It was a bleak time. On 21 October 2006, Paul’s old friend Brian Brolly, who’d helped him set up MPL, died of a heart attack. A week later, Beatrice McCartney’s third birthday degenerated into an ugly scene when press came to an open-air play centre where Paul and Heather had taken the child as a treat, resulting in a fracas with photographers.
Unable to stop the flood of ugly stories, Sir Paul adopted a policy of dignified silence, pressing on with his work as Heather became ever more excitable and vociferous. Her popularity plummeted accordingly, reaching its nadir when she became the butt of a TV presenter’s joke. Presenting an awards show in London, Jonathan Ross described Heather as such a ‘fucking liar [I] wouldn’t be surprised if we found out she’s actually got two legs’.
BEHOLD MY (BROKEN) HEART
Nine years since the President of Magdalen College invited Sir Paul to write a modest choral work for the new college auditorium - and two years since the try-outs in Oxford - Sir Paul premièred the final version of Ecce Cor Meum at the Royal Albert Hall. Commissioned during Linda’s last months, the music had been in the works so long that Paul had been widowed, remarried and separated in the meantime.
Arranged in four movements, with a melancholy orchestral interlude written in the immediate aftermath of Linda’s death, Ecce Cor Meum was in many ways a typical example of McCartney music: there were lovely tunes, beautifully played and orchestrated, yet the result was uneven, bland in places, overwrought at the end, while the libretto struck the critic from the Independent as ‘sententious’. A bit of a mess really, reflecting the fact that Ecce, like his other classical works, was the result of hired hands trying to express what they thought Paul wanted to hear. Yet the crowd at the Albert Hall - many of whom were Beatles fans who just wanted to see Sir Paul close up - gave the work an enthusiastic reception, and urged him to his feet at the end to say a few words, which he did with his usual confidence and grace, acknowledging the support of friends and family in the audience.
There was in fact further personal discord behind the scenes. Although the extended McCartney family was close, Paul’s wealth had long created dissent in the clan. As we have seen, Paul had been very generous over the years with his family, helping relatives buy homes, lending money and in some instances putting ‘relies’ on the McCartney Pension so they didn’t need to work. Still some weren’t satisfied. When one relative was reminded by Paul’s accountant around the time of Ecce Cor Meum that a loan Paul had made, to help the relative buy their home, had not been repaid, the relation apparently retorted: ‘Fuck him, he’s got enough money and I don’t need to fuckin’ pay him back.’
Several relatives were invited to the première of Ecce Cor Meum, Paul’s Uncle Mike and his Aunt Bett Robbins being among those who accepted tickets, with Paul’s PA Holly Dearden booking the now-elderly couple into a first-class London hotel, where a butler greeted them with vintage champagne. As they enjoyed Paul’s hospitality, the Robbins discovered that not all the ‘relies’ were so pleased with their arrangements. Word had got about that Aunt Joan had been chauffeur-driven all the way from the Wirral to the show, in light of the fact she was in her 80s, leading to younger family members asking MPL to lay on door-to-door cars for them, too. ‘They wanted not only [a] free hotel, they wanted free cars from Liverpool and back again - because Joan Mac had a car,’ says Mike, who was told by Holly Dearden that one relation slammed the phone down on her when informed a car wasn’t available, telling the PA angrily: ‘I don’t want to talk to the monkey, I want to talk to the organ grinder.’ As a result, some of Paul’s nearest and dearest were not at Ecce Cor Meum.
All of a sudden it wasn’t as much fun being Paul McCartney. That winter Sir Paul abandoned his planning battle to keep the Cabin, agreeing to tear the wooden house down. There was slim consolation in the fact the council said he could keep the pavilion. A routine medical examination also revealed that Paul had a ‘minor heart irregularity’. It turned out to be nothing much to worry about, thankfully, unlike the news from Heather’s lawyers, three days before Christmas, that she wanted £50 million ($76.5m) as her divorce settlement. Just what you wanted to hear before the holidays. In the new year, Paul counter-offered with a more reasonable £16.5 million ($25.2m), which together with assets Heather had accrued during their marriage meant she would walk away with about £20 million ($30.6m). She turned this offer down as insufficient. Paul also filed an affidavit that revealed how much he had wanted their marriage to work. ‘I believed it was for life,’ he said, sadly.
