Paul McCartney (93 page)

Tony Blair quickly proved even more starstruck than his Old Labour predecessor Harold Wilson, when Wilson courted popularity by sucking up to the Beatles. Britpop stars like Oasis’s Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, were invited to receptions at 10 Downing Street to be fawned over by as devout a groupie as they would ever meet. Several were persuaded to become proselytisers for New Labour, most notably Bono from U2 (who’d been among the first to mimic the Beatles’ concert on the Apple roof). In a future keynote speech at New Labour’s party conference, he was to hail Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown ludicrously as ‘kind of the John and Paul of the global development stage… Lennon and McCartney changed my interior world. Blair and Brown can change the real world.’

Nineteen ninety-nine brought Blair the ultimate perk of his job. LIPA still needed money and Paul came to him in person with a request for government funding. ‘Each of them dressed for the other,’ recalls Mark Featherstone-Witty. ‘So Paul turned up in a suit to find Blair in casual clothes, trying to look rock ‘n’ roll.’ Half an hour or so of prime ministerial hero-worship was a small price for the funding package LIPA later received.

This year, too, Paul’s need to be constantly generating music was all but extinguished by grieving for Linda–and concerns about their oldest and youngest children. Mary and Stella seemed to be coming to terms with their mother’s death, one helped by a new marriage, the other by a glittering career, but 21-year-old James and 35-year-old Heather, in their different ways, were still struggling.

James had virtually given up college, where he was studying art, photography and English, to be with Linda in her last months. Despite his facial resemblance to Paul and passion for music, he was a more sensitive, less driven character; unable to put a shell around himself like his father in the same situation, he sought escape in alcohol, drugs and listening to Nirvana, the American grunge band at the furthest extreme from the Beatles and sunny Britpop. At Mary’s otherwise idyllic wedding there had been an awkward moment when James rocked up to the church, Kurt Cobain-style, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

It was even worse for Heather, whom Linda had always protected so carefully–and unnecessarily–from any favouritism by Paul towards his biological children. After her mother’s death, she later said, she ‘could see no reason for living any more’ and retreated into her cottage on the Peasmarsh estate with only her animals for company.

Heather’s chief solace was her one-woman design company, largely inspired as it was by healing memories of living among the Huichol Indians. In January 1999, she was persuaded to launch her range of Heather McCartney Housewares in person at a trade fair in Atlanta, Georgia. Paul–‘my real daddy’ as she always referred to him–went along to help her handle the inevitable heavy media interest, shamelessly plug the (very attractive) rugs, cushions and ceramics she had designed and get her into and out of places as efficiently as one of his own roadies.

He now had a daughter he could lean on in his turn. In March, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his own right–something Linda had started lobbying for after his induction of John five years earlier, not slackening her campaign even after she became ill.

In contrast with that heartfelt yet beautifully diplomatic 1994 tribute to John, his acceptance speech was his first-ever public appearance visibly under the influence. ‘I would like my baby to share this with me,’ he slurred. ‘She wanted this… You’ve got John in there. OK guys, how about George and Ringo?’ Finally, he called Stella up to join him; the new darling of Parisian couture dressed down in a white T-shirt lettered ‘IT’S ABOUT FUCKING TIME’. ‘She doesn’t give a shit,’ her father remarked admiringly. As they left the podium, Stella had one arm wrapped tightly around him.

On 10 April, to mark the first anniversary of Linda’s death, her friends Chrissie Hynde and Carla Lane staged A Concert for Linda: Here, There and Everywhere at the Royal Albert Hall, with proceeds going to her favourite animal charities. A week earlier, in a nice coincidence, Mary had presented Paul with his first grandchild, Arthur Alistair. The concert, later shown on BBC television, featured Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, George Michael, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Sinéad O’Connor, Des’ree, Lynden David Hall, Chris Elliott, Johnny Marr from the Smiths, Neil Finn from Crowded House, Heather Small from M People and the South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Surveying the galaxy of talent, old and new, emcee Eddie Izzard quipped, ‘Some bunny rabbit’s gonna go, “Hey, these guys rocked for us.”’

