The subsequent reviews made Magical Mystery Tour seem like a smash hit by comparison and brought Paul his first public ridicule on British TV’s Spitting Image puppet show. As a big-eyed Macca figure sat in a restaurant, his waiter announced “Your turkey, Sir!” and dumped a film can labeled Give My Regards to Broad Street onto his plate.
More successful MPL film projects were an animated feature about Rupert Bear and a television documentary on the Beatles’ old idol Buddy Holly, released in 1985 and including the first ever intimate glimpses of Holly from his family, his fellow musicians, and his widow, Maria-Elena. Yet here again, Macca could not bear to stay off-camera: As well as introducing the film, he made several incidental appearances, including a lengthy—and poorly prepared—soliloquy on Holly’s compositional methods. It was noticeable, too, that he chose not to be filmed in his own home but in the deliberately neutral setting of a hay barn. Even when talking of the music closest to his heart, he could not “open the door and let ’em in.”
Supremely successful though he was on so many fronts, there remained one glaring gap among his myriad possessions, acquisitions, and holdings. This ultimate creative control freak might have the satisfaction of controlling everything from Buddy Holly’s songbook to Grease and I Love Lucy. Yet, ironically, he did not control his own earliest work, the songs he had written for the Beatles under the democratically unspecific “Lennon–McCartney” byline. “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love of the Loved,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Eight Days a Week,” and all the dozens more of John and Paul’s perfect primitive paintings still belonged to Northern Songs, the publishing company Dick James had sold from under their feet at the height of the Apple crisis in 1969.
Northern’s original buyers, Lew Grade’s ATV network, had in turn sold the company on to the Australian mogul Robert Holmes à Court. In 1985, it unexpectedly came on to the market again. Swallowing his ill-feeling toward Yoko, Paul contacted her and persuaded her of the wisdom of their making a joint bid. But while the two and their lawyers argued over strategy, Northern was snapped up in a $47.5 million deal—by none other than the eighties wunderkind Michael Jackson.
Even the canny Macca was stunned by the speed and duplicity with which his former recording partner, and supposed good friend, engineered the coup. He was later to give his own wry account of it, perfectly mimicking “Jacko’s” childlike lisp. “Michael asked me one day how you went about buying a song catalog, and I gave him all kinds of advice. The next time I saw him, he said, ‘I’m gonna buy your songs, Paul.’”
All of the former Beatles had attracted criticism for their seeming indifference to Liverpool’s desperate economic plight during the recession-hit seventies and early eighties. With his well-founded reputation for being careful, to put it no stronger, Paul had always seemed the least likely benefactor of his home city or his alma mater, Liverpool Institute High School. During the late seventies his former English teacher, Dusty Durband, wrote to ask his support in a school reconstruction appeal. Mr. Durband was disappointed—and annoyed—to receive a cheque back for just one thousand pounds.
A radical change of mind came in the mid-nineties after it was reported that Liverpool Institute, already closed for some years, now faced actual demolition. Paul became the moving spirit in the old high school’s thirteen-million-pound transformation into the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA for short), a project that, perhaps more than any other, was to symbolize the city’s economic revival and regenerated self-belief. It was opened by the Queen in 1996, with an unfamiliarly dark-suited Macca beside her. Not since 1964 had any Beatle made so triumphant a homecoming.
By this point, it seemed that the McCartney name automatically shed magic in whatever context it occurred. In 1995, Paul’s younger daughter, Stella, graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art and began an ascent in the couture world destined to be as meteoric as her father’s in the musical one. Even more to Paul’s satisfaction, Linda had at long last achieved recognition in her own right by skillfully blending her dietary principles with her prowess as “Cook of the House.” The Linda McCartney range of vegetarian frozen foods with accompanying recipes, launched in 1991, now adorned major supermarkets throughout both the U.K. and America.
In the Queen’s birthday honors of 1997 Paul became the third British pop singer to receive a knighthood (after the saintly Cliff Richard and Live Aid’s organizer Bob Geldof). The award came in the dying days of John Major’s sleaze-ridden and clapped-out Tory government, and could be seen as a desperate bid for popularity by playing the well-worn Harold Wilson card; even so, none could deny Paul had long been in line for some public recognition more substantial than his 1965 MBE. Significantly, his checkered history of drug busts and brief Japanese incarceration seem never to have been an issue when 10 Downing Street consulted with Buckingham Palace about the award.
Becoming Sir Paul was just one of the honors now showering on him thicker than jelly beans at an old-time Beatles Christmas show. His family home, the modest council house on Forthlin Road, Allerton, was acquired by the National Trust and opened to the public, creating a historic shrine of the little front room where John and he used to huddle with their guitars and Buddy Holly records after cutting school. He was invited to join leading politicians and diplomats as a weekend guest at Highgrove, the Prince of Wales’s country seat. He even had a variety of rose named after him.
The whole rose-tinted idyll came crashing around his ears when Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The disease is never other than cruel and arbitrary in its toll on women often still in the prime of life. And in this case, like so many others—and so much else in the Beatles’ story—history was horribly repeating itself. Breast cancer had also struck down the other essential woman in Paul’s life, his mother Mary, when he was only fourteen. Ironically, on Linda’s public appearances with Paul she looked smilier and more vibrant than her hypercritical public had ever seen her before. Only the close cropping of the former luxuriant blonde hair gave a clue to the ordeal she was suffering.
