Macca's meltdown: The inside story of the marriage that cost Sir Paul £24m

Daily Mail ^ | 14th August 2010 | Howard Sounes

[tlb]

Heather found a message on her answer machine: ‘It’s Paul ­McCartney here.’

Paul presented the Heather Mills Trust — which she hadn’t yet registered with the Charity Commission — with a cheque for £150,000.

At 14, she claimed in her ­autobiography, she’d run away from home. She’d started ­sleeping rough and mixing with drug addicts, rent boys and prostitutes.

Then she got a Saturday job with a jeweler, from whom she stole — resulting in a ­probationary sentence for theft. Next, Heather strayed into the fringes of the sex industry, ­finding employment at around the age of 16 as a waitress in a Soho hostess club.

Her ex-husband Alfie Karmal says: ‘It was difficult to believe anything she said, as I caught her out lying to me so often.’

Why did Paul invest such trust in a self-­publicising minor celebrity with a dubious past?

Mike Robbins thinks he knows the answer: sex.

He confused sex with love,’ says Mike. ‘He couldn’t tell the difference.’

Of course, any woman who ­married Paul was always going to have a near impossible task: living up to his first wife, Linda, whose image as the ultimate earth mother was only enhanced by her untimely death from breast ­cancer in 1998.

However, as we will see on ­Monday, when Linda first came into Paul’s life she was far removed from the maternal vegetarian campaigner who was to become almost as famous as her husband.

She was a single mother who made a living ­photographing rock stars who she then often slept with — one friend dubbed her a ‘groping groupie’.

And long before she met any of the Beatles, she decided she liked the look of the baby-faced one. From then on, Paul McCartney was her number one target.

[a fool in paradise]

Of course, any woman who ­married Paul was always going to have a near impossible task: living up to his first wife, Linda, whose image as the ultimate earth mother was only enhanced by her untimely death from breast ­cancer in 1998.

Paul was with Jane Asher for 5 years and they were even engaged in 1967. They eventually broke up in 1968 (after an affair by Paul). By 1969 he was married to Linda.