Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Despite the routine, the concerts were entertaining and moving, the spectacle enhanced by huge display screens, as big as those in Times Square, a montage of colours and themed images, pictures of Beatlemania accompanying ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ for example. At the end of this particular song Paul had an alarming habit of tossing his famous Höfner violin bass to John Hammel, whose other duties included ensuring the boss’s guitars had new strings for every show, standing guard while he briefly but warmly greeted his VIP visitors backstage, and pouring a celebratory glass of Dom Pérignon for Paul and Heather on the bus afterwards.

  In pictures taken by Paul’s official tour photographer, Bill Bernstein, Paul and Heather presented the image of happiness on tour, but away from the cameras there were ugly scenes between the couple. In mid-May, the Driving USA tour reached Florida, Paul and Heather checking into the Turnberry Isle Resort and Club in Miami. On Saturday 18 May, Paul played the second of two shows at the National Car Rental Center in Fort Lauderdale, returning to the Miami hotel with Heather afterwards. This was the end of the first part of his tour and naturally an opportunity to party. In the early hours of the following morning, hotel guests awoke to hear Paul and Heather having a blazing row. Paul was heard shouting: ‘I don’t want to marry you. The wedding’s off!’ Heather’s engagement ring was then apparently flung - by an unknown hand - from their hotel window. Told that a valuable ring had ‘fallen’ from Sir Paul’s suite, hotel staff spent a good part of the following day searching for it, hiring metal detectors to help them do the job. The ring was eventually found and returned to Sir Paul, who was by this time back in England, where he had gone to help celebrate his monarch’s Golden Jubilee.

  To mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 50 years on the throne a unique pop concert was staged on 3 June 200263 inside the usually private grounds of Buckingham Palace. The bill included a roll-call of British rock stars - rock music being one of Britain’s more successful post-war industries - headed naturally by Sir Paul. It was good to see such a quintessentially English artist at the centre of such a very British event, especially after Paul had wrapped himself in the American flag on tour in the USA, the star playing Beatles songs on his Magic Piano in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the music relayed to a million people outside the garden walls on what was a beautiful, soft summer’s evening in the capital. At the end of the show, Paul played a cheeky reprise of ‘Her Majesty’, the bonus ditty that concluded Abbey Road, daring to flirt with a monarch who was 43 when he made that album, and was now a grandmother of 76. At the end of the show, when the Queen came on stage to join Sir Paul and the other artists, McCartney suggested to Her Majesty that they might hold a show like this in her back garden every year, to which she replied tartly that she didn’t think so.

  Apart from coming home to play for his Queen, this summer break in Sir Paul’s tour schedule gave Paul and Heather an opportunity to get married. For they had patched up their relationship after that quarrel in Miami. In acknowledgement of the musician’s Irish ancestry, the wedding was held in County Monaghan, the land of Paul’s maternal ancestors. The Mohins had been poor farmers, so poor Grandfather Mohin left Ireland to make his living on the mainland. Two generations later, his grandson returned as one of the richest stars in show business, so rich he hired a castle for his big day, booking himself and his guests into Castle Leslie, an hour south of Belfast. The whole affair was meant to be secret, but the castle’s octogenarian owner Sir John Leslie let the cat out of the bag a week in advance when he told journalists: ‘It’s next Tuesday, but it’s top secret.’ The world’s press then stood at the gates of Castle Leslie and watched enormous supplies of food, booze, sound equipment, fireworks and flowers trucked onto the estate.

  Paul’s Liverpool family were summoned to Heathrow Airport, where they were put on a chartered plane to Ireland. Brother Mike was to be best man again. Ringo Starr led the list of celebrity friends, who also included Dave Gilmour, Chrissie Hynde, Twiggy Lawson, Sir George Martin and Nitin Sawhney. Once again, Yoko Ono was notably absent. Heather’s aged father John Mills wasn’t invited either. While Paul’s daughters Mary and Stella attended, there was no sight of Heather and James, both of whom were understood to be against Dad’s second marriage.

