Sunday 8 June 2014

MI6 Hit-Piece on Paula Yates - September 19th 2000


ROCK chick, earth mother, Jezebel, journalist, manipulator, victim, survivor, prey: Paula Yates was all of those things, and sometimes none of them, so you would never be certain who she was going to be on any particular day.

I say this as though I knew her - and of course, I didn't, I met her only on a handful of occasions, when she appeared, variously, as bitch, vixen, sweetheart, Lolita and long-suffering wife. But like the rest of the nation, I felt as if I did know her, because I had seen her on a more or less daily basis for the past 18 years, decorously posed for women's magazine covers, indecorously for men's ones, draped across the centrefold or the television screen or snapped for the tabloids, performing her wide range of roles whenever and wherever seemed necessary.

She was a couple of years older than me, and always seemed to be the girl who did everything first. The quickest punk-babe to hook a pop star - just 18, in 1977, when Bob Geldof was as desirable as he was ever going to be - she left the rest of us trailing again in 1982, as the smart, sexy, sussed presenter of The Tube. She raced ahead again the following year, producing a baby (Fifi Trixibelle) when most of her peers were still babies themselves; and then sparked off the debate about whether mothers needed to stay at home (she said they should, but managed to carry on working herself).

By the time the rest of her contemporaries were just beginning to try to juggle small children and careers, Paula had already moved on to the next stage: extramarital affairs. I remember staggering to a friend's wedding party in 1994 when my second son was three months old, feeling middle-aged and saggy and too tired for fun; and there was Paula, the blonde bombshell herself, three perfect daughters safely out of harm's way, while she flirted with every man in sight (including the most handsome of the lot, Michael Hutchence).

In 1995, she left Bob Geldof - who was still a saint, as well as a knight, 10 years after Live Aid - and moved in with Hutchence, a red-blooded rock star. She was 36, and exemplified the emerging thirtysomething tendency to believe that middle age was years away; that middle youth was where it was at; and that sex and drugs and rock and roll should be available whenever and however you wanted them, family life notwithstanding. Thus, she had a breast job and a new baby (Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily); and both she and her boyfriend seemed equally to appreciate these new additions to their rapidly moving lives.

If only she had managed to leave it at that, Paula Yates would have been the perfect model of perky girl-power. But there was all the dark stuff, too. Surely it was improbable, even impossible, that the woman who had made a virtue of going to bed early with her children in the Eighties - something that I had always liked about her, when everyone else was stomping around in power suits and padded shoulders, surviving on four hours' sleep a night in apparent homage to Margaret Thatcher - should now be staying up late, taking Class A drugs and partying till dawn? How could this be the same woman?

But it was - the loving mother who kept her opium in a Smarties tube under the bed; who breastfed on Prozac; who bought bathroom cleaner as well as vodka the night before she died. I suppose it is called "Having It All": the happy and the sad and the bad and the ugly, all at the same time; all mixed up until she couldn't tell the difference between madness and motherhood.

And how could it ever be otherwise? Because aside from everything else that she did first and fastest, Paula Yates was a leader in the celebrity stakes, where life is played out for the cameras, transforming a personal narrative into public soap opera long before Big Brother was even a twinkle in a hotshot producer's eyes.

At 15, when she should have been safely wrapped up in her O-levels (but no, the cleverest girl in the class had already been there, done those), Paula experienced the white-hot glare of the media when it was revealed that her father, Jess Yates, who hosted the religious series Stars on Sunday, was having a relationship with an actress 30 years his junior.

As it turned out, in another bout of Yates-related celebrity scandal in 1997, Jess Yates was not, in fact, Paula's father; another television presenter - Hughie Green, the star of Opportunity Knocks - was, though both men were dead by then (Jess Yates leaving behind another girlfriend, who was 51 years younger than him, and therefore younger than Paula, too).

