Heather Millss Private Crusade

Beatles' wives win no popularity contests, as Yoko and Linda discovered, and, at 34, Heather Mills, the new wife of Sir Paul McCartney, carries some extra baggage of her own: a near-Dickensian childhood, the accident that destroyed one of her legs and shattered her modeling career, a rising profile as an anti-land-mine crusader, and the questions about her credibility. As Mills's autobiography is published in the U.S., LESLIE BENNETTS cheeks in with the blissful newlyweds for the full story on Heather's past, the pre-nup, and the feud with McCartney's children

LESLIE BENNETTS

When Heather Mills has a demanding day of work ahead, her husband busies himself in the kitchen while

eats only healthy vegetarian foods, and he loves to pamper her.

If Heather has a particularly long or grueling schedule, the stump of her amputated leg is often angry and purple by evening. But her husband is ever eager to massage it for her, easing her pain and soothing the stresses and strains of the day.

Most working women can only dream of receiving such tender solicitude from their husbands—let alone of being coddled by Sir Paul McCartney, the former Beatle and emperor of pop whose fortune is estimated at well over a billion dollars. But for Heather Mills—who was abandoned by her mother at the age of 9, who had to steal in order to eat, whose father was jailed for fraud when she was 13, who spent months living as a homeless teenager under Waterloo Bridge when she was 14, who had become a jewel thief by the age of 15, and who saw her modeling career shattered when a police motorcycle crashed into her and ripped off her leg when she was 25finding a white knight to take care of her at last has seemed utterly miraculous.

For Heather's life story—a Dickensian saga of poverty, abuse, and catastrophe— would seem preposterous even as a lurid soap-opera plot. When Heather and Sir Paul got to know Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson on vacation at Parrot Cay, Neeson and McCartney were equally incredulous. "As Heather's stories unfolded, Liam and I began joking: 'She's just a typist from Newcastle. She's making it all up!'" McCartney says. "It's quite improbable, her story. But she is genuine. That's why I like she is getting ready to go in the morning. First he prepares the fruits for her breakfast, slicing mangoes, papayas, and pineapples, mixing in blueberries, and sealing everything in a Ziploc bag for her convenience. Then he makes her a sandwich for lunch with avocados and cheese and lettuce and fake bacon, neatly packing it all up in another Ziploc bag. In case she craves an additional snack, he also fixes a bagel with hummus. He wants to make sure she her, and love her. She is a great romance for me, and I am a great romantic."

He surely does love her—enough to have married her last June in a reported $3.2 million ceremony at an Irish castle despite the impassioned objections of his grown children by his late wife, Linda, who died of cancer in 1998. "Heather's sister Fiona said in her speech at the wedding, 'All I've ever wanted for my sister was someone to take care of her for once. She was always the strong one, always the mother figure. And now, for the first time, she's with someone who takes her in his arms and says, "It's going to be all right,""' reports Susie Charrington, a former television colleague of Heather's.

McCartney even loves Heather enough to have embarked upon his second marriage without a pre-nuptial agreement to safeguard his vast assets, although the British tabloids claimed erroneously that Heather had signed on the dotted line. "His kids were desperate to make it happen," says one family friend. "They're afraid she was just going to take the money and run. But she refused to sign it."

Heather denies this, maintaining that she actually volunteered to sign, but her gallant swain demurred. "I wanted to prove that I love him for him," she says. "He said, 'I wouldn't let you.'"

McCartney's willingness to forgo such protection reflects how besotted he is—and how much he wants to hang on to his new bride, who put him on notice at the start of their relationship. "He said, 'How am I going to keep you?'" recalls Heather, whose past history includes a throng of jilted boyfriends and fiances as well as an embittered ex-husband. "I said, 'Romance.' If romance stops, what's the point of a guy? I can do everything else myself." She sighs. "He's sooo romantic!"