  The ceremony itself was to be held in St Salvator’s Church on the Leslie estate at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday 11 June. The guests assembled inside the seventeenth-century church, where they waited, and waited, press helicopters thudding overhead as photographers took aerial pictures, Sir Paul pacing up and down nervously, a sprig of lavender from Dad’s bush at Rembrandt in his button-hole for luck. He needed it. Brother Mike was present and correct, unlike when Paul married Lin, but the bride-to-be was missing. ‘We were all sitting in the church for an hour, our bums on the hard seats, packed; where are they?’ recalls cousin Mike Robbins. ‘We’re an hour waiting for her, waiting to come down the [aisle].’ Finally the music started. ‘Thank Christ for that! By then we are talking to each other. Everybody is standing up and talking in this little church, talking to people you’ve never met before.’ Some say Heather had been delayed putting on her wedding dress, others that she and Paul had had a last-minute row. In any event it was with a sense of relief that the couple emerged from the church as husband and wife to be showered with confetti.

  The reception was lavish. ‘A huge marquee was erected to give a vast dinner for 300 guests served on gold plates, which the guests were told to keep as souvenirs,’ reports Sir John Leslie. The food had an Indian theme, the wines rare and expensive vintages. The dinner proved too rich for some. Notes Mike Robbins, whose enjoyment of the big day was further tempered by suspicions about the bride:You couldn’t get anything decent to eat. It was magnificent. There were Indian maidens in saris giving you little bhaji things, [but] I hate bloody foreign food. I thought, Hasn’t anybody got a sausage roll or a pork pie? But, oh, it was magnificent. The flowers! It cost bloody millions, must have done. And by then we knew, the family knew, my family are not dopey, we knew this was a wrong’un.

  Paul gave a hilarious wedding speech, causing his guests to cry with laughter. ‘I don’t recall any of it, but I remember thinking, God, he’s a sharp cookie,’ says Nitin Sawhney. ‘He’s very, very funny. And he will say things with absolutely no fear, [which] makes people very funny.’ Then everybody adjourned to the second marquee, where there was a band and dancing, at the end of which Sir Paul and Lady McCartney boarded Paul’s motor boat the Barnaby Rudge, which he’d had brought over from Rye and bedecked with flowers. A colossal fireworks display erupted as the married couple chugged away down the lake cheered by their relatives and friends.

  Six years hence, when this union ended in a divorce court, telling personal details emerged about the build-up to the wedding, including the fact that Paul continued to wear Linda’s ring until the day itself, then exchanged it for a new ring; and that he and Heather used contraception until their wedding night. In other words, he didn’t seem sure he was doing the right thing until the last minute. Then he made the mistake of his life.

  HER MAJESTY’S A PRETTY NICE GIRL

  Sir Paul’s performance at Buckingham Palace was another step in an evolving relationship with his monarch. It started in a sense when Paul won a prize for a schoolboy essay about her Coronation. Playing before members of the Royal Family at the Royal Variety Show ten years later was a landmark in the Beatles’ story, two years after which the Queen bestowed MBEs upon the fab four, unprecedented for pop stars at the time. Over subsequent years, Paul had been presented to the Royal Family many times, been invited to dinners, performed at St James’ Palace, received a personal donation from the Queen for LIPA, then welcomed her to his school, after which he’d been knighted and asked to headline her Golden Jubilee concert. His easy manner with his monarch showed how well acquainted they now were.

  That July, the Queen paid an official visit to Liverpool, taking the time to call in on the Walker Art Gallery where Paul was showing his paintings. ‘I had to mi
nd him on the day the Queen came,’ recalls Liverpudlian journalist Gillian Reynolds, who was active in raising money for the city’s museums. ‘It’s a bit like minding the Pope. Everybody wanted to touch the hem of his garment.’ Gillian was struck as others have been by Paul’s easy, conversational manner with the Queen. Whereas almost everybody was obsequious and flustered in Her Majesty’s presence, Paul remained relaxed with a woman he had clearly got to know quite well over the past four decades.

