The cat's whiskers
Her journey from cardboard city to Lady McCartney won her as many enemies as admirers. Now, as she prepares to take on the fur trade by buying 100,000 dogs, Heather Mills-McCartney talks to Tim Adams about land mines, life with Paul and why she prefers Linda to the Beatles
Tim Adams
The Observer
Tuesday January 24, 2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5379948-110648,00.htmlI spent the best part of two days with Heather Mills-McCartney before I managed to ask her a proper question. She is, according to her publicity, among the most sought-after speakers in the world. You quickly see why.
We met in a bar at a Brussels hotel. The following day she was due to present evidence to the European Union about the trade in dog and cat fur from China. She had just flown in from LA, where she had been accompanying Sir Paul on his sell-out American tour; he was now back home in Sussex looking after their daughter Beatrice. She was tired, she had said on the phone, and so cold that she thought she might 'lose her other leg to frostbite'. So she only fancied a quick chat. In the event, it was me who had to make my excuses.
Before I could, Lady Mills-McCartney did what she does best. She talked with an extraordinary, slightly unnerving compulsion about the cause that is currently closest to her heart. Two million dogs and cats were being skinned alive each year in China, she said, pretty much by way of greeting. It was happening in the Czech Republic, too, and even here in Belgium, where she had evidence that cats were being stolen to order: why did I think there were all those 'missing moggy' signs on street corners?
She had become involved in all of this, she explained with hardly a pause, nearly a year ago, and since then it had all been a bit mad, like her landmines campaign. She first saw the film of the Chinese animal skinning when it was given to her by Dennis Erdman, a director of Sex and the City. He had watched it for 45 seconds before he fainted. She had watched it over and over, and put some of it on her website. Eleven months on, she was hoping for a Europe-wide ban on fur from China. Her husband was doing his bit. He has refused to play in China until the practice is made illegal. 'I pull him in for specific events,' she said, 'just at the right moments.'
She had wanted to go undercover herself to film the cat farms in the Czech Republic, but she was in hospital in the end, sorting out problems with her leg. She had not been idle, though.
In New York she had heard Jennifer Lopez on TV being asked about the fur she was wearing and saying, 'Oh, I guess I need to be educated.' Mills-McCartney decided to educate her. She went to J-Lo's office with the video of cats and dogs being skinned. It was Fashion Week in New York and the office was just over the road, so she was like the Pied Piper with all these journalists in tow. In the scuffle that followed the papers said that security had knocked her over and she had lost her prosthetic leg, but that was not true; or that she was having trouble with her leg at the time and she just stumbled.
Which charity was she doing this work for? I started to ask.
Well, her special skill, she said, was to bring all the charities together. They all needed her, so she made them work with each other. The Humane Society, Peta and so on. ('Talks a lot about being needed,' I wrote in my notebook, not entirely fairly.)
As we were speaking, a woman walked into the bar wearing a full-length fur coat. 'The thing is,' Lady Mills-McCartney said loudly, 'people who wear fur are always so ugly. The coat just makes them even uglier.'
I was not sure the woman understood English. Mills-McCartney turned back towards me.
'Would you go out with someone dressed in an animal?'
Crikey, me?
She had tried to stop haranguing people in furs, she said. But sometimes in a shop she could not help herself going up behind someone and starting to stroke their coat, before asking them how many dead animals it was made from. That seemed to work.
One of the people whose coat she would no doubt like to stroke is Naomi Campbell: 'That stupid, superficial hypocrite', who has started modelling fur, having previously led Peta campaigns. Another is Anna - 'Cruella de' - Wintour, who, as editor of US Vogue, has championed fur, and who was at the very least 'in league' with the fur industry and its advertisers.
When she paused from this monologue briefly, her sister Fiona, who is her agent and right-hand woman, acted as a prompt: about cat-fur festivals in Germany, and about how the animals in China were skinned alive because a bullet or an injection was too expensive. They explained how they had plans to go to China and buy, say, 50,000 dogs in crates at a market for a dollar each, the going rate, and set up a sanctuary for them. Or 100,000 dogs. They would then educate the men who had skinned them in how to look after animals. (I had a brief image of the pair of them barking orders to Chinese dog minders in their impassioned Geordie.)
'The thing is,' Fiona said, 'with something like this you have to do it full time, six days a week.'
And how did the tour go?
'It was good, but I didn't sleep well,' Lady Mills-McCartney said. 'The screaming always goes on in my head.'
What, I began to say, the screaming of Paul's fans? Outside the hotel? Does that still happen ...?