There were echoes of Linda and her loss throughout the marathon setlist. Chrissie Hynde and Johnny Marr duetted on the Smiths’ ‘Meat Is Murder’. Before delivering a version of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ almost as good as the original, George Michael revealed that his mother, too, had recently died from breast cancer. Neil Finn and Sinéad O’Connor joined in Finn’s doubly resonant ‘She Goes On’. Tom Jones lustily revivified a half-forgotten ‘Paul’ Beatles track, ‘She’s a Woman’. Elvis Costello recalled his nervousness on arriving at Hog Hill to work with Paul, and how welcoming and kind Linda had been.

Paul himself was not scheduled to perform but, buoyed up by the homage of his fellow musicians and the waves of Linda-love from the 5000-strong audience, he decided to close the show, backed by the Pretenders and Costello. He dedicated his set to ‘my beautiful baby and our beautiful children, who are here tonight’ and added a proud mention of his week-old grandson.

Surprisingly, he didn’t open with any of the Beatles, Wings or postWings songs he had written for Linda. Instead, he chose Ricky Nelson’s ‘Lonesome Town’, a piece of saccharine American pop–the kind the Beatles would ultimately annihilate–which the two of them had listened to, thousands of miles apart, when it came out in 1958.

The lyrics were self-dramatising teenage drivel, typical of their time. But there wasn’t a heart that didn’t ache for him as he sang:

Maybe down in Lonesome Town

I can learn to forget.

A month later to the day, he was at the Dorchester Hotel in London for a further tribute to Linda. The occasion was the Daily Mirror’s first Pride of Britain Awards to people who had performed acts of heroism, faced up to fearful challenges or in some way ‘made a difference’. Paul was to present a Linda McCartney Award for Animal Welfare to the crusading vegetarian Juliet Gellatley.

One of the awards for ‘outstanding bravery’ went to 24-year-old Helen Smith who had lost both legs and both hands to meningitis, yet managed to lead a fulfilling life, studying biology, even learning to play the piano. She was introduced by another symbol of triumph over disability, the model and charity campaigner Heather Mills whose left leg had been partially amputated after a traffic accident in 1993.

Paul was at a stage-front table with the Mirror’s editor, Piers Morgan–the same who, as editor of the News of the World, had offered his ex-manager, Richard Ogden, £250,000 for the inside story on his and Linda’s marriage. Now he beheld a spectacular young woman of 31 wearing a tight red top and white trousers which accentuated her curvaceous figure, yet with an air of being too busy to care about her appearance. Her prosthetic lower left leg was unnoticeable as she sprinted onto the stage and, brushing aside her short golden hair, began an impassioned speech about the plight of amputees in a north-eastern accent that is as soft and lilting as Liverpudlian is harsh.

If Linda had been viewed in some ways as a temporary standin for Diana, Princess of Wales, Heather Mills seemed like an ongoing surrogate. In Diana’s final months, her main charitable cause had been the landmines which still infested the world’s war-zones, past and present, maiming thousands of innocent victims each year, a high proportion of them children.

Heather had since taken over as the embodiment of Britain’s anti-landmine movement–although her involvement with the campaign actually predated Diana’s and had placed her in far greater danger. Impatient with the bureaucracy and mismanagement of established charities, she had started one of her own, the Heather Mills Health Trust, to raise money for child landmine victims and lobby the National Health Service for better amputee-care in the UK.

Paul had never run across her before, and had to ask Piers Morgan who and what she was. They weren’t introduced at the awards ceremony, but shortly afterwards he contacted her, saying he’d like to discuss her charity projects with a view to offering help. They had two or three business meetings, as a result of which Paul agreed to donate £150,000 to the Heather Mills Health Trust. Then he invited her out to dinner, discovering that, as a result of homeopathic treatment for her leg, she had recently become a vegetarian.

Heather’s autobiography, Out on a Limb, published four years earlier, had created a sensation. It described a horrendous upbringing in the north-eastern town of Washington by a feckless mother and an unloving, cruel father, in which she witnessed habitual domestic violence, suffered sexual abuse, engaged in pretty crime and spent some time with her younger sister, Fiona, in a local authority children’s home. When she was nine, her mother ran off with another man, leaving her and her two siblings at the mercy of her father, who was subsequently imprisoned for fraud.