Linda’s greatest solace in those grim and increasingly less optimistic months was the explosive success of her daughter Stella in the fashion world. In 1997, just two years after graduating from St. Martin’s School of Art, Stella joined the Parisian couture house of Chloé as chief designer in succession to Karl Lagerfeld. She was already becoming an international celebrity in her own right, with her peaky Paul face, her plunging necklines, and her penchant for walking hand-in-hand with female rather than male escorts. She designed clothes with a rummage-sale raggedyiness no sane woman would ever wear but which flew into the glossy fashion mags as instantaneously as her father had once burned up the Top Ten. At her first Paris show—arguably the most highly publicized since Yves St. Laurent’s debut in the pre-swinging sixties—Linda and Paul were among the host of rock and movie celebrities cheering her from the catwalk side.
Linda died in April 1998 at the McCartneys’ ranch near Tucson, Arizona, a retreat whose existence had been kept secret from all but their closest friends and associates. In a misguided attempt to preserve the ranch’s incognito, Paul’s spokespeople initially announced that Linda had died several hundred miles to the west, in Santa Barbara, California. The truth emerged only when Santa Barbara’s municipal authority began asking why the death had not been registered with them.
It was barely seven months since Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a Paris car crash, unleashing a wave of hysterical mourning throughout Britain. An appetite still remained for a blonde-haired female martyr, and Linda McCartney perfectly fit that bill. Forgetting their old hostility, the media extolled her campaigns for vegetarianism and animal rights in much the same terms as Diana’s for AIDS and land-mine victims. For a brief, surreal moment, she became a kind of mini–People’s Princess, lauded with the same crazy disproportion as she had formerly been denigrated.
For Paul, paradoxically, los
ing Linda meant stepping back into limelight brighter than any he had known for more than a decade. Rock, as a rule, tends to create widows; here was the music’s first A-list widower. For the first time ever he showed pain and vulnerability to the world, which in turn responded with an affection greater than any he had received in all his previous decades of relentless winning. To one interviewer he recalled how he had comforted Linda’s final hours by making her picture them both riding their favorite horses through their favorite countryside. To another he revealed that, in twenty-nine years of marriage, they had never spent a single night apart.
Two memorial services for Linda were held, one in London, the other in New York. It might have been expected that the widow of Paul’s oldest friend and still much-missed partner might have been asked to the New York service, especially after the reconciliation he had so publicly proclaimed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony four years earlier. But Yoko was excluded from the list. An additional memorial was a Linda McCartney solo album, compiled by Paul in an obvious attempt to win her the musical credibility she’d been denied in her lifetime. Entitled Wide Prairie, it brought together various Linda vocal tracks from the Wings era, including “Cook of the House.” Though it was widely and earnestly reviewed, not even the most ardently pro-McCartney critic could find much more to say than “nice try.”
But the period of mourning was to end rather abruptly. Early in 1999, Paul began to be seen in public with thirty-two-year-old Heather Mills, a prominent figure in the now interdependent worlds of show business and charity. Though initially he smiled away their meetings as pure coincidence, the subterfuge was short-lived. That summer, while Heather was being interviewed on a TV talk show, Paul made a “surprise” appearance, took her hand, and announced that they were in love.
His new love’s background was, to say the least, an unusual one. Born and raised on Tyneside, she was a self-confessed juvenile delinquent who claimed to have fled from a violent, tyrannical father to work on a fairground on London’s Clapham Common and live rough “under the arches” at Waterloo station before turning her looks and spectacular figure to account as a glamour model and playmate of the Arab billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. As a teenager, she had been arrested for stealing jewelry, but had been let off with probation owing to her troubled family circumstances.
Her autobiography, Step by Step, recounted further traumatic youthful experiences—among them, being held prisoner as a seven-year-old by a pedophile swimming teacher and being almost murdered by a knife-wielding lesbian flatmate. She made an early first marriage, to a Middlesex businessman named Alfie Karmal, who had encouraged her to progress from Soho club waitress to pinup, a career in which she would later claim to earn as much as two hundred thousand pounds per year. She became pregnant but lost the baby through an ectopic pregnancy and, not long afterward, left Karmal for a Slovenian ski instructor. At the age of twenty-five, she was run over by a police motorcyclist who had been hurrying to a so-called emergency involving Diana, Princess of Wales. Her left foot was almost severed, and surgeons had no choice but to amputate the leg just below the knee.
Whatever might subsequently be said of Heather, no one could deny her courage or unstoppable determination. She designed her own prosthetic leg, with which she was soon able to run, dance, even ski with the same freedom she had before her accident. She would recall with hilarity how, on one early ascent in a ski lift, her prosthetic leg came loose and sailed down the slopes below with the ski still attached to it. Nor could her spirit be dampened even by the crushing advice of a female social worker immediately after she lost her leg. “You’ll have to face it, dear,” the social worker told her. “You’re never going to be attractive to men again.”