In exchange for romance, McCartney has landed a mesmerizing Scheherazade with fabulous tales to tell. The girl who used to sleep in a cardboard box has made an international name for herself as a crusader for land-mine-survivor assistance and a tireless charity worker helping to provide prosthetic limbs to amputees around the world. An indefatigable self-promoter, she is fond of telling people that she was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize, that she is the most requested female speaker in England, that she is the seventh-most-indemand worldwide. She and McCartney hobnob with the likes of Colin Powell, and Heather's conversations often feature A-list openers: "I had a long conversation with Tony Blair about this issue ..."

Heather's friends believe she's so remarkable that McCartney should be grateful. "A lot of people think she's hit the jackpot, but I think he is one of the luckiest men in the world," says Kirsten Lever, whose handicapped son was befriended by her. "She is so courageous, and he's as proud as Punch to be with her."

But at 34, Heather is as controversial as she is celebrated—and while her 60year-old groom may be satisfied that she is genuine, questions about her credibility have dogged her for years. After she and McCartney went public with their romance, Heather's often sordid past set off a feeding frenzy among the Fleet Street press, which has raked through her history with savage glee, turning over every rock to see what slithers out.

British readers have been regaled with spiteful stories: from the actor Heather's late mother ran off with, who denied that he'd thrown Heather out or that she had ever been forced to live on the streets; from former lovers, who branded her a sexual temptress practiced in the art of enslaving men with her erotic wiles; from the ex-husband she spumed, who called her a pathological liar and claimed she had soaked him financially; from the father who insists he was never abusive or violent, despite the fact that all four of his children say he was.

Heather is now poised to retail her hairraising story in the United States, where her autobiography is being released this month. Published in Britain in 1995 under the unfortunate title of Out on a Limb, it has been updated with the perfect fairy-tale ending of how our heroine married the cutest Beatle and graduated to virtual sainthood. The book has been retitled A Single Step, invoking the 2,500-year-old words of Lao-tzu: "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." According to Heather, all royalties as well as the advance on her book will go to Adopt-a-Minefield, a program of the United Nations Association that has recently subsumed Heather's own charity, the Heather Mills Health Trust, which is no longer accepting donations.

Heather's account of her harrowing childhood is certainly a page-turner, and no matter how many peripheral characters dispute her veracity, her siblings have rallied loyally to her defense. "It's all true," says her brother, Shane, a bass-trombonist who lives in London. "It's not exaggerated. I'm surprised we're as sane as we are."

They are particularly disdainful of Heather's former husband and his attack. "Alfie is the lowest life-form on earth," says Fiona, Heather's sister and assistant. "He's just a bitter ex."

But other associates have developed a very different view of Heather's trustworthiness. "She's a complete fruitcake and a fantasist," says a former television colleague who claims that Heather grossly exaggerated everything from her TV career to her charity work. "Paul is a poor sap who may have gotten himself into something very nasty."

So which is the real Heather Mills—the glam one-legged Florence Nightingale or the alleged ex-hooker rumored to be a former call girl who could be rented for £500 a night, who slept with Mohamed A1 Fayed, and who frolicked in a threesome with multimillionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi at his mansion in Spain (all charges vehemently denied by Heather in the British press)?

To her many friends, Heather is a paragon of altruism. "Heather thinks about others more than she thinks about herself," says Renata Matijasevic, a friend from Croatia. "There is nothing insincere about her charity work. She wants to help, and she has this gift of giving. We should be grateful to have people like Heather. More of them would make the world a better place."

But even Heather's admirers admit that her concept of truth can be elastic. "When she was younger she'd exaggerate things a bit, but never with any malicious intent," says Anya Noakes, a longtime friend who became Heather's press representative last spring. "She is hyperbolic; she gets caught up in some of her stories. When you've said something often enough over the years, you forget what's true. It's a rather childish quality."

"If you were kind, you'd say she would exaggerate various things," comments another former television colleague. "If you were unkind, you'd say she would fantasize. She did exaggerate quite a lot, which was funny in some ways—we all used to laugh about it—and tragic in others, because sometimes it was so ridiculous. I think it's all about her insecurities. It was never anything nasty. It was just inflating her own importance."

