For the funeral today in Sydney of her lover, Michael Hutchence, Paula Yates has threatened to wear her wedding dress, Miss Haversham style, dyed black. If she does, it will be an undignified end to an undignified week, when grief was poisoned by hatred.
"I Blame Geldof", the tabloid headlines screeched on Monday morning, following Paula Yates's hysterical accusation on the flight to Australia that "That bastard killed Michael". Blame is the landmine of the emotional battlefield, a cheap weapon of last resort.
A week ago it was "Fergie Blames Philip", as the former Royal took the opportunity to point the finger, on American prime time TV, at her children's grandfather for her non-appearance on the golden wedding jamboree guest list. A few days before, the Daily Mail ran a venomous account by journalist Fiona Duff of the break-up of her own marriage, fixing the blame firmly on "the trollop" as she called the other woman over four pages of bile. What is going on? When a child blames her teddy for a spilt drink, no one is taken in. When one child blames another for some misdeed, the accusation is treated with the circumspection it deserves. All three of these women, all mothers, must be familiar with the scenario. They are also adults, responsible for the well-being of their children. Yet all three seem to have lost any sense of that responsibility and have descended to the blame-game of the playground.
Not only does none of them look for the mote floating in their own eye, but - more importantly in the case of Paula Yates and Fiona Duff - each appears to be blind to the affect that blaming the father will have on the children. Duff asserts that her children are too young to be hurt by her cathartic diatribe. Indeed, she says the whole public bean-spilling exercise has speeded up her own healing process. The children's healing process - learning that daddy still loves them even though he now no longer lives with them; that being with daddy is something to look forward to, to enjoy - is another matter. As for Paula Yates, it is hard to even approach the awfulness of what has happened. But whatever one's feelings about the Geldof/Yates/Hutchence menage - indeed, the whole celebrity, rock star circus - the plight of those four little girls is heartbreaking. At a stroke, Geldof's children have lost an apparently caring step-father figure in the most appalling circumstances and their mother has branded their real father as the one who brought it all about. As for Hutchence's child, it is hard to imagine a more tragic legacy than that of her father being found hanged in a Sydney hotel room.
When their split was announced in 1995, Geldof and Yates appeared to have understood that blame was self-defeating. They would, they announced via a fax to the press, "see and speak and eat with each other daily, occasionally go out together and continue to love one another". The divorce changed all that, at least from Yates's side. While Geldof has until now kept his own counsel - beyond saying that his wife had turned into a soap opera - Yates has not. The details of the Geldof v Geldof hearing last Friday in the High Court in London concerned the custody of the children, which they share both in legal terms and on a practical level. Bob, Paula's friends have claimed, was being "difficult". Paula had wanted to take the children to Australia for four months to join Hutchence. Bob countered that four months was too long to be away from school. He was not being difficult, he asserts, just responsible. Geldof is a hands-on parent, taking and picking up his two youngest children regularly from school which is within walking distance of his Chelsea house.
The fact that Christmas fell smack in the middle obviously compounded things. When you have two sets of children by two different, warring men at opposite ends of the globe, a happy Christmas for all simply can't be done. Over the past few years Paula Yates has been ridiculed and disparaged by the media who have her nailed as the ultimate ageing rock chick, desperate to keep her hot lover boyfriend whose attributes memorably included "the Taj Mahal of crotches". From her recent memoirs (knocked off in a few weeks), to her much vaunted breast implants, she had become the media's favourite Aunt Sally. Yet from the naming of her children (Fifi Trixiebelle, Peaches, Pixie and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily) to her self-congratulatory book on the importance of stay-athome motherhood (published some years ago while still with Geldof) Yates has been her own worst enemy. Recently she had made it clear she would like to live in Australia where Hutchence had status beyond his supporting role in the on-going Geldof/Yates saga, and where they would be treated more kindly. No doubt true. Yet any such move would in effect deny the children access to their father and vice versa. It is thus hardly surprising that Geldof, who is known to have loathed Michael Hutchence, would have tried to stop such a move.
No doubt Yates was distraught when she made that fateful last phonecall to Hutchence at the Ritz Carlton and gave him the news that she and the kids wouldn't be coming to join him. It is unlikely she pulled her punches. Yates is no stranger to histrionics. Her famous tantrum-throwing appearance on Have I Got News For You, showed that when thwarted, she stamps and stomps (and storms out) like a spoiled child. Emotionally, she appears to have a skin as thick and rubbery as a HGV tyre. A puncture to her pride that would destroy anyone else barely deflates her. As long as she can have a go, get it out of her system, she bounces back, trucking on down the same road, oblivious to the chaos in her wake.
The same thick skin appears not to have been part of the Hutchence emotional make-up. It is too early yet to say what pushed him over the edge - indeed, we may never know. He was clearly depressed enough to have been prescribed at least one anti-depressant drug. The last people to see him alive say he was drunk. Yesterday's reports that he was in his holel room with actress Kym Wilson most of the night before he died only complicate things further.
Over recent days Geldof has tried to keep his head beneath the parapet, and that's what he should continue to do, however goaded by the feeding frenzy of the tabloids or Yates's hysteria. "I will not be drawn in," he said this week to door-stepping reporters. "I've not talked about this for three years. I'm not being difficult, but it is better if I say nothing at all. I can live with the whole situation a lot better, with myself if I say nothing." And, he could have added, a lot better for the children too.
Fergie blaming Prince Philip may appear simply laughable when compared with the death of Michael Hutchence. Yet it is all part of the same, destructive game played by parents, in which children are caught in the crossfire. Guilt and blame are sides of the same coin. Rightly, they no longer play a part in divorce proceedings.
Anyone who has had counselling of any description knows the importance of accepting responsibility for what happens. Anyone who has been through a divorce involving children knows the importance of channelling the feelings of hurt and anger away from them, the importance of reinforcing the love that the absent parent still feels for them. Because a child's terrifying sense of abandonment is not something that can be eased as their mother's or father's sometimes can be by the arrival of a replacement lover. It is with them forever.
