Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (72 page)

Heather now found herself in the middle of a civil war in Yugoslavia, as the country began to fall apart with the collapse of communist hegemony in Eastern Europe. She became involved in aid work for war victims, developing a particular interest in people who had lost limbs in landmine explosions. On trips home to the U K, Heather raised money and resources for these people and resumed her modelling career, which became so successful, by her account, that she was able to buy a Saab convertible and a flat in the salubrious London suburb of Hampstead. Milos was history. One night at Stringfellow’s nightclub, Heather met a well-paid bond dealer named Raffaele Mincione, with whom she began a new affair. Heather had already resolved to end this relationship when the couple set off for a walk in Kensington Gardens on Sunday 8 August 1993. As they crossed Kensington Road, walking towards the park, a passing police motorcycle collided with Heather, tearing off her left foot in the accident. Surgeons subsequently amputated all but six inches of the leg below the knee to create a clean stump. This was the turning point in Heather Mills’s life.

For a single 25-year-old woman with little education who traded on her looks, losing a leg would appear to be an almost insurmountable calamity, and it seemed that way to Heather at first. The sight of her stump was shocking, and when Heather tried to go to the toilet on her own she fell over. She wept, asking ‘Why me?’, but then pulled herself together in a way that showed tremendous character. The tabloid press was eager to tell the tale of a sexy model turned plucky amputee, so Heather auctioned her story to journalists from her hospital bed. Apart from being photogenic, she proved a good talker, quite charismatic in her own way. After discharging herself from hospital, Heather started to appear regularly in the tabloids and on daytime television. The
Daily Star
gave her its Gold Star Award for courage; she met the Prime Minister, John Major, at Downing Street, a previously unimaginable situation for the shoplifter turned glamour model. As Charles Stapley observes, the attention Heather now received because of her accident made her a somebody, ‘which she’d always wanted to be’.

Soon Heather was doing bits of broadcasting, and writing her autobiography. She courted publicity, talking to journalists about her charity work and her love life, which continued to be eventful. Raffaele was dumped, two more fiancés following, neither of whom she married. Heather now seemed obsessed with her celebrity, granting endless interviews to talk about herself and her causes. Likened by credulous journalists to fellow landmine campaigner Princess Diana, Heather became the subject of increasingly improbable articles: she was being nominated for a Nobel Prize; she planned to ski for Britain in the Paralympics; a Hollywood movie was to be made of her life; a career in politics beckoned. ‘By my mid-forties I want to be Secretary of State for Health,’ she announced ridiculously in 1998. Then something almost as unlikely happened. Heather began to date the greatest living Englishman.

‘THE MORE YOU MET HER, THE MORE YOU KNEW SHE WAS A NUTTER’

That July, Sir Paul McCartney attended a choral concert at Charterhouse School in Surrey to commemorate Linda’s memory. Sir Paul, the recently knighted Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, David Matthews and Paul’s old friend John Tavener were among nine composers who contributed choral works for A Garland for Linda. Paul’s piece,
Nova
, has a distinctly religious feel, Paul asking in the libretto the question Christ asked on the cross: ‘God where are you?’ Paul concluded that God was everywhere, in nature, in every snowflake and blade of grass. Paul may have gone further in this spiritual direction, in his music and in his life, had he not been yanked out of his grief by his vivacious new girlfriend.

Heather Mills had only recently got engaged again, after a ten-day romance, to documentary film-maker Chris Terrill. The couple set 8 August 1999 as their wedding day. A week beforehand, Heather called it off, telling her fiancé she was going on holiday to Greece. In fact, she accompanied Sir Paul to America for his summer vacation in the Hamptons. When they returned to the UK, Paul and Heather were inseparable. They tucked themselves up in the Forecastle, a quaint hideaway cottage Paul owned in Rye, near the town’s old church. Then, in October, they left the love nest to release a charity record,
Vo!ce
, in which Heather delivered a monologue about limbless people while Paul played guitar and sang backing vocals. Heather proved herself to be as hopeless a musical partner as Linda had been. It was, though, typical of Paul to take on the interests of the women in his life. He had always done so.