These days Heather is building a new life with a husband who is an international icon. Perhaps only in the service of their privacy, she still comes up with apparent whoppers. Right before the wedding, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported that Heather and Paul had a screaming fight at their $l,500-a-night hotel suite in Miami, which ended with Paul hurling Heather's $25,000 engagement ring off the fifth-floor balcony. Family confidants told a different story: "Heather threw the ring out the window," says one. The fight was so loud and angry that other guests at the hotel complained. According to a security guard, McCartney was heard shouting, "I don't want to marry you! The wedding's off!"

After the ring took flight, McCartney summoned the hotel staff to help look for it, to no avail. Finally Paul and Heather departed. Desperate, the hotel brought in metal detectors, and the ring was eventually located, hidden in the bushes. Paul paid for a first-class ticket to England for a hotel representative to hand-deliver it. One British paper later reported the fight was caused by Heather's request that Paul take off the ring given to him by his late wife, Linda. Wedding photographs show that Linda's jade ring has indeed been replaced by a new wedding band.

When I ask Heather about the incident, she turns uncharacteristically subdued. We are sitting on the rocky beach in front of her seaside house on the southern coast of England, and she keeps her eyes on the ground as she replies. "We were playing a game—having a joke, doing catch with the ring," she says. "We have arguments, but not that kind of fight."

Heathers conversations often feature A-list openers: "I had a long conversation with Tony Blair..

She is staring down at the ring, a bright-blue sapphire flanked by diamonds that glitter in the sunlight. On her other hand is the sapphire-and-diamond band that served as her wedding ring. Large diamond studs sparkle in her ears, and a heart-shaped diamond nestles at her throat. She does not meet my gaze.

In person, Heather is an imposingly tall, slender woman with blond-streaked hair and arresting green eyes. Although her features are sharp, her mouth is so full and lush it looks as if it belongs to another, softer face. These are lips that will never need collagen. A former bathing-suit model, McCartney's new missus is wearing beige linen pants and a clinging sandcolored top that accentuates her bosom, which, despite the breast-reduction surgery that diminished her bra size from 32E to 32C, remains quite formidable. Within moments of being introduced, she has already popped off her prosthesis to show me her remarkably lifelike silicone leg, complete with blue veins, tiny freckles, and chipped crimson toenail polish. Her left leg was amputated just below the knee, and Heather has a wide array of prosthetic legs: ones for skiing, for running, for swimming, for the gym, for high-heeled shoes—seemingly for every occasion and sport imaginable.

"You've got to have a sense of humor about it," says Heather, who provoked public consternation when she deliberately dropped her leg at the end of her video, "Voice," in which McCartney sang backup. "If I dance to more than eight songs, it gets hot, and your own little leg comes out and it will kind of flop on the floor. People tend to freak out."

Because such squeamishness is common, Heather has made it her mission to demystify the wearing of prosthetics at every opportunity, treating her amputated leg with the calm matter-of-factness she has mustered to weather the many trials life has thrown her way. "It is fate, why I lost my leg," she explains. "I realized that everything that happened to me was meant to happen, so I could make a difference. My childhood was the way it was to give me strength to cope. It was predestined. When you're born, your life's already marked out. I totally believe that. Sometimes you get to a juncture where you have choices, and it's up to you which path you're going to choose. But you keep going till you've learned all your lessons."

Although there tends to be a daunting steeliness about Heather, she cracks a toothy grin. "I was definitely a murderer in my last life," she adds. "Why else would all this happen?" Her grin grows broader. "So hopefully my next life will be better."

Some might argue that she's already achieved her next life, but the challenges of her past were undeniably traumatic. "I never had a childhood," Heather says.

"I had to grow up very quickly." Even during the early years, when her parents were still together, Heather was abducted and molested by a swimming instructor who held her and another girl captive in his apartment for days. Heather's parents apparently thought nothing of her failure to come home, explaining later that they assumed she was still at a swim meet. When the girls were finally rescued, the instructor killed himself.

