There was an initial buzz of excitement and sympathy when the couple met, and the bereaved superstar was comforted by the courageous victim. But slowly the mood changed. Mills was barely older than McCartney's children, and the media exploited every possible rift between them. She was described as a gold-digger, targeting McCartney for his fathomless wealth; he was portrayed as a foolish old man, beguiled by the attractions of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Since he had been deserted by John Lennon 30 years earlier, his survival had centred on his relationship with Linda Eastman, his public image and his music. Now two of those struts had collapsed, and the third was made almost irrelevant by the petty drama of his private life. In 2003 he released Chaos and Confusion in the Backyard, one of the most effective solo albums in his catalogue, but it was quickly buried beneath the debris of his marriage.
When the pair separated, Mills accused McCartney of unleashing a witch-hunt against her and responded with a string of ever more shocking tales of degradation and abuse. By October 2006, for example, it was being claimed that McCartney had stabbed Mills with a broken glass, attacked her in a drunken rage, assaulted her when she was pregnant, mocked her disability and refused to let her breast-feed their daughter, telling Mills, 'They are my breasts.' McCartney maintained a dignified silence and let journalists find their own methods of puncturing Mills' reputation. As the stories grew more outlandish, however, it was inevitable that some of the dirt would tarnish his image. It was but a short step, after all, from the Mills camp's claims about McCartney's alleged bad behaviour to the unsubstantiated rumours about his sexual preferences that were the subject of amused speculation in media circles. No matter how ridiculous the accusations – and most of them were laughable – McCartney was damned if he answered them and equally damned if he didn't. Years of careful handling of the media were erased as it became possible to allege almost anything about one of Britain's most famous celebrities, in the knowledge that he would be unable to respond.
It was difficult not to feel that Mills had been naive in the way she had handled herself, her marriage and her past. Yet even if the cruellest tabloid allegations were true, there was something shocking in the way that she became the repository for every ill-concealed impulse of hatred against women – not least from other women, many of whom seemed to relish her transformation into a global scapegoat, like the crowds who gathered to watch mediaeval witch burnings. Mocked, battered, belittled, hated, Mills had little option but to retire into the self-justification that was her least attractive public face, and thereby toss more wood onto the pyre.
The denouement was a divorce hearing held behind closed doors in February 2008. A month later Mills arrived at the High Court to hear the judge award her an estimated £16.5 million from McCartney's billion-dollar fortune. After throwing a glass of water over her ex-husband's lawyer, she pleaded for the full judgement not to be made public, but it was too late to argue for privacy. Inevitably, the press focused on the judge's verdict that Mills was 'a less than impressive witness' who had been 'not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid'. But for McCartney it was a hollow victory. Throughout his career he had carefully satisfied the demand for knowledge about elements of his private life while retaining strict barriers around the rest, thereby allowing himself the sanity of existing – to some degree, at least – beyond the view of the world. Now everything was laid bare, as if he'd been photographed naked by a paparazzo: the homes in Beverly Hills, Long Island, Somerset, Essex and Merseyside; the £32 million collection of 'artefacts'; the £36 million pension pot; even the security arrangements at his various residences.
The saga took a savage toll. Throughout his courtship, marriage and divorce McCartney had worked, as he always will. He'd staged massively successful world tours; organised the Concert For New York City after the 9/11 disaster; made records, issued DVDs, published a children's book, exhibited paintings, raised money for charity and offered his familiar thumbs-up to a million photographers and fans. Yet through it all the world was more interested in whether he had really demanded that his estranged wife return three bottles of cleaning fluid to his home, or whether he was so addicted to marijuana that he could barely function without it. After decades of youthfulness, he suddenly aged faster than his years, and took steps to repair the damage which merely accentuated the changes. Like a fading Hollywood star, his face was a strange combination of youth and age, his hair a shade removed from nature's palette, his skin both tight and sagging. When he publicised Liverpool's Year of Culture in December 2007 he was wearing an almost bouffant approximation of his 1963 Beatle cut and appeared slightly dazed. In interviews his voice sounded restricted and slightly strangled. A month later it was reported that a 'spokesman' had confirmed that McCartney had recently undergone an operation for a coronary angioplasty, to improve his blood circulation; then McCartney countered that the supposedly official tales were 'completely untrue'. For a man who was reported to be facing a major health crisis, he was certainly energetic: during 2007 and 2008 he was linked by the overexcited media with a dazzling list of women, among them Rosanna Arquette, Sabrina Guinness, Renee Zellweger, Christie Brinkley, Natasha Marsh, Elle Macpherson, Lulu, Tanya Larrigan and Nancy Shevell, who became his regular companion. Understandably, he remained silent about his relationship with Shevell, though that didn't prevent others talking. But as a woman who was not only dignified but rich, she was perceived as a suitable candidate for McCartney's affections.
