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 Heat
her 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.’
Another way to look at Paul’s relationship with Heather is to consider that, like John Lennon, McCartney had spent his adult life in a situation where almost everybody he met venerated him. Most people couldn’t behave normally around a Beatle. John and Paul had chosen as their partners gutsy women who treated them as normal people. Yoko, Linda and Heather were all three a match for their dominant, wilful partners. And the senior Beatles were both of them a handful. John and Paul had become so famous, so rich and so powerful that they were inevitably slightly monstrous. They were only comfortable with equally monstrous women.
Other, normal people naturally struggled to see what Paul saw in Linda and particularly in Heather, whom almost nobody had a good word for. Paul’s fans didn’t like Heather any better than his ‘relies’ did. That autumn, a selection of Paul’s paintings were shown at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Linda Aiello and Toni Kraker showed up, greeting Heather brightly as she left the gallery. ‘Hi Heather!’ chirped the women. ‘She gave us the look, you know, when somebody is saying to themselves “Get a life!”’ says Linda.
She put her nose in the air, she turned her face [away]. Two seconds later here he comes, Paul, bopping up. ‘Hi girls!’ thumbs up. ‘How are you doing?’ Now she sees that he knew us … If I tell you how she changed - like a light switch. She just switched on … smiled all of a sudden. But to me, so fake.
Yet Paul was besotted. Happy in bed, he found himself showered with money again when Neil Aspinall gathered together the 27 Beatles singles that had reached number one in the UK or USA on a CD titled Beatles 1. Although many commentators figured Beatles fans already owned all these songs, and wouldn’t buy the compilation, Beatles 1 made number one in 34 countries, becoming, amazingly, the best-selling album of the decade in the USA. It seemed there was no end to the public’s appetite for the Beatles. Flushed with his windfall, Paul took Heather to India for most of January 2001, arriving in Cochin on the Malabar Coast by private jet, then touring the country, staying in the most exquisite hotels. Paul delighted in arranging romantic surprises and treats for his girlfriend during their Indian holiday, including an overnight train journey to Jaipur on her 33rd birthday. As they lay in their stateroom, rolling through the night, Paul picked up his Gibson Backpacker acoustic and composed ‘Riding Into Jaipur’.
The couple flew on to the USA. Paul took Heather shopping in Manhattan on Valentine’s Day, then to the top of the Empire State Building where he wrote their names on the stonework. That evening, they danced in the Rainbow Room. Travelling west to LA, Paul was inspired to record almost a whole album of new music in two weeks, working with Rusty Anderson, a rangy Californian guitarist, powerhouse drummer Abe Laboriel Jr, and Gabe Dixon on keyboards. The American band created a nice sound, captured by producer David Kahne, but it was the lyrics that were most interesting. Although there were references to Paul’s first marriage on Driving Rain, most of the songs seemed to be about his new relationship, revealing a man befuddled by love, with intimations of disagreements, rifts and doubts. Paul sang on ‘Lonely Road’ that he had tried to get over his new girl, but she had been tested and found true. He sounded vulnerable, making it plain in ‘About You’ that in the wake of Linda’s death he felt he’d fallen into a slump as bad as that he suffered when the Beatles broke up. As Linda saved him then, Heather was pulling him out of his grief now. He was inordinately grateful, and terrified he would lose her, besotted and adoring. To top it all, there was ‘Heather’, a pretty tune with a lyric based on Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, with Paul and Heather sailing away into a dreamy world of magic and love. While he worked on this album, Paul rented a property on Heather Road, Beverly Hills. They liked their ‘Heather House’ so well he bought it. Back home, MPL loaned Heather £800,000 (£1.2m) to buy and fix up another house, Angel’s Rest, part of a terrace of gorgeous, whitewashed houses on a private shingle beach near Hove in Sussex. Paul and Heather were often to be found walking hand in hand by the shore.
