Paula Yates
Factfile
Born: 1960
Famous for: Being famous
Why in news: Her rock star lover Michael Hutchence was found hanged in a Sydney hotel and Yates is said to blame ex-husband Bob Geldof for his death
You never know where it will all end with Paula, wrote Maeve Binchy rather prophetically in this newspaper almost 15 years ago. "If she goes over the top," she said, "it will be a very controlled over-the-top."
Fast forward to November 1997, the first-class lounge in Heathrow Airport. Yates is on her way to Sydney, Australia, with four companions and her 16-month-old baby, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, to view the body of her dead lover, rock star Michael Hutchence.
Reports say she was loud and abusive, bad-mouthing her ex-husband Bob Geldof and generally, as a British Airways source said, "being a bit wild". At one stage she threw a glass of champagne into a lounge assistant's face. She and her four friends (the response of her baby is unknown) then burst into shrieks of laughter.
Their antics are understood to have come to a sudden halt when the captain of flight BA009 to Sydney told the group he would only agree to let them fly on the understanding that there was "no yelling and shouting". Paula Yates agreed. Sometimes over the top. Always in control.
She flew to Sydney, it is understood, using the name Lady Geldof. Her former husband was awarded a knighthood for his humanitarian work, but why she would want to adopt his name now when she appears to blame him for her boyfriend's death adds yet another dimension to the peroxide puzzle that is Paula Yates.
"You have murdered Michael as surely as if you'd strangled him yourself," she is reported to have screamed at him down the phone on being told of Hutchence's death.
Geldof is understandably aggrieved and has told friends that he received a phone call from Hutchence hours before the INXS front man was found hanging from a leather belt in Sydney's Ritz-Carlton hotel. "He called up in the early hours of the morning, I couldn't understand a word he said. I just put the phone down," Geldof said.
When one thinks about it, it is not surprising that, even in the throes of grief, Yates chose to operate far beyond the bounds of conventionality. Her unexecuted threat to dye her wedding dress black and "wear it with pride" at her soon-to-have-been husband's funeral on Thursday delighted the tabloids. In the end she settled for a low-cut flower-patterned number and impenetrable shades.
She has always manipulated her own life situation, however personal or tragic, to ensure that she is worthy of documentation by either herself or the tabloids. As a consequence, we are unwittingly but uniquely intimate with the three lives of Paula.
Life No 1 was the wild-child era which began as a young tearaway at an Oxford boarding school. She swiftly got fed up with academia and posed nude for Penthouse. She became the ultimate music groupie (hence her book Rock Stars In Their Underpants) and developed a trite theory on how to get your man.
From her autobiography: "You just dazzled them with your repartee and then gave them a blow job when they were still wheezing from your last hilarious anecdote." Which is kind of how she met the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof, and entered life phase No 2, TV personality and earth mother.
She had three children with Geldof whose names, Fifi Trixiebelle (13), Peaches Honeyblossom (6), and Little Pixie (4), made sure that, like her mother, they would enjoy lasting if somewhat dubious fame. She presented The Tube music show, a programme called Sex with Paula Yates and appeared on the Big Breakfast.
Meanwhile she was extolling the virtues of stay-at-home motherhood: "If you choose to stay at home with your baby, then you have chosen to put her emotional well-being before that demon of our times, self-gratification"; a classic nugget from one such tome entitled The Fun Starts Here ("a practical guide to the bliss of babies").
Self-gratification. In life No 3 we learn that Yates, for all her smug admonishings, is a virtual slave to it. When Hutchence died on Saturday, she was in the middle of her Petrina Pan phase. In her late 30s she rebelled again, this time against growing up, so she had her breasts enlarged, ditched Geldof and began an affair with the handsome rock star Hutchence.
In the beginning, they spent most of their time in bed, she says in her autobiography. While there her new partner did "about six things within the first hour" that she "was firmly convinced were illegal . . .". Her professed selfless devotion to her children appeared a sick joke when the house she shared with Hutchence in London was raided by police. They are alleged to have found a quantity of opium hidden in a tube of Smarties under the bed.
Understandably, this was too much for Geldof who recently refused to allow Yates to bring their three children to Australia for four months. A bitter custody battle for the children is ongoing.
A clinical psychologist this week described Yates as a borderline personality.
"She is liable to feel she does not exist unless she is at the centre of a crisis. Despite protestations to the contrary, she likes the tabloids to chronicle because they make her feel significant."
Paula was 13 when her father Jess Yates, a presenter of the religious programme Stars on Sunday who was dubbed The Bishop by the British tabloids, was found to be having an affair with a 23-year-old showgirl.
If the loss Yates suffered this week is deeply sad, so too is her subsequent behaviour. However, Geldof can take heart from the fact that things change, often dramatically, in the weird and not-so-wonderful world of Paula Yates.
"Even now," she wrote in her autobiography two years ago, "I get angry when people say anything negative about Bob. What do they know?"