Paula Yates died of a heroin overdose in 200 aged 41. Photo / Getty Images
The presenter’s personal life was the stuff of tabloid fodder, but behind the headlines she was an altogether different person.
It’s approaching 23 years since Paula Yates – bombshell television personality, rock star of rock star interviewers, fireball of flirtatious energy – died of a heroin overdose, and her best friend Belinda Brewin is determined to set the record straight on the woman whose demise was chronicled so publicly with such glee.
If you’re over 40, you’ll surely remember Yates’s image, even if you never tuned into any of the Channel 4 programmes she appeared in: notably music show The Tube (1982 to 1987) and The Big Breakfast (launched in 1992). Her face was splashed across so many tabloid pages that Princess Diana once told her: “I love it when you’re on the front page of the papers because it means I’ve got the day off.”
One of the most famous British women of the 1980s and 1990s, Yates was dead by 41. This week, those who knew her look back at her life in a new two-part documentary that explores the legacy of a star whose “fierce, funny, intelligent spirit [and] incredible skill as a television presenter has been largely written out of history”.
None of the contributors to the film knew her better than Brewin, who became a close companion when both were pregnant at the end of the 1980s and living in Chelsea. Meeting through mutual friends, they bonded over a shared sense of humour. Yates was sharp with it, too.
“She had an in-depth knowledge about everything,” Brewin tells The Telegraph on a video call from Florida, where she is working as head chef on a yacht. “It didn’t matter what you were talking about, she knew it. She read voraciously. But then we’d sit in bed sometimes and watch [US talk show] Jerry Springer when it first came out and laugh at everyone else’s soap opera of a life. Until hers turned into one.”
It hadn’t then, not yet; Yates was still in the ascendant. Married to Bob Geldof, whom she’d fallen for in the 1970s when he was the swaggering frontman of the Boomtown Rats, she’d made an impression on television viewers with her raucous presenting style that seemed to capture the spirit of the age. She was fun, fresh and punkish, yet also a loving mother to her daughters, Fifi, Peaches and Pixie; a teetotal peroxide blonde and a “kind of self-invented person”, as she is described in the documentary. A bundle of apparent contradictions, her books included Rock Stars in Their Underpants (1980) and, a decade later, a couple of parenting guides.
Was she the original ladette? “She was a little bit like that,” says Brewin. “She was what every girl at that time wanted to be like. I think everybody wanted to be a little bit ballsy, a little bit brassy, but still sexy. With a little bit of edge but still quite feminine.”
Yates’s interviews with pop stars on the bed in The Big Breakfast are the stuff of entertainment legend. Anarchic yet seductive, she snuggled up to a string of stars and coaxed their secrets from them. It’s hard to imagine anything like it featuring in the more sanitised breakfast television landscape today. Brewin says a celebrity like her wouldn’t exist today “because everyone’s so serious and vain”.
If Yates’s on-screen persona was as a largely unserious provocateur, the real Paula was deeply sincere, even shy, says Brewin, who characterises her as a mixture of Mary Poppins and Marilyn Monroe. The Poppins side of Yates was capable of being scandalised when others took her on-screen image as a green light for saying whatever they wanted to her.
“People spoke to her in the manner in which she appeared on television. They felt they could say things to her that were kind of sassy, and she’d go to me: ‘Did you hear what he said?’”
Yates may have come up with a style that was all her own, but she was born into the entertainment industry – albeit in Colwyn Bay, Wales. Her mother was Elaine Smith, a former Blackpool beauty queen and writer of erotic novels, who took the professional name Heller Toren and also became known as Hélène Thornton.
Until 1997, she believed that her father was Jess Yates, presenter of ITV’s religious television show Stars on Sunday during the early 1970s. A DNA test revealed her real father was in fact Hughie Green, host of the talent show Opportunity Knocks, and a rival of Jess’s. The revelation came as a bolt from the blue to Paula, who told Brewin that she felt she had “lost my past”.
Yet it was her love of rock stars that was to be part of her undoing. Enter Michael Hutchence, another sultry frontman, this time of the Australian band INXS. Yates fell for him hard, and ultimately left Geldof for him, in the mid-1990s. Hutchence fathered her fourth daughter, Tiger Lily, in 1996. It was his only child.