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Life was little better inside the Mills household, which moved frequently around Northern England as Mark Mills attempted to stay a step ahead of his creditors. After years of alleged abuse by her violent and explosive husband, Heather's mother finally ran off with an actor named Charles Stapley. Her three children didn't hear a word from her for years, although she later claimed she had written letters that their father must have confiscated. "She was full of guilt for leaving us, and her way of dealing with it was cutting off completely," says Heather. "I never knew her."

The children often bore the brunt of their father's terrifying rages; according to the kids, Fiona was thrown through a glass door and Shane through a glass window on separate occasions. Otherwise they were mostly left to fend for themselves. Heather says if she didn't steal, they didn't eat, so she was a proficient shoplifter by the age of 10. "I stole clothes, food, everything—to survive," she admits. "My father would say, 'Go get the food.' He knew we had to steal it."

When their father went to prison, Shane was sent to live with their grandmother in Brighton and Heather and Fiona with their mother and her lover in London. But, according to the girls, Stapley made it clear that he didn't want them around, and eventually he issued an ultimatum: either Heather had to leave or he would. Knowing that her mother wouldn't choose her, Heather ran away, first to live with a traveling fair and then, when the older man who befriended her died of a heroin overdose, resorting to a harder life on the streets of London, showering in Victoria Station and dragging her belongings around in plastic garbage bags. "I think she thought, Sod you, I'll do it on me own," says Julia Quinn, her childhood best friend.

By the time she was 13, Heather had left school, ending her formal education. "For me it's been the university of life," she says wryly. "Paul said to me once, 'Thank god you're not educated! What would we have to put up with if you were? You'd take over the whole world!'"

Early on, however, Heather seemed headed only for a life of crime. Her thieving included a serious episode as a teenager when she was working in a jewelry store and stole some necklaces. After the tabloid press began to excavate her past, the jewelry-store owner complained that the thefts had been far more extensive than Heather owned up to in her book, with losses of £20,000 in merchandise ultimately putting him out of business.

Stapley also objected to the way he had been portrayed, saying that he and Heather's mother had spent many a night wandering the streets of London with a photograph of Heather, trying to find their headstrong little runaway. "Rubbish," says Fiona bitterly.

The Mills children are equally disgusted with their father's attempts to exculpate himself, although they discount the interviews he has purportedly given to the British tabloids proclaiming his innocence; after multiple strokes, they say, he can only mumble. "He can't speak, so they just put words in his mouth," Heather explains. "They shout things at him and he just says 'Uhhhhh ... ' They take that as a yes."

When Heather got married, Mark Mills sent a glass fruit bowl with a card that read, "To Heather and Macca, from Father."

"Fiona said, 'Why don't you just go smash it on his head?'" Heather says. "She hates him." Fiona, who has joined us on the beach, nods vigorously.

Also estranged is Mills's other daughter, his child with a girlfriend he never married. Now 17, Claire Mills doesn't speak to her father, either. "I haven't seen him for a few years," says Claire. "He always gets really angry and starts shouting. He'll just argue over nothing and be really violent. Wife beaters always apologize and say they'll change, but they never can. Heather's given him loads of chances as well. She was always bailing him out, but he's never going to learn. He always blows it."

Heather says she finally gave up on her father after her accident, when he called her in the hospital and failed to inquire about her lost leg. "He said, 'I need a new TV and video.' Not 'Are you all right?' I realized I had to let go. It's like letting go of an abusive boyfriend. Sometimes you've got to let go of an abusive father. That's just who he is. He'd sell me for a camel. I think that's what made me determined not to put up with so much crap from guys."

Her father may have been unconcerned, but Heather's friends were awed by her response to the accident. "After a traumatic amputation, some people never come to terms with it, and others take years," says Bob Watts, the prosthetist who makes Heather's artificial legs. "With Heather it took a few weeks. She's a very motivated, very strong character."

And she immediately turned those strengths toward helping others. "At first she was delirious, but when she came round she was like, 'Right, I'm going to make something out of this. I'm not just going to lie here,' " says Ruth Matthews, a former model who met Heather when she was running a modeling agency. "When she realized how hard it was to get prosthetics, she said, 'I've got to do something for these people.'"

