The Beatles legend, who is currently embroiled in a bitter divorce battle with Mills, is said to be fuming after she attacked him on several UK and US TV shows and has now offered her just £7 million.
A source said: "The war between them has just gone to a new level. Paul knows she will go all out to damage his reputation."
During her TV outbursts, Mills blamed McCartney for the breakdown of their marriage, claimed she felt suicidal and persecuted since receiving death threats, branded McCartney's daughter Stella "evil" and likened herself to the late Princess Diana.
Mills was dropped by her legal team Mischon de Reya following her rants, and she will now represent herself at the next divorce hearing in February.
McCartney is convinced Mills' TV appearances have weakened her case and he is confident he can thrash out a £7 million settlement.
However, Mills is planning to hit back by selling 10 explosive secret tapes she made during their marriage.
The 39-year-old vegan - who lost her left leg below the knee following a motorbike accident in 1993 - reportedly has recordings that prove McCartney accepted blame for the breakdown of their marriage, took Viagra pills to spice up their sex life and mocked her disability.
Meanwhile, McCartney is planning to confirm he is dating Nancy Shevell when they attend Harvey Weinstein's wedding together next month.
Movie mogul Weinstein will marry British fashion designer Georgina Chapman in Connecticut on December 15.
McCartney was first linked to the married millionairess after they were photographed kissing in the Hamptons last month.
The pair spent the weekend in the exclusive New York resort, having dinner, enjoying cocktails and visiting each other's mansions.
Tuesday 20 November 2007
Sunday 11 November 2007
Divorce dunks Michael Jordan for £80m
As A basketball superstar, Michael Jordan was always in a league of his own. Now he is setting a record with his divorce as he prepares to pay his former wife an unprecedented settlement of more than $168m (£80m).
Last December, when Jordan, 44, and his wife Juanita, 48, split up, the athlete balked at signing the settlement. Insiders claim that negotiations have added £20m to the final deal.
The final severance package for Juanita Jordan, which includes the couple’s seven-acre estate in Chicago and custody of their three children, is expected to be agreed before the first anniversary of their last row – which was said to be about money.
The settlement eclipses the most expensive celebrity divorce on public record, in which Neil Diamond paid his ex-wife Marcia Murphey £75m. After licking his wounds, the singer, who had married the television production assistant before he became famous, won plaudits for his chivalrous verdict. “She’s worth every penny,” he said.
It makes other high-profile divorces, such as Steven Spielberg’s £50m separation from his first wife, the actress Amy Irving, and Sir Mick Jagger’s £12m farewell to Jerry Hall, seem like bargains. Sir Paul McCartney’s pending settlement with Heather Mills has been mooted at £50m.
Legal sources close to the 6ft 5in Jordan said that after 17 years of marriage he wants to get on with his life and is willing to pay a premium for an early end to his matrimonial woes. He was already a wealthy basketball star with the Chicago Bulls when the couple met on a blind date in 1984.
He proposed a few months later but Juanita initially turned him down. A year after their marriage in Las Vegas, he signed a prenuptial agreement that entitled her to half his fortune, but she has claimed only a third.
During the marriage Jordan’s warm personality and dazzling basketball skills lifted the game to new heights of popularity. He also pioneered lucrative sponsorships deals with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Nike, which created the bestselling range of Air Jordan shoes.
The sports icon has recently been photographed with a series of young women while Juanita is involved with a banker 20 years younger than herself.
Last December, when Jordan, 44, and his wife Juanita, 48, split up, the athlete balked at signing the settlement. Insiders claim that negotiations have added £20m to the final deal.
The final severance package for Juanita Jordan, which includes the couple’s seven-acre estate in Chicago and custody of their three children, is expected to be agreed before the first anniversary of their last row – which was said to be about money.
The settlement eclipses the most expensive celebrity divorce on public record, in which Neil Diamond paid his ex-wife Marcia Murphey £75m. After licking his wounds, the singer, who had married the television production assistant before he became famous, won plaudits for his chivalrous verdict. “She’s worth every penny,” he said.
It makes other high-profile divorces, such as Steven Spielberg’s £50m separation from his first wife, the actress Amy Irving, and Sir Mick Jagger’s £12m farewell to Jerry Hall, seem like bargains. Sir Paul McCartney’s pending settlement with Heather Mills has been mooted at £50m.
Legal sources close to the 6ft 5in Jordan said that after 17 years of marriage he wants to get on with his life and is willing to pay a premium for an early end to his matrimonial woes. He was already a wealthy basketball star with the Chicago Bulls when the couple met on a blind date in 1984.
