Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (76 page)

WHEN YOU’RE IN HELL, KEEP GOING

When it seemed things could hardly get worse for Sir Paul and Lady McCartney, it emerged that their new Cabin and its pavilion had been constructed on the Sussex estate without planning permission. When this surprising oversight was noticed, and Paul applied for retrospective permission, Rother District Council turned him down. Paul now faced the prospect of having to demolish the home he had built for his new family, or launch a planning battle to retain the buildings. Unlikely though it was that he would win such a contest, he chose the latter course of action, employing experts to prepare a case that relied partly on their client’s need for ‘privacy and security’, arguing that it was important that his residence ‘is isolated and completely screened from public view and intervention. The Estate Lodge [Cabin] and associated Pavilion satisfy these requirements completely.’

While this retrospective application proceeded, Paul and Heather campaigned in Canada against the annual seal cull, which they added to a list of causes that included being pro-veggie, anti-poverty and anti-landmines. These predictably safe and worthy issues gave Heather endless reason to expound on television and in print to the degree that she and Paul started to appear more than a little tiresome, the antithesis of the tradition of the rich undertaking their good works discreetly. And there was now a whiff of bullshit about the McCartneys. While they appeared together as a united, loving couple, posing with a cuddly seal pup in Canada in March 2006, they were on the brink of separation. Just before the final break-up, Heather tried
again
to extract cash from MPL to clear what she now claimed were four loans on the Thames Reach property, totalling £450,000 ($688,500). On 1 March 2006, the accountant Paul Winn informed Heather that he would not pay her the money ‘without proof that the loans exist …’ Heather could not provide such proof because there was no mortgage.

Seven weeks after Paul Winn knocked back this latest request for money, Paul asked Heather to accompany him on a trip, according to the leaked divorce papers. She had recently had ‘revision surgery’ on her left leg. The papers alleged that Paul failed to make adequate provision for his wife in the circumstances. She was apparently obliged to ‘crawl on her hands and knees up the aeroplane steps’. Three days later, on Tuesday 25 April 2006, the couple reportedly had a particularly bad domestic row which ended with Sir Paul allegedly pouring the remainder of a bottle of red wine over Heather. He then ‘threw what remained in his wine glass at the Respondent’, as the story went in legal papers. ‘The Petitioner [Sir Paul] then reached to grab [Heather’s] wine glass and broke the bowl of the glass from the stem. He then lunged at the Respondent with the broken, sharp stem of the wine glass, which cut and pierced the Respondent’s arm just below the elbow, and it began to bleed profusely. He proceeded to manhandle the Respondent, flung her into her wheelchair and wheeled it outside, screaming at her to apologise for “winding him up”.’

The following evening, despite Heather asking Paul to stay with her in the Cabin because she felt unable to cope with Beatrice alone, Sir Paul allegedly stalked off into the woods. She telephoned him, according to the leaked divorce papers, begging him to come back. ‘ [Sir Paul] mocked her pleas, mimicking the voice of a nagging spouse, and refused to return.’ When McCartney did return from his walk, he seemed the worse for drink.

[Heather] pulled him, staggering, towards the ground-floor bathroom, undressed him, ran the bath and helped him into it. She then phoned the Petitioner’s psychiatrist for advice and he told her not to attempt to move him (she might otherwise ‘do herself an injury’), to get a duvet and two pillows, to empty the bath of water, cover him, and leave him there. The Respondent thereupon dragged herself upstairs, on her hands and knees … and brought back down the duvet and pillows. She found that [Paul] had vomited on himself. She rinsed him off, and (worried that he might choke if he vomited again in the night, unattended), she got him out of the bath, dried him, and dragged him upstairs to bed …

The sun rose on Thursday 27 April, the last full day of Paul and Heather’s life together. Believing Paul would be too hung over to help, according to the leaked divorce papers, Heather called a babysitter to get Beatrice ready for nursery, then drove to the school. When Heather returned to the Cabin, Paul was up, trying to make a joke of what had happened the night before. That evening Sir Paul drank ‘very little (a half bottle of wine)’ and went to bed. The allegations continue:

The following day, Friday 28 April 2006, the Petitioner went to London, but said he would be back in time to help the Respondent put Beatrice to bed. He did not arrive back at her bedtime, even though he knew the Respondent could not cope on her own … At 10:00 p.m. [Sir Paul] returned home staggering drunk and slurring his words, demanding his dinner. The Respondent stated that it was on the stove but that she would not be cooking for him again, as he had no respect for her. The Petitioner called her ‘a nag’ and went to bed. That evening the Respondent realised the marriage had irretrievably broken down and left, crawling on her hands and knees whilst dragging her wheelchair, crutches and basic personal possessions to the car.

