Paul McCartney (101 page)

Q. What is your favourite smell?

A. The McCartney rose…

Q. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

A. My husband, my baby daughter and my sister…

Q. When did you last cry and why?

A. Watching the film The Dreamer with my husband asleep on my knee…

Q. How often do you have sex?

A. Every day. Doesn’t everyone say that?

As a 14-year-old, Paul had written a song full of cosy images of his then-inconceivable old age–doing household chores and gardening, just like his dad, while a placid spouse ‘knit[ted] a sweater by the fireside’; going for Sunday drives and holidays at ‘a cottage in the Isle of Wight’. But now he actually was 64, very different imagery lay in store.

The milestone moment on 18 June brought an orgy of journalistic birthday greetings with metaphorical Valentines and bottles of wine. Contrary to the song’s prediction, he wasn’t losing his hair, even though its colour might be a little suspect. And the question ‘Will you still need me?’ produced a resounding unanimous ‘Yes’.

Unfortunately, the tabloids had their own, less pleasant salutations to deliver. ‘LADY MACCA HARD CORE PORN SHAME’ shrieked the Sun’s front page on 5 June. The paper had acquired colour pictures from a 1988 German sex manual, Die Freuden der Liebe (The Joys of Love), showing Heather in simulated intercourse with a male companion, both of them as oil-slicked as misdirected Channel-swimmers. Even more explicit ‘beaver’ shots of her on her own subsequently appeared online.

The News of the World followed this up with ‘HEATHER THE 5K HOOKER’, alleging that her modelling career in the same era had included actual prostitution. She denied the story and announced she would be suing for libel, but no proceedings followed.

The separation never looked other than permanent. By the time it was announced, Heather had already left Peasmarsh with two-year-old Beatrice and moved into a £500,000 property named Pandora’s Barn, a few minutes’ drive away, which she bought by selling Paul back the west London apartment his cash gifts had bought her in 2004. She also still had Angel’s Rest, the £1 million beach-front property in Hove that he’d financed as a love-nest for them in 2001.

Paul, meanwhile, sought solace with his daughters Mary and Stella and the three grandchildren they’d between them put ‘on his knee’–not Vera, Chuck and Dave, but seven-year-old Arthur, three-year-old Elliot and 18-month-old Miller. To add to the air of finality, Rother District Council had discovered that the lakeside wooden cabin he’d built for Heather and Beatrice was erected without proper planning permission and had ordered him to demolish it.

The semblance of an ‘amicable’ split was short-lived. In June, the Sunday Mirror reported that Heather had bugged his phone and listened to a conversation with Stella during which she’d called her stepmother ‘a liar’. As a result, Heather had banned her from any contact with Beatrice.

On 29 July, Paul began divorce proceedings on the grounds of Heather’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’, accusing her of being argumentative and rude to their staff, and refusing him sex (despite her recent claim to the Guardian that it was a daily occurrence). So exploded the final roseate vision of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’: ‘And if you say the word/I could stay with you.’

Practical measures were swiftly taken to prevent it. On 2 August, Heather took advantage of his absence from their London home, 7 Cavendish Avenue to go there, accompanied by Beatrice, and remove some of her possessions. She found the lock on the front gate had been changed and staff had been instructed not to let her in. Her bodyguard climbed over the wall to open the gate from inside, whereupon Paul’s security people called the police. A photographer was on hand to snap Heather in the street, arguing with a bemused female constable.

After the media love-in for the sixty-fourth birthday boy, and her own recent disastrous nudity-attack, Heather realised her need for specialised PR help in the coming battle. She therefore followed Paul’s example in hiring a press spokesman who was an ex-tabloid journalist and therefore understood the ‘red top’ psyche inside-out. Blind to incongruity, she chose Phil Hall, a former editor of the News of the World which had so lately splashed ‘HEATHER THE 5K HOOKER’.

By Hall’s account, Paul tried to warn him off taking the job. ‘[He] rang me up and said, “I hear you’re going to be handling Heather’s PR. I’m not very happy about that.” I thought it was wrong for this man to try to stop Heather being advised when she clearly was going to face an absolute onslaught from the press.’