He proposed a few months later but Juanita initially turned him down. A year after their marriage in Las Vegas, he signed a prenuptial agreement that entitled her to half his fortune, but she has claimed only a third.
During the marriage Jordan’s warm personality and dazzling basketball skills lifted the game to new heights of popularity. He also pioneered lucrative sponsorships deals with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Nike, which created the bestselling range of Air Jordan shoes.
The sports icon has recently been photographed with a series of young women while Juanita is involved with a banker 20 years younger than herself.
Tuesday 16 October 2007
Divorce is like Hell: Macca
"Going through a divorce is a very painful thing. As Winston Churchill once said, ‘If you're going through Hell, keep going,’" the Daily Mail quoted him, as saying.
Sir Paul McCartney has broken his silence about his divorce from estranged wife Heather Mills and admits that it’s like going through Hell.
The former Beatle, when by Radio Times asked if he had any regrets about bitterness that had overtaken the divorce, said that the experience was ‘very painful’.
"Going through a divorce is a very painful thing. As Winston Churchill once said, ‘If you're going through Hell, keep going,’" the Daily Mail quoted him, as saying.
He added that the only solution to the problem was remaining dignified, and the only way he could do that was by remaining silent.
“The only solution is to remain dignified. If I don't keep a silence about it, I lose this idea of being dignified,” he said.
One good thing however, is the couple’s daughter Beatrice.
“But I've a wonderful baby. 'She's a great joy to me, as are my elder children, so I'm a lucky man.”
Sir Paul McCartney has broken his silence about his divorce from estranged wife Heather Mills and admits that it’s like going through Hell.
The former Beatle, when by Radio Times asked if he had any regrets about bitterness that had overtaken the divorce, said that the experience was ‘very painful’.
"Going through a divorce is a very painful thing. As Winston Churchill once said, ‘If you're going through Hell, keep going,’" the Daily Mail quoted him, as saying.
He added that the only solution to the problem was remaining dignified, and the only way he could do that was by remaining silent.
“The only solution is to remain dignified. If I don't keep a silence about it, I lose this idea of being dignified,” he said.
One good thing however, is the couple’s daughter Beatrice.
“But I've a wonderful baby. 'She's a great joy to me, as are my elder children, so I'm a lucky man.”
Monday 17 September 2007
Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War
The slaughter of a generation of young men in the first world war left a generation of young women without their normal chance of marriage and motherhood. Their fate was already apparent before the war ended. In 1917, the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls stood up before the assembled sixth form and broke the news: “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry.” Her estimate, a former pupil later recorded, proved exactly right. What this generation of women made of their diminished lives, and how the rest of the population regarded them, are the questions that Virginia Nicholson’s pioneering book confronts.
The answer to the second question is – with astonishing spite, resentment and lack of sympathy. When the 1921 census revealed that women outnumbered men by almost 2m, it unleashed a frenzy of vituperation. “The superfluous women,” proclaimed the Daily Mail, “are a disaster to the human race.” They were labelled “limpets” and “bread-snatchers” for taking jobs from demobbed soldiers. They were reviled for forming “unwholesome female friendships” and mocked for lavishing their stifled affection on cats and lapdogs. Sexual psychologists pronounced them unnatural, and Oswald Mosley found them “distressing”. A popular solution was that they should be exported to the colonies. Canada, it was pointed out, had an excess of male trappers and lumberjacks, and even Australia offered many “simple pleasures”.
When, desperate to fill the gap in their lives, they wrote for advice to women’s magazines, they met with heartless optimism (“Cheer up, dears”) or insulting tips on man-catching (“If you use a henna shampoo, don’t overdo it”). Self-help books, with titles such as Sex Philosophy for the Bachelor Girl and Live Alone and Like It, prattled on about taking up folk dancing, astrology or amateur dramatics. But for women whose men had died, the need was to find some way of appeasing their desire for love and their guilt at surviving. An advertisement in the Matrimonial Times read “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war.”
Nicholson’s book centres, however, on women who refused to be overwhelmed by grief and struck out in new directions. One of her heroines is Gertrude Caton-Thompson, the distinguished archeologist. The love of her life, a hussar officer, had been killed, and, like many of the bereaved, she felt at first that it was a treachery to him even to breathe and eat. But after the war she enrolled for classes at University College London, learnt Arabic and studied African prehistory. She braved leopards, fleas, fevers, swamps and crocodiles to excavate Neolithic sites in Malta, South Africa, Arabia and Egypt – where she camped out in a tomb with a family of cobras. Other “superfluous women” whose stories Nicholson tells achieved eminence as explorers, entomologists, marine engineers, doctors, mountaineers and fashion models. Some devoted themselves to slum improvement or famine relief, or broke into what had been male preserves – as the first woman solicitor, the first woman director of a firm of stockbrokers, the first woman privy councillor and cabinet member, the first women vets, civil servants and architects. Meanwhile, women novelists shattered the old spinster stereotypes. Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie transformed the schoolmarm into a sexy elitist; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes blossomed into a happy practising witch.
