By PAUL VALLELY
LONDON - In the end she died as she had lived, with sad and unnecessary drama. Paula Yates, aged 40, whose body was discovered late on Sunday (NZT) in her home in Notting Hill, was a TV presenter, naked Penthouse model, Sun columnist and, perhaps most famously, the
mother of a quartet of girls with the exotic names Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches, Pixie and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. And yet that was only the start of it.
Having caught the headlines with her starburst style of preposterous extravagance, she retained them in an altogether grimmer fashion - with a messy divorce from Sir Bob Geldof, the strange and shocking death of her rock star lover Michael Hutchence, binges of booze and pills, a nervous breakdown and a series of rebound love affairs in which her judgment seemed ever more erratic.
"It was like living in a Harold Robbins novel," Geldof once said, without a spark of humour. If so, it was one which Yates seemed to be writing herself as she went along, ever determined to make each chapter more fantastic and dramatic than the last.
It was a tendency which I first noticed in her when I was a frequent visitor to her home in the years just after Band Aid, when I was working with Geldof, ghost-writing his auto-biography.
One day we arrived at their Chelsea townhouse to find her sitting on the sofa, with her hair in bunches, dressed like a 14-year-old. She had her thumb in her mouth. She was watching a Take That video and joining in the songs with glazed enthusiasm. She refused to speak to Geldof, who shrugged and left the room.
The previous time I had seen her, the week before, in their home in the country, she had had her hair up in a bun, and was floating round the place in a Laura Ashley dress, reading Enid Blyton to the children, talking about giving up work and making jam at the local Women's Institute, and generally aiming to become the perfect 1950s mother so that she could write a book on how to bring up children.
From time to time Yates would utterly reinvent herself, swapping not just clothes but personality. Sometimes it was just innocent fun. When The Big Breakfast was launched in a blaze of publicity in 1992, Yates set the tone when she turned up to meet the press in a dress made of artificial turf and covered in daisies and veges.
In the programme's heyday she transformed herself into a coy temptress, interviewing pop stars lying on a double bed. There were rumours at the time that sometimes she did more than interviews with them on the sheets. But Geldof, infatuated with her elfin exuberance, refused to believe them. He found out the hard way that there was a darker side to her role play, too. When after 10 years of what he thought was a happy marriage she filed for divorce, he was visibly shaken when he received the petition. It was years before he was to acknowledge that his wife's games had turned into a disorder. There were unpleasant custody hearings over the children but Geldof was still very much in love and continued to protect her - only becoming disillusioned when heroin was found in the home she shared with Hutchence. It was hidden in a Smarties box in the children's bedroom.
But once the media-savvy pop star was gone, Yates found herself unprotected - from herself and the media. Then in 1997 Hutchence was found dead in a Sydney hotel - naked, with a ligature around his neck.
The coroner said it was suicide but Yates insisted he had died in an act of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Better, she said, for their little girl, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, to learn that her father was a sexual deviant than to believe that he would desert her through an act of suicide.
There was something of her old play-acting in the role Yates then adopted as the grieving widow. That is not to say that her grief was not genuine, only that she threw herself into playing the part of the bereaved woman with a familiar extravagance.
The problem was that those around her eventually became fed up or disenchanted as she switched parts. There was never a reconciliation between Yates and her mother, Helene Thornton, who protested that the portrait her daughter used to paint of her unhappy childhood was a fiction.
Indeed, the rift between them deepened three years ago when it was revealed that Yates' father was not Jess Yates, who presented a 1970s religious talent show Stars On Sunday. At the funeral of Hughie Green, host of another talent show, Opportunity Knocks, a rumour began that he was the real father.
In a distraught attempt to disprove the rumour, Yates underwent DNA testing with Green's other children. But the tests proved positive.
The shocking revelation, her mother feared, further disturbed Yates' delicate mental health. (In 1998, there were reports that she tried to hang herself in emulation of Hutchence's macabre death). She regularly abused alcohol and drugs and tried expensive clinics, therapy sessions and other relationships to try to stabilise her life.
But she always seemed in difficulties. She worked her way through a £150,000 ($480,615) advance for her "quickie" autobiography. She was always short of cash. But the problems were not just financial. She attracted considerable ridicule immediately after the book was published, when she had a breast enlargement operation and dyed her hair a vivid orange.
Ironically, things had begun to pick up. "I think the worst is definitely over," she told one interviewer.
Geldof, who last saw her on Saturday, said: "She looked a bit of a mess but she had just signed a deal with a new agent and was very bullish. She was getting it together."
On Sunday she had been due to have lunch with their daughter Pixie. Geldof said she was not in a suicidal frame of mind but she never gave up taking drugs and drink to excess.
"I loved her madly, the girl that she once was, all those years ago," said Geldof, whose own mother died when he was 7 and who now faces the task of bringing up their daughters alone. "When you write about her, be kind to her."
Yates' problem was that she was never a woman who could be kind to herself.
- INDEPENDENT
* Paul Vallely was the ghostwriter of Bob Geldof's autobiography, Is That It?
By PAUL VALLELY
LONDON - In the end she died as she had lived, with sad and unnecessary drama. Paula Yates, aged 40, whose body was discovered late on Sunday (NZT) in her home in Notting Hill, was a TV presenter, naked Penthouse model, Sun columnist and, perhaps most famously, the
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