  It was really strange because he was so cheery and chatty with the Queen. He said, ‘Oh, Your Majesty, you’re a keen photographer, we’d love to show some of your work here in the Walker.’ It took my breath away … She gave him this very roguish look and she said, ‘I bet you would!’ … She was really quite flirtatious with him - acknowledging a somewhat closer relationship than one might expect.

  After a summer break, Paul resumed his North American tour, renamed the Back in the US tour, travelling with Heather, who was entitled to call herself Lady McCartney since their wedding but tended to style herself Heather Mills McCartney. She took the opportunity of being in America to promote a revised version of her autobiography, retitled A Single Step, from which had been excised the more lurid details of her affair with Milos the Yugoslav ski instructor, with new pages added that gave a surprisingly candid insight into her relationship with Sir Paul. In the book, Heather revealed intimate details of their courtship as well as making it plain how much she disapproved of his smoking marijuana. Interviewed by the broadcaster Barbara Walters on TV, Heather made further complaints about hubby. ‘I am married to the most famous person in the world and that is very unfortunate for me,’ she said, making it clear she didn’t like her charity work being overshadowed by Paul. Indeed, she seemed to find her husband generally annoying. ‘This is a man who has had his own way his entire life,’ she told Walters. ‘When you become famous at 19, it is sometimes hard to listen to other people’s opinions.’

  Then came the first in a series of alleged marital arguments. According to court documents later leaked to the press (we shall come to the how and why later), when Paul’s tour reached Los Angeles that autumn Heather complained to her husband about the Barbara Walters interview, in which the host had tackled her on some of the less flattering stories emerging about her early life. Paul apparently dismissed Heather’s concerns, saying she was in a mood. Heather decided he was drunk. The row allegedly escalated when they got back to their LA home. According to Heather’s account later set down in legalese: ‘The Petitioner [Sir Paul] grabbed the Respondent [Heather] by the neck and pushed her over a coffee table. He then went outside, and in his drunken state he fell down a hill, cutting his arm (which remains scarred to this day).’

  This alleged incident occurred shortly before a break in the tour. Heather stayed in the US, appearing on Larry King Live. Her experience with Barbara Walters had not put her off American chat shows. Indeed, she appeared repeatedly on Larry King in the months to come, usually to talk about her charity work, though she increasingly found herself facing tough questions about her past. Larry was as likely as Barbara to put her on the spot. ‘Did you ever have to prostitute yourself?’ King asked Heather directly on 1 November 2002.

  ‘No, never!’

  On the day of this broadcast, on the other side of the Atlantic, the people of Campbeltown were commemorating the life of Paul’s first wife with the opening of a memorial garden in the wee toon. After Linda’s death, local people contacted Paul to ask if he might help them open an art gallery in his wife’s name, with a permanent display of her photographs. Paul’s vet, Alastair Cousin, went to see the musician in London about it and gained the impression Paul was all for the gallery, that is until Heather Mills came on the scene. ‘It was put very much down the list of priorities as far as he was concerned … So I’m afraid that really never happened, which was a big disappointment.’ Instead, the town created a memorial garden, the centrepiece of which is an amateurish bronze of Linda, sculpted by Paul’s cousin Jane Robbins.

  Sir Paul didn’t attend the opening, and was rarely seen in Kintyre these days. Heather didn’t seem to care for a place so heavily loaded with memories of her husband’s first marriage. And the star himself was back on the road, playing shows in Mexico, then Japan. In November 2002 a new double live album appeared, Back in the US (marketed as Back in the World outside the United States). Its chief point of interest was that Paul unilaterally reversed the Lennon-McCartney credits on the Beatles songs featured - all songs Paul had written alone, or with limited help from John - to ‘composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon’. Yoko was not impressed. Even Ringo was quoted as saying it was ‘underhand’. Still, the lone two surviving Beatles appeared together on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in November to honour George Harrison, a year and a day since his death. In a long, perfectly paced tribute show - featuring many old friends, from 82-year-old Ravi Shankar to Eric Clapton - Paul played ‘Something’ on the ukulele, with Ritchie, Eric and the house band coming in halfway through, which proved an even more effective arrangement than Paul’s solo version. In future, he’d do the song this way. ‘I was choked with emotion at the Concert for George when he sang “Something”,’ comments Ravi Shankar. ‘It is amazing to see how much he [still] loves to perform and sing.’