After Linda McCartney's death there was a partial truce in the battle of wills with Yoko Ono. 'It's normal in any business relationship,' Ono explained in 2000. 'Sometimes he gets upset, and sometimes I get upset. I'm not as vocal as he is in the world about it, but I do get upset. Also, I'm sure that in the case of Paul there's that feeling that I'm the woman who took away his partner – it's like a divorce.' But the two parties continued to squabble over their joint legacy. In late 2002 McCartney prepared his fifth live album in twelve years, Back inthe US – its title deliberately evoking the Beatles, just as his previous release, Paul Is Live!, had done. *42 He chose to repeat what he had done on Wings Over America more than 25 years earlier, and credit the Lennon/McCartney songs – his songs – to McCartney/Lennon.
Ono chose to be violently offended by this effectively meaningless gesture; a spokesman called it 'absolutely inappropriate'. (The spokesman clearly hadn't seen copies of the earliest Beatles records, which were indeed credited to 'McCartney/Lennon'.) If her response was designed to rile McCartney, it succeeded, as he reacted like a disgruntled adolescent. 'Why do I care?' he asked himself rhetorically. 'I don't know. I've given up. I'm not going to bother with it. It's very unseemly for me to care, because John's not here and it's like walking on a dead man's grave. I was talking about him as if he were here, and he's not.' His sense of injustice was reasonable: after all, why should Lennon pass into history as the primary composer of 'Yesterday' and 'Hey Jude' when they were entirely McCartney's work? 'It's actually just a very little request,' he said, 'and it makes me look stupid.' Starkey agreed with the latter sentiment: 'I think the way he did it was underhanded,' he said of McCartney's gentle rewriting of history. 'He's wanted to do it for years. I thought he should have done it officially with Yoko.' But that was based on the unlikely assumption that Ono would ever allow the change.
In a more charitable mood Ono revealed keen insight into those who were left behind by Lennon's death – not just McCartney, but Cynthia and Julian Lennon as well. 'This is like a drama,' she said in 2005. 'Each person has something to be totally miserable about, because of the way they were put into this play. I have incredible sympathy for each of them.' Yet she had a way of expressing solidarity that could still pierce the heart: 'My perspective is that it is probably very hard to be Paul McCartney. There's a certain kind of insecurity that famous people have. And he has more than other people because he's more famous, probably.' McCartney paid constant tribute to his fallen companions during his 21st-century live shows
, performing 'Something' in honour of Harrison and 'Here Today' for Lennon. But at an intimate in-store show in California 27 years after Lennon's death his persona cracked open wide, to reveal the pained, abandoned man within. In front of no more than 200 people McCartney gently began a solo rendition of 'Here Today', the letter he'd never had the chance to send to his best friend. As he acknowledged Lennon's absence, his voice faltered and broke as he choked back tears. It was a moment of naked reality almost unmatched in his career, a gesture of love and pain, and a wound that could never be healed.
Like McCartney, Ono channelled her emotions into constant activity. Much of her work was sensitive, and generous to Lennon's fans; some was more selfish. It seemed churlish, for instance, when she reworked Lennon's promotional videos from the period when the pair were separated. Songs written during his relationship with May Pang were now accompanied by footage of Lennon and Ono as if those magical lovers had never been parted. Even more regrettable was her treatment of Lennon's Walls and Bridges album, a true artefact of the Pang era. Reissued in 2005, the disc now bore artwork that merged Lennon and Ono's faces. If reversing a songwriting credit was 'absolutely inappropriate', what was reversing an artist's intentions?