Paul had also always been one of the most romantic of men. For Hallowe’en he arranged a tryst with Heather in a London hotel, filling their suite with Hallowe’en lanterns. Heather noticed Paul was so happy he was literally dancing down the street, like his hero Fred Astaire. A few days later, he invited Heather and her sister Fiona to Peasmarsh for a bonfire night party. Blossom Farm had become a shrine to Linda since her demise, with a memorial fountain tinkling outside the kitchen window where she and Paul had once fed Wirral the Squirrel. Heather couldn’t decently come and stay here. So she and Fiona were accommodated in another property on the estate, a house named Beanacres. The
News of the World
broke the story of the romance after its photographers caught Heather leaving the property the next day. Clearly they had been tipped off.

Rejuvenated by his relationship with Heather, Paul picked up the reins of his career, releasing
Working Classical
, a CD that featured attractive arrangements of tunes Linda had inspired, ‘My Love’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and ‘The Lovely Linda’, played by the Loma Mar Quartet. He also returned to his roots, recording a new rock ’n’ roll album,
Run Devil Run
, with guitarist mates Dave Gilmour and Mick Green. Ian Paice from Deep Purple played drums and Pete Wingfield keyboards. Recorded quickly over five days at Abbey Road Studios,
Run Devil Run
had the same attractive live sound as
CHOBA B CCCP
and
Unplugged
. Like those two records, the set list featured songs Paul had grown up listening to, most of them obscure, with a couple of newly written tracks including the title song, ‘Run Devil Run’, inspired by a voodoo remedy Paul had picked up in Atlanta to ward off evildoers, thieves and liars. To promote the CD, and help mark the end of the millennium, Paul decided to perform these rockers at the Cavern.

Music fans had come to appreciate what a grievous loss the destruction of the Cavern had been in 1973, with the result that a replica had been built nearby, opening for business in 1984. The new Cavern was on the same side of Mathew Street, but slightly deeper underground, with a recreated vaulted ceiling, and a second, larger stage area where various acts performed, including Beatles tribute bands of which there were now many. Sir Paul performed in this larger room with his
Run Devil Run
band on 14 December 1999, playing to 300 selected guests and millions watching on the Internet. A rather clinical, emotionless event was enlivened by a heckler yelling for ‘Satisfaction’. Paul stopped, glanced up crossly and said: ‘There’s a little wag in the crowd - read my lips [then mouthed the words] Fuck Off!’ Later he discovered the heckler was a member of his own family.

A few days later, Paul invited Heather to Rembrandt to help the McCartneys usher in the new millennium. It was at this Merseyside house party that Heather was introduced to Paul’s children, ‘a difficult situation for everybody,’ she later admitted. The ‘relies’ also looked upon her askance. ‘The first time she ever appeared was at Paul’s house, New Year’s Eve,’ recalls Mike Robbins. ‘I went in the kitchen for some reason. It’s only a little kitchen there. Seated at a table in the kitchen, in white fur, and a white Cossack fur hat,
⁶¹
is this very glamorous-looking blonde who I’d never seen.’ Mike extended his hand. She didn’t shake it, and seemed to want to stay in the kitchen rather than join everybody else in the living room.

I said to [my wife], ‘Have you seen the bird?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Go and have a look.’ So [Bett] wandered into the kitchen, comes back a bit later and said, ‘Oh, very strange young lady.’ I said, ‘One of Paul’s brief bits of crumpet I presume.’ And that was Heather - the first time we met her. And the more you met her, the more you knew she was a nutter. She was weird.

Paul clearly didn’t think so. After the holidays, he took his children to Parrot Cay, a resort island in the British West Indies. The day the children left for home, Heather flew in to join her boyfriend. During a walk along the beach Paul told Heather that pirates once used the island and pirate relics could sometimes be found under the rocks. Coming to a likely stone, he suggested she turn it over. Heather did so, discovering that Paul had been out on the beach earlier and scratched a heart, with their names in it, in the sand underneath. ‘I stood there shaking my head in disbelief. This man was too much.’

ANOTHER DEATH IN ARIZONA

For the past 15 years Mel See had lived with his partner Beverly Wilk on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. Recently, he’d begun seeing a new woman in Santa Fe. He seemed unable to choose between his two lovers. Feeling guilty, Mel became depressed, withdrawn and increasingly irrational. ‘He kept saying, “I betrayed you,”’ recalls Beverly. ‘He was just really weird …’ Mel was prescribed anti-depressants, but didn’t like taking them, and became increasingly intense and strange. He read the Bible and his favourite Ernest Hemingway books obsessively and said peculiar things. Mel hit bottom on Saturday 18 March, 2000, pleading with Beverly not to leave him. Beverly said she wasn’t going anywhere, though they slept in separate rooms. She woke in the night to find her boyfriend standing over her bed. ‘I couldn’t do it to you and Heather,’ he told her.

