Paul McCartney (98 page)

Massed photographers laid siege to the castle walls, some possibly hoping to see a ring come sailing over its battlements. On the day, 300 guests, including Sir George Martin, Twiggy and Chrissie Hynde as well as Paul’s numerous Liverpool relations, had instructions to report to London-Heathrow for a special flight to Belfast. Ringo made his own way by private jet.

Mike McCartney was best man–just as at Paul’s and Linda’s wedding–and all the children attended. Their father had hoped their various talents might contribute to the occasion, Stella designing Heather’s wedding dress, Mary taking photographs, James playing music and daughter Heather creating some fabrics or ceramics. But he had not pressed the point. In a family group photograph, taken by Paul’s former housekeeper Rose Martin, none of the four had a celebratory air, especially not Mary and Stella.

Rather than a Stella McCartney creation, Heather wore a white lace dress she had designed herself and her bridal bouquet included 11 pink ‘Paul McCartney’ roses. A bridal photograph was later released to the press in return for a donation to Adopt-A-Minefield. Paul’s buttonhole was a sprig of lavender from a bush his dad had planted.

A lavish vegetarian meal was served on gold plates, which the guests were allowed to keep as souvenirs. Paul’s converted trawler, the Barnaby Rudge, had been brought over from Rye and moored on the castle lake, bedecked with flowers. After the speeches and toasts, the newly-weds went on board amid hails of confetti, and sailed, or chugged, romantically off into the sunset.

A landing-stage specially installed for the occasion was known afterwards as the McCartney Jetty. It had been meant as only a temporary structure, but would outlast the marriage.

‘You don’t say a lot, do you, Paul?’

A producer friend of Paul’s, a fellow Liverpudlian and pupil at the Inny, was later to recall him confiding rather wistfully what he’d hoped from his second wife. ‘He said that now he was older, all he wanted was someone to be there every night when he came offstage and say, “You were wonderful, darling.”’ On that score alone, he could hardly have made a worse choice.

True to her promise on their engagement, Heather did not style herself Lady McCartney; rather, she became Heather Mills McCartney, to distinguish her from Paul’s daughter and also signify that she was still a celebrity and a person in her own right (though the point might have been more forcibly made if she’d continued as Heather Mills).

The Mills McCartney name was immediately employed on a new American edition of her 1995 autobiography, Out on a Limb. Now retitled A Single Step, it contained four brief extra chapters and an epilogue covering the remarkable turn her life had taken since. However, there were some omissions, notably her engagement to the TV director Chris Terrill and her dumping of Terrill on their wedding-eve to go off to be with Paul on Long Island.

The book ended at Castle Leslie on a note of rosy optimism: ‘Maybe I’m finally learning to slow down… Now that I am finally going to settle down with my fella of a lifetime, I want to have time to enjoy it.’

As Paul wound up the second instalment of his Driving America tour in late 2002, Heather was doing an intensive round of media interviews to promote A Single Step and Adopt-A-Minefield (to which she had pledged its royalties). And somehow, it was she not he who kept grabbing the headlines.

Back in Britain, the tabloids were by now in full cry after her. The Sun had published her wedding picture alongside one of her as its topless ‘Page Three Girl’ during the 1980s. The Mail On Sunday had gotten to Charles Stapley, an actor with whom her mother had lived after leaving her father (and who’d been in the TV soap Crossroads when Paul wrote its theme music). According to Stapley, Heather lived in a ‘confused fantasy world’ and her descriptions of sleeping rough among alcoholic, incontinent tramps under the Waterloo arches, for which she largely blamed him, were ‘exaggerated’.

Now America’s top magazines and news shows offered her a chance to bite back. And by now she had some ammunition for her complaints about tabloid ‘lies’. The Sunday Mirror had recently run a story about her supposed investigation by Britain’s Charity Commissioners over the way relief funds for the Gujarat earthquake victims in 2001 had been handled. The Mirror had been forced to withdraw the allegation and was about to pay damages which, she told New York magazine, would ‘drain them of all funds’. (Hardly: they paid £50,000.)

To New York magazine’s interviewer, Andrew Goldman, she refuted the many stories in the British press about how Paul’s children disliked and mistrusted her. She spoke to her namesake Heather every day, she said, and got on so ‘brilliantly’ with Stella that Stella had recently put out a press release saying so. Goldman later checked with the Stella McCartney company PR and was told that Stella never discussed family matters and no such release could have been issued.

