Britain is often said to have become a “celebrity culture”. It is hard to say if the preoccupation with celebrity is more extreme in Britain than in many other societies, but if it is, the reason may lie in the vast inequalities and extraordinary moral and psychological disarray of British society. At all events, today’s Britain abounds in people who are at once ill educated and emotionally disturbed and only too ready to believe that the pursuit of fame and money is the only human aspiration that matters.
It is celebrity culture that provides the context of the unedifying divorce proceedings now under way between Sir Paul McCartney and his second wife, the former model Heather Mills. Though it is many years since McCartney was at the height of his fame as a member of the Beatles, he remains at the age of 64 one of the world’s best-known rock stars, a celebrity who commands pan-continental attention. Before becoming involved with him, the 38-year-old Heather Mills was no more than moderately well known. What now seems clear is that she always nursed an insatiable appetite for publicity and that when McCartney asked her to marry him she had no objection to the hugely increased personal exposure entailed in becoming his wife.
The product of a troubled childhood who became a model, Mills went on to commit herself to charity work. After losing a leg in a traffic accident and resorting to a prosthetic replacement, she devoted her energies to campaigning for prosthetic limbs for war victims. It could charitably be said that she was marrying McCartney both because she had fallen in love with him and because she saw marriage to him as a means of benefiting her humanitarian activities.
But few are disposed to see her in charitable terms. The leaked allegation that she has video evidence that McCartney abused her has revived innuendoes that she is a self-seeking fantasist and strengthened suspicions that she was scheming to get her hands on his wealth from the outset.
The media “feeding frenzy” to which the couple have fallen prey is profoundly damaging to both of them. For his part, McCartney must be ruing the day he met Heather Mills; maintaining his winsome “nice guy” image was never least among his concerns. Even before the latest ugly rumors about his marital conduct began to circulate, he had been embarrassed by stories that, far from having been involved in mere glamour modeling, Mills had previously made a living from altogether less salubrious work. With his wife of thirty years, the late Linda McCartney — who was chiefly known for establishing her own brand of vegetarian food — he had appeared to enjoy the happiest of marriages (though a friend of Linda McCartney’s has now cast doubt on this). There was much public distress on behalf of him and his children when Linda McCartney died prematurely. McCartney’s hasty re-marriage — to a much younger woman with a checkered past — cannot be said to have been welcomed by his children or his fans.
The irony that McCartney has been pre-eminently identified with romance has been widely noted; with fellow Beatle, John Lennon, he composed some of the most touching love songs of modern times.
The irony has been noted, too, that the embattled star was once much associated with the utopian hopes and dreams of the 1960s. Beamed across the world in 1967 at a time when satellite television was a novelty, the occasion when the Beatles gave a live performance of their epoch-making anthem, “All you Need is Love”, is vividly remembered by many now in middle age. Not a few born after the 1960s have since been captivated by the Beatles’ aura. When the audiovisual history of the group, the Beatles Anthology, came out in 1995, it was avidly watched by younger people nostalgic for an idealistic era they never experienced. McCartney remarked that the Beatles’ charismatic career owed much to the fact that a “pretty good spirit” lay behind it. That may not always have been true; there was endless rivalry between the so-called “fab four” and the creative partnership between McCartney and John Lennon declined into poisonous mutual enmity. But the public perception of the Beatles will always be that of a uniquely gifted group whose music was an affirmation of life and a force for unity. Theirs was a humanist art which now stands in sharp contrast to the nihilism that marked the pop culture of the 1970s, when the punk rocker, Johnny Rotten, bawled out the Sex Pistols’ doom-laden lyric “No Future”.
It is hard to resist the temptation to see large implications in the unhappy turn things have taken for McCartney. That this apostle of love and peace has ended up fighting a squalid divorce case over his vast personal fortune mocks the ideals of 40 years ago. The Beatles were after all the product of a historical phase when Britain boasted a welfare state and the ethos of national unity bequeathed by World War II remained relatively intact. It could be said that McCartney’s ill-fated second marriage represents a collision between the Britain that was and the Britain that is. Yet there is a closer kinship than is always acknowledged between the 1960s and the acquisitive society spawned by the 1980s, for the cult of self-expression and emphasis on liberation of the Beatles’ heyday all too easily degenerated into the narcissism and self-interest which have since prevailed. “It’s easy”, ran the refrain of “All you need is love”, inviting people to embrace the illusion that the fun and fame enjoyed by the Beatles were available to everyone.
Celebrity culture can be traced back to the 1960s, and so can the emotional incontinence that accompanies it. Not least is Heather Mills a child of her time in dramatizing herself as a high-profile victim. She is, however, unlikely to be remembered as anything more than a pathological attention-seeker who sought to take advantage of her husband’s mega-stardom. No matter what the upshot of the legal battle between them, McCartney’s fame is founded on unimpeachable artistic achievements. Heather Mills’ unrestrained assault on the former Beatle merely exposes the paltriness of her values and of the society that formed them.