Hall’s advice was to acquire a lighter touch than she’d previously been known for, responding to the charge of argumentativeness by conceding that she could be ‘feisty and opinionated’ (so making Paul seem a grumpy old chauvinist) but mostly keeping her head down and focusing on her charity work.

After the Cavendish Avenue lock-out, Hall told the papers she’d laughed the incident off. However, he did confirm other reports of McCartney vs. McCartney conflict on matters both major and minor: Paul had frozen their joint bank account at Coutts, and also sent Heather a stern legal letter about her removal from Peasmarsh of ‘three bottles of cleaning fluid’ to her new office at Pandora’s Barn.

His lawyers had initially proposed a quickie divorce with no blame imputed to either party that could go through with a minimum of damaging publicity. However, the absence of a prenuptial agreement meant that–just as his children had warned–Heather could lay claim to a substantial part of his fortune, as much as 20 per cent according to some reports.

In Britain, the preparation of divorce actions normally takes place in absolute confidence. But this one was to have a literal deus ex machina. On 17 October 2006, fax machines began to chatter out inside information about the case in three locations where it could reach the widest possible readership in double-quick time: the UK offices of the Press Association and Bloomberg news agencies and the press room at London’s Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

There were nine pages of a 13-page document, apparently compiled by Heather’s solicitors, Mishcon de Reya, in response to that offer of a quickie ‘no blame’ action. It contained her response to the brief, unspecific allegations in Paul’s petition, followed by a list of counter-claims which, by contrast, went into devastatingly intimate detail. These portrayed him as a controlling and selfish domestic tyrant, indifferent to his wife’s special medical needs, who had treated her in a ‘punitive, vindictive manner’ and, on four occasions, subjected her to peculiarly unpleasant physical violence.

The general rebuttal of his petition denied she had ‘withdrawn sexual intimacy’ from him save on just one occasion in seven years when she had been physically exhausted. She had been, it said, a committed wife ‘who sacrificed many of her own projects’ for his sake. Any scenes in front of their employees had been caused by his ‘controlling and possessive behaviour’ and unreasonable demands that staff should work late or at weekends. Furthermore, he had continued to ‘use illegal drugs’ and ‘consume alcohol to excess’ despite a promise not to do so when she agreed to marry him.

The itemised allegations of ill-treatment dated back to late 2002, only four months after their wedding, when they were both in America, Paul on tour and Heather promoting her book, A Single Step. The trigger was said to have been her television interview with Barbara Walters, by now no longer an admiring fan but a searching, often hostile interrogator on the subject of her early life.

Afterwards, she had been upset but, it was claimed, Paul had reacted unsympathetically, drunkenly accusing her of ‘being in a bad mood’ in front of other people. The argument had continued in private, with increasing heat, until he ‘grabbed her by the neck and pushed her over a coffee table… He then went outside and in his drunken state fell down a hill, cutting his arm (which remains scarred to this day).’

In May 2003, by now four months pregnant, Heather had been with him in Rome for his two concerts at the Colosseum. At their hotel on the morning of the second show, she had been upset by a newspaper article about her, but Paul had allegedly reacted ‘coldly and indifferently’ and in the ensuing argument ‘became angry and pushed her into the bath’.

When she threatened to boycott that evening’s performance, he made his staff badger her into going. However, she refused to attend the after-show party, preferring to have dinner at a restaurant with her sister Fiona and her female bodyguard. In reprisal, Paul allegedly withdrew her bodyguard and car, leaving her with a 30-minute walk back to the hotel ‘exposed to a crowd of 500,000’.

That August, when they’d been married only just over a year, had brought a steep escalation in the level of physical violence claimed. On holiday in Long Island, Heather had asked Paul if he’d been using marijuana despite his pre-wedding promise to stop. He ‘became very angry, yelled at her, grabbed her neck and began choking her’.

The birth of their child, it was claimed, only made matters worse, for Paul had had ‘no regard to Heather’s emotional or physical (and especially her disability) needs’, often treating her with an uncaringness his first wife would not have recognised.

Despite her exhausted and fragile state after Beatrice’s Caesarian delivery, he still ‘insisted she should accompany him everywhere’. Once, she’d had to postpone an operation for two months so as not to interfere with his holiday plans. After the revision surgery on her stump, he’d talked her into a plane trip with assurances that special disabled facilities would be provided–but none was. Even the aircraft steps had turned out to be too narrow for a wheelchair, obliging her to board on her hands and knees.