Some detected foul play at work in 1998 when the release of Julian Lennon's Photograph Smile coincided, to the exact day, with Sean Lennon's flimsy debut album. 'Julian was devastated,' his mother recalled. 'He knew it couldn't be a coincidence that he and his brother had been pitted against each other so blatantly.' Sean had hip associates (Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys) and garnered critical acclaim; Julian sounded like Paul McCartney in his melodic prime, but was distinctly unfashionable, and his album suffered by that unbalanced comparison. He did not issue another record for the next decade, feeling that the industry was stacked against him; while his step-brother continuing to attract media attention. It didn't hurt that Sean Lennon had developed McCartney's knack for attracting press controversy to sell a record – alleging that his father used to beat him, for example, or had been killed by a US government hit man.
Ono knew what she was doing when she bracketed Lennon's oldest son with McCartney in her roll-call of victims. Lennon was commemorated when Liverpool's airport was renamed in his honour; McCartney had the knighthood but not the civic recognition. At the Q Awards in 2005 Ono carved another wound in McCartney's reputation: 'John would say to me, "They always cover Paul's songs, they never cover mine." I said to him, "You're a good songwriter, it's not June-with-spoon that you write."' Friends said that McCartney dreaded what would happen if Ono – one of life's natural survivors – outlived him.
'It's the kind of a challenge that a warrior likes,' Ono said of her responsibility as Lennon's executor. 'I would really like to see his work is properly communicated.' But the nature of that communication became increasingly controversial. In an astute article in 1995 rock critic Paul Du Noyer wrote,
You have to wonder if this is what the future will look like: all our yesterdays, digitally magicked into the soundtrack of all our tomorrows. Music will never grow old – not because it is timeless, but because it will get cosmetic surgery whenever the market is ready to buy it all over again. And a company like Apple Records, which I used to imagine as the custodian of a legacy, becomes instead an incubator for endlessly refined Beatles material, perhaps in media we haven't even dreamed of.
It was an uncannily accurate vision.
As early as May 1997 Richard Starkey was promising digitally enhanced editions of the Yellow Submarine and Let It Be films, plus CD releases of the un-Spectorised Get Back album and EMI's Live at theHollywood Bowl concoction. The first of those projects emerged in 1999, when Apple authorised the DVD release of Yellow Submarine alongside a 'new' Beatles album, Yellow Submarine Songtrack – nothing more than a compilation of the songs featured in the film. But the marketing campaign did allow Apple to license a new range of YellowSubmarine collectables – a Pepperland globe, baseballs, T-shirts, boxer shorts, even a lava lamp, all embellished with the images of your favourite cartoon pop stars. 'I don't think it will add any more [to the legend],' George Harrison said. 'It just keeps what is already there going, it just keeps it ticking over. But all of that really had nothing to do with us. It was like we were just put there as playthings for the rest of the world.'
The least commercially minded of all the Beatles, it was Harrison who conceived the project that would occupy Apple for the first years of the new century. He had become close friends with Guy Laliberte, owner of the Cirque du Soleil franchise. He suggested that the Cirque should design one of their spectacular fusions of circus, dance and music around the Beatles' catalogue. 'In typical Apple fashion, it began with a lot of discussion,' said Giles Martin, son of the newly knighted Sir George. His father was recruited to supervise the musical content of the show, which slowly began to take shape in the years after Harrison's death. 'I knew I was the only one who could do it with any degree of credence,' Sir George said. His son added, 'Apple wanted this to be the best show it could be, and Neil [Aspinall] made it clear that they didn't want to do anything where they sanctioned other people singing Beatles songs.'