They separated the following day, after less than four years of married life.

The McCartneys announced their separation a month later, blaming the media largely: ‘Our parting is amicable and both of us still care about each other very much but have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a normal relationship with the constant intrusion into our private lives …’ Heather sold her Thames Reach property and bought a barn conversion not far from the Peasmarsh estate, accompanied almost constantly by her sister Fiona and a male personal trainer. Sir Paul sought solace with his grown-up children, spending time with Stella and her husband at their country house in Worcestershire. Stelly was now a wealthy and famous woman in her own right, head of the eponymous Stella McCartney fashion house, with boutique stores in London and abroad.

Now it was clear that Sir Paul’s ill-starred marriage had failed, the popular British press, for whom Sir Paul had always been a pet, began to publish the harshest and most sensational stories about his estranged wife. LADY MACCA HARD CORE PORN SHAME screamed the front page of the
Sun
on 5 June 2006. Its journalists had laid their hands on a German sex manual from 1988,
Die Freuden der Liebe
(
The Joys of Love
), in which Heather was pictured nude and semi-nude, simulating sex acts with an equally bare male model. The picture set, shot in London around the time of Heather’s supposed stint as a cosmetics model in France, was presented as a sex manual, but a manual without any words, leading the
Sun
to describe the images as pure pornography, thereby labelling Heather a ‘former porn star’. Heather’s lawyers disputed the picture set was pornography, describing the book as ‘a lover’s guide’, which became a moot point when even more explicit pictures of Heather emerged, including classic top-shelf images of the model with her legs splayed apart.

The
News of the World
then published HEATHER THE £ 5K HOOKER, alleging that during the time Heather had supposedly been a legitimate model in Paris she had actually been working in London and elsewhere as a whore. Unlike the nudey pictures, there was no empirical evidence Heather had taken part in group sex with Arabs for £ 5,000 ($7,650), as the
News of the World
alleged. It was all down to the word of denizens of this shadowy world. Heather threatened to sue, but no action came to trial. Sir Paul’s friends said he was oblivious to Heather’s past, if indeed the hooker story was true, but even if she had been a prostitute, would he really have been so shocked? Paul had knocked about with working girls in Hamburg.

Such was the sorry state of Paul’s affairs as he reached 64. A lifetime ago, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ had been one the first tunes McCartney composed at Forthlin Road, putting lyrics to the song in his twenties when the Beatles recorded
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Precociously, he had projected himself decades into the future, envisaging life as a grey-haired old man sitting by the fire with his wife. If they scrimped and saved, perhaps they could afford a summer holiday in the Isle of Wight, cheered by visits from their grandkids Vera, Chuck and Dave. Now he’d reached this fabled age, the reality was rather different. Paul’s hair might indeed be grey, but he’d dyed out the traces; the wife he expected to live with into old age was gone, so was his second wife, and theirs had not been a life of sitting by the fire. As to scrimping and saving, Sir Paul had so much money, and so many assets, he didn’t have a clear idea how much he was worth. With a divorce settlement looming, he had to hire the accountants Ernst & Young to find out how rich he actually was.

Paul did have three grandchildren, though: Arthur, Elliot and Miller. The first two were Mary’s boys, aged seven and three respectively, the third was Stelly’s 16-month-old son. In the weeks leading up to Granddad’s landmark birthday, Mary and Stella marshalled everybody at Abbey Road Studios to record a family rendition of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ as a surprise gift. Sir Paul was out of the country when they made the recording. He was in Las Vegas, where Cirque du Soleil was holding a dress rehearsal for
Love
, a new Beatles-themed show that necessitated a coming together between Paul and Yoko, who hadn’t been on the best of terms in recent years. They seemed OK now. When Paul returned home from Vegas, the family, including little Bea, greeted him in Sussex with a rousing chorus of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and gave him their special recording.