Kirsten Lever, whose child has multiple disabilities, met Heather when she was making a television program at the hospital where Lever's son was a patient. "It was a very low point in my life, and she got me through it," says Lever. "She would come in on all her days off and sit with me and Alex, just giving support.

He's had 15 operations, and I'm terrible with anesthesia, so Heather would take him in and sit through his operations, which were like eight hours at a time. She's so positive and inspirational, she makes you pick yourself up and move on again. She has had such a terrible life, and yet she carries on and does all these things for other people."

Heather is philosophical about her past. "I think I was born resilient," she says. "I never believe in blaming your childhood for your behavior. Maybe I would have been different if I had a perfect childhood. I might have been less ambitious, less driven."

And no one has ever questioned Heather's drive. After she matured into an astonishingly buxom young woman ("Bloody hell, Heather, your tits are like watermelons/" she quotes one schoolmate as marveling), her ambitions turned to modeling, although her Playmatestyle figure relegated her to the so-called glamour end of the business—including the topless cheesecake photographs known in British tabloids as "page 3" pictures. She met Alfie Karmal, a half-Greek, half-Arab businessman, when she was an 18-year-old cocktail waitress, but their marriage ended when Heather ran off with a Slovenian ski instructor named Milos. It was her experiences in the former Yugoslavia as war was breaking out that launched her career as a charity worker. Horrified at the hardships inflicted by the war, she began collecting relief supplies for refugees. "I was taking trucks down with everything from insulin and painkillers to crutches and walking frames—anything we could get," she says.

Heather's efforts eventually metamorphosed into the formation of the Heather Mills Health Trust, her personal charity. Her heart may have been in the right place, but her accounting was somewhat lax, to put the most generous interpretation on her rather mysterious finances. Although Heather had raised money for land-mine-survivor assistance since 1994, she never bothered to register her trust with Britain's Charity Commission, which requires that any organization collecting more than £ 1,000 a year must file an annual report. It was only at McCartney's insistence that Heather finally developed a business plan for the trust, to which he gave £150,000. She registered it in 2000.

"I had funded most of my charity work myself," Heather explains in her book. "A big donation would mean I'd have to become a registered charity. I had mixed feelings about that prospect. Up until now, when I wanted to do something I had just got on and done it. But I knew life wouldn't be that simple once we were a registered charity. There'd be lots of rules and regulations. ... I didn't relish all that bureaucracy slowing my work down."

Equally hard to verify is Heather's claim that she has sent 27,000 prosthetic limbs to amputees over the years; some knowledgeable observers suspect that's wildly inflated. "Her figures are plucked out of the air," says one veteran of the relief movement who has worked with her.

These days Heather is focusing her efforts on Adopt-a-Minefield. "The land-mine cause had dropped off the agenda after Princess Diana died, because people thought the problem was solved," says Alexandra Lagelee, director of Adopt-a-Minefield in the U.K. "What Heather has done for the land-mine cause is to give it a huge profile, because of who she is and because of her and Paul. She was the reason we expanded into survivor assistance, in addition to mine clearance, to make it a more comprehensive approach."

While cynics claim that Heather's real motive is self-aggrandizement, fellow activists say that's not fair. "Heather is willing to use her position to try to bring humanitarian good and social change to the world, and to that I say, 'Amen,' " says Nobel Prize co-laureate Jerry White, founder and director of the Landmine Survivors Network. "To some, it may appear that her motivation is egocentric, but that's true with most people. Look at the good she's trying to do. I believe her passion is genuine."

Although Heather seems largely without rancor about her parents, she becomes enraged by unfavorable coverage of her charitable work. She was particularly incensed by a recent attack in Britain's Sunday Mirror questioning her handling of donations for victims of the Indian earthquake in Gujarat, which she funneled through the Lions Charitable Trust, an independent group unconnected to the Heather Mills trust. In late August, the Sunday Mirror agreed to pay £50,000 in damages— which Heather said she was donating to Adopt-aMinefield—for wrongly implying that she was being investigated by the Charity Commission, among other things.

"I do this for nothing," she says heatedly.

