The Tabloids on Paula Yates at that time:
“Pathetic Paula makes mockery of love and loss”
“Why poor Paula is only as good as the last man
she slept with.”
“Headline, suicide blonde.”
Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll stars: the lethal cocktail
that ended in tragedy
Vikram Dodd
Mon 18 Sep
2000 08.31 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/sep/18/broadcasting.uknews2
After two
decades spent living in the public eye, the final act of Paula Yates had no
audience. It was a tragic end to what was to the outside world a glamorous, if
turbulent, life of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll stars.
Since 1982,
pretty much everything she did had attracted headlines, often at her own
behest. But the media maelstrom around Yates grew so much more intense after a
chat in bed with the rock star Michael Hutchence.
She had
interviewed the Australian frontman of the band INXS for Channel 4's Big
Breakfast programme, made by a production company owned by her husband, Bob
Geldof. With their legs entwined, the mutual attraction that would consume and
destroy her marriage to Geldof was obvious to those watching.
Yates
became famous as the front woman of the Tube, the groundbreaking Channel 4
music programme. She was hired for the job by Andrea Wonfor, the show's
executive producer: "Everything changed after she met Michael Hutchence.
She threw everything away and found nothing left after he died."
In 1982
Yates, then 22, burst on to television screens. With her blonde hair and
low-cut, tight dresses, she came across as a wild child. The reality, says Ms
Wonfor, was very different.
Restrained
Compared to
the later stories of drugs and drink, her time at the Tube was relatively
restrained as she soon became pregnant with her first child: "For the
whole five years of the Tube, Paula was the bloody boring one. She'd go to bed
at 9.30pm, when everyone else was in the bar, and be back up at 6.30am to take
Fifi for a swim," Ms Wonfor remembers.
Yates began
dating Geldof, the frontman of the band the Boomtown Rats, in 1977. She was
determined to have him and stuck so close to him that other band members called
her "the limpet".
Paula and
Bob were one of the most fashionable couples of the 1980s, but their paths to
the outside world were diverging. She, to some, appeared narcissistic and
shallow, happy only in the world of celebrity and rock stars. He went off to
fight famine in Africa and became "Saint Bob" after masterminding
Band Aid.
Their
marriage was dogged by persistent rumours of Geldof's infidelity and from their
public utterances Geldof and Yates had different expectations about their
relationship, and about the role of passion. "To live your life in a state
of passion would be tedious because everything is distorted. It is extremely
dull and limiting. Sexual passion burns out," Geldof once said.
Seven
months before she left Geldof, Yates told an interviewer she thought of herself
as a "steaming Jezebel given half an opportunity. Why can't I be? Why can
I only be this great lactating person?".
Asked if
she was storing up an emotional time bomb, she replied: "It probably is,
and I say to Bob it will be terrible. It will be like the Exorcist."
By February
1995 she had found her source of passion and left Geldof for Michael Hutchence.
But she would pay a terrible price for bagging what she called "God's gift
to women" and a man who possessed the "Taj Mahal of crotches".
Geldof was
determined not to surrender custody of their three daughters, Fifi Trixibelle,
Peaches and Pixie, and the bitterness of the split sapped the joy she found
with Hutchence, whom she had fallen for deeply. "She did really love
Michael, she was mad about him," said a friend last night. But it was
Hutchence who introduced Yates to a drink- and drug-fuelled lifestyle:
"That's when the spiral of decline started," the friend said.
The
break-up with Geldof was acrimonious and detailed by the tabloids, with Yates's
connivance. She went to the house they had shared in Chelsea and after shouting
abuse at him, threw a rock through a window. Friends were authorised to leak
details of the bitter wrangle and Yates's financial straits as her debts at one
stage reached £100,000.
In May 1996
the divorce was granted, and Geldof later won temporary custody of the children
after a sweet tube containing opium was found at the home of Yates and
Hutchence. They claimed it was planted.
If the
fallout from her relationship with Geldof left Yates emotionally drained, the
bizarre death of Michael Hutchence as good as broke her. The singer was found
hanging in a Sydney hotel room in November 1997, having consumed vodka, beer,
champagne, cocaine, Prozac and other prescription drugs. Yates could never
accept it was suicide. The couple had a daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily,
who is now four years old. She described his death as like being "flung to
the dogs", and tried to find comfort in Tiger Lily.
Yates
branded Geldof "a killer" after it emerged Hutchence had hanged
himself with a leather belt hours after pleading with the former Boomtown Rat
over the custody of Yates's daughters with Geldof.
Yates later
told an interviewer: "When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was
beyond grief. I went completely mad.
"Now
I'm starting, relatively, to think straight again. I live one day at a time,
one hour at a time. What makes it all worthwhile is my children."
Rapid decline
Yates had
to deal with more torment when it emerged that the man she thought was her
father, the former Stars on Sunday star Jess Yates, was not. Her mother had had
a relationship with the TV presenter Hughie Green and DNA tests showed that he
was her real father.
Her decline
became more and more rapid. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with
depression and in June 1998 lost custody of her three daughters from her
relationship with Geldof and, though to the outside world apparently
effervescent, tried to end it all. A friend found her and she was admitted to a
clinic.
Even there
Yates found no stability. She began an affair with a heroin addict, which
attracted more lurid tabloid headlines. The stories provoked Hutchence's family
in Australia into proceedings to gain custody of Tiger Lily from Yates. When
Yates ended the relationship, Hutchence's family dropped the lawsuit.
Yates was
again in the headlines when she had a relationship with the rock star Finlay
Quaye. And in 1999 it was reported that she had collapsed while her daughters
with Geldof were staying with her, and that police had to take the children
away.
