Arden Roberie
Flirting away together on the iconic Big Breakfast bed, presenter Paula Yates and guest Rupert Everett appeared very close indeed.
It was 1995 – the same year Paula split from her husband Sir Bob Geldof, and 12 months after she met the man who would become her last boyfriend, INXS superstar Michael Hutchence.
Dressed in a bottom-skimming floral miniskirt and red top, Paula languished on the animal print fur throw as she questioned the actor while clutching prompt cards, though she almost certainly didn’t need them. For, as we now know, Paula was already very familiar with Rupert.
Indeed what the Channel 4 programme’s loyal viewers didn’t realise was that Paula and Rupert had enjoyed a six-year affair during the 1980s, conducted in part while the former model was married to Sir Bob. It was, say celebrity journalists working at the time, the best-kept secret in showbusiness.
‘Nobody had an inkling,’ says one industry publicist. ‘Paula was a livewire but she was actually quite busy having kids with Bob.
‘And Rupert was gay, very openly gay. Nobody would have been looking.’
In fact, the affair first came to light in 2006, six years after Paula died of an accidental heroin overdose aged just 41.
In his memoir, Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins, Rupert tells how they dined together at Langan’s restaurant in London’s Mayfair the night before an interview she was conducting with him for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1985.
Later, she undressed him and their love affair began. It was a jaw-dropping revelation, and those who knew Paula and Sir Bob wondered why Rupert chose to reveal it. One described it as ‘a little disrespectful’.
This week, during a promotional interview to plug his latest movie MadFabulous – the historical drama about Henry, 5th Marquess of Anglesey – Rupert, 67, once again spoke of the unlikely showbiz affair.
The actor, who has also had heterosexual relationships with model Bianca Jagger and actors Susan Sarandon and Beatrice Dalle, said of Paula: ‘She was adorable and beautiful. We were bonded by our sense of drama. We loved things being dramatic and dangerous.
‘She was a fragile rock – tough, but very vulnerable too. We were kindred spirits.’
He admitted: ‘Being straight was heaven, because you fitted in so well.’ He recalled a dinner he and Paula had with the Upstairs, Downstairs actor Gordon Jackson and his wife Rona Anderson which ‘felt like the whole restaurant was celebrating the normalcy of two couples getting together. Gordon was telling me about getting a mortgage and I remember thinking, “God, this is fitting in!” ’
In 2021, Rupert also appeared on the now defunct ITV show Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, where the host asked the My Best Friend’s Wedding and Rivals star about the fling.
‘We were very, very close, I must say, for a long time, and she’s someone that I adored and still do. I think I was in love with her. I adored her,’ said Rupert. Piers then asked how he ‘squared off’ Sir Bob in relation to the affair.
Rupert replied, insisting that he didn’t feel guilty at all – that he ‘just ignored him’ – and that the Live Aid organiser knew about the affair. But others who are close to the Geldof clan have taken a dim view of Rupert re-sharing details of the affair.
Paula’s second daughter Peaches died – also of a heroin overdose – at just 25 in 2014. Her other children are Fifi Trixibelle, 43, and Pixie, 35, with Sir Bob, and Tiger Lily, 29, whose father is the late Hutchence.
Fifi was 17 when her mother passed away, while Peaches was 11 and Pixie ten. Tiger Lily, who was taken in by Sir Bob and his partner Jeanne Marine, was just four.
Friends of the women say they are ‘extraordinarily protective’ of their beloved mother’s memory and ‘detest’ how her sex life has been used to titillate after her death at her mews house in London’s Notting Hill. They have also been disgusted in the past at people who use their dead mother to make money.
‘Pixie, in particular, will emphatically defend her,’ says one friend. ‘It all feels a bit unnecessary to her that her past gets dragged up.
‘She found out on her tenth birthday that her mother had died. It was tragic for her, as it was for all of her sisters. In their own ways, they were all private about her but it is upsetting when people start dragging things up about Paula.
‘Not only is it Paula but it’s Bob too. He was the innocent party in all of it, yet has to read more from a man who was having sex with his wife. While he might be used to that, it doesn’t make it any nicer.’
Another former associate of Paula, who worked with her through the 1990s, also predicts that she wouldn’t have liked Rupert to have revealed their secret. ‘While she was commanding headlines in the tabloids for years, Paula didn’t want dirt out there about herself,’ they tell me. ‘She got it. She was a journalist herself and Bob was very media-friendly but, still, there were some boundaries.
‘The girls were little, they didn’t know but they do now. They have been through so much, and so much of it when they were so young.’
Indeed, they have.
Sir Bob and Paula – who was in her 30s when she learned her biological father was legendary game show host Hughie Green – became a couple in 1976 and married a decade later. She ended the relationship in 1995 after meeting Hutchence, leaving the Boomtown Rats star bereft.
Paula and Michael’s romance was headline news in the British and Australian Press, especially when, in July 1996, they had Tiger Lily.
Their happiness was short-lived – a little over a year later, Michael was found dead in a Sydney hotel room, with the coroner ruling that he died of suicide by hanging.
Paula had planned to visit him in the city with Tiger Lily and her other three daughters but Sir Bob had taken legal action to stop it.
Sources said that Paula had claimed Michael became distraught when she told him she couldn’t bring the girls with her and insisted he couldn’t live without seeing his young daughter.
Paula refused to accept the coroner’s verdict and believed he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Today Fifi Trixibelle works as a personal assistant at London- based PR company Freuds, which is run by Matthew Freud – a friend of her parents. She split from her husband of ten years, sand sculptor Andrew Robertson, earlier this year.
Pixie is a model and mother to a four-year-old daughter with her husband drummer George Barnett. Meanwhile, Tiger Lily is a singer-songwriter and an artist. Last year she married model Ben Archer, with whom she has a child. All three girls have tried to put the tragedies behind them.
‘The girls have done so well for themselves,’ says a friend. ‘They try to look forward and remember their mum in the best way they know how rather than taking any notice of what they read about her.’
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