Similarly, a man who’d already lovingly–and thoroughly–parented four children was portrayed as the most selfishly squeamish novice in the nursery. He’d allegedly told Heather he didn’t want her to breastfeed Bea because ‘they are my breasts’ and ‘I don’t want a mouthful of breast milk’. She did so anyway, but after six weeks his ‘constant interrupting… often in the presence of a midwife’ became ‘so intolerable to her that she gave up’.

He was also said to have turned her into a domestic slave, forcing her to prepare two different dinners each night, one for him, another for the baby, and objecting to her employing any help. Even while suffering from a broken pelvic plate, in December 2003, she’d still had to make a meal for him on crutches and ‘in agony’.

This despotism, it was claimed, even followed her into bed. Though she was an inveterate early riser and Paul addicted to rock-star lie-ins, he didn’t like her to get up until he did. There were times when she needed to use the bathroom after having taken off her prosthetic leg and, rather than have to crawl there, she’d asked if she could use an ‘antique’ bedpan. He allegedly objected that it would be ‘like an old woman’s home’.

His former generosity towards her had seemingly evaporated. He’d recently bought a property in New York, a handsome townhouse on West 54th Street whose lower floors were to provide offices for MPL but whose top storeys were a luxurious apartment where he could stay instead of using hotels. Heather had asked for one of its commodious spare rooms as an office, so that she could work on her own projects while staying close to Beatrice. But Paul had allegedly turned down her request, instead offering her office-space a 20-minute walk away that was too small for her purposes and, when she declined it, calling her ‘an ungrateful bitch’ in front of their chauffeur.

The protective husband who’d spoken up for her online seven months earlier was portrayed as far from consistent. On receiving advance warning of Russell Miller’s damning Sunday Times Magazine article about her in 2004, she’d hit on a seemingly quick and easy way to stop it. The Sunday Times’ proprietor Rupert Murdoch also owned America’s Fox Television network, whose broadcast of the annual Super Bowl always featured a major pop act performing at half-time. Paul was due to play at the next Super Bowl and, so she thought, could have threatened to pull out unless Murdoch killed the Sunday Times piece. According to her statement, he refused, though it seems he did make personal representations to Murdoch and the article was pulled from the magazine. But it was then reinstated on the orders of the Sunday Times’ editor.

By far the most extreme ill-treatment of which he was accused had taken place at the Cabin, the lakeside home he’d been so eager to build that he couldn’t wait for planning permission. There in April 2006, while Heather was still recovering from her revision surgery and using a wheelchair, a drink-fuelled argument had allegedly culminated in his pouring ‘the balance of a bottle of red wine’ over her head and throwing the residue in his glass at her. He was said to have grabbed her glass so violently that the bowl snapped off the stem, and ‘lunged’ at her with the broken stem, cutting her arm just above the elbow so that it bled ‘profusely’, then ‘mishandling’ her, putting her into her wheelchair and pushing it outside, shouting at her to apologise for ‘winding him up’.

On the night of 26 April, it was claimed she’d asked Paul not to go out as he’d refused to employ a nanny and she couldn’t cope with Beatrice on her own. He’d gone anyway, and when she’d phoned begging him to come home he had ‘mocked her pleas in the voice of a nagging spouse’. He hadn’t returned until late that night, allegedly so drunk that she had to help him undress and get into a hot bath.

By her account, she’d then phoned his psychiatrist–a personage whose existence had been unsuspected hitherto–who advised her not to try to move him in case she injured herself but (shades of John’s ‘Norwegian Wood’!) to leave him to sleep in the bath. Because her left leg hadn’t yet healed sufficiently to wear a prosthesis, she’d had to crawl up to their bedroom to fetch pillows and a duvet.

On her return, she claimed, she found that he’d vomited over himself. Fearing he might do so again during the night and choke to death, she’d somehow dragged him upstairs to bed, terrified that the strain would damage her pelvic plate or break the stitches from her recent surgery. The next day, far from showing any contrition, he’d ‘made a joke of it’.