  Paul now set out on the European leg of what was becoming a world tour. ‘ [It was] as if we were listening to the best Beatles’ tribute band in the world,’ wrote Ray Connolly perspicaciously in his Daily Mail review of the first night in Paris. A few days later, in his Barcelona dressing room, Sir Paul gave to the Daily Mirror what now reads as an ironic comment on his second marriage: ‘Heather said to me this morning, “I don’t think of you as rich, you know.”’ Only rich enough to give Heather a cash gift of £250,000 in December ($382,500), after which he set up a £360,000-a-year allowance for his wife ($550,800), paid quarterly. As the tour progressed, more unflattering stories began to emerge about Heather at home in England where, in early May, Channel 4 broadcast an investigation, Heather Mills: The Real Mrs McCartney, which contrasted her account of her life in print with what people who knew her remembered. There appeared to be gaps between the story and the truth.

  A childhood girlfriend disputed details in Heather’s memoirs about the two of them being held prisoner by a paedophile in Tyne and Wear. She sued Heather on the grounds that the model’s memoir had identified her without permission, and falsified the events themselves, and won compensation. Charles Stapley, effectively Heather’s stepfather, likewise disputed Heather’s published story of running away from him and her mother to join the fair on Clapham Common. ‘When she disappeared at the weekends, and she was still at school, she did go and sleep in the back of a truck with a chap who worked on the dodgems, but that was just at weekends,’ he said, describing Heather as a ‘damaged personality’. The Clapham jeweller who’d employed Heather as a teenager alleged that she stole far more from him than she had admitted to in her books, including gold chains worth £25,000 ($38,250). ‘She virtually plundered the shop,’ asserted Jim Guy. Most damaging was the testimony of two women associates of Adnan Khashoggi who spoke of Heather enjoying the high life with wealthy Arabs in London and Paris at the time she claimed to be working as a model for a French cosmetics firm. Ros Ashley, who said she met Heather in Khashoggi’s London hotel, and allegedly groomed her for success in this twilight world, said her friend’s ambition was to ‘meet a wealthy man [who] would be able to give her a good lifestyle and a little bit of prestige and status’. It seemed she had been looked after by a Lebanese businessman for a time, but had excelled herself in marrying Sir Paul.

  In May 2003, McCartney’s world tour reached Rome, the star playing two prestige shows at the Colosseum, a relatively small acoustic show inside the ancient amphitheatre on 10 May, followed by a free rock concert for half a million people outside the stadium the following day. This was the biggest show of Paul’s career to date. Heather was again upset about stories in the press, it wo
uld later be alleged, and again Paul seemed indifferent to her concerns. ‘An argument ensued in the bathroom during which [Sir Paul] became angry and pushed [Heather] into the bath’, according to the divorce papers later leaked to the press. The couple apparently argued over Heather’s decision not to accompany her husband to an after-show party, choosing to have dinner with her sister Fiona instead. Sir Paul allegedly withdrew his security people ‘in a fit of pique’, leaving Heather unprotected among a mob of fans.

  Ten days later, Paul played the AOL Stadium in Hamburg, introducing Heather to his old St Pauli friends Horst Fascher and Astrid Kirchherr, who in common with so many of Paul’s associates didn’t warm to his second wife. Astrid felt Heather had taken advantage of Paul’s vulnerability. ‘He was so protected by Linda, and surrounded with her love and care, that he was like an unborn baby towards women, and [Heather] just could roll him around her fingers,’ she remarks. ‘Then being handicapped and good-looking, he probably felt sorry [for] this woman with one leg. [But] she turned out a bitch.’ Few people were able to be so candid to Paul’s face of course. His children had told him what they thought of Heather, but he’d rejected their counsel. There was increasingly an element of the Emperor’s New Clothes about this marriage.