Paul McCartney (102 page)

On 28 April, it was alleged, he’d gone to London, promising to be back in time to help put Beatrice to bed, but had not done so, obliging Heather to call on ‘a friend’ for the backup she needed. He had finally returned at 10 p.m., ‘slurring his words and demanding his dinner’. She had told him it was on the stove but that she would no longer cook for him because he didn’t respect her; he’d accused her of being ‘a nag’ and gone to bed.

It was then that she’d decided their marriage had ‘broken down irretrievably’ and left their log love-nest for good–on her hands and knees, ‘dragging her wheelchair, crutches and basic personal possessions out to her car’.

The two news agencies to which the claims had been leaked did not instantly disseminate them to dozens of publications, as the anonymous sender had evidently expected. In Britain, divorce proceedings, celebrity or otherwise, are protected by the Judicial Proceedings Act of 1926, which expressly prohibits the reporting of such intimate details prior to the hearing. There was even a possibility that the document was a hoax. Though it seemed genuine, it had not been signed nor filed with the court, and Heather’s solicitors, Mishcon de Reya, refused to confirm its authenticity.

In the event, both the Press Association and Bloomberg decided the story was too legally hazardous to put out. But the Daily Mail–which had received the document independently–had no such inhibitions, splashing it over numerous pages the next morning. After weighing up the legal risks, the BBC and independent broadcasters took the same decision.

The initial assumption was that Heather herself was the leaker. However, her press spokesman, Phil Hall, insisted that she’d had nothing to do with it and was ‘utterly flabbergasted’. Her solicitors announced she would be taking legal action against the Mail, its stablemate the London Evening Standard and the Sun, adding, ‘She could not afford to sue all the newspapers she would like to.’ They also made public a letter from the Mail On Sunday to her sister, Fiona, offering ‘a substantial sum’ for inside information about the divorce.

From Paul, there was no talk of retributive lawsuits, only a brief statement via his own solicitors, Payne Hicks Beach: ‘Our client would very much like to respond in public and in detail to the allegations made against him by his wife and published in the press but he recognises, on advice, that the only correct forum for his response is the current divorce proceedings. [He] will be defending these allegations vigorously and appropriately.

‘Our client is saddened by the breakdown of his marriage and requests that his family will be allowed to conduct their private affairs out of the media spotlight for the sake of everyone involved.’

If Heather had not leaked the document–which certainly wasn’t in her best interests to do–then who had? The explosive fax turned out to have been sent from a public-use machine in a newsagent’s shop in Drury Lane, central London, not far from Mishcon de Reya’s office. The shop-owner recalled the sender vaguely as a woman ‘aged between 35 and 45, tall and brunette with a “different” accent, possibly American or Canadian’. But her identity and motivation remained a mystery, and still do to this day.

Paul and Heather’s daughter, Beatrice, fortunately was too young to understand fully what was happening; and, whatever their feelings about each other, they made conscientious efforts to preserve an air of harmony in front of her. On 30 October, they co-hosted her third birthday party at an adventure play-centre in Hastings, taking a full part in the activities provided and chatting and joking with each other. ‘If I didn’t know what had been going on in their marriage in the past few months, I never would have guessed,’ commented one of the other mums present. Afterwards, Bea left to spend time with her father while Heather thriftily took away the remains of the birthday cake.

The tabloids, however, stuck to the line of a couple at each other’s throats, with Paul–as People magazine noted–‘cast as the Queen Mother and Heather as the Wicked Witch’. In November, the Mail On Sunday said she had told ‘a close friend’ that she’d discovered Paul had also physically abused Linda during their seemingly idyllic marriage.

The Daily Mail subsequently reported a clandestine meeting between him and Peter Cox, Linda’s collaborator on her first vegetarian cookery book, at which Cox had handed over a large brown envelope. According to the Mail, this contained audio tapes she’d made with Cox on which she’d talked of her victimisation by Paul, and which he was now buying for £200,000 to prevent them being used against him in the divorce. In fact, the envelope contained only a copy of Cox’s book, Why You Don’t Need Meat, containing a foreword by Linda that Paul had never seen.

Two people who might have been expected to know if he was a wife-beater immediately came forward to dismiss any such notion. Carla Lane, Linda’s close friend in the late Seventies and early Eighties, said if it had been the case, she certainly would have told her. Paul’s long-time PR, Geoff Baker, concurred: ‘[He] doesn’t hit women. He doesn’t eat flesh, let alone beat it.’