Most of these enterprising single women, Nicholson acknowledges, were from affluent middle-class families. But there were exceptions. Florence White, a Bradford mill-hand, became a leading political activist and the founder of the National Spinsters Pension Association. Gladys Aylward, a London parlour maid, saved up her wages and travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway to China, where, for 20 years, she worked as a missionary, tending lepers and caring for sick children. Less outstanding, but as heroic in their way, were the women who remained satisfied with little. By 1921, there were half a million female clerks (typists, lowly civil servants, secretaries) who lived in bedsits and spent their days clattering away at Remingtons. They earned 30 shillings a week, and lunched off a penny bun or a Marmite sandwich. Social historians have tended to pity them, but Nicholson, interviewing survivors, found them upbeat. They were all girls together and stayed friends for life. They enjoyed dancing at the Locarno or the Palais, walking in Kensington Gardens, and consuming wonderful bacon-and-eggs teas at Lyons Corner House. It was a brave new world – much better than slaving for a husband.
Other single women, with no particular talents beyond the ability to make children happy, found fulfilment as nannies, wheeling perambulators in London’s parks.
Often the bonds they formed were closer than those the children formed with their parents, and lasted a lifetime. In 1921, a maiden aunt called Gertie Maclean, much in demand for taking nephews and nieces back and forth to school, decided to make aunthood professional and set up Universal Aunts in the back room of a bootmaker’s in Sloane Street. Soon her “Ladies of Irreproachable Background” were escorting children around London, organising trips abroad and doing other people’s shopping for everything “from a hairpin to a Moth aeroplane”.
Gertie, like the trailblazers in male professions, freed single women from dependence and contempt. Another liberator was Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Many single women had found happiness with members of their own sex, but the subject was deemed unmentionable until Hall came along.
Even Marie Stopes, renowned as a birth-control campaigner, proved hostile. The letters of women who wrote to her about their sexual feelings provide an extraordinary archive of ignorance, fear and unhappiness. Asked about lesbianism, Stopes replied firmly that it was a “disease”. Hall, by contrast, made it fashionable. When The Well was prosecuted as an obscene libel she appeared in court in a Spanish riding hat and long leather coat, and though her novel was condemned to be burnt, it became a clandestine bestseller. The centre of a galaxy of artistic and theatrical types, including Tallulah Bank-head and the cellist Gwen Farrar, Hall made it her mission that lesbians should never again be “driven back to their holes and corners”.
The women Nicholson celebrates changed our culture. They turned the Victorian spinster into the modern career woman. But, she believes, they were also different from modern women. Like anyone who has lived through a war, they had lower expectations of happiness and a stoicism and dignity that were all their own. Her book applauds the celebrities but does not forget the obscure. Beside Caton-Thompson she sets May Jones, who wrote her autobiography, in Biro, on scraps of coloured paper, when she was 85. She was a Welsh carpenter’s daughter and fell in love with Philip, a young Quaker intellectual, who went to France with an ambulance unit and was killed. “I knew then,” May wrote, “that I should die an old maid.” Then she added, in pencil, “I was only 20 years old.” The rest of the page is blank. It is moments such as this that make Singled Out so powerful and so inspiring.
The answer to the second question is – with astonishing spite, resentment and lack of sympathy. When the 1921 census revealed that women outnumbered men by almost 2m, it unleashed a frenzy of vituperation. “The superfluous women,” proclaimed the Daily Mail, “are a disaster to the human race.” They were labelled “limpets” and “bread-snatchers” for taking jobs from demobbed soldiers. They were reviled for forming “unwholesome female friendships” and mocked for lavishing their stifled affection on cats and lapdogs. Sexual psychologists pronounced them unnatural, and Oswald Mosley found them “distressing”. A popular solution was that they should be exported to the colonies. Canada, it was pointed out, had an excess of male trappers and lumberjacks, and even Australia offered many “simple pleasures”.