She recounted how at the age of 13, by then living with her mother in London, she had run away from home, first getting a job with a funfair on Clapham Common, then living rough, stealing food from supermarkets and sleeping in a cardboard box in the hobo-city under the arches at Waterloo station, with alcoholic tramps urinating only inches from her head.

At the age of 18, while working as a waitress in a Soho club–just around the corner from MPL–she met a businessman named Alfie Karmal, ten years her senior, who encouraged her to take up modelling and to whom (at her own suggestion) she was briefly married. After she had suffered two ectopic pregnancies, Karmal sought to cheer her up by sending her on a skiing holiday to Yugoslavia. The gesture backfired when she fell in love with her instructor and refused to return home.

As a result, she was there when Yugoslavia splintered into its pre-Communist Balkan states in 1991 and numerous vicious civil wars broke out. Having come to love the region and its people, Heather set up a refugee crisis-centre in Slovenia and accompanied food and medical convoys into neighbouring Croatia where the suffering was even worse, often under fire and with the dead and dying all around her.

With her return to London came the episode that would change her life. One sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1993, she and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Mincione, were walking from De Vere Gardens in Kensington towards Hyde Park. As Heather crossed the intervening main road on a pedestrian crossing, she was struck by a police motorcyclist travelling at speed–part of a convoy rushing to answer what later proved to be a false alarm from Princess Diana at nearby Kensington Palace. The impact tore off her left leg below the knee; as she lay on the ground, she could see her severed foot a few yards away, with traffic swerving to avoid it.

In hospital, more and more of her leg kept becoming infected and having to be amputated, to the point where she feared she might lose the knee also. At this time, a female social worker paid her a visit and, in the guise of kindliness, warned that she must prepare never to be attractive to men again. ‘If I lost my arms and my legs, darling,’ Heather replied, ‘I’d still be more attractive than you.’

In fact, the hideous misfortune proved to be the making of her. From her hospital bed she sold her life story to a Sunday tabloid, achieving national, then international fame as the ‘£200,000-a-year catwalk model with a golden future’ that had been so cruelly terminated.

She bought her first artificial leg off the peg for $1500, mastered it with phenomenal speed and was soon back jogging, skiing, horse-riding, scuba-diving, rollerblading, playing tennis and climbing, using a differently-crafted prosthesis for each. ‘MODEL OF COURAGE’, the tabloids named her.

Her formerly private welfare work in the Balkans now took place under the eye of television cameras, as when she organised a convoy of 4500 second-hand artificial limbs from Britain to help landmine victims in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. With that same echo of Princess Diana, she toured hospitals, bolstering the spirits of children struggling to walk with new artificial limbs and kicking off her own false shin and foot to show she was no different.

Paul also got involved in the Balkans relief effort in 1995, rounding up a crew of younger chart stars to make an album–borrowing the name HELP from the Beatles’ one of 20 years earlier–whose proceeds were sent to help injured and homeless children in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Recorded in a single day, in the manner of John’s ‘Instant Karma’, it featured a version of ‘Come Together’ by a supergroup named the Smokin’ Mojo Filters including Paul, his namesake Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher from Oasis. Amid the publicity surrounding this new HELP album, he might easily have met Heather Mills. But it never happened.

By 1999, Heather was Britain’s best-known ‘charity celebrity’: she’d received a Daily Star Gold Star for courage from the then prime minister, John Major, taken part in a swimathon organised by the Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew and been tipped for the British team at the next Paralympics. Ever more impressive news stories swirled about her: that a Hollywood film about her life was in production; that she could look forward to a future government post as Secretary of State for Health; that she was in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even at this early stage, many people close to Paul–notably Neil Aspinall–warned that he might himself be walking into a minefield. But he was deaf to all such advice, as a man might well be who’d made ‘Mull of Kintyre’ sell a million during the Punk Revolution.

Many theories would later be advanced about how someone normally so shrewd and cautious could have fallen so quickly and heavily. One was that after his long monogamous relationship with Linda he was in a particularly vulnerable state and the combination of a powerful, seductive woman with a social conscience was irresistible. Not to be discounted either was the relief of being with someone totally unawed by his Beatle fame. Heather was too young to have known Beatlemania; indeed, she claimed to have hardly been aware of the Beatles, although she’d liked Wings.