The Beatle and the Bedpan

From Expat-Village.com

Entertainment News
The Beatle and the Bedpan
By
Oct 26, 2006, 11:43

Expat Village is edited and published by Iain Williams in Caracas, Venezuela.

Comments by D.P. Sorensen who writes satire for City Weekly at http://www.slweekly.com

By now, everyone is familiar with the sensational accusations Heather Mills, the one-legged estranged wife of Sir Paul McCartney, has lodged against the former Beatle.

According to court documents, Sir Paul drank like a fish, smoked a lot of dope, threw wine at her, flung her into her wheelchair and took her for a wild ride, slashed her arm with a broken wine glass, told her not to breast feed because he had a proprietary interest in their pristine succulence and raged when dinner wasn’t on the table.

So what’s the big deal? This sounds like run-of-the-mill stuff for celebrity divorce shenanigans. There is one shocking detail, however, that is probably unique in the annals of divorce complaints. Ms. Mills, an acknowledged amputee, claims Sir Paul denied her the use of a bedpan during the night, instead forcing her crawl to the toilet.

Sir Paul’s lawyers will no doubt make short work of Mills’ claim, pointing out that it was the former model’s own decision to crawl, given that she was perfectly capable of hopping to the toilet.

As silly as it sounds—calling to mind, for instance, the Beyond the Fringe skit where a one-legged “artiste” is rejected for a movie because the audience is not yet ready for the sight of a one-legged Tarzan “swinging through the jungly tendrils”—the bedpan allegation nevertheless has the ring of truth. The other accusations, as noted earlier, are boilerplate divorce stuff. But how can you make up the crawling to the toilet story?

But I still have some doubts about the veracity of Mills’ bedpan allegation. Sir Paul went into the marriage fully aware that in the leg department, Mills was, as Peter Cook tells Dudley Moore in the Tarzan skit, “deficient to the tune of one.” Many men in Sir Paul’s position—music legend, cultural icon, billionaire—would have set a minimum requirement of two legs when auditioning for a wife.

So Sir Paul was obviously not in thrall to the superficial beauty standards of our looks-obsessed society. Just on the face of it, Sir Paul looked past her missing limb to her warm heart. Given his lack of squeamishness about missing body parts, it’s hard to imagine that he would be at all squeamish about functioning body parts and their normal products.

Despite my skepticism about the story, I think it is nevertheless useful to keep it in the mind’s eye for just a while, until some other instructive celebrity morsel is served up for our delectation. Whenever you start to long for a life of fame and riches, whenever you feel excluded from life’s feast, whenever you regret your sublunary life of puny obscurity, hit the mental scene select button and enjoy the spectacle of Heather Mills falling with a thump from the marital bed and dragging herself to the master bathroom to mount the porcelain throne, the whole time castigating Sir Paul for failing to provide a bedpan, while a sleepy Sir Paul lobs his own curses into the nocturnal gloom.

Meditate upon this sad state of affairs, and think back on the mop-topped Paul on The Ed Sullivan Show, mugging and winking at the shrieking girls sweating and swooning in the studio audience. Forty-five years of fame and glory and it’s now come to a bedpan and a one-legged wife crawling on the floor. John’s murder at least spared him the fate of finding himself unfed and unneeded at age 64.

People like Sir Paul, are, after all, just people, not exempt from the banalities and indignities of mortal existence. We live in the Age of Celebrity and somehow expect people like Sir Paul not only to be larger than life, but also to inhabit a shiny, clean and perfect dimension. When we chance to encounter a celebrity in our grungy world, it’s always a shock to see that he or she not only is smaller than we imagined but also subject to the same deteriorations of humiliating entropy. There’s Robert Redford falling on his prat in Deer Valley; there’s Uma Thurman with squalling infant at her breast and spilled food on her blouse in a New York deli; there’s Faye Dunaway, bedraggled in a floppy hat standing in line at Space Mountain; there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger on a Santa Monica sidewalk, his face and his hair impossibly orange.

Sic transit gloria mundi, the ancient sages said. But the glory of the world doesn’t just pass, it never was of the world to begin with.

Expat Village is edited and published by Iain Williams in Caracas, Venezuela.