True to form, her two most important television interviews left sharply conflicting impressions. The first was with ABC’s Barbara Walters, who’d been so captivated by her in London two years earlier as to make comparisons with Princess Diana. Now, Walters recalls, she was a prima donna who arrived with a PA–her sister Fiona–and a female bodyguard, was ‘impossible’ with the show’s producers and complained even about the temperature of her glass of water.

Paul had accompanied her to the studio, and watched the interview take place, some of it in terms less than flattering to him. ‘I am married to the most famous man in the world and that is very unfortunate for me… This is a man who has had his own way his entire life. When you become famous at 19, it’s sometimes hard to listen to other people’s opinions.’

This time around, Walters reverted to her usual tough inquisitorial mode. But when she tried to broach some of the issues raised by the British press, she found ‘a whole other side’ to the open, charming interviewee she remembered. Afterwards, she complained to her producer how ‘tough’ Heather had been, not realising Paul was in earshot. ‘I like tough women,’ he said.

The other crucial TV booking, on 30 October, was CNN’s Larry King Live. A year ago, she had appeared with Paul, coming in only for the final segment and keeping a respectfully low profile. Now she faced a solo hour with King whose persona was that of some old-time city editor who stood no bullshit from anyone.

Yet he was surprisingly easy on her, accepting her assertion that A Single Step was a wholly different book from Out on a Limb because of its ‘many more chapters’, and greeting the story of a neglected, brutalised and sexually-exploited childhood told in its early pages with none of the scepticism now being voiced elsewhere. Once again, Heather reprised its most shocking episode: how, aged seven, she and a school friend had been kidnapped by their swimming teacher and imprisoned for three days in his flat, Heather being forced to watch him masturbate while the friend suffered actual sexual abuse.

To the catalogue of family nightmares, she added one previously unheard: that her mother had lost a leg at the very same age she’d lost hers, but that it had ‘reattached’; and that even while her mother was on crutches, her father still beat her up or pushed her into boiling hot baths.

‘Did you ever prostitute yourself?’ was King’s most searching question, in reference to the time she claimed to have lived on the streets.

‘No, never,’ Heather replied. ‘Never.’

The talk then turned to her self-designed prosthetic left leg, ‘which’, she suddenly said, ‘I’ll pop off if you don’t mind.’ With that, she performed the trick she so often did in amputee-wards, handing the detached limb to King, then baring her stump and inviting him to feel it. ‘Wow! Does that not turn Paul off?’ he asked as he did so. She repeated that, disability or no, every man she’d ever met had proposed to her inside a week.

Such a display would have appalled the squeamish British, but America loved it. ‘You’re a gutsy broad, Heather,’ King told her, so enamoured that she became his standin on the show a few months later. To give her appearance maximum impact, Paul fixed for her to interview the normally reclusive screen legend Paul Newman.

Since The Beatles Anthology, things between Paul and Yoko had gone very quiet. Anyone who asked him how they got on nowadays (as Larry King had) received only diplomatic soufflé-speak: ‘We don’t not get on. But you know, it’s like some people you may not be destined to become good buddies with. I don’t kind of ring up… “Hey, Yoko, what’s happening, babe?”’

But, as was all too evident, they didn’t fall over themselves to be in each other’s company, even when they happened to be in the same place at the same time–even if that place happened to be Liverpool. The previous July, Paul had been there to greet the Queen, as she stopped off on her Golden Jubilee tour of Britain, and show her round his exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. Yoko had been there to open the new terminal at the just-renamed John Lennon Airport.

It was an unprecedented honour: no airport in Britain had been named after a person before, and none has been since. With it went the first municipal statue of a Beatle erected in Liverpool, a seven-and-a-half-foot figure of John surveying the checkin hall. The airport logo borrowed an apposite line from ‘Imagine’: ‘above us only sky’.

Some questioned why the honour hadn’t been shared with Paul, who’d done so much for Liverpool, or else given to the Beatles collectively. The city rather feebly responded that its purpose was ‘to celebrate an entire life’, but Paul gave no sign of feeling snubbed–on the contrary, was all in favour of the rebrand.