“Michael was a very charming, lovely guy, and I absolutely loved him, but he was a very bad boy,” says Brewin, who is Tiger’s godmother. He was dubbed the “wild man of rock”, not entirely without reason. Would Yates have got into drugs if it wasn’t for him?
“No,” says Brewin firmly. “I’m not saying she wasn’t a willing participant, but no, I don’t think she would have done.” Not that her drug use was particularly heavy afterwards, Brewin is at pains to stress. In her view, a pernicious narrative around Yates was created after she had the audacity to leave Geldof, by then an honorary knight, whose part in 1985′s Live Aid fundraising concert had made him something akin to a national treasure.
Looking back now, there are certainly some scenes from the time that make for uncomfortable viewing. Appearing as a guest on the satirical BBC panel show Have I Got News For You in 1995, Yates visibly squirms as she is subjected to a series of jokes by the programme’s male stars about her breast implants. “Afterwards she burst into tears,” says Brewin. Photographers lay in wait outside her house, ready to snap her as she tried to bundle her children into the car to do the school run with Brewin. On one occasion, to provoke a reaction, one of them allegedly asked of her child, “How’s your f------ bastard this morning?”
“That’s kind of the price of fame, but why do you have to be that mean, that unkind?” says Brewin.
One reason Brewin agreed to appear in the documentary, she says, is the parallels she saw with the way television presenter Caroline Flack was treated a few years ago, before she took her own life at the age of 40. “I thought, ‘Wow, it’s still going on,’” she says.
When Hutchence was found dead in a hotel room in Sydney in 1997, at the age of 37, Yates was devastated. A coroner ruled it a suicide, but Yates, who was not present, believed it to be autoerotic asphyxiation.
“Each day she would say to me, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through this day,’ says Brewin. “But she did, and she said, ‘I have to for my children, I couldn’t bear to be without them.’ There was never any question she was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other. She loved those girls so much. She didn’t want her loneliness to affect them.”
Brewin recalls arriving at Yates’s house one day and finding Martin Bashir, the BBC presenter whose 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana was later found by an inquiry to have been obtained in a “deceitful” way. “[He was] saying she needed consoling,” says Brewin. “She was distraught after Michael had died… and there was [Martin] cooking food [in her house].” Brewin says that she told Bashir to get out. “He said, ‘Oh no, she needs looking after.’”
Yates’s self-destructive behaviour worsened for a time. “Mainly drinking,” says Brewin. But when she took the heroin that killed her on September 17 2000 – Pixie’s 10th birthday – it was the first time she had used illegal drugs in almost two years. Her inquest heard that the amount she took would not have been enough to kill her had she been an addict, and suicide was ruled out. It was, said the coroner, a “foolish and incautious” binge.
Brewin was one of the last to see her alive, the night before her body was found by a different friend, the journalist Jo Fairley. “She wasn’t in a great state and I was really, really cross with her,” Brewin says. “As soon as she opened the door, I could tell [she’d been taking drugs]. I was genuinely shocked because she’d been so together.
She suggested Yates come and stay at her house that night, but Tiger was asleep and Yates didn’t want to wake her. “She said, ‘It will be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
But they never spoke again.
Tragically, Peaches also died of a heroin overdose, 14 years after her mother, at the age of 25.
Had Paula lived, Brewin believes she would have done more serious television. She may well have blown the whistle on the darker goings-on of the time. “She was interested in things like the way women were treated. She would have loved the #MeToo movement, that would have been right up her street.”
Given what we now know of the permissiveness, the lasciviousness of 20th-century showbiz culture, it feels grimly unsurprising that Yates would have had her own stories to share. Brewin remembers her talking about one man in television, whom she described as a “disgusting old lech”, and whom she would have to tell to behave himself. “I think there was a lot of it,” says Brewin.
She hopes that future generations will remember Yates not for how she died but for how she lived; for being “hilarious, sexy, cheeky and chatty”. Yates was, she says, a proper trailblazer. “She paved the way for half these girls today who probably don’t even know who she is.”
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