"I use my own money and time. These editors, what do they do for people? It was so unfair! It was harder than losing my leg. I know that sounds totally mad, but I find some logic in losing my leg. But every time you take one step forward, the tabloid press gets the knives out. That's been the most stressful thing in my life. Every time the press wants to slag me off, that can be detrimental to the charity. The press in Britain has done so much damage our donations started going down. As far as I'm concerned, they're killing people." She glares fiercely, her green eyes burning with anger.

Now that the Heather Mills trust has been merged into Adopt-a-Minefield, Heather hopes that her cause will be protected from the negative fallout of her celebrity. "With Adopt-aMinefield, every dollar gets matched by the Better World Fund, which is Ted Turner's fund—so it doubles the money. I'm not egotistical about my name being on the charitable letterhead," says Heather (although she and Paul did put their official wedding photograph on the McCartneys' new personal stationery, prompting much amused gossip among London's smart set). According to Adopt-a-Minefield, the Better World Fund actually contributes only 25 percent in matching funds rather than doubling the money.

Like her philanthropy, Heather's sex life has provided a bumper crop of tabloid fodder. She admits that she has often been disappointed in love. "I'm a total romantic," she says. "I fall in love quite easily, and then find out that the person isn't the person I thought they were. I meet guys, they fall in love with my independence, and then they try to change me—keep me behind bars with a Quaker dress on. And then they wonder why it doesn't work out."

But everything is different with Paul, she says. "I'm really happy. It's incredibly passionate. It's intense all the time, and we love each other's company. Our favorite thing is to stay home. I cook a meal—Indian or Thai or Italian—and he dances around the room like Fred Astaire. We've always got so much to talk about. I've met someone who's at the same level intellectually, but who's like a little boy, so I feel like I'm a grown woman and he's my little boy. He creates the child in me. He's very funny. He does things to embarrass me, just to make me laugh. We're great for each other. I could eat him! When you love someone, you just like their smell, and he smells fantastic. I think when you find your soul mate, you could sleep under their armpits. I'm like a little dog. He says, 'You're always sniffing me!'" Heather sighs dreamily, her often tense expression uncharacteristically beatific.

Both Heather and Paul describe their courtship in terms that make it sound more like an 18th-century minuet than a 21st-century rock song. "It evolved very slowly," says Heather. "I was properly dated and properly wooed. I had flowers sent to me; I was sung to on the phone, sung to while I was making dinner. I thought, This is unbelievable! This is what people dream of!"

Heather and Paul first met at the Daily Mirror's Pride of Britain awards ceremony, where Heather was introducing a quadruple amputee named Helen Smith. McCartney found Heather electrifying. "I thought she looked great, and then I heard her speak and she sounded great," he says. "She was talking about the work she does, and she was very in command of the situation, very impressive. She just struck me, and I went, 'Wow!' So I made it my business to inquire about her and see what it was she did. I arranged a meeting with her. There certainly was a physical attraction when I first saw her, but I became more impressed as I realized what sort of character she is. She's very kind. She gives up a lot of her time. When things go wrong, she says, 'What can I do?' Instead of backing off, she steps right in. It's very hard to knock. Heather's really a lovely girl, a very impressive woman. Anyone who knows her really admires her. Self-respect for disabled people—it's huge, what she does. She bloody cares. Look at Heather's history—what she's done, what she's overcome, what she does now, for a living and with her living. Her detractors can be infantile and pissy, but please don't put some good like this down. We ain't got enough of this."

As Heather was getting to know McCartney, she was planning to marry a BBC producer named Chris Terrill, but she suddenly broke off their engagement a few days before the wedding, all but leaving skid marks as she careened out the door. Heather has left at least three former fiances, two of whom fell madly in love with her during whirlwind courtships and proposed within days of their first meeting. Many of her romances received breathless coverage in the British press, which quoted Heather's rhapsodic pronouncements—"We were making love with our minds and not just our bodies!"—and followed up with equally prurient examinations of her breakups.