A different issue with Yoko hung in the air, one about which he felt as strongly now as when it had arisen in 1995. During the compilation of the second Anthology CD, he’d asked for the Lennon–McCartney credit on ‘Yesterday’ to be reversed since he’d written and recorded it without any input from John. George and Ringo made no objection but Yoko vetoed the idea, so he’d dropped it.

For all his oceanic fame, it still galled him that half ‘Yesterday’s’ royalties went to John’s estate and that on one statement he’d seen, Yoko earned more from it than he did. Nor could it any longer be argued that he benefited in the same way from John’s compositions in which he’d had no part. A 1997 Lennon compilation had included ‘Give Peace a Chance’, which John had written and recorded with Yoko during their 1969 Montreal bed-in but, because Beatle rules still applied, had always borne the Lennon–McCartney label. Now the ‘McCartney’ had disappeared.

In November 2002, he released Back in the U.S., a double live album of the previous seven months’ American concerts. Nineteen of the Beatles songs on it, including ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Yesterday’, were credited to ‘Paul McCartney and John Lennon’. The result was the first public row with Yoko he’d ever had. Her spokesman, Elliott Mintz, accused him of ‘an attempt to rewrite history’ while her lawyer, Peter Shukat, warned of ‘legal recourse’ to undo his ‘ridiculous, absurd and petty’ act, though none was ever to materialise.

Media opinion overwhelmingly took Yoko’s side: a novelty in itself. Paul was criticised for small-mindedness, overweening vanity and tampering with a sacred treasure; ‘McCartney and Lennon’, one columnist wrote, sounded as unnatural as Hammerstein and Rodgers or Sullivan and Gilbert. Even Ringo weighed in against him, calling his action ‘underhand’. He himself affected surprise at the furore, protesting that he wasn’t trying to diminish John’s contribution to their partnership, just provide ‘correct labelling’. ‘The truth is that all this is much ado about nothing and there is no need for anyone to get their knickers in a twist.’

Ringo’s comment on the affair caused no rift between the two surviving Beatles, for on 29 November they appeared together in a memorial concert for George, organised by his widow, Olivia, at the Royal Albert Hall to mark the first anniversary of his death. The impressive stage-ensemble included both a symphony and an Indian orchestra, George’s sitar-teacher and mentor Ravi Shankar, his best friend Eric Clapton and his son Dhani, now the image of the shy lad Paul had brought into the Quarrymen in 1957.

Paul’s performance included his ukulele version of ‘Something’, segueing into a big production that exactly replicated the one on Abbey Road. He also played ‘For You Blue’, a little-remembered George track from the Let It Be/Get Back sessions in 1969.

On that score, at least, a long-standing McCartney grievance had finally been assuaged. Thirty-four years later, he still fumed over the way the album’s producer-salvager, Phil Spector, had drenched two of his finest tracks, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Let It Be’, in sickly orchestration and celestial choirs, and how his protests had been overridden by the other Beatles and Allen Klein. Now there was to be a remixed and remastered version, Let It Be… Naked, with ‘The Long and Winding Road’ scrubbed clean of Spector’s effects (‘Let It Be’ in its original hymn-like version had already appeared on Anthology 3).

Let It Be… Naked would go platinum in the US (and double platinum in Japan) in 2003, though many critics still preferred the overdubbed version. By that time, Phil Spector’s career as ‘Pop Music’s Svengali’ had come to a bloody end. He was about to go on trial for murder after the body of a young actress was found in his mock-medieval California mansion, shot in the mouth. In 2009, he would be convicted and sentenced to 19 years to life.

Bizarrely for someone who owned so many houses, Paul embarked on his second marriage with an accommodation problem. Heather, understandably, did not want to move into Blossom Wood Farm, the home he’d shared with Linda, where her presence still lingered in every comfortably shabby couch, well-used kitchen-utensil and invunerable chicken or duck out in the yard.

The newly-weds were living temporarily across the valley at Woodlands Farm, whose grounds contained an expansive lake. Here, at Heather’s behest, Paul was building a home totally unlike any he and Linda had created–a two-bedroom Norwegian-style log cabin. So anxious was he for them to move in that the build was being rushed through without the necessary permissions from the local planning authority. But thanks to luxurious extras like a gym annexe and a ‘lakeside pavilion’ for watching wildlife, it still was not finished.