'No,' she said, just a bit impatient, as if I had not been paying attention. 'The screaming of the dogs and cats I had seen on the videos. Little puppy dogs and girl private cats, their faces so trusting. Just before the noose comes.' And she was off again.
The following morning, bright and early, I watched Mills-McCartney explain a lot of this once more in a lecture hall at the European parliament, flanked by the Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson holding a piece of cat fur. The impact of her presentation was dampened a little by the fact that no one knew how to turn down the lights so we could see her film. But she was undaunted; in the corridors afterwards she railed against fur for the benefit of television stations from across the continent.
A few days later, back in London, I caught up with her again. She was spending the morning in Bond Street, giving out horribly graphic leaflets to Christmas shoppers in fur coats while another film crew followed her. ('Did you know,' she wondered, repeatedly, 'that two million cats and dogs in China ...? She has the kind of celebrity that makes people double take, but often not be quite able to place her. As she accosted hapless coat-wearers, passers-by asked each other, 'Who is it?' or noted, 'She's prettier than you imagine isn't she?' A paparazzo had picked up her presence. She gave him a leaflet ('Did he know that ...').
Some of her targets were robust. One woman in a stole informed her to 'keep your opinions to yourself young lady', which I knew, by now, was never really going to happen. 'If I had kept my opinions to myself I would never have done half of what I have done,' Lady Mills-McCartney shouted back. 'Everyone thinks I'm a nutter,' she said to me cheerfully. Some fur-flaunters scuttled away or pretended not to speak English. One woman in a hideous floor-length chinchilla hid in Pied a Terre until the coast was clear.
Mills-McCartney's other mission in the shops was to buy Chinese fur and take it away for DNA testing to see if it was cat or dog. By the end of a long morning, her sister was laden with bags of evidence. I wondered at one point if Heather had got Paul anything for Christmas yet. She'd just seen some brilliant crocheted shoes in a shop in Burlington Arcade, she explained, but they also sold fur scarves so she could not get them.
Crocheted shoes? I said.
To finish her morning's filming she decided to go to Stella McCartney's shop to prove that fur-free can be fashionable, and to pick up some clothes to wear for the Observer's photos. She called Stella, who was away in the Far East, on her mobile. After a brief chat it seemed that Stella had said it was fine, but she might want to check with head office.
At the shop she explained to security, 'I'm not sure what you'd call me. Her stepmother, I suppose.' They looked bemused, but let her in. Chrissie Hynde, fellow animal-rights activist, happened to be in the fitting rooms. They hugged and talked about the merits of Stella's vegan stilettoes. One of the shop assistants came across to tell her how the cats and dogs video on the website had made her cry. On the whole, it could not have gone better.
A couple of days before Christmas, she is in a studio in north London wearing Stella's dress, holding a cat, and smiling into the Observer's camera. The cat will not behave, quite, and the hours tick by, but nothing is too much trouble. Over lunch she informs everyone how much pus there is from infected cow teats in the average glass of milk. Most people decide to have their coffee black.
Afterwards she sits by a gas heater in the airy room, trying to coax a little circulation into her bad leg. For the first time, since I've seen her, I have a slight sense that she might be capable of relaxing. Of all the people I have met, I suggest to her, truthfully, I have never met anyone with quite her sense of self-belief.
She rubs her good foot. 'I have,' she says, 'a disbelief in the impossible.'
Where does it come from, her determination?
'I think seeing so much injustice when I was young made me very sensitive to what is unjust,' she says, referring to her abusive childhood. 'It's like the dogs and cats. You may not want to watch these things, but I think you have to.'
Does she ever let herself stop?
'When I am on I am full-on completely,' she says. I nod. 'But then I can switch off completely, too. On Tuesday I was working from 6 to 10.30 doing TV and radio and stuff. The next day it was my husband's office Christmas party. I always go along. So I played with my daughter all day, switched off the phones. I have to do that occasionally.'
Now aged 37, her sense of mission redoubled after she lost her leg in 1993 when she was run down by a police motorcycle, but she'd always had it really, she says. 'It's like a drug. Or at least it keeps me sane.' When she met Paul, or when he first saw her speak, she was giving an award to a young girl who had lost her arms and legs from meningitis. The girl had been studying to be a top pianist. She went on to help others and now she is a TV journalist. 'People can be in a black tunnel and you have to let some light in so everything looks a bit brighter and more colourful. Once you get out of it, if you start to help people, you'll find that you haven't got time for therapists and "woe is me".'
