Fab

by Howard Sounes

  The curator, Wolfgang Suttner, also found Sir Paul in uncompromising mood as final preparations were made for the long-planned show of paintings at the Lÿz Art Forum in Siegen, Germany. Generally, Suttner had found Paul easy to deal with on the project. The musician agreed that the cost of the show shouldn’t fall on the taxpayers of Westphalia, saying he would pay for the transportation and insurance of his pictures. Sir Paul was punctual for meetings and Suttner learned that McCartney’s word was his bond. ‘What Paul said happened. If Paul said, “I’m there,” he was there. That was fantastic.’ Reliability is often considered to be a characteristically German virtue and it is one that Paul appreciated. ‘He told me once, “I love to be punctual, and you Germans are so efficient.”’ It also helped that Paul had a little of the language, actually less than one might think considering he studied German in school and spent part of his youth in Hamburg, but enough to be polite. ‘He likes Germany … He told me it’s his second best market in the world after the USA, and one of the best countries to tour.’ Also, Germans didn’t resent his wealth, as Paul sometimes felt the English did.

  In the build-up to the art show, Suttner found how sensitive Sir Paul was to criticism. The curator had asked an academic, Professor Gundolf Winter, to look through Paul’s pictures with a view to writing an essay for the catalogue, but Paul didn’t like what the professor wrote. ‘He said a lot of wonderful things about the pictures, but he also said Paul would never have a position in art history,’ says Suttner. ‘He’s a good painter but not a worldwide [artist]. At that time he was not happy about this. He told us: “No, I don’t want the show! … I won’t come.” He was a little bit pissed off.’ At times like this, Paul forgot his invented persona as the humble, unknown English painter Paul Miller and reminded Wolfy that he was Sir Paul McCartney, former member of the Beatles! What’s more, he was the Beatle responsible for the iconic jacket designs for Sgt. Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road, so he knew a thing or two about art. Professor Winter’s essay was quietly dropped from the catalogue, replaced with a more complimentary one by Christoph Tannert.

  Having sent his artist friend Brian Clarke ahead to make sure everything was in ordnung, as the Germans say, Paul arrived in Siegen on the eve of his show, requesting last-minute changes just when Wolfy and his team were exhausted. ‘He is never getting tired. He costs you a lot of strength.’ A large number of press turned up for the opening the next day, 30 April 1999, Paul effortlessly charming the journalists, and posing patiently for the photographers. Then the doors opened to the public. Typically, a show at the Lÿz Art Forum attracted 4,000 people during its run. Approximately 45,000 people came to see Paul McCartney’s paintings.

  As to the quality of Paul’s art, opinion was divided. The waspish British critic Brian Sewell was profoundly unimpressed:Paul McCartney’s paintings are a self-indulgent impertinence so far from art that the art critic has no suitable words for them - they are, indeed, beneath criticism. They may have some private and personal value as therapy, but exposed to the public gaze they betray his arrogance and vanity … he is not a painter.

  The less demanding viewer could find things to enjoy in the work of this enthusiastic amateur: a modest, dream-like quality at least. On the scale of rock star painters, of which they are many, Paul comes fractionally above Bob Dylan (who is very bad), but below Joni Mitchell, who is quite good.

  RUN DEVIL RUN

  Two months later, Sir Paul attended an awards show at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he had once celebrated the release of A Hard Day’s Night and, later in the Sixties, had an acrimonious business meeting with Allen Klein. This time he pitched up at the hotel with a host of celebrities to support the Daily Mirror newspaper’s Pride of Britain Awards, whereby the paper recognised people who had ‘made a difference’ in various ways, including by acts of bravery. It was a coup to have lured Sir Paul out of mourning for the event. Little had been seen of him in public during the 13 months since Linda died. Paul was so inactive that MPL had just recorded a £368,979 annual loss ($564,537). He came to the Dorchester on 20 May 1999 primarily to remember Linda, by presenting an award in her name to a campaigning vegetarian friend of theirs, Juliet Gellatley.

