Gerry Agar, writing as both friend and part-time PR person to the central figures, offers an insider's perspective, though hardly from the inner sanctum. Her narrative begins innocuously enough: a chance encounter at school pickup, an old acquaintance rekindled. How refreshingly mundane for a story that would spiral into such sordid territory.
Paula emerges as "very intelligent" yet fundamentally unstable—an assessment that proves generous given her pattern of discarding people once their usefulness expired. Twenty years with the domineering but dependable Geldof had apparently kept her borderline tendencies in check, but living with someone who'd achieved semi-god status must have been insufferable. One could almost sympathize with her predicament, if not for what followed.
Unfortunately, her reaction to marital trouble was very predictable. Yates started an affair, which grew into an obsession. Hutchence had some psychological flaws of his own and the result was two people getting the worst out of each other.
From sordid clandestinity the affair developed into tabloid fodder, also thanks to Yates. She pushed the story into the open, possibly trying to infuse some "reality" into an episode that was better left short and secret.
The subsequent chapters read like an inventory of human frailty: court battles, custody wars, escalating substance abuse, delusion, and paranoia. Paula demanded everything bend to her will, wielding suicide threats like a weapon against anyone who dared contradict her. Hutchence, her "part-time" boyfriend, crumbled first under the pressure, his fragile psyche no match for the chaos.
By the time of his death, Paula had abandoned any pretense of self-sufficiency, financing her lavish lifestyle through the men in her orbit and her lucrative deals with the very tabloids she publicly scorned. Whatever sympathy one might have harbored evaporates upon learning of the astronomical sums she pocketed for interviews and photographs, including those of her children. The eternal complaint about gutter press rings rather hollow when "celebrities" prove so eager to exploit it for profit.
I approached this story without allegiance to INXS, Geldof, or tabloid narratives, hoping for some measure of objectivity. What I found instead was a tale so saturated with lust, greed, and delusion that finishing it felt less like completion than escape. The physical and chronological distance from these events does nothing to dilute their essential squalor.
None of the principals emerge as particularly sympathetic - not Paula with her manipulative desperation, not "Saint" Bob with his calculated righteousness, not "elegantly wasted" Michael with his weakness masquerading as sensitivity. In the end, Geldof prevailed through the most bizarre twist of fate, though "victory" seems too generous a term for what amounts to outliving the carnage.