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THE EVER-PRESENT PAST
WHEN LOVE GOES WRONG
Heather Mills didn’t believe Sir Paul was only worth £387 million ($ 592m). He’d told his wife he was twice as rich, as her barrister informed the judge during a preliminary divorce hearing. Mr Justice Sir Hugh Bennett, a near contemporary of Sir Paul’s, having been born in 1943, and a fellow knight of the realm, asked for updated estimates of the star’s assets as a result, but the difference didn’t prove significant.
Heather claimed to be short of cash so, while the divorce was thrashed out, Sir Paul agreed to pay his wife an interim sum of £5.5 million ($ 8.4m), which would give her enough to live on and buy a house. She chose a large, secluded property at Robertsbridge, 13 miles from Peasmarsh. This way they could both have access to Bea, and take turns ferrying her to a local preparatory school. Unlike Paul’s older children, Bea would be educated privately.
As his second marriage drew to an expensive conclusion, Sir Paul severed another important connection. He had signed with EMI as a young Beatle, and released all his subsequent UK records with the company, but the star now decided the old firm wasn’t up to the challenge of marketing his new album, Memory Almost Full. Like most major record labels, EMI was suffering in the age of digital downloads, with several of its biggest acts voicing dissatisfaction with their sales figures, on top of which the company had recently been taken over by a private equity firm. Paul began talking to Hear Music, a new company co-founded by the Starbucks chain, whose executives impressed Sir Paul partly by promising that, if he signed with them, Memory Almost Full would be on sale not only in the company’s coffee shops in the West but in 400 Starbucks in China, one of the few territories he hadn’t yet conquered.
With the exception of the lovesick Driving Rain, Paul’s rock albums had been getting more interesting lately, and Memory Almost Full turned out to be a particularly good listen, opening with the party pop of ‘Dance Tonight’ then plunging into more introspective territory. After young love, soured love has inspired more good songs than any other human experience. Bob and Sara Dylan’s problems in the 1970s led to Dylan making his supreme album Blood on the Tracks, for example. While Memory Almost Full wasn’t that strong, it followed in the same tradition. Paul expresses bitter-sweet thanks to a lover whom one presumes is Heather in ‘Gratitude’, acknowledging that she’d done him wrong, but he couldn’t hate her for it. Meanwhile ‘You Tell Me’ found Paul exploring memories of Linda, the focus of the song given away by the reference to a red cardinal, a bird native to the Arizona desert. Other songs looked back to the Beatles, Paul’s ‘ever-present past’. Once, he’d tried to ignore his history. Now he dealt with it squarely. The lovely ‘That Was Me’ presents a musical slide show of his early life, from scout camp to sweating cobwebs on stage at the Cavern as the Beatles worked their way up and out of Liverpool and onto TV. ‘That was me!’ Paul yelped, as if surprised to realise the glossy young man on the Ed Sullivan Show was the sexagenarian singing now.
There are no better lyrics on Memory Almost Full than in ‘The End of the End’ in which the star faces down death itself. Composed at Cavendish Avenue on Dad’s old NEMS piano, the lyric is original, poetic and true in way that had eluded Paul for much of his career, with simple and pleasing rhymes that remain in the mind, the second verse of the song being especially elegant:On the day that I die I’d like jokes to be told,
And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets
that children have played on,
And laid on while listening to stories of old.