Cirque du Soleil's show, entitled Love, debuted with a gala premiere at the Mirage, Las Vegas in June 2006, attended by two Beatles and two Beatle widows *43. It promised to capture 'the spirit and passion behind the most beloved rock group of all time . . . underscored by aerial performance, extreme sports and urban, freestyle dance'. To accompany the astonishing visuals, Martin père et fils created a collage of Beatles music influenced (as Giles Martin admitted) by The GreyAlbum, an underground mash-up of samples from the Beatles' White Album and hip-hop tracks by Jay-Z. †6 The Martins began by preparing a 15-minute demonstration of what their techniques could create. 'Ringo thought it was fantastic,' Sir George said, 'and he said to me, "George, you can do anything you like as far as I'm concerned." Paul said, "Yeah, really great, but you know you can be more adventurous." I thought, Blimey, I thought we had been pretty adventurous anyway, but he gave us carte blanche to do even more. Olivia [Harrison] liked it, she didn't make any comments. Yoko liked it, but said she was a little concerned that what we had done with John's work wasn't quite right.' Although Sir George Martin was ostensibly in charge of the project, hearing problems restricted his involvement, and the Love album (issued in November 2006) was effectively compiled by Giles Martin and engineers at EMI. Paul McCartney said, 'The album puts the Beatles back together again, because suddenly there's John and George with me and Ringo. It's kind of magical.' The record briefly caught the global imagination but was as ephemeral as confectionary, melting to leave an unpleasant, chemical aftertaste.
Love was far from being the only 21st-century fantasy built around the Beatles. The TV channel VH1 screened Two of Us, a fictional recreation of a meeting between Lennon and McCartney in 1976. It was made by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had last featured in the saga as the director of the Let It Be film. Broadway briefly hosted Lennon, an Ono-approved musical that was greeted as a theatrical catastrophe. More entertaining than either was the 'discovery' in 2003 of a Beatles reunion tape supposedly made in Los Angeles in 1976. A memorabilia dealer claimed to have the only recording of this hitherto undocumented session. He listed the songs that the Beatles had recorded, the titles of which were so banal that they dampened any sense of excitement: 'Happy Feeling', 'Back Home', 'Rockin' Once Again', 'People of the Third World' and 'Little Girl'. Needless to say, there was no reunion; yet it was testament to the Beatles' endless power to command publicity that such stories were widely reported as news.
In the absence of any new tapes, EMI and Apple concentrated on the old. In 2000 they released 1 (known to insiders for months beforehand as Project X). 'The Beatles are still saving the industry's ass,' one retailer noted as this compilation of hit singles sold 18 million copies around the world. Inevitably, this success prompted rumours that the Beatles would re-form for a world tour, until the extent of Harrison's illness was revealed.
; The industry could continue just as well without him. By 2002 McCartney was boosting the imminent arrival of a DVD transfer of the Let It Be film and a fuller and more accurate representation of the January 1969 sessions than Phil Spector had achieved. Let It Be . . .Naked – an album but, significantly, no film – duly appeared in November 2003. Lacking either the historical accuracy of the original Get Back album from 1969 or the production finesse of Spector's edition, it was accurately described by the New York Times as ' Let It Be with a fig leaf ' – a pointless and faintly insulting product, widely ignored by the public. When 2003 passed without the appearance of the long-anticipated DVD, there were rumours that McCartney and Starkey were blocking its release because it showed the Beatles in a bad light. The story wasn't true, but it was easy to believe when the financial potency of the Beatles' brand clearly outweighed the interests of their fans or their creative legacy.
Perhaps inevitably, the most satisfied consumer of the Beatles in the 21st century was the legal profession. In September 2003 Neil Aspinall's Apple Corps launched its third and, they hoped, final assault on its American near-namesake. Far from distancing themselves from the music business, as they had promised in their previous settlement, Apple Computers had launched the iTunes system of music downloads and the pioneering MP3 player, the iPod. Apple was now synonymous in the public mind with music – but not the Beatles' music, as Apple Corps refused to make its wares available for download. By 2003 it was hard to find anyone under the age of 40 who even knew that the Beatles owned a company named Apple, so total was the computer firm's domination of the marketplace.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 42