a father of two going through a divorce. He took photos of Heather for her first modelling portfolio, which his sister shopped around town. Agents suggested the busty teenager might be suited to ‘glamour’ modelling, the sex industry euphemism for topless and soft porn shoots, though Alfie says he only found out later that Heather did such work. By Heather’s account she progressed almost directly to being a more respectable ‘swimsuit model’.

Two years passed. Alfie and Heather were living together in a semi-detached house in suburban Stanmore, Middlesex. Their relationship was tempestuous.

One Friday she called me and said she’d been asked to go to Paris for some modelling … I didn’t hear from her all weekend. I just wondered where the Hell she was. I was worried about her. And then she phoned up on Sunday night and said, ‘I’m not coming back. Bye-bye.’

Heather writes in her memoir that at this stage in her adventures she became ‘the face’ of a large cosmetics firm, which brought her to live and work in France. ‘I would have to live in Paris for twelve months with an option of another year if things went well. But the best thing about it was the money - I’d be paid £1,500 a day [$2,295] … It was the chance of a lifetime.’ The firm was sufficiently substantial to accommodate Heather in a luxury Paris hotel. She was earning so much that she sent enough money home for Dad to buy himself a new BMW. Alfie has no idea how much if any of this story is true. ‘It was difficult to believe anything she said, because I caught her out lying to me so often - Where she was going, what she was doing …’ Heather’s frankly incredible French adventure came to a suitably improbable ending in December 1988 when, by her own account, the unnamed boss of her unidentified cosmetics firm fell so violently in love with his model that she fled France, catching a late-night ferry home to Dover. Heather telephoned Alfie to pick her up at the docks, thus resuming their relationship. ‘She asked me to marry her about 50 times that same week.’

On the assurance that she would see a psychiatrist, to help her stop telling lies, so he says, Alfie agreed to marry Heather. Their wedding took place on 6 May 1989. They couple lived once more in Stanmore, then Hoddesdon, a commuter town in Hertfordshire. Heather suffered the first of two ectopic pregnancies, ran a small modelling agency for a while, and had cosmetic surgery on her breasts. Then she went to Yugoslavia for a ski holiday, had an affair with her ski instructor, Milos, came home briefly, then left Alfie once and for all in 1991. He recalls:

I came home from work and she’s gone, packed all her cases, smashed the front door. A big pane of glass by the front door. She’d scraped all the wallpaper carrying her bags, getting out - took off. And that was that. I didn’t know where she was. Her sister didn’t know where she was. Nobody knew where she was … I found out she was in Yugoslavia, fucking around.

He also claims to have found out that Heather had driven the car he’d bought her to the nearest garage and sold it for cash. Alfie says Heather sold her rings, too. In her memoirs, Heather tells the story differently, writing that she told Alfie she was going to Yugoslavia to be with her ski instructor boyfriend. ‘My marriage hadn’t had a pretty ending. When I told him I was leaving, Alfie had been first shocked, then angry, then bitter,’ she wrote in
Out on a Limb
. ‘He’d told me that running away to Yugoslavia was just like running off to the fair when I was thirteen.’ In any event, she left and Alfie filed for divorce.