Yet Paul wasn’t ready to stop. That autumn he was seen with a new girlfriend, a dark, pencil-thin American named Nancy Shevell. Almost a quarter of a century Paul’s junior, Nancy was the daughter of a New Jersey trucking magnate, Myron ‘Mike’ Shevell, who’d led a colourful life. A fraud investigation caused Shevell’s companies to go bankrupt in the 1970s, after which he took over New England Motor Freight (NEMF), a small firm located in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Sopranos territory, building the company up into a huge concern with a $400 million turnover (£261m), facing accusations of racketeering in the process.
Nancy Shevell was involved in this family firm. She joined NEMF in 1983 after graduating from Arizona State, the same university Linda attended. The following year, Nancy married law student Bruce Blakeman, who became prominent in the political life of New Jersey. In 1988, when Nancy Shevell was a Vice President of NEMF, the US government sued the trucking firm, with other defendants, for colluding with the Mafia. The chief defendant in the case was the head of the Genovese crime family, Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante, whom Mike Shevell allegedly conspired with in hiring labour. In bringing the court action, the government sought, in part, to stop Nancy’s father ‘endeavoring to obtain the assistance of organised crime figures regarding any labor relations matters’. Shevell entered a ‘Consent Decree’ by which he agreed to restore union members ‘who had been deprived of work as a result of the sweetheart arrangement’ and promised not to get involved in labour negotiations again. NEMF kept on trucking.
Apart from helping run the family firm, Nancy and her husband raised a son named Arlen, maintaining homes in New York and the Hamptons, where they first became friendly with Paul and Linda. The Blakemans were still married, though separated, when Nancy began seeing Sir Paul in October 2007. In many ways, Nancy was a similar woman to Linda: she was American, Jewish, the moneyed daughter of a tough, self-made man. She had also suffered a bout with breast cancer and, again like Linda, was a denizen of New York and Long Island. Nancy’s Manhattan apartment was a 10-minute walk from the building where Linda used to live on the Upper East Side. In romancing Nancy, Paul was retracing his past.
The couple were first photographed together on a beach in the Hamptons in the autumn of 2007. When he got home to London, Paul went to see Nitin Sawhney, who’d developed a successful career since they first worked together. Sawhney had invited his superstar friend to contribute to his new album, London Undersound. The musicians had talked about Paul doing a song about his experiences with the paparazzi during his relationship with Heather Mills, but Paul was more exercised now about the photographers who had caught him with Nancy. ‘He came in feeling quite passionate and saying, “I’m amazed they managed to take a picture of me. I didn’t think they were around. I really didn’t expect that,”’ recalls Sawhney. ‘In one way he was quite admiring of it. He kind of laughed it off. But you could see it wasn’t something he felt that comfortable with either.’ These sentiments went into ‘My Soul’, in which Paul spoke and sang about photographers stealing the soul. Sawhney chose not to improve Paul’s vocal digitally, allowing the star to sound his age. ‘Some people have said Oh he sounds a bit old! I think, well, good. He’s not a young bloke.’
Paul’s reaction to the paparazzi was mild compared to that of his estranged wife, who allowed herself to be endlessly wound up by the media. On the morning of 31 October, Heather invited herself onto the morning television show GMTV to rant about the British press, going ‘right over the top’ in the words of the divorce judge. Heather began by replying to the most damaging stories that had been published about her in recent months, her alleged past as a porn model and prostitute, stating that she had never made a secret of being a ‘glamour model’. As a teenager she aspired to be a celebrity topless model, like Maria Whittaker. ‘That was the thing to be in the Eighties.’ She had written about topless modelling in her memoirs. ‘Paul knew about my glamour-modelling. ’ Because of the photo-shoot she’d done for Die Freuden Der Liebe, the press now portrayed her, in her words, as a ‘hard core porn queen’. Her face expressed incredulity, as if she’d never seen the pictures of herself with her legs open.
