Everyone agreed it was the hottest ticket in town. As a gloriously pink Hollywood sunset settled over LA, one limousine after another swept up to the Century-Plaza hotel. Liveried flunkies rushed forward to open the doors, TV lights flared, cameras flashed and the crowd cheered as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas stepped into the blinding glare. Then came Jack Nicholson,then Rosanna Arquette, then Kiefer Sutherland, then Daryl Hannah, then Andy Garcia... There was no question that this invitation-only gala evening had attracted the cream of Hollywood. But few of the people gathered would have recognised the real star of the show: a lassie from Washington, Tyne and Wear, formerly known as plain Heather Mills, now Lady McCartney.
Heather and Paul McCartney were co-hosting the fourth annual Adopt-A-Minefield Gala, a $1,000-a-head dinner and concert at the Century-Plaza. The McCartneys are patrons of the charity, which aims to publicise the global landmine crisis and collect funds for mine-clearing; the concert would raise $2m for landmine victims. For most of the1, 500 guests the highlight of the evening was the concert, featuring McCartney and Neil Young. But before the music began it was Heather's show — from the moment she emerged in a strapless Valentino gown, hand in hand with her husband, and walked through the ballroom with applause ringing in her ears.
All the early speakers paid tribute to her undoubted courage and spirit. The 2004 "honorees" were called up to receive awards for their work on behalf of Adopt-A-Minefield. "Calling her my friend is a great honour," gushed the honoree Wendy Walker Whitworth, producer of Larry King Live. "I am totally awed by her kindness and love."
"Heather is a shining example of hope and bravery in the face of adversity," said Josephine Eastman, another honoree, and the sister of McCartney's late wife, Linda. (It was Josephine who got Heather involved in Adopt-A-Minefield.)
After Eastman's speech, Heather quipped: "I don't know why you people haven't got a female president yet." Many of those present stirred uncomfortably in their seats at being addressed as "you people". In a video produced by Heather,shown on two huge screens, we watched her in Cambodia,talking to landmine victims, visiting hospitals, describing, in her Geordie lilt, the horrors wrought by landmines left behind after war, particularly on innocent children. Then it was time for her speech. She stepped up to the lectern with all the confidence of an international diplomat about to address the United Nations Assembly and began by warning those present that America needed to think about what it was doing, "throwing bombs at a country" in a "so-called just cause" and creating a thirst for revenge. "People have to elect the right president," she said, making it clear she was not thinking of George W Bush. (This was three weeks before the presidential election.)
I was at a table with a group of staunch Republicans. Most thought her speech was offensive, and one summed up the feelings of the table when he said: "I don't give a rat's butt — write that in your notebook — what she thinks. I didn't pay all this money to be told how to vote by a Englishwoman, then get served a plate of carbohydrates." (The fact that the dinner was strictly vegetarian, in deference to the wishes of the McCartneys, did not sit well with some steak-eating Californians.) During her speech Heather talked rather vaguely about how she had lost her leg. "My mother lost a leg at the same age as me," she said. "Then I worked on the front lines in Bosnia. Then I lost a leg. Then we got Princess Diana involved [in the landmine campaign], then I met my husband, President Putin and Colin Powell. It is all about using contacts and networking to make a difference..."
"Did she lose her leg in Bosnia?" a woman at my table asked. "No," I replied, "Kensington." I forbore to add that Heather's mother still had two legs when she died in 1989.
The talk-show host Jay Leno conducted an amiable auction to raise funds, which was partially hijacked by Heather, who first offered up her Valentino gown ("I got it at a discount," she joked), which went for $10,000. She then grappled with Leno for the hand microphone and, to his playful embarrassment, invited bids for his underpants. They fetched $2,000. Later, whipping up bids for an oil painting by McCartney, Leno cracked: "Listen, the sooner you buy this crap, the sooner Paul will play." It was a relief when McCartney and his band eventually took the stage. He can still bring on the magic, and even the sour Republicans round my table began to look as if they were enjoying themselves for the first time that night. The concert ended just after midnight. On their way out, every guest was given a bag stuffed with a copy of Heather Mills McCartney's autobiography, A Single Step, and the first issue of a new magazine, Privilege, which featured Heather on the cover. Inside was a long interview in which she talked about her life, how she was forced to steal food and clothes to survive when she was a homeless teenager, and how she reinvented herself as a model and businesswoman.
Who could not fail to be moved by her reminiscences? If only they were all true. For much of Heather's version of her rise and rise from misery to celebrity is fantasy. Ironically, the real story of how this former model was able to position herself between Princess Di and Mother Teresa in the spectrum of angels, marry McCartney and host dazzling celebrity-packed galas in LA is even more extraordinary than her own extraordinary version of events.
The defining moment in Heather Mills McCartney's life was the accident. It happened on August 8, 1993. She was standing on the corner of De Vere Gardens and Kensington Road in London with her then boyfriend, Rafaelle Mincione, a banker. As she stepped into the road she was knocked over by a police motorcyclist on an emergency call. When she woke up in hospital three days later, she found she had lost her left leg below the knee.
The tabloids described her as a "£200,000-a-year catwalk model with a golden future", although it would have been hard to find too many pictures of Heather on a catwalk. Her field was glamour — pouting prettily in skimpy lingerie or swimwear. She had made an appearance on page three of The Sun five years earlier and was hired for "promotional" work, adding some welcome sex appeal to dry corporate events. Many young women — she was only 25 — would have been devastated by losing a leg, particularly if they earned a living from their good looks. But in one way at least, it was the best thing that ever happened to Heather, because it instantly provided what she she seemed to crave most: publicity. Within two weeks of the accident, she was negotiating the sale of her life story from her hospital bed. The People won the bidding with an offer reported to be in the region of £180,000 and opened its first double-page spread with a classic tabloid tear-jerker: "Gorgeous model Heather Mills gazed down at the stump where her shapely left leg once was — and wept..."
No doubt to the irritation of The People, Heather was talking freely to some other newspapers about how she was on the brink of hitting the big time as a model, about how, during her bleakest moments, she tried to "think of others who were suffering", about how she had tried to end her "whirlwind romance" with Rafaelle Mincione but how he insisted on sticking by her. By the time she was up and about on an artificial leg, she had become something of a celebrity, described as "the courageous model" or the "tragic model". With her determination not to let her disability blight her life, she was an inspiration to young amputees, happy to be photographed with what she referred to as her "stump".
In November that year, she began thinking about doing something to help landmine victims in Bosnia and Croatia.She had discovered that there were thousands of discarded artificial limbs in Britain not being used. Undaunted by advice that prostheses need to be individually made and fitted, she rounded up 4,500 unwanted artificial limbs and organised a convoy to Zagreb for a filmed report broadcast on BBC1's Good Morning with Anne and Nick. However, Croatia had little need for second-hand limbs shipped from Britain. Every Croatian citizen had the right to be fitted with prosthetic limbs; virtually all fees for fitting and rehabilitation were paid by the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance.