Other impressive character witnesses added their own timely testimonials. Former US president Bill Clinton proprietorially claimed him as ‘an American icon’ and called his music ‘a unifying force’; Microsoft’s Bill Gates compared him with Bach; rapper Jay-Z described him as ‘a genius writer [who] changed music’; even America’s National Space Agency lauded him for filling the Mir space station with ‘Good Day Sunshine’. The tributes were collected on a DVD of his 2005 American tour, entitled The Space Within US.

At the same time, his classical oratorio Ecce Cor Meum finally completed the journey it had begun during the last months of Linda’s life. Five years after its first, low-key performance at Magdalen College Oxford, it was premiered at London’s Royal Albert Hall with Magdalen’s choir augmented by that of King’s College, Cambridge, the orchestra of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the London Voices choir and soprano Kate Royal. It would go on to a second premiere at Carnegie Hall, New York, and the award for best album at the 2007 Classical Brit Awards. After the Albert Hall recital, Record Collector magazine reported that Paul ‘took to the stage amid a confetti burst to thank one and all, happy that his vision had been fulfilled’.

If only the same could have been said of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.

‘Even by British tabloid standards, the nastiness has been extraordinary’

It was inevitable that the divorce would be likened to Prince Charles’s from Diana, Princess of Wales in 1996. Here were a comparably exalted husband suffering an unprecedented intrusion into his private life, and a golden-haired wife who had often seemed to cast herself in the princess’s image. The opposing solicitors were the same as in the royal case, Paul being represented by Fiona Shackleton of Payne Hicks Beach, who’d acted for Charles, and Heather by Mishcon de Reya’s renowned Anthony Julius, who’d secured Diana’s £17 million settlement. The difference was that no infidelity on either side had been alleged–and public opinion this time overwhelmingly favoured the prince.

A preliminary hearing took place on 27 February 2007, in the family division of the High Court before Mr Justice Sir Hugh Bennett. Paul’s last visit to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand had been in 1971 when, with Linda beside him, he’d ended the Beatles’ partnership. Then he’d been a 28-year-old, awed by the elderly-seeming grey-wigged figure on the bench; now he and the judge were equals, both in their mid-sixties and knights of the realm.

Before Christmas, Mishcon de Reya had indicated that Heather would accept a settlement of £50 million. Payne Hicks Beach, for Paul, had come back with an offer of £16.5 million which, together with the properties he’d already provided for her, would take the total to around £20 million. But it had been rejected.

The hearing before Mr Justice Bennett consisted mainly of testimony from accountants. Heather’s £50 million claim was predicated on her estimate of Paul’s net worth, which she claimed he had always told her was in excess of £800 million. However, detailed investigation by two firms of accountants had suggested it was less than half that, below £300 million. An important factor in the case was how much his relationship with Heather might have benefited his career and thus increased his fortune. The judge ordered a report on his assets in March 2000, when the relationship had begun in earnest, adjourning the hearing meantime.

The proceedings were held in camera, with strict security to ensure nothing leaked to the reporters massed outside. Nonetheless, lurid reports attributed to ‘inside sources’ dominated the next day’s front pages. It was said that Paul and Heather had ended up screaming at each other after he produced a detailed dossier of her ‘lies’ since they’d met. Their respective lawyers took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement, condemning the ‘misreporting’, notably in the Sun, and rather naively appealing for them to be given privacy ‘as they work out the outstanding issues between them’.

Since their separation, Heather’s £360,000 per year allowance from Paul had continued and in the current year she’d already received £180,000. On 1 March, he terminated the allowance, paying her £2.5 million on account of her final settlement and so freeing himself from responsibility for her day-to-day expenses other than their daughter Beatrice’s school fees.

Against her legal team’s best advice, Heather was already finding the court of public opinion hard to resist. Some weeks before the first court hearing, a message had appeared on her website, signed by her sister Fiona, saying that she and Beatrice were in actual physical danger because of the ‘vicious agenda’ of tabloid photographers who’d hounded them ‘practically every day for the past 253 days’. One had actually been convicted of assaulting her as she cycled through Hove the previous July. Since then the persecution had become so bad that she’d resorted to filming those attempting to snatch pictures of her. She was also said to have received death threats, which the Sussex police refused to treat seriously, even accusing her of crying wolf. As she had ‘no money’, she was asking Paul for the same protection given to other members of his family.