Becoming increasingly worked up, she reminded television viewers of the very worst the papers had written: ‘They’ve called me a whore, a gold-digger, a fantasist, a liar, the most unbelievably hurtful things, and I’ve stayed quiet for my daughter, but we’ve had death threats. I’ve been close to suicide. So upset about this,’ she said, apparently overcome with emotion, though it looked like she was pretending to cry. ‘I’ve had worse press than a paedophile, or a murderer,’ she wailed, ‘and I’ve done nothing but charity for 20 years.’
Heather compared the way photographers treated her to the experience of the late Princess of Wales. ‘What did the paparazzi do to Diana? They chased her and they killed her,’ she stated, in an extravagant and inaccurate analogy.66 Heather then referred to her recent appearance on the American TV show, Dancing with the Stars. ‘The only respite I got [from the media] was going to America and I did Dancing with the Stars, because our charity was so damaged and we needed the money. I was the only person on the show that gave the money to the charity …’ (The impression was that she had given all the money to charity. When the divorce judge came to study the paperwork he found Heather had been paid $ 200,000 [then worth about £110,000] from which she donated £50,000 to the vegetarian group Viva! - which, by the by, wasn’t a registered charity at the time.)
Turning to her divorce case, Heather hinted darkly that she was the victim of a conspiracy. ‘There is so much fear from a certain party of the truth coming out that lots of things have been put out and done,’ she said mysteriously, repeating that she’d had death threats. ‘That means my daughter’s life is at risk, because she’s with me all the time.’ Despite the millions Paul had given her, Heather claimed she had to borrow money to hire bodyguards. ‘A certain part of the tabloid media created such a hate campaign against me, they put my life and my daughter’s life at risk. And that’s why I considered killing myself,’ she said, welling up again, ‘because I thought if I’m dead, she’s safe, and she can be with her father, and that is the truth. That’s the truth.’
Heather was ridiculed for this TV appearance, which apart from being a hysterical display seemingly contravened a legal agreement that she wouldn’t talk about the case in public. As a result, Heather’s relationship with her legal advisors broke down and she began representing herself in the case. Her outburst was also in marked contrast to the dignified silence maintained by Sir Paul. A hint of what he was feeling came when he said, in reply to a question about the divorce: ‘As Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through Hell, keep going!”’ But he said no more.
INTO THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE
The gothic towers of the Royal Courts of Justice were cloaked in London fog as Sir Paul McCartney was driven down the Strand on Monday 11 February 2008, day one of a week of hearings during which his divorce would be settled. Seeing the press photographers erecting their ladders outside the main entrance of the High Court, which looks like a cross between a medieval church and an English public school as imagined by J.K. Rowling, Sir Paul ordered his driver to take him round the back way. He was familiar with the building. It is where he came in 1971 to sue his fellow Beatles.
Heather was already inside, a sharp-faced blonde in a pink blouse, black skirt and black boots, her false leg clumping on the flagstones as she strode down the corridor to Court 34. Having parted company with her lawyers, the famous charity worker was representing herself with the help of three ‘McKenzie friends’, a system whereby litigants in person are able to have people in court to advise them. In Heather’s case these were her sister Fiona, a solicitor advocate named David Rosen, and an American attorney Michael Shilub. In contrast, Sir Paul was represented by two of the most expensive and formidable lawyers in the land
, Nicholas Mostyn QC and solicitor Fiona Shackleton.
A surprisingly slight figure in person, Sir Paul entered the corridor with a bouncy step, wearing a pinstripe suit, white shirt and tie, a scarf round his neck, non-leather shoes on his feet with thick, moulded soles. At 65, the grey was showing again at the roots of his tinted hair, which had been arranged to disguise where he was thinning, while his sagging jowls carried a trace of winter tan. He was nevertheless still handsome and affable. He wished the ladies and gentlemen of the press a friendly ‘good morning’, holding the door open for Ms Shackleton as they made their way into the ornate, wood-panelled courtroom, from which the press were excluded.
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