‘What’s wrong, Mel?’

Beverly didn’t get a sensible answer.

She got up in time to see Mel walking out of the house. ‘I’m going down to the wash for a walk,’ he said. When he didn’t come back, Beverly went to look for him. She found Mel lying in a hollowed-out palo verde tree that he loved, having shot himself in the head like his hero Hemingway. Remarkably, Mel had chosen to take his life in exactly the same way, and at exactly the same age, as Hemingway: both men were days away from their 62nd birthdays when they blew their brains out. ‘I looked and I saw him lying there,’ said Beverly, ‘and I just ran …’

Mel had left a note of sorts in his office; a piece of scribble, with crossings out and addendums. It began: ‘To Heather, executor, instructions for my cremation …’ Obviously realising this was too great a burden to put on his daughter, Mel had then struck out Heather’s name and addressed the note instead to a male friend, informing him that he wanted his body to be cremated and his ashes scattered over his parents’ grave. He asked for forgiveness. A phone call was made to John Eastman, who contacted Paul, who told Heather that her father had died. Mel’s suicide placed an almost intolerable additional strain on an already fragile woman who, two years after losing her mother at 56, now lost her natural father at 61 in extremely distressing circumstances. More upset followed.

It is standard police procedure in Arizona to have a homicide unit investigate any violent death, a fact the British press got hold of and beat up into a story about Linda’s first husband possibly being murdered, nonsense that was fuelled by irresponsible local gossip about who might have wanted Mel dead. Such rumours persist in Tucson, with one former neighbour claiming improbably that Mel’s anthropology had been a cover for his real work for the CIA. This is almost certainly untrue, as was the homicide story. ‘It didn’t turn into a full-blown murder investigation,’ says Lieutenant Deanna Coultas of the Pima County sheriff’s office. ‘I believe it was classified as a suicide.’

Although the main purpose of Mel’s ‘will’ was to make sure his friends and family had his body cremated, he was buried on 27 March at the Evergreen Cemetery in Tucson. The marker reads:

JOSEPH MEL SEE COMPANION MENTOR AND DAD 1938-2000

So ended the life of the man who may have been the Jojo of ‘Get Back’. More significantly, it was an event from which Heather McCartney seemed unable to recover, becoming a virtual recluse thereafter. Her design businesses fell into desuetude, as did her pottery. A high wooden fence was erected around her Sussex cottage, where she became a hermit. ‘The last time I met her [she] was in a dreadful state,’ says neighbour Veronica Languish. ‘Terrible thing, a girl like that, got everything to live for and nothing.’

BEHOLD MY HEART

The other Heather now took centre stage in Sir Paul’s life, with stories emerging in the press that Heather Mills might not be an ideal girlfriend for the star. Her ex-husband Alfie Karmal made his position clear when he told the
Sunday People
: ‘Marrying Heather was the biggest mistake of my life.’ Other negative stories followed from different sources suggesting that during her time as a ‘swimsuit model’ in Paris Heather had actually kept rich Arabs company, including the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Heather had been a ‘party girl’, said a fellow model, who claimed to have introduced Heather to a seamy world where pretty girls were rewarded with gifts and cash. It looked bad. A private investigator contacted Alfie, saying he worked for a client who needed to know whether certain things about Heather were true - such as who paid for her plastic surgery. Alfie concluded that the private eye was working for Sir Paul McCartney.

Despite these stories, Sir Paul chose to support Heather, making his support public when he walked onto the set of a cheesy TV show his girlfriend was appearing on,
Stars and Their Lives
, to affirm his love for Heather. Many onlookers and friends of Sir Paul wondered why the star invested such trust in a self-publicising minor celebrity with a dubious past. Paul’s cousin Mike Robbins suggests the answer is sex. Although Paul had enjoyed a vigorous bachelorhood, he had been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years, and in that time friends and family observed that Paul had lost some of his worldliness. Then along came a busty blonde who may have had a certain expertise in the bedroom. ‘I’m being crude now, [but he was] cock happy,’ says Mike. ‘And he confused [sex with love]. He couldn’t tell the difference.’