"She gives her men sex, sex, and then even more sex—anywhere and everywhere," said one school friend. "She says she is giving Paul the best sex of his life, and as much of it as he wants—no wonder he looks happy."

Heather and Paul kept their budding romance under wraps as long as possible, finally going public on television—"Yeah, I love her!"—in October of 2000. Since then, gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic have worked overtime, churning pervasive rumors that McCartney's four children—James, Mary, and Stella, his children with Linda, and Linda's daughter Heather, whom he adoptedare appalled by his choice. At one point McCartney admitted that things were difficult, attributing any problems to the inevitable adjustments when one parent dies and the surviving parent finds a new partner.

These days the family is pretending that harmony reigns and complaining that the press is fomenting trouble where none exists. "We get on so well it's hilarious," Heather Mills says, her expression grim. "We get along brilliantly. I'm closest to Heather [McCartney], We speak every day. We are so close she's like another sister!" Mills does not mention the fact that James and Heather McCartney boycotted the wedding, a fact that their father's handlers successfully kept out of the press. "That's pretty bad form," observes Susie Charrington, who attended the wedding.

McCartney nevertheless claims that all is well. "It's been hugely exaggerated. Nobody has any problems," he insists. "We just have to get used to each other. It just takes time, and the less I can make of this the better. They're loving kids. Everyone's getting on fine, but like any family, there are degrees of getting on fine."

In fact, however, McCartney's kids have made it clear on two continents that they loathe and distrust their new stepmother. They have a long litany of complaints which recently included the fact that Heather didn't ask Stella to design her ecru lace wedding dress (she was quoted as saying that Stella's designs, which have featured slogans such as "Wet" printed on the crotch, are "too tarty," whereupon Stella was quoted as saying, "Doesn't she know lace is out of fashion?"), and that Mary, a photographer, wasn't asked to take the official wedding photograph. When I ask Heather why Stella didn't make the dress, she says coldly, "She never offered."

The McCartney girls were also hurt that Heather didn't invite them to her hen party, and the rift was on public display one weekend last spring. Heather was giving a hen party in the United States. Stella, who had not been invited, was browsing in a SoHo art gallery with her father, who was urging her to call Heather, when their conversation erupted into a loud argument. Onlookers listened, transfixed, as Stella cried, "You've chosen her over your own family!" and stormed out of the gallery in tears.

It's a feud," says a confidante of the McCartney children, whose friends portray them as devoted to their father and worried about how vulnerable he might be to a predatory seductress. Other observers are more cynical. "I think it's the money," says one. "They're up against Heather's toughness, and they're scared by it. It's easy to make Heather the enemy, but if the kids have an issue it's really with their father." Those less sympathetic to the McCartney offspring also note a certain unseemliness in the spectacle of four ultra-privileged rich kids slandering a handicapped charity worker who has risen from homelessness and abuse to make herself into a world-famous Nobel Prize nominee. "She's desperate for their affection and approval—of course she is," says Charrington. "She gave it her best shot, but at the end of the day it's up to them. She's done all she can."

McCartney knows that many people think he's been bamboozled by a gold digger. "I'm not stupid," he says mildly. "Heather's a really nice person, or else I wouldn't be attracted in the least. She's great. But you're going to find people who are going to knock her, because the better story is the negative one."

After all, he has been through this before. When he married Linda Eastman, she became known as "the most hated woman in Britain." "Linda had a terrible time of it," acknowledges McCartney. He also watched John Lennon deal with similar antagonism when Yoko Ono entered his life, and he's well aware that Heather is regarded by many as the new Yoko.

Heather is infuriated by the widespread assumption that she has played Paul for a sucker. "It's the biggest insult to Paul to say, 'Oh, there's nothing else a woman would want him for!'" she says heatedly. "He's not talented? He's not sexy? He's a very sexy, charismatic man!"

He is also enduringly successful. "Beatles One, a compilation of their No. 1 hits, was No. 1 on the charts for 16 weeks—the biggestselling CD of the year [2000]," says someone who works for Paul. "But it's not just Beatles; Wingspan [by McCartney's band Wings] was a double CD that was No. 2 on the charts in America."