As she explains this philosophy she returns a few times to the well-trodden story of her childhood. 'It was survival when I was young,' she says. Or: 'I knew that I would never be frightened of anyone after my father.'
Her dad was violent towards her, her brother and sister throughout their childhood. When her mother left home with a Crossroads actor, and ran away to London, she left Heather to cope on her own. At 12 she was running the house, getting her sister off to school, occasionally stealing a bit of food for dinner. Her father would beat them if things were not right. He once threw Fiona through a plate-glass window. She must still feel tremendous anger towards him.
'I think he is mentally ill,' she says. 'My problem and my attribute is that I can always see the other person's side. My father had a hard life. He was adopted when he was seven, from care. God knows what happened to him before that. He had a great love for animals; he used to work for the RSPCA, but he obviously had a more troubled relationship with human beings.'
She hasn't been in touch with him since he phoned her in hospital after she had lost her leg and asked her if he could have money for a new TV and video. Before then she had always paid his debts. 'It was a realisation, really,' she says. 'It's like when you put your hand in a fire and you keep putting it back in. I was the last to give up. My brother and sister had given up on him years before. He had another child who is 20 now and she does not see him. A person only has so many chances I think. He never learned from his mistakes.'
Did it make her desperate to be looked after, that lack of love?
No, she says, with some conviction. 'Though certainly they were crap parents. My mother's dead now, but I can understand her wanting to run away. You've got three kids, abuse for 12 years and suddenly a man comes along who will take you away, but he won't take your kids. I know myself I could never do that. But I know, too, that if she took us my father would have come after her. Unfortunately, I didn't get on with her new partner either.' When the three children turned up at their mother's doorstep Heather was made so unwelcome she left, aged 14, to go and sleep rough on the streets. 'My stepfather did a story with Channel 4 recently and then wrote to me to apologise,' she says. 'He said he needed the money. He was a good actor. He played Henry Higgins.'
I ask if she sees her mother in herself at all.
'I think I am a bit like her as I get older in that she was a psychologist so she counselled people, she was a homeopath at the Royal Marsden. She had a PhD in psychology. When I got my honorary doctorate I wondered a bit what she would have thought. Her boyfriend had told me that I would never get anywhere in life.' She smiles broadly at this idea.
Obviously, she could never have quite imagined how her life would go, but did she have a sense then of where she wanted to be?
'What I wanted when I was 15,' she says, 'was just to get out of Washington, Tyne and Wear. I wanted to earn money so I could get my brother and sister through their education. And I never wanted to have to ask anyone for anything.'
In that desperation, she suggests, she was prepared to try anything. She stole. And she got married young, and wrongly, to a Lebanese businessman who wanted a trophy wife. He introduced her to glamour modelling. The relationship that perhaps kept her going through all of that was with her sister. I say I'm amazed that they can work so closely together.
'We have had one row in 37 years and that was because of the press,' she says. 'We had two libel cases going and something was supposed to go to the lawyers and I was in Rome and Paul was demanding attention: half a million people were turning up to see him and I said to her, "For God's sake, how could you have forgotten to do that?" Then we both burst into tears. We never would let that happen again.'
When she talks about her husband it is with the same matter-of-fact, chirpy normality that he has made his own defence against the strangeness of his world. 'I was devastated for two years when I first met Paul,' she says.
I laugh.
'No,' she insists. 'It was like, I love this man but I want out of this life completely. But then doors started opening. President Putin wanted to have a meeting about land mines. President Putin. And I knew suddenly that was the reason Paul and I had met. Obviously we were in love and there was our daughter and everything, but I knew that was the reason. Paul can open these doors, but he won't have time to do the work. He needs me because I do the work.'
Given her life, I suppose, it's hard not to believe in fate, or fairytales.
'Oh, everything in my life is fate,' she says. 'My mother almost loses a leg [in a car crash] then goes on to help others and then leaves us. I lose a leg at the same age, use it to help others. Then [Princess] Diana appears for eight months. She got involved with land mines around 1997, after I had been doing it for many years. Then we lost her, sadly. Then Paul came along and everyone wants to know about land mines again. How can it not be fate in some way?'
Does that sense translate into a religious faith?
'Nah,' she says. 'I don't have time to follow any religion. But I very much believe that things happen for a purpose.'
Given all her work, it is clearly a great shock to her that she generally gets so bad a press. A recent Sunday Times piece suggested that given her desire for publicity 'the best thing that ever happened to her' was the crash in which she lost her leg, broke her pelvis and punctured her lung. I turned on the TV the other night and heard a comedian I'd never seen before describe her as 'a two-bit Geordie with a wooden leg'. Both her husband and her sister have been moved to make public statements in her defence. Paul, 63, explained, among other things, that she did not make him dye his hair, he was doing that before he met her, and actually she got on pretty well with his kids. Fiona argued that she was just about the best sister anyone could have.