A month later, Paul filed for divorce from Heather on the grounds of her unreasonable behaviour. Heather replied that
he
had been the unreasonable one, and she would contest the action. Paul had the locks changed at 7 Cavendish Avenue and the press were on hand to photograph the moment when Heather tried in vain to open the front gate, eventually sending a man over the top to open it from within, whereupon Paul’s staff called the police. All good fun. On 11 August, Paul’s lawyers offered the other side a quickie divorce based on ‘cross-decrees’ (his complaint and her reply), without getting into a long debate about who was in the wrong. Heather’s lawyers rejected this, with a draft ‘Answer and Cross-Petition’ - that is, Heather’s allegations about Paul’s behaviour during their marriage. The damaging document was couched in ‘very strong terms indeed’, in the words of the divorce judge, and was leaked to the press. Before that leak, however, came another important stage in the proceedings: Ernst & Young reported on what Sir Paul was worth.

Speculation about how rich Paul McCartney was had been a journalistic parlour game for years. By common agreement, Sir Paul was the wealthiest Beatle, possibly the richest rock star in the world. Most recently, the
Sunday Times
had estimated his wealth at £825 million, easily making him a dollar billionaire. The true size of Sir Paul’s wealth was less than this figure (which erroneously gave Paul the direct benefit of Linda’s estate). He was still an exceedingly wealthy man, though, the owner of ‘vast - I repeat vast - wealth’ as the divorce judge remarked breathlessly. Sir Paul’s net wealth added up to approximately £387 million ($592m), concluded the accountants, making him the richest rock star in Britain and one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world. There is little doubt the figure is accurate (as much as such audits can be with fluctuating share prices, property values and currency exchanges). Ernst & Young had access to all Sir Paul’s financial records, including his extensive publishing interests and shares in Apple Corps and other companies through which Beatles money still flowed.

In detail, Sir Paul’s business assets came to approximately £241 million ($ 369m). In addition he owned property worth £ 33.9 million ($ 51.8m), investments of £ 34.3 million ($ 52.4m), and another £15.1 million ($23.1m) in various bank accounts (interestingly, he kept £ 6,000 [$ 9,180] in ready cash, to pay the milkman perhaps). Valuables, including original artwork by de Kooning, Magritte, Matisse, Picasso and Renoir, were worth another £32.2 million ($49.26m), with £36 million ($55m) tucked away in pension funds. In a statement, Paul said that most of this wealth had been accumulated prior to his marriage, though he had added £ 39 million to his fortune during the marriage (or $ 59.6m). In that time he had been generous to not only his wife, but also her family, lending Fiona Mills £421,000 ($ 644,130) to buy a house, and buying another Mills relative a £193,000 property ($295,290). All these figures were as yet confidential, as the details of divorces usually remain. This was to be a highly unusual divorce, however, both in its bitterness and in how much information emerged into the public domain.

The first watershed of information came a month after the Ernst & Young report was delivered confidentially to the interested parties when, at lunchtime on 17 October 2006, a fax machine at the Press Association emitted 9 of 13 pages of Heather’s ‘Answer and Cross-Petition’. As we have seen, Heather is identified in the document as ‘the Respondent’, replying to a case brought by ‘the Petitioner’ (Paul). Included were all the allegations we have already read of cruelty and mistreatment, starting with the night in 2002 when Sir Paul allegedly got drunk and pushed Heather over a coffee table, to the events of April 2006. In addition, the document alleged: ‘The Petitioner has been physically violent towards the Respondent.’ He had behaved in a ‘vindictive, punitive manner’ to his wife and, ‘In breach of his promises to the Respondent made when she agreed to marry him, the Petitioner continued to use illegal drugs, and to consume alcohol to excess, throughout the marriage …’ This fax was a windfall for the press, many newspapers printing the document verbatim, with reporters wondering who had been so kind as to send them the gift. It had been faxed anonymously. The fax was traced to a newsagent’s shop in London’s Drury Lane, the proprietor of which said a woman sent it. Heather Mills denied she was behind the leak, and began defamation proceedings against the
Daily Mail
and the
Sun
when these papers gave their readers that impression. In their defence, the publishers asserted Heather
had
been behind the leak, in order to damage Sir Paul’s reputation, and furthermore the allegations were lies. Again Heather’s action for defamation never came to trial.