McCartney's current road show is raking it in as well. With tickets costing up to $250, the tour grossed $53 million last spring. The 23-city fall tour, "Back in the U.S.," winds up on October 29 in Phoenix. Although McCartney turned 60 in June, he seems full of vigor these days; his fans have noted the rich chestnut color of his hair and speculated about his youthful face. "He dyes his hair, but he's never had plastic surgery," Heather insists. "He's got all his lines. He's just looking good for his age."

Friends familiar with both of McCartney's wives comment that Heather actually resembles the strong-willed Linda. "This is a guy who likes women who run the show," says one acquaintance. "He was in deep, deep grief after Linda died; he was lost, and Heather brought him back to life. He could have had anyone, but he likes women who are the boss."

Now that Heather's position is secure, observers are wondering what her agenda will be. McCartney's children are distraught that their father and his new wife are trying to have a baby. Heather, who suffered two ectopic pregnancies with Alfie Karmal, is not sanguine about her chances. "I don't know whether I ever could have a child, because of the ectopics," she explains. "I just say, 'What will be will be.' The last thing I want is to say, 'It's Tuesday, it's five o'clock, I'm ovulating—let's go for it!' I adore kids, and if it happens it happens, but I've seen too many people get too upset about it."

In the meantime, she will certainly continue to campaign for her cause, which has benefited immeasurably from her relationship with McCartney. On his current tour, he puts on a NO MORE LAND MINES! T-shirt during his encores, with anti-land-mine merchandise on sale at every venue and proceeds going to Adopt-a-Minefield. Heather has also lent her name to a new line of clothing from INC International Concepts, with a percentage of the profits going to the charity. "So far we've raised $100,000," she says.

Although Heather has become skilled at exploiting her new husband's fame, she remains aggressively protective of her own autonomy. "I believe every woman should have a reserve, because you never know what will happen in life. You have to keep a degree of independence to keep your relationship equal—and to keep some spark in it," she says. "Guys can get bored, especially if they feel they've just got you there. I'll never be dependent on Paul financially."

She gazes around at her spare, whitewashed house, which looks more like something you'd find on a Greek island than on a British isle. "This is my house," she says firmly. "He can come to visit my house." She is still angry about her ex-husband's claims that she took money from him, insisting she paid everything back. "If you can't even borrow money from your husband when you've helped build his business and brought his kids up ... " She shakes her head in disgust. "I will never borrow money from a man again, and I will never be in a situation where a guy says, 'This is my house.' I never want to be that dependent."

For the McCartneys, naturally there are many residences, from Paul's Regency town house in London's St. John's Wood to the 160-acre family estate in East Sussex, where his son, James, still lives, to their house in the Hamptons. So where, for Heather, is home? "Wherever I lay my hat," she says with a shrug. Constantly uprooted as a child whose family was always on the run, she is a lifelong gypsy. "I haven't known any different," she admits. "I nest in short periods and make a home wherever I am. Paul travels a lot; he's used to being on the go. We've got this thing where we like to be together, so he says, 'I'll come with you,' and I try and go on tour with him. I do a lot of counseling around the world, and I meet up with amputees at local hospitals while he goes off and does sound checks. We're always on the move."

These days the moves feature chartered planes and first-class hotels, and Heather's past is beginning to seem like a bad dream. "I spent my life just kind of surviving, trying to build some kind of security for my family," she muses. "I've always funded my family, and it was always just about survival. I was always waiting for another disaster."

Perhaps the disasters are behind her now, but Heather remains visibly wary. "There's a saying, 'Life is a piece of shit. You have to eat slowly,'" she says. "I don't agree with that, by the way." A mischievous grin tugs at the corners of her Cupid's-bow mouth. "I think it's more like: 'Life is a wonderful, big, juicy mango—but occasionally you hit a piece of shit.'"

But no matter what challenges lie in wait, those who know her have little doubt that Heather will prevail. "She knows what she wants, and she'll go out and get it," says her half-sister, Claire. "She's still Heather Mills, which she's always been. But she's Lady McCartney now."