Like many a widower who plunges into a new relationship before he has finished grieving for his late wife, Paul’s infatuation with Heather coexisted with deep feelings for Linda. There was a song titled ‘Magic’ on Driving Rain about the moment he first spoke to a girl who became his love. This wasn’t about Heather, but Linda. In May Paul released a double CD retrospective, Wingspan, that charted the story of Wings, the cover art featuring Linda’s hands making the Wings symbol. Paul sat for interviews conducted by his daughter Mary, and filmed by her husband Alistair, for an accompanying documentary, during which he spoke lovingly of that happy time in his life, ‘having my best mate, my wife, to sing along with …’
When a book of Paul’s poems and lyrics was published, it was dedicated to Linda and the children. Introduced and edited by Adrian Mitchell, Blackbird Singing made an ambitious case for Paul as a poet, a singing poet in the tradition of Blake and Homer, Mitchell argued, in that most of the selected works were song lyrics. This was too strong. The best of Paul’s Beatles songs, ‘Penny Lane’ for example, did have a poetic quality, but a modest one. Many of his post-Beatles songs looked bare as orphans on the page, without their music. ‘Mull of Kintyre’ just about worked as a poem, but Denny Laine says he wrote much of that. Of the work Paul had written as poetry per se, ‘Ivan’, ‘Meditate’ and ‘Standing Stone’ were among the better efforts in Blackbird Singing, though again Paul had help with the latter, and Adrian Mitchell acknowledged in his introduction that he ‘made suggestions for small cuts or changes …’ to other poems in the book. As in the workshop of a great Renaissance painter, many talented men now toiled, with little credit, in the illustrious name of Sir Paul McCartney.
In the last months of Linda’s life Paul had been offered a commission by Magdalen College, Oxford, to write a choral work for the college’s new auditorium. Paul and Lin had paid a visit to the ancient university, and accepted the commission, which was prestigious but unpaid. Paul would bankroll the project. He started work shortly before Linda died. ‘We thought, after Linda died, nothing was going to happen,’ says Anthony Smith, then President of Magdalen, but Sir Paul came back to Oxford for All Souls’ Night in November 1998, when Linda’s name was read as part of the service, and resumed work on the commission shortly thereafter. Although Smith had originally suggested a relatively modest piece, reflecting the academic seasons, Paul began to think of a much grander composition to commemorate his love for Linda. He found his title on a flying visit to New York in May 2000, where he had gone at his friend Sir John Tavener’s62 invitation to narrate a poem as part of a Tavener concert at the church of St Ignatius Lo
yola. As he waited to speak, Paul noticed a statue of Christ, over which was inscribed Ecce Cor Meum. With his schoolboy Latin, Paul deduced that this meant ‘Behold My Heart’.
Paul worked on Ecce Cor Meum with David Matthews through the summer of 2001, frequently travelling to Oxford to stay with Anthony Smith in the President’s residence. When he wasn’t working, Paul could slip over to the college bar where, refreshingly, the students were sophisticated enough not to ask for his autograph, but spoke to him in a normal, civilised way. He mixed easily with everybody on campus, from the choir boys he charmed with stories of his own failed career as a chorister (‘If I’d been accepted by Liverpool [Anglican] Cathedral, there would have been no Beatles,’ he told them) to the dons. Smith feared that some of his learned colleagues might condescend to Paul, but everybody was respectful of what the musician had achieved in his career, and indeed quietly thrilled to have him at Magdalen, female colleagues noticeably dressing up when Sir Paul came to dine. McCartney’s ambition to compose complex classical works seemed to the academics a laudable desire to stretch himself. Says Smith, who found Sir Paul to have acquired gravitas as he neared 60:He has aspired to be something more as a person. He involves himself in great causes. He wants to do something for the world and as he feels himself growing bigger his musical work is developing at the same time and he no longer wants to write singles for teenagers as he did many decades ago. He wants to be a composer. He is that. How good and durable he is, the future will decide … He has now established himself as a public person in a way that commands respect, [and] I think he also has a sense of himself as a bit of a national monument.
Heather Mills made a less favourable impression in Oxford, the charity worker showing little interest in Paul’s classical projects, unless she had suggestions for changes, which she gave freely in the irritating manner of Yoko Ono. ‘I think she felt she knew best about the music as well [as other things],’ snorts Smith. ‘I think she was trying to put Paul right quite a lot of the time, and I don’t think he felt that was necessary.’ There was a sense of the couple not being entirely at one, perhaps because Paul was working on a piece in praise of his past love, and while he and Ms Mills didn’t row publicly, there were awkward silences at the President’s house. Heather was often on the phone to do with her charitable works. ‘I didn’t get a strong sense that she was in love,’ says Smith,and then she left in the middle of the night once. She was always doing the counselling work on the phone with kids who were suffering from cancer and so on, and I think it was because of that she left very early on one day, because one of them had been phoning her or something … Her own life was very important to her.
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