Sex, money and marital dysfunction: It’s all there in the Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce settlement, splayed out in 58 revelatory pages that read more like a British tabloid story than a legal decision.
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The decree, which awarded Mills $48 million, is larded with prurient, and seemingly gratuitous details, such as the fact that McCartney did not take off his wedding band from late wife Linda Eastman McCartney until the day he married Mills And that the couple stopped using birth control only on their wedding night. “I was and remain fairly old-fashioned about marriage,” McCartney is quoted. “We decided upon a proper wedding for that reason. . . .We stopped using contraception the night we were married. There was never any question of us doing so before the wedding.”
But what is unprecedented is the glimpse the settlement offers into the pop millionaire’s sprawling financial empire, valued at about $768 million, including an art collection with Picassos and Renoirs worth $62 million, and a string of luxurious properties valued at $68 million in the U.S. and Britain. They include:
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• a midtown Manhattan apartment he bought in 1984;
• a house in Amagansett, Long Island;
• a house in Beverly Hills;
• a 1,500-acre estate called Peasmarsh in East Sussex, where he spent much of his married life with Linda;
• a country retreat in the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland;
• a townhouse in St. John’s Wood, London;
• other homes in East Sussex, Essex, Somerset and Merseyside.
The majority of McCartney’s wealth comes from business assets, valued at $480 million, primarily through MPL Communications, an umbrella company which among other things, includes an extensive music publishing catalogue. MPL owns the rights to all the songs written by Buddy Holly, as well as musicals including Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line and Grease.
He also has $30 million in British and U.S. banks, investments of $68 million, and is owed $7.4 million and has $19 million in tax liabilities, according to the settlement.
For all that, the 65-year-old musician comes through the pages of the settlement as remarkably down-to-earth. He spends most his time in his London apartment or in East Sussex, which the judge describes as “a very modest property,” and sent his older children to public schools. Despite the stalking murder of former bandmate John Lennon, McCartney said he has little security for himself or his older children, except when he is on tour.
“It sets them apart from their peers and makes them an object of curiosity and ridicule,” McCartney is quoted. “Such children live in gilded cages.”
Mills, on the other hand, comes across as manipulative in the extreme. She describes a slew of “offers” she claims she had to turn down because McCartney demanded her undivided attention, from a contract to model bras for Marks & Spencer, to a partnership with McDonald’s USA to sell a vegetarian food line and to co-host the Larry King Live.
McCartney suggests she exaggerated their importunings and also denied he stood in her way - positions that Judge Hugh Bennett came to embrace.
“To some extent she is her own worst enemy,” Bennett ventures at one point. “She has an explosive and volatile character.”
She is also determined. She has already has hired a team of forensic accountants to prove her ex-husband is actually worth almost double what the judge found in an effort to get his decision thrown out.
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1 Comments
#1. martin 03.27.2008
Can’t buy me love, yea, everybody tells me so…..
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