WEARING a slinky red satin dress, Heather Mills McCartney is standing stock still. With her lipstick perfectly applied and just the right amount of blusher in place, she steps into the limelight. The band strikes up; the audience applauds.
The first episode of the US television show Dancing With the Stars aired on the ABC network on Monday night and may have been a dream come true for Lady McCartney, as she is now formally known. There were spotlights, there were cameras and, most impo
rtantly, there were fans. In the relative safety of a television studio, she could bask in the limelight with little fear of intrusion.
But if Lady McCartney - still mostly commonly known as Heather Mills - thought she could use the American version of Strictly Come Dancing to win back the hearts of the public, it seems she was wrong.
It wasn't her performance that was the problem. Despite her having only one leg - and yes, it was openly discussed - the judges praised her dancing skills. One congratulated her on having "more guts than Rambo".
But Mills wasn't aiming to please the judges, and it's doubtful that she was striving to be recognised for her tango twist. It's the public she is after: more specifically, their support and admiration. But there, it appears, she is already failing.
By Tuesday morning, America's viewing public made it quite clear they were not about to be dazzled, either by Mills or her dance moves.
On the network's website, www.abc.com, fans of the show pulled no punches. One viewer logged on to question Mills's qualification for being there at all, saying he had no idea who she was and therefore she should not be included as a "celebrity" contestant.
He was given a sharp education on Mills' profile to date.
One critic, Starr_Bright, cleared up the confusion: "Heather Mills is the most hated woman in Britain now, and maybe explains why she came over to the US to try and re-invent her image. There is no reinventing that golddigger and liar. She is no celebrity and the only mistake Paul made was marrying her and no pre-nup."
Mizzcatty went further, saying: "Is there anyone besides me who has a problem with a former call girl who posed nude in sexual situations now being called a 'charity campaigner' and hero for the disabled? Why would ABC put a person like this on a family show? Her nude shots (with a man) are available to anyone who can google, including my friend's older teenagers, who were pulling up the pictures and laughing at them as she danced. In the UK she has a disabled parking badge. In the US she is dancing and doing high kicks."
Some bloggers jump to her defence, citing Mills's ongoing charity campaigning and fundraising as the reason for her inclusion. But the negative views of the vast majority does raise one pertinent question: What does Mills think she's doing? And why is she doing it?
If her aim was to launch the comeback to end all comebacks, a reality TV contest was not the obvious choice. And now one has to wonder if she hasn't ruined for ever any chance of reclaiming her dignity.
REGARDLESS OF THE extent to which there are any grounds for this character assassination - which has centred both on her motivations for marrying McCartney in the first place and her pre-divorce allegations of his physical and verbal abuse towards her - Mills has been sought after and reviled in equal measure.
One can understand, therefore, her desire to salvage any shred of respect the public might bring themselves to lend her.
But why, then, choose a reality TV show, the very calling card of desperation? There is so little to recommend it as a form of redemption that it is hard to understand what (or who) informed her decision to take part.
Whose example does she hope to follow? Les Dennis, who broke down live on Celebrity Big Brother while his marriage to actress Amanda Holden publicly fell apart? Or perhaps Michael Barrymore, who used the same show to make a comeback following the death of factory worker Stuart Lubbock after a party at the TV personality's home in 2001?
Possibly, Mills plans to use this as her "Fergie" moment, to capture the hearts of the American public, rather than those of the British, as a vehicle to public redemption. The two women both saw their marriages fail and have suffered the embarrassment of seeing intimate photos published in the tabloids. Mills was caught out with photographs from her early modelling career, when she posed for a sex manual aimed at couples. And, while Ferguson's were far less revealing - they featured her then-boyfriend John Bryant sucking her toes as the couple sunbathed on holiday - given her royal connections, they were still very shocking.
For Fergie, the US transition worked. Scorned in Britain, she found acceptance in the US, guided by crisis-management guru Howard Rubenstein. Ten years ago, she focused her efforts on establishing herself Stateside, undergoing that key celebrity rite of passage, an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show and publishing a book, My Story. She then became a spokesperson for WeightWatchers, and has even gone on to win the "Mother of the Year" award from the American Cancer Society.
"Heather has two things going for her in America," Rubenstein said recently. "The institutional memory of the American public is very short, and they don't read the British newspapers, so they haven't seen [what] she has been subjected to over there.
"But [Sarah Ferguson] had to lead a life that was above reproach - and Heather should follow suit. The Duchess overcame the negative attitudes and people wanted to forgive her. We'd walk down Fifth Avenue together, and they would cheer her.
"My guess is that if Heather comes here, does a few good interviews, and acts like a lady - doesn't say anything negative about her husband, who is a hero to many Americans - then she'll be embraced. Having a missing leg as a contestant on a dance show may also help, if it can be handled subtly."
Heather has already taken steps in the "Fergie" direction, pledging her salary from Dancing with the Stars to an animal charity.
But one has to assume that her cause - to establish herself as a right-minded, not remotely publicityhungry campaigner - would be far better served by lying low and shielding herself from the media attention against which she has protested so vehemently, especially given her call last week for a change in privacy laws.
She said: "I now believe that this has happened to me so that I can change the privacy laws, just like I changed things in the European Parliament. I'm suing three newspapers at the moment. When I win, instead of making a two-line apology, they should be made to say 'we apologise, we lied about what we wrote'. Then we will get proper journalism."
And in response to accusations that she seeks and cultivates her own press profile, she told GMTV last week: "Think about it. When do I ever go on TV, how many times in the past year? Once. I'm chased down the street day in, day out. I'm not a publicity-seeker.
"Try and think of one time in the past 14 years that I've gone on TV to promote anything other than a cause."
It's an argument that would be far more convincing were it given over the phone from a secluded cottage in Devon, and not in the week she began a run on a network television show in America. Quite how she thinks she can call for increased privacy in one breath and then subject herself for a public phone vote in the other is baffling to say the least.
It seems desperate, and at the very least is certainly sad. Having overcome tragedy after tragedy, she is soon to be a divorced, 39-year-old mother of one. She is widely known across the globe, but for very little apart from marrying a Beatle and enduring a horrific accident, both of which entailed grievous loss.
And that perhaps is the crux of her problem. Mills is tenaciously trying to preserve a celebrity profile that was gained only through association. She came to international fame as the wife of everyone's favourite Beatle, and even her own profession as a charity campaigner has been secured by attaching herself to other existing causes.
That is not to say she is without achievement: she has overcome unimaginable hardship in her personal life. But that's the point. It's personal. We already know far more than we ever needed to about her own difficulties, and even if she were able to erase the most extreme negative image from which she suffers, that of a bitter, manipulative, money-grabbing ex-wife, from public memory, what would she carry on talking about?
Mills needs to reflect on her own calls for privacy and to realise that actually, without her instigation, the attention may die down. It would do her no harm to lie low for a while.
She could continue her charity work in relative anonymity - as plenty of people with both wealth and a conscience do - and still feel like she makes a difference. She should go and live a quiet life. That is what she wants, after all. Isn't it?
