Paul's poor little rich girl
by Matthew Norman
Read Matthew Norman every Monday and Thursday in the Evening Standard
Several months before their wedding, it is possible to discern an encouraging omen for the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills: the two are in complete agreement, it seems, about one of the most potentially vexing land mines in the entire marital field - the question of money.
"Say you don't need no diamond rings and I'll be satisfied," as Paul sang on Can't Buy Me Love, "Say you want the kind of things that money just can't buy. I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love." Indeed it can't ... and indeed it hasn't. Talking to Michael Buerk on Radio 4's The Choice, Heather was eager to scotch spiteful hints that she in fact goes along with the Beatles-covered Berry Gordy track Money ("The best things in life are free/ But you can leave them to the birds and bees/ I want money, that's what I want ...")
Scandalised by suggestions of gold-digging, Heather produces a blisteringly logical denial. "If I was going to go out with anybody for their money," she told Buerk, in what may have been his most moving journalistic experience since discovering the famine in Ethiopia, "it would be someone a lot richer. There are a lot of people who are a lot richer, believe me." I should say so. At the last count, or estimate, her fiancИ was worth £700 million - not exactly boracic, perhaps, but hardly flush either.
Maybe 20 years ago, when Paul was enchanting us with The Frog Chorus and you could have a nine-course dinner at The Ritz and still have change from a sovereign for the cab ride home, £700 million might have been seemed a useful wedge to a former homeless person such as Heather. But these days, what would it get you? Two cheap holidays in Spain a year, a second-hand VW Golf, the odd night out at the local tandoori ... hardly the lap of luxury.
So let's hear no more of this gold-digging nonsense, and start celebrating Heather for what she is ... a woman who spurned all the really rich men lining up for her hand - Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, various Rothschilds, etc - for a future full of turning off lights and darning Paul's socks.
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http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/top_story.html...84568&in_review_text_id=441221
