Heather Mills McCartney is telling us about waking up to the smell of a tramp urinating a few feet from her head and about the time she found a friend at the fairground where she once worked, “lying there with a needle in his arm, just dead from a heroin overdose”.
At this harrowing juncture in her address to the London Business Forum, just behind Oxford Street, we are still some way from her 15th birthday, her experience as a young adult in the early stages of Yugoslavia’s civil war and the modelling career that ended when she was 25, after her left leg was scythed off in an accident with a police motorcyclist on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Not surprisingly, the audience is still as she speaks; her measured voice delivering a dramatic life story with self-deprecating humour, never mentioning, for example, being nominated for the Nobel peace prize for her anti-landmine work in 1996.
The wife of Sir Paul McCartney has lived with extremes - from begging to billionaires - and experiences that resemble cliffhanger episodes in daytime soap operas. At one point, she says, as if to herself: “It’s just, like, amazing to think how my life has changed so much.”
Like all opera, this one also has improbable coincidences. For instance: “My mother lost her leg [in a car accident] at the same age as me and in the same place,” though it was reattached.
And there was the dinner party eight years after Mills McCartney lost her leg, where a man began staring at her across the table. “’We’ve met before,’ he said. ‘Have we?’ ‘Yes, I’ve seen you naked.’ I’m thinking, ‘How can he say that in front of his wife? I don’t remember this one.’ And he said, ‘I was the doctor on call and was asked to get the death certificate because they thought you weren’t going to live.’”
There are plenty of mordantly comic interludes, notably when the artificial leg fails to behave, falling off in expensive restaurants, on a ski lift and while she is rollerblading around Hyde Park.
Mills McCartney was a doughty campaigner for refugees in Slovenia long before she met her famous future husband. Nowadays, she is patron of Adopt-A-Minefield, which campaigns for a worldwide ban on the use of landmines and gives prosthetic limbs to victims.
She gets to the subject of her leg almost immediately, drawing attention to what lies beneath an elegant, fitted lime-green dress. “It looks good doesn’t it?” Later she says that if cancer swooped down, “I’d cope.” And you believe her. “Injustice, unfairness, that’s what affects me the most, and will probably be what kills me in the end - the way that people treat each other in this world.”
Her tone shows she’s not too keen on the way “the press” treat people, either. Journalists were circling the hospital when she came out of intensive care after her crash in August 1993. She asked for money, drawing on her experience of running a modelling agency. “They didn’t know that side of me, they just knew dumb-blonde-model-in-hospital-loses-leg.” The result was £180,000 and the start of an affectionless respect, the sort that professional poker players have for each other. “I built up a great relationship with these editors for quite a number of years, until I met my husband. But Mother Teresa couldn’t have had a good relationship with them if she’d married my husband.”
This is her only hint of a soured relationship with the press and one of only two references to her husband.
Mills McCartney, now 37, is the daughter of a theatre impresario, from whom she is estranged. He is the same age as Sir Paul, and there are no tender words for him. Born in Tyne and Wear, she seems to have had a short-lived childhood and learned an early self-reliance. Her mother had a bad relationship with her father. “It was all horrific,” she says. Her mother eventually ran away with an actor, and Heather, her younger brother and her sister were left with their father, but not for long. He was jailed for fraud and the children headed for London, where their mother was embroiled in another damaging relationship, “the next best rung up the ladder, which was just a mentally abusive man”. Heather left and found work among the dispossessed in a travelling fairground - on Clapham Common.
The next few years of her life involved moments of happiness punctured by indignity and misery, notably grinding poverty and the loss of her close friend at the fair to heroin. Eventually, she discovered modelling, which she quickly excelled at and which introduced her to accomplished men, including a ski instructor, with whom she lived in Slovenia, and a “snooty” Italian who tried, unsuccessfully, to teach her not to say “cheers” when raising a drink.
The word “survival” crops up several times during the hour, providing a steady backbeat to the score, although less often than “boobs” (her own three times).
When she leaves the room, you notice instantly that she walks without a limp. She seems balanced, in control and steely, the artificial limb and its owner utterly indistinguishable.