  Towards the end of the ceremony, Heather Mills strode on stage, a good-looking woman of 31, wearing an eye-catching, red, translucent top. With large, shapely breasts, a wide, inviting smile, and a flirtatious toss of her thick blonde hair, she was what Paul might once have termed ‘a right little raver’. Speaking in a strong northern accent, Heather explained to the audience that she was at the Dorchester to introduce a friend of hers, student Helen Smith, who had shown fortitude in coping with the loss of both her legs, an arm and a hand due to septicaemia. Although it was not immediately obvious, Ms Mills was herself an amputee, wearing a prosthetic leg. A slight stiffness in her walk was the only sign of the disability.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Paul asked Piers Morgan, Editor of the Mirror.

  ‘That’s Heather Mills,’ replied the journalist, briefing Sir Paul on someone who was a minor celebrity in the tabloid world: the plucky model who’d lost a leg in a road accident and now raised money for charity.

  ‘She’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’

  Heather travelled to Cambodia after the Dorchester show. When she returned home she discovered that Sir Paul had telephoned and left a message for her: ‘It’s Paul McCartney here. I’d like to talk to you about the charity work.’ He meant the Heather Mills Health Trust, an organisation Heather advertised in the back of her newly published autobiography, Out on a Limb. Although Heather did charitable work, and tended to talk casually about ‘my charity’, she hadn’t yet registered the trust with the Charity Commission, as organisations with an income over £5,000 ($7,650) are obliged to do in England before they can properly call themselves a charity. Heather’s organisation received a windfall 30 times this amount when, in August 1999, Paul invited the charity worker to his office and gave her a cheque for £150,000 (£229,500), which she gratefully accepted for the trust. But she didn’t get around to registering the Trust as a charity for a further seven months.

  As she left MPL that summer day, Heather noticed Sir Paul was admiring her backside. He hadn’t looked with lust at a woman since Linda died. He felt guilty doing so, then told himself Linda wouldn’t mind. Indeed, he convinced himself that Lin was sending him messages via the wildlife on the Sussex estate: ‘… there were strange metaphysical occurrences that seemed to mean something. Animal noises. Bird noises. You’d ask yourself a question under the stars and, like, there’d be like an owl in the valley going whoo-whoo-whoo.’ In short, he had decided to date Heather Mills.

  In contrast to her predecessors, Jane Asher and Linda Eastman, but in common with Paul himself, Heather had been raised in the working-class north of England. Born Heather Anne Mills on 12 January 1968 - that is, between Magical Mystery Tour and the Beatles’ White Album - Heather was the middle child of John and Bernice Mills, with an older brother named Shane and a younger sister, Fiona, to whom she was close. Dad was a soldier, living in Aldershot when Heather was born, and her life prior to meeting Paul was troubled, eventful and slightly mysterious.

  Family life started to fall apart in the mid-1970s when Mum was involved in a car accident. During her convalescence, Heather and Fiona were taken into care. Heather came to look back on the children’s home as preferable to life with her dad, whom she disliked intensely. When Mum came out of hospital, the reunited family moved to a council estate near Washington, Tyne and Wear, where Heather claims Dad hit Mum, and that she and another girl were abducted by a man who kept them prisoners in his flat, fondled Heather and masturbated himself, until the girls were rescued by police.60 Mum then left home, to live with an actor named Charles Stapley, leaving the children with their father.

