Heather Mills has a strange request. She asks the young woman in a chic beauty parlor to do a pedicure on her right foot only, and whether this would cost half the price.
The pedicurist looks baffled.
“Why do you want only one foot done?” she asks, a bit defensively.
“Because,” the striking blond answers with a sweet smile, “I don’t seem to be able to see any toes on this one.” And she lifts her left leg’s trousers high enough to reveal a black metal prosthesis.
“Having a sense of humor helps,” Mills says with a grin as she recalls the incident. She is tan, tall and toned, managing to look sexy and comfortable in a pink fluffy midriff top and flared navy sweat pants.
In a friend’s apartment in West Hampstead, her pied-a-terre when she is doing business in London, Mills talks enthusiastically about her numerous projects and engagements.
One morning she might be in Parliament lobbying ministers on health-care issues. At night she might be fronting a charity event. The next day she might be doing a few modeling shots and a radio interview before flying to Cambodia, where she works with Oxfam, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, established in 1942 to provide training and financial aid in developing countries and disaster areas.
Mills is a national celebrity, a jet-setter, a model, a charity worker, a TV presenter, a documentary-maker and a public speaker. But 2 1/2 years ago, the athletic 28-year-old was “only” a swimwear model. A very successful one, that is. With her long, shapely legs and eye-catching cleavage, she was worth $300,000 a year.
Then she had a terrible accident.
In was on August 8, 1993, in London, Mills says in a flat voice. “I was waiting to cross a street when I heard sirens and saw two police motorcyclists flying by. I looked to the right. It was clear. I took two steps forward and before I knew it I was flying through the air.” She was run over by a third police motorcyclist whom she hadn’t seen coming.
“There was blood everywhere. People were screaming and running about in all directions. My leg had been not cut, but pulled out like a spaghetti.” It was so damaged doctors could not sew it back, and they amputated her left leg below the knee.
“At first I was in too much pain from my other injuries (broken ribs, fractured pelvis and punctured lung) to even think about my leg,” she says.
After a week it sank in. While trying to stand up, Mills forgot to take hold of the handrails and toppled forward on the floor, she recounts. She cried. Nothing would ever be the same.
“I won’t be able to dance or ski or play tennis or swim,” she thought. “I won’t be able to wear short skirts. Worse, I won’t be able to model again.”
She had lost not only her leg but also her livelihood.
“I felt sad and weepy for the rest of the day,” she wrote in her recently published autobiography, “Out on a Limb” (Little, Brown UK).
“It took till suppertime for me to get sick of my own misery. I knew I had to pull myself together . . . I had to be positive,” she wrote. “My life was about to change direction, there was no escaping that. But it had changed direction before and I’d always coped with it. Why look at this latest change as a disaster. Why not treat it as an adventure itself?”
This sounds like an impossibly optimist statement from someone who had just had her leg amputated, but it’s pure Mills’ spirit.
“I had worked too hard and come too far to give up and let everything slip away,” she says simply, teasing her blond hair. “I had to face so many traumas and setbacks in my life. It was like a preparation. I have learned to take whatever life threw at me.
“Some people live wrapped in cotton wool, then something happens — they lose a leg for example — and it’s the end of the world. Not for me. I was never afraid. I always knew that my life would never be as bad as when I was a child.”
Mills sits back on a cream sofa and begins to tell her life story. She was born in 1968 in Wales, but her father’s shady dealings forced the family to keep moving.
“He probably was schizophrenic,” she says about her father, who sometimes was clever and charming but most of the time was violent and unstable. Her mother endured her husband’s abuse in silence. When Heather was 9, though, her mother ran away with an actor, abandoning her three children.
“I felt betrayed and lonely,” Mills says, “but I felt happy for her too because I knew how unhappy she was.”
Mills says that as the oldest child she felt she had to look after her brother, Shane, and little sister, Fiona. She took on the shopping, cooking, cleaning and ironing. When her father’s business collapsed, the little mom had to resort to shoplifting to feed the family.
Four years later, her father was arrested and sent to prison, and the children were split up. Mills, then 13, was sent to live with her mother in her small London apartment.
Within the next two years, Mills says, she ran away from home, left school, lived for six months on a fairground (“the happiest time of my life”), was arrested for stealing, slept under the Waterloo Bridge and held down a succession of menial, underage jobs — all by age 16.
Then her life seemed to be on the up. Mills landed her first modeling jobs and launched the first American frozen yogurt franchise in Britain, an idea she got during a photo shoot in America. At 21 she was a successful model running her own modeling agency.
The media interest didn’t die in the first few weeks after the accident. The public was so impressed by her courageous, upbeat fight that she soon became a national hero, appearing on TV and being invited to high-profile events.
She bravely went everywhere on one leg and even participated in a swimathon to help raise funds for a children’s charity.
When she finally got her artificial legs, including a sports leg and a ski leg with a special corset lacing up her thigh, she started to dance again — and ski, and rollerblade and swim and play tennis.
In the end, Mills didn’t lose her financial independence either. Her high media visibility allowed her to retain many modeling contracts — most swimwear shots don’t show full legs — and generated many lucrative media and speaking contracts.
“I take from the rich to feed the poor,” she says, “so I can afford to take time out for my charity work.”
Money also allowed her to buy the best possible artificial legs, which are not available through the state medical system.
“Wait,” she says, excitedly, as she disappears in the bedroom.
Walking without the slightest limp, she comes back cradling her cosmetic leg, the one she wears with high heels and short skirts. It is a perfect lifelike silicone leg, the exact color and shape as her other one, complete with painted toenails, slight veins and even a little brown mole hiding a button that releases or blocks the heel.
The media attention also gave her the power to do more meaningful work.
“Before, if I went to a truck agency and asked for a truck to go to Bosnia, they would have said `No,’ ” she says. “But now I can say: `How many trucks can you give me. I’ll be on the 6 o’clock evening news and everyone will see your logo.’ “
These days, it’s not food and medicine that Mills transports to Bosnia, but artificial limbs, thousands of them. She had the idea when her first artificial leg didn’t fit any longer because the shape of her residual limb had changed. There are thousands of discarded limbs in England, she discovered, but because of labor costs, the state medical system doesn’t refit them. They remain unused, stored in hospitals and people’s attics.
So the young woman went around the country, appealing for discarded limbs. She collected thousands of them, but they couldn’t be used as such because each limb must be customized. She then obtained the permission to ask inmates in British prisons to take them apart and took the pieces to Bosnia with a team of specialists to fit them.
So far, the Heather Mills Health Trust, which raises money for child amputee war victims worldwide, has taken 20,000 limbs to Bosnia, half of them to children.
“There are about 300,000 amputees in Bosnia, and most of them have been mutilated by land mines,” she says, switching to her public-speaker’s voice. “Land mines overwhelmingly kill civilians, and the UK is manufacturing them.”
She is lobbying the government on Oxfam’s behalf to stop the manufacture and storage of land mines. She also provides an example for the 63,000 amputees in England.
“Every week, I get hundreds of letters from parents who ask me to tell their children it is not the end of the world, from people who say they want to commit suicide, people who say I inspired them. I answer them all. I have to. It’s a lot of work, but I see it as a responsibility rather than a burden.”
If anything, she plans to add to her busy schedule. Her lobbying work gave her a sense that politics might be her ultimate calling.
“I believe my whole life has been preparing me for this. I can relate to every walk of life. I have no formal education, but I know about real life and I believe I could make a difference.”