She is quite shaken by the hatred she evokes, though. 'It's jealousy, I suppose,' she says. 'One of the first things Paul did was to tell me to look through the cuttings of what was written about Linda, who had, by any standards, lived a pretty blameless life. I could not believe it. From 1993, when I lost my leg, to when I met Paul I literally never had a bad word written about me. But as soon as I met Paul that all changed overnight. I was totally floored.'
When she talks you often have the sense that she is prone to exaggeration. She claims to have investigated all of the journalists who had written badly about her.
'One of them is in prison now as a paedophile,' she says.
Who was that?
'I can't go into that. It's confidential,' she suggests quickly. 'But if someone writes lies then I will get myself into their lives and see how they feel about it. I am not used to having everything taken out of my control. And when I looked at these people they had done nothing with their lives. One was an alcoholic. One had been divorced three times and was refused access to her kids. So when I realised no one nice had written anything bad about me that was OK. I moved on.'
Does she divide her life into two - before and after the accident?
'Not really,' she says. 'Though I can still see my leg there with blood all round it and my training shoe still on my foot. It was a new trainer so I thought, "Blimey, that's going to take some cleaning up."'
Most of the time when her leg is not hurting she tends to forget and runs down the road like everyone else. She's due for a revision amputation because the muscle tissue has come away from the bone. She will have to spend eight weeks on crutches. 'I can't imagine being eight minutes on crutches with the world I have at the moment, carrying my baby on planes and trains,' she says.
She must be relieved as much as anything to have found Paul, I say. For a long time it looked like she was a sort of runaway bride. Three relationships ended after engagements.
'I'm just a romantic,' she says. 'I always thought, you know, this was the one. Ironically, it was not like that with Paul at all. It was the longest pursuit I have ever had. I'd been very much let down by the boyfriend previous to him - the director Chris Terrill - who was not what he said he was, and I was very much in love with him. In fact, every boyfriend I ever had asked me to marry them. And I was in love with all of them. I've only had seven boyfriends. I meant it each time I said yes.'
How hard was it to step into Linda's place?
She says she has never been a jealous person. 'All my boyfriends have said that. I've always thought that if they want to go off with someone else that's their choice. So all I can do is be the best I can be. When I met Paul and he had had this amazing love with Linda for like 30-odd years, I just thought if I was lucky enough to have any of that love it would be fantastic. Some people don't know how to do it. A lot of people are terrified of being that vulnerable.'
She doesn't feel that by doing her animal welfare work she is turning herself into a copy of her husband's first wife?
'She was a fantastic animal-rights campaigner. She was the kind of person I would admire much more than, say, a Beatle. Yes, they wrote some good songs and got rich, but even while they were doing it sometimes they would admit it was for a swimming pool or to build a bigger house. Linda was not afraid to speak out for what she believed in.'
In that way, she suggests, Paul thinks they are similar. In all other ways she believes they are completely different. One thing she has changed in her husband's life is to stop him smoking pot. 'Him and Linda,' she claims, 'had smoked it every day for the whole of their lives together. But I would not get married to him if he was taking drugs. I hate it. I counselled people on drugs. Fifty per cent of people can smoke joints their entire life and be fine. But the other 50 per cent, if there is a history of depression in their family or in their genes, then they can not smoke marijuana. If I had it I'm sure I would go wacky because we obviously have this history of mental instability in the family. And I could not have him lying to our child about not taking drugs and then going out for a sneaky puff.'
Did he find it hard to give up?
'He says he had a good incentive.'
I wonder if her desire to be clean, and in control, which is perhaps the dominant impression she gives, comes from her nights sleeping under Waterloo Bridge as a teenager. She must have seen a lot of addicts.
'In those days there were lots of camp fires and so on. There were winos and druggy people, I suppose, but even now I'm really crap at spotting anyone who is off their head. I've never taken drugs in my life. One time at Ascot two models ran into the toilets and sniffed some cocaine off the cistern and I was, like, totally shocked. I never drank either until I met Paul. I was drunk yesterday on two glasses of wine at the Christmas party. I'm a very cheap date.'
She laughs, says she has a train to catch: she has to get home to cook supper. 'The thing about me,' she says 'is that I didn't want to get to the end of my life and think I hadn't done all I could, used all my opportunities.'
I don't think there is any danger of that.
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