Mills McCartney Seeks To Repair Image
Just when you thought the dust had settled for awhile on the explosive Heather Mills McCartney story, it all blows up again, observes CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.
"She's highly excited," says show business commentator Neil Sean, "goes on TV, and lets it all come out, rather than possibly going to see a psychiatrist!"
Mills McCartney had gone on TV to give angry interviews, Phillips explains, hitting just about every morning show in the English-speaking world. She was accusing ex-Beatle and soon to be ex-husband Paul McCartney's camp of purposely sullying her image even as she stayed mum about McCartney, for the sake of their daughter, as their bitter divorce battle intensified.
"I've had worse press than a pedophile or a murderer," she cried on one show.
Mills McCartney did it all against the advice of her public relations consultant -- who then quit. Mills McCartney had also antagonized her high-priced lawyers, with whom she also severed ties.
And now, reports Phillips, she's hired controversial Hollywood hairdresser and publicity agent Michele Elyzabeth to handle her public image.
With an accent from the Champs Elysee via the Sunset Strip, the self-styled French aristocrat is more famous for her caviar facials than high-profile P.R., Phillips notes. But she will now dedicate her video blog to singing Mills McCartney's praises."
Elyzabeth says Mills McCartney is "a wonderful person who very, very few people know personally. A lot of press people decide that they can trash her as much as they want to. And the main reason that I decided to start this blog, which I will do once a week, is to take every fake article and lying article apart is because somebody's got to do it, and it's my job."Photos: Heather Mills McCartney
So when, after Mills McCartney's TV marathon, Barbara Walters said on "The View" that she didn't think Heather was a very nice person when she met her, Elyzabeth stuck up for Mills McCartney, saying, "Barbara Walters 'people,' along with 'The View,' decided to trash Heather for the third time. ... Who are they to have an opinion of what Heather should say or not say?"
Michele will have more work on her plate, it seems, with the upcoming publication of an unflattering book on Heather, Phillips points out. Laying her hard-nosed attitude and checkered history down to her poor and rough childhood, it reportedly quotes Heather saying she hoped to find a rich and powerful man of her own for the power it would bring her.
McCartney, the man she found, meanwhile, has taken the high road, staying quiet and giving Heather as much rope as she needs, Phillips says.
"Is he betting she'll self-destruct, and is that what she's doing?" he asked Sean, the showbiz commentator.
"I think," Sean replied, "she is already self-destructing, but she's a tough woman. She's probably got a plate of steel in her back. There's not a problem with her. She claims that she's breaking down and near suicide ... but there's a woman who turns up on breakfast TV very early in the morning, glossed, hair, everything, that's not a woman falling apart. That's a woman out for revenge."
And maybe, Phillips says, with a new cause. McCartney has recently been seen in the company of a wealthy, married New York woman with whom he became friendly on the Hamptons social circuit. The two were seen walking along a Long Island beach, and sharing a much-publicized goodbye kiss.
What's Mills McCartney's overall game plan now?
"I think," Phillips remarks, "if you were trying to put a rational framework around heather's strategy, and that's a risky business these days, it would be the 'pain-in-the-neck' strategy. One of the central issues in this divorce battle appears to be whether or not she gets to tell the tale, provide her version of the divorce, and what was wrong with the marriage, and whether or not there's a restriction on what she can say. This seems to be very much a lesson in the kinds of things she might go around saying, if she doesn't get the kind of deal she wants from him. But, you also have to remember as well that there is a child involved in this, and whether it's the money or the keep-still clause, that's (their daughter) really what the issue of this whole divorce appears to be about."