Ms Wonfor,
with whom Yates and her children stayed last year, said: "There was a
culmination of the madness that overtook her with Michael's death and the
change of her father. She is quite a fragile creature. She probably never grew
up and maybe that was to do with her difficult childhood; she needed an arm
around her a lot."
After the
death of Hutchence, Yates was angered by news that Tiger Lily would only get
£2m from the singer's will and became locked in a dispute with his estate.
An attempt
at a television comeback flopped and earlier this year she won libel damages
from the Mail on Sunday newspaper over claims she had deliberately and
"deceitfully" become pregnant with Hutchence to try and ensnare him
in a permanent relationship.
She found
no let-up at the Notting Hill home she moved to last year, where she was
pursued by a stalker.
Paula Yates
made an art of getting what she desired: Geldof, fame, children and Hutchence.
But ultimately, she could not get what she wanted: peace of mind.
1959 Paula
Yates born to former Bluebell Girl Heller Toren. Her father is thought to be TV
presenter Jess Yates
1976 Moves
to London and meets Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof. His friends dub her
"the limpet"
1978 Poses
naked for Penthouse and publishes Rock Stars in Their Underpants, hailed by
Andy Warhol as "the greatest work of art in the last decade"
1982
Co-hosts C4 music show The Tube with Jools Holland. Runs until 1987
1984 Writes
and presents the TV series Baby, Baby on C4 after her first daughter Fifi
Trixibelle is born
1986
Marries Geldof in Las Vegas
1990 After
the birth of her second daughter Peaches, writes a book on motherhood
1992 Starts
celebrity interviews - often conducted on a bed - for C4's The Big Breakfast.
1995 Leaves
Geldof for INXS singer Michael Hutchence. She calls him "God's gift to
women"
May 1996
After divorce, Yates goes back to her matrimonial house in Chelsea, while
Geldof moves into Hutchence's home nearby
September
1996 A childcarer finds opium at Yates's home. Yates is arrested but not
charged
October
1996 Geldof wins custody of the children, but later agrees to share the
responsibility
May 1997
Hughie Green is revealed to be Yates's father
November
1997 Hutchence commits suicide in Sydney
April 1998
A depressed Yates is admitted to psychiatric hospital
June 1998
Yates loses custody of Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. She tries to hang herself
September
1998 Former lover, Kingsley O'Keke, claims she sleeps with Hutchence's ashes
March 1999
Yates presents An Evening With Jerry Springer, which flops
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Paula Yates documentary is a horribly riveting study
in late 20th-century celebrity
Television: A fascinating reminder of the anarchy and
misogyny that was part of British media in 1980s and 1990s
In the documentary Paula, we see another side to Yates
- funny, wise, slightly out of control and terrifying to the male-dominated media
of the period.
Ed Power
Tue Mar 14
2023 - 10:34
The singer
Terence Trent D’arby was in his hotel room in New York when he received a call
from the front desk. Bob Geldof was downstairs demanding to know if there was
any truth to rumours about his wife, Paula Yates, and D’arby.
“Did you
knob my wife?” Geldof apparently asked.
“I did what
any self-respecting 25-year-old would do,” says D’arby, who today goes as
Sananda Maitreya. “I lied to him.”
“Bob’s
Paula caught with Black star,” was the racist headline that ran in that week’s
News of the World. It fuelled the feeding frenzy around Yates, the glamorous
and gobby TV presenter famous – later notorious – for her relationships with
some of the biggest rock stars of the age.
As her
marriage to Geldof unravelled past any possibility of reconciliation, she
became a public punchbag. In the documentary Paula (Channel 4, Monday, 9pm),
however, we see another side to Yates.
Paula does
a good job reminding the viewer of the scale of Yates’ fame – and of the
enthusiasm with which everyone collaborated in her public shaming
She is
funny, wise, slightly out of control and terrifying to the male-dominated media
of the period.
“Please
stop being unkind,” she says at one point. She’s on Have I Got New For You?,
that Oxbridge guffaw-fest where Boris Johnson was lionised yet where Yates –
whose infractions would appear to have included being a woman, being born in
Wales and marrying an Irishman – was torn to pieces
“All of the
things that made her lovable in her 20s, the fact she was gobby, anarchic and
sexual ... by the time she was in her late 30s, they were no longer attractive
to lots of people in the media,” says writer Grace Dent. “Mainly men.”
Paula is a
fascinating reminder of the anarchy and misogyny of the media in Britain
through the 1980s and 1990s. But I’m not sure it unpicks the mystery of what
Yates was like under the glammy exterior.
There is
little sense of Yates as a person in the film beyond her doomed public image.
We see her
flirtatiously introduce Geldof’s Boomtown Rats on Channel 4′s The Tube around
the time she and the Dubliner became an item. Yet, the film doesn’t tell us
much about their relationship other than the shallow observation that Yates,
who passed away in 2000, was attracted to rock stars.
Geldof
isn’t interviewed. There are however contributions from Belinda Brewin, a
neighbour in London who became her assistant, and from the older sister of
Michael Hutchence, the ‘bad boy’ rock star whose death by suicide sent Yates
into a spiral.
Her decline
and death are covered in part two. In its first half Paula does a good job
reminding the viewer of the scale of Yates’ fame – and of the enthusiasm with
which the tabloids, Have I Got News For You? and everyone else collaborated in
her public shaming.
There is
little sense of Yates as a person beyond her doomed public image (when a
newspaper sent the presenter her obituary by accident the headline read
“Suicide Blonde”).
But as a
study in late 20th-century celebrity, Paula is horribly riveting.
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