“I could lose both my arms and both my legs,” Heather replied, “and I’d still be more attractive to men than you are.”
In fact, she was always to maintain that men were never turned off by her leg and that every one of her boyfriends had asked her to marry him “inside a week.” She was determinedly frank and open about the pros-thesis, showing it to any interviewer who wanted to see it, once even whipping it off and waving it under the nose of American radio talk-show host Larry King.
Following her accident, she tried to make a career as a television presenter, appearing on various regional programs but never winning any permanent spot. Her involvement in charity work began at the same time, drawing directly and indirectly on the traumas of her own past. She became a campaigner for the homeless, for amputees, and—like Diana, Princess of Wales—for the victims of land mines left behind by wars in Asia and Africa.
A television colleague of that era describes her as “one of the shrewdest and most calculating women I’ve ever met. Whatever misfortune is being talked about, Heather has suffered it—from homelessness to ectopic pregnancy. But I have to admire her. Once, after she’d appeared on The Richard and Judy Show with a homeless girl, she had the girl to stay with her for about two weeks, even though her current boyfriend was coming over to see her from New Zealand. The three of them were together in Heather’s house, plus her terrier.
“When she went to Cambodia to see land-mine victims with the Duchess of Kent, she met a girl who’d lost both arms and both legs. Heather took the girl under her wing, and she’s now working in the Anglia Television newsroom.
“Her attitude was that in her life she’d sunk to the very bottom, so she deserved only the very best. And Paul McCartney was the ultimate notch on the bedpost.”
The new relationship had a galvanic effect on Paul, blowing away the clouds of sadness that had engulfed him since Linda’s death. To escape media harassment, he and Heather took to spending weekends at a borrowed cottage on the Cliveden estate in Berkshire—the famous scene of John Profumo’s first meeting with Christine Keeler, now transformed into a luxury hotel. Heather tempted him back to parties and even discos where—as one friend reported—“they danced together like a couple of teenagers.” As proof of her beneficial influence, he declared he had even given up using marijuana for her sake.
The announcement that they planned to marry brought a sharp change to this initially friendly perception of Heather. To be sure, the ructions surrounding Paul’s wedding to Linda, thirty years earlier, would sometimes seem mild by comparison. Heather was portrayed as an opportunistic gold-digger, out to stake her claim on a McCartney fortune that—after the phenomenal success of the Beatles’ 1 album—was on course to make him pop’s first-ever billionaire. (To this charge, she made the somewhat surprising reply that if she’d been out for money alone, she would have gone for someone “richer than Paul.”)
The media pack quickly tracked down her former husband, Alfie Karmal, who did not need much persuasion to describe a “damaged” person who, he said, had left him without warning after their five-year relationship, trashing their home by way of farewell. The childhood friend with whom she claimed to have been held prisoner by the pedophile swimming teacher dismissed her account as “crap.” Her stepfather, John Stapley, said that her memories of fairground life on Clapham Common were likewise part of the “fantasy world” she had created from her past. It was whispered that even the best part of her career, her work for land-mine victims, derived merely from an ambition to be seen as a substitute Princess Diana. Fellow campaigners questioned her claims to have been appointed a United Nations ambassador for land mines and even to have been short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize. One of her former TV colleagues was surprised to see her on BBC2’s Ready, Steady, Cook program, claiming to have been a vegetarian every bit as devout as Paul “for the past seventeen years.” “When I worked with her a few years back, her diet used to be almost all protein,” her ex-colleague says. “She used to tuck in to huge bits of steak.”
Most crucially, Paul’s children—particularly his three grown-up daughters—were said to be horrified by his choice of a former swimwear model to replace their mother (and one sharing the name of their mother’s oldest child to boot). Paul himself drop
ped his sunshine mask sufficiently to admit there were difficulties about Heather within the family and that she could be “bossy” at times, but at the same time made it clear that these factors had no effect on his resolve to make her the next Lady McCartney. From then on, he became as determined to win acceptance for Heather as he had once been to win it for Linda. So that nobody around him should mistake his wishes, he granted her a power and influence of which even Linda had never dreamed. At his concerts, Heather became the first person in history to give him critical notes on his performance—and have them earnestly listened to.
She on her side showed little of the meekness and deference he had always been used to from Linda. Early in 2002, staff at a Miami hotel reported overhearing a furious row between them, in which Paul allegedly shouted, “I don’t want to marry you any more.” A hotel team equipped with metal-detectors was then mobilized to search the bushes below their room after Heather had apparently hurled her fifteen-thousand-pound engagement ring through its open window. Heather’s explanation was that Paul and she had simply been “having a laugh” and playing catch with the ring.
The approaching nuptials brought further allegations of dissent and discontent among the McCartney children. Stella was reportedly furious at not having been asked to design Heather’s wedding dress, her soon-to-be stepmother considering her clothes “too tarty.” Instead, Heather announced, she would be creating her own Chantilly lace bridal gown with the help of London couturiers Avis and Brown. Mary McCartney, a rising portrait photographer—whose subjects had already included Tony and Cherie Blair—was said to feel equally slighted because she hadn’t been asked to do the wedding pictures.