It was such an English story - almost comical, like the nudge-nudge wink-wink plot of a Carry On film - though the bedroom farce turned black when Michael Hutchence was discovered hanging in his hotel room in November 1997. Paula never accepted that it was suicide - better, she said, for their daughter to think that her father died in a sex game gone wrong, than see him as a man who would choose to leave his baby and her mother alone on this earth (though what will Tiger Lily be told now?).

So there she was, no father, no husband, no lover. What else - or who else - was Paula going to pull out of her bag of tricks? 

Where was she going, on the other side of 40? Only one thing seemed certain: bereaved, crazed with grief, suicidal, yet from time to time apparently on the mend again, with one new boyfriend or another, and a couple of hopeful television projects in the offing, Paula Yates was still front page news.

I found myself talking about her with other women of my age - sometimes half-arguing - about whether she was a good thing or a bad thing; more sinned against than sinning, or was it the other way round? Somehow, she still managed to embody a bit of our own confusion about how we were supposed to behave as we contemplated hitting 40. She was there first, of course, with her toyboys and her anti-depressants and her wry anxieties about whether she could still turn heads after all these years.

"Out of It".

In June, she was photographed looking drunk or drugged or both, at the premiere of Madonna's new film, The Next Best Thing, and it somehow seemed sad that while Madonna went from strength to strength (new baby, new man, new hit) our own Material Girl, our next best thing, our English version of super-charged Blonde Ambition, was looking so lost and confused; so literally "out of it".

"Out of It"

But she still got to the finishing post first: dying younger than most, fixed in the celebrity hall of fame by virtue of the manner of her departure. She was never an absolute golden girl in life - too mixed up for that - but in death, she will attain a kind of golden status. Which is as it should be: in death as in life, Paula Yates remains impossible to pin down; infuriating, mysterious, even, despite all those years of revelation and exhibition. Better to remember her that way than any other: the girl who ran too fast ahead of the rest of us, so that we never really saw her face.


"August 1979: Lead singer of the Boomtown Rats Bob Geldof, his wife and television producer Paula Yates (1960 - 2000) arriving for the premiere of the film ‘Quadrophenia’ at the Plaza in London."


Mother-to-be Madonna confessed to cravings for eggs, olives and crisps as she proudly showed off her swelling tummy at the premiere of her latest movie.

Arriving at the Odeon West End in London's Leicester Square on Tuesday night for the screening of The Next Best Thing, she joked that it was "almost impossible" to find the right thing to wear when pregnant. 

The superstar arrived at the premiere with her boyfriend Guy Ritchie and co-star Rupert Everett and spoke about how much she loved being in Britain.

Adopting a British accent the star said: "I love the countryside, I love a nice glass of stout and I love my boyfriend."

The 41-year-old singer and actress wore an ankle-length black dress and long frock coat through which her bump was clearly visible.

The child, her second, is due in September.

Eggs, olives and crisps

In the film - released on 23 June - she plays a single woman who asks a gay friend, played by Everett, to father her child.

She laughed off the coincidence that she is pregnant in real life while promoting the film.

"Well, I wasn't pregnant when I was making the movie and I didn't know I was going to be pregnant - life imitates art sometimes," she said.

Asked about her pregnancy Madonna said she craved "eggs and olives". She added: "I'd like a packet of crisps right now."

There has been speculation about whether Madonna plans to settle permanently in the UK with Ritchie, director of hit movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or return to the US, but she would not be drawn on her plans.

Paula Yates 'tearful'
Also at the premiere - which raised money for HIV and Aids charity Crusaid - was Paula Yates, who was swaying as she arrived, walking unevenly in front of the crowd gathered outside the cinema.

Inside Yates looked tearful and emotional as she tried to shield herself from photographers. 

Paula Yates: looked tearful and emotional

Other guests at the screening included model and TV presenter Melinda Messenger, wearing a black bodice and trousers, who was accompanied by husband Wayne Roberts.

EastEnders star Michael Greco, model Sophie Anderton, Simply Red star Mick Hucknall and singer Natalie Imbruglia were also at the event.

Other guests included Spice Girl Mel C and Jay Brown from boy band Five, making their first public appearance together.


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