Part of Phil Hall’s PR strategy was to remind people of Heather’s courage in overcoming her disability and the range of demanding physical activities at which she was a match for anyone. Hence in April she appeared in the American TV show Dancing with the Stars, partnered by professional dancer Jonathan Roberts. Despite her supposed impecuniousness, she donated £50,000 of her £110,000 appearance-fee to the Viva! animal charity.

Wearing a succession of slinky gowns that made no attempt to hide her prosthetic leg, she lasted until the fifth round of the elimination contest, coming an overall seventh out of 11 celebrity couples. Her partner praised her stamina and dedication–she was commuting between London and LA during the series–and the judges, somewhat different from Mr Justice Bennett, gave her a standing ovation when she ended a mambo routine with a backflip.

True to past form, having won admiration for her indomitability, she undermined it with a self-regarding Oscar-style farewell speech (‘People keep coming up me and saying, “My God, now I want to dance”’) and an appeal to her audience to go vegan.

The result was vicious ridicule from American comedy shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, which doctored the series’ footage so that her prosthesis appeared to fly off midway through a samba, clubbing a young female audience-member bloodily in the face. A similar parody online intercut the footage with a horrified-looking Paul, covering his eyes and pleading ‘Stop! Stop!’, a snatch of ‘Money’, that old Beatles Cavern favourite, and a giant dollar sign.

The British press performed a characteristic volte-face, attacking the ‘cruel’ Americans for mocking disability. Back home, jokes about ‘Mucca’, as the tabloids nicknamed Heather, didn’t have to be funny to bring the house down. ‘She’s such a fucking liar,’ quipped chat show host Jonathan Ross, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out she’s actually got two legs.’

A month earlier, the final dividend on Paul’s Magritte painting of a green Granny Smith apple had been added to the Beatles’ already incalculable exchequer. Since 1978, their company Apple Corps had been fighting a copyright war with the Californian electronics corporation whose logo was also an apple, albeit with a leaf and a bite-mark. In that time, Apple Inc. had diversified from chunky desk-top computers into a range of portable entertainment, information and communication devices, tagged by a lower-case letter ‘i’, which seemed to grow sleeker and ‘smarter’ almost by the minute and which no fashion-conscious person of any nationality could bear not to possess.

Following the last court battle with Apple Corps in 1991, Apple Inc. had been allowed to retain its name and logo on condition its products had nothing to do with music. It had then promptly created the iTunes system for sending the stuff directly to its global orchard of iPods, iPads and iPhones.

Yet another court action in London in 2003 had ended with a ruling that Apple Inc. had not breached the 1991 agreement; so the ‘i’s had it. But hostilities between the two companies continued, much to the distress of Apple Inc.’s CEO, Steve Jobs, a passionate Beatles fan who had used Paul’s ‘Lovely Rita’ as a soundtrack to his unveiling of the iPhone.

Finally, in March 2007, an out-of-court settlement was reached whereby Apple Inc. bought out the name and logo from Apple Corps–for an undisclosed sum, said to be $500 million–then licensed the name back to it. A delighted Jobs said, ‘We love the Beatles and it has been painful to be at odds with them.’ Apple Corps’ managing director, Neil Aspinall, added: ‘It is great to put this dispute behind us and move on. The years ahead are going to be very exciting for us.’

But not, unfortunately, for Aspinall himself. Immediately after the settlement, it was announced he had decided to ‘move on’ from Apple Corps and would be succeeded by Jeff Jones, formerly a vice-president at Sony/BMG with special responsibility for back-catalogue reissues.

There had been many claimants to the title of ‘fifth Beatle’ but none so deserving as the terse, hollow-cheeked man who, like Paul and George, had attended Liverpool Institute and whom John had mischievously nicknamed ‘Nell’. He’d served the band continuously for 46 years, starting as their driver when they played pound-a-night gigs on Merseyside, circumnavigating the world as senior of the two roadies who were their only protection in the mayhem of Beatlemania, then retiring into Abbey Road studios with them to minister to their every need and, incidentally, suggest the concept for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.