When, desperate to fill the gap in their lives, they wrote for advice to women’s magazines, they met with heartless optimism (“Cheer up, dears”) or insulting tips on man-catching (“If you use a henna shampoo, don’t overdo it”). Self-help books, with titles such as Sex Philosophy for the Bachelor Girl and Live Alone and Like It, prattled on about taking up folk dancing, astrology or amateur dramatics. But for women whose men had died, the need was to find some way of appeasing their desire for love and their guilt at surviving. An advertisement in the Matrimonial Times read “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war.”
Nicholson’s book centres, however, on women who refused to be overwhelmed by grief and struck out in new directions. One of her heroines is Gertrude Caton-Thompson, the distinguished archeologist. The love of her life, a hussar officer, had been killed, and, like many of the bereaved, she felt at first that it was a treachery to him even to breathe and eat. But after the war she enrolled for classes at University College London, learnt Arabic and studied African prehistory. She braved leopards, fleas, fevers, swamps and crocodiles to excavate Neolithic sites in Malta, South Africa, Arabia and Egypt – where she camped out in a tomb with a family of cobras. Other “superfluous women” whose stories Nicholson tells achieved eminence as explorers, entomologists, marine engineers, doctors, mountaineers and fashion models. Some devoted themselves to slum improvement or famine relief, or broke into what had been male preserves – as the first woman solicitor, the first woman director of a firm of stockbrokers, the first woman privy councillor and cabinet member, the first women vets, civil servants and architects. Meanwhile, women novelists shattered the old spinster stereotypes. Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie transformed the schoolmarm into a sexy elitist; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes blossomed into a happy practising witch.
Most of these enterprising single women, Nicholson acknowledges, were from affluent middle-class families. But there were exceptions. Florence White, a Bradford mill-hand, became a leading political activist and the founder of the National Spinsters Pension Association. Gladys Aylward, a London parlour maid, saved up her wages and travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway to China, where, for 20 years, she worked as a missionary, tending lepers and caring for sick children. Less outstanding, but as heroic in their way, were the women who remained satisfied with little. By 1921, there were half a million female clerks (typists, lowly civil servants, secretaries) who lived in bedsits and spent their days clattering away at Remingtons. They earned 30 shillings a week, and lunched off a penny bun or a Marmite sandwich. Social historians have tended to pity them, but Nicholson, interviewing survivors, found them upbeat. They were all girls together and stayed friends for life. They enjoyed dancing at the Locarno or the Palais, walking in Kensington Gardens, and consuming wonderful bacon-and-eggs teas at Lyons Corner House. It was a brave new world – much better than slaving for a husband.
Other single women, with no particular talents beyond the ability to make children happy, found fulfilment as nannies, wheeling perambulators in London’s parks.
Often the bonds they formed were closer than those the children formed with their parents, and lasted a lifetime. In 1921, a maiden aunt called Gertie Maclean, much in demand for taking nephews and nieces back and forth to school, decided to make aunthood professional and set up Universal Aunts in the back room of a bootmaker’s in Sloane Street. Soon her “Ladies of Irreproachable Background” were escorting children around London, organising trips abroad and doing other people’s shopping for everything “from a hairpin to a Moth aeroplane”.
Gertie, like the trailblazers in male professions, freed single women from dependence and contempt. Another liberator was Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Many single women had found happiness with members of their own sex, but the subject was deemed unmentionable until Hall came along.
Even Marie Stopes, renowned as a birth-control campaigner, proved hostile. The letters of women who wrote to her about their sexual feelings provide an extraordinary archive of ignorance, fear and unhappiness. Asked about lesbianism, Stopes replied firmly that it was a “disease”. Hall, by contrast, made it fashionable. When The Well was prosecuted as an obscene libel she appeared in court in a Spanish riding hat and long leather coat, and though her novel was condemned to be burnt, it became a clandestine bestseller. The centre of a galaxy of artistic and theatrical types, including Tallulah Bank-head and the cellist Gwen Farrar, Hall made it her mission that lesbians should never again be “driven back to their holes and corners”.
The women Nicholson celebrates changed our culture. They turned the Victorian spinster into the modern career woman. But, she believes, they were also different from modern women. Like anyone who has lived through a war, they had lower expectations of happiness and a stoicism and dignity that were all their own. Her book applauds the celebrities but does not forget the obscure. Beside Caton-Thompson she sets May Jones, who wrote her autobiography, in Biro, on scraps of coloured paper, when she was 85. She was a Welsh carpenter’s daughter and fell in love with Philip, a young Quaker intellectual, who went to France with an ambulance unit and was killed. “I knew then,” May wrote, “that I should die an old maid.” Then she added, in pencil, “I was only 20 years old.” The rest of the page is blank. It is moments such as this that make Singled Out so powerful and so inspiring.
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