  When she was ten, Heather was caught shoplifting. The police let her off with a warning. Dad seemed unconcerned about her thieving, but flew into rages if the house wasn’t in order, lashing
out at the kids. Heather decided her father was a madman. Around the time she was 13, John Mills was imprisoned for fraud, with the result that the children went to live with their mother and Charles Stapley in Clapham, South London. Heather claims she ran away from this home at 14 to join the fair on Clapham Common; she started sleeping rough under railway arches, mixing with drug addicts, rent boys and prostitutes. Then she got a Saturday job with a jeweller, from whom she stole. Heather was arrested, taken to court and given a probationary sentence for theft. A precocious teenager who dressed provocatively, Heather next strayed into the fringes of the sex industry, finding employment around the age of 16 in a Soho hostess club; that is, a red-light district bar where men are encouraged by semi-clad women to spend extortionate amounts on drink. She didn’t work as a hostess herself. When she went for the interview she showed herself to be so naive, apparently, that the boss put her to work as a regular barmaid. Nonetheless, our heroine entered the seedy side of Soho, which exists alongside the smart offices of creative types like Paul McCartney, whose building was just around the corner on Soho Square.

  Paul was promoting Press to Play when Heather met her first husband in a Soho bar named Bananas. Alfred Karmal, who went by the name Alfie, was ten years Heather’s senior, a father of two going through a divorce. He took photos of Heather for her first modelling portfolio, which his sister shopped around town. Agents suggested the busty teenager might be suited to ‘glamour’ modelling, the sex industry euphemism for topless and soft porn shoots, though Alfie says he only found out later that Heather did such work. By Heather’s account she progressed almost directly to being a more respectable ‘swimsuit model’.

  Two years passed. Alfie and Heather were living together in a semi-detached house in suburban Stanmore, Middlesex. Their relationship was tempestuous.

  One Friday she called me and said she’d been asked to go to Paris for some modelling … I didn’t hear from her all weekend. I just wondered where the Hell she was. I was worried about her. And then she phoned up on Sunday night and said, ‘I’m not coming back. Bye-bye.’

  Heather writes in her memoir that at this stage in her adventures she became ‘the face’ of a large cosmetics firm, which brought her to live and work in France. ‘I would have to live in Paris for twelve months with an option of another year if things went well. But the best thing about it was the money - I’d be paid £1,500 a day [$2,295] … It was the chance of a lifetime.’ The firm was sufficiently substantial to accommodate Heather in a luxury Paris hotel. She was earning so much that she sent enough money home for Dad to buy himself a new BMW. Alfie has no idea how much if any of this story is true. ‘It was difficult to believe anything she said, because I caught her out lying to me so often - Where she was going, what she was doing …’ Heather’s frankly incredible French adventure came to a suitably improbable ending in December 1988 when, by her own account, the unnamed boss of her unidentified cosmetics firm fell so violently in love with his model that she fled France, catching a late-night ferry home to Dover. Heather telephoned Alfie to pick her up at the docks, thus resuming their relationship. ‘She asked me to marry her about 50 times that same week.’

  On the assurance that she would see a psychiatrist, to help her stop telling lies, so he says, Alfie agreed to marry Heather. Their wedding took place on 6 May 1989. They couple lived once more in Stanmore, then Hoddesdon, a commuter town in Hertfordshire. Heather suffered the first of two ectopic pregnancies, ran a small modelling agency for a while, and had cosmetic surgery on her breasts. Then she went to Yugoslavia for a ski holiday, had an affair with her ski instructor, Milos, came home briefly, then left Alfie once and for all in 1991. He recalls:I came home from work and she’s gone, packed all her cases, smashed the front door. A big pane of glass by the front door. She’d scraped all the wallpaper carrying her bags, getting out - took off. And that was that. I didn’t know where she was. Her sister didn’t know where she was. Nobody knew where she was … I found out she was in Yugoslavia, fucking around.

  He also claims to have found out that Heather had driven the car he’d bought her to the nearest garage and sold it for cash. Alfie says Heather sold her rings, too. In her memoirs, Heather tells the story differently, writing that she told Alfie she was going to Yugoslavia to be with her ski instructor boyfriend. ‘My marriage hadn’t had a pretty ending. When I told him I was leaving, Alfie had been first shocked, then angry, then bitter,’ she wrote in Out on a Limb. ‘He’d told me that running away to Yugoslavia was just like running off to the fair when I was thirteen.’ In any event, she left and Alfie filed for divorce.

  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 ev
erywhere, 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.