We remember the images of screaming fans and swooning girls, but the women who married into the Beatles empire are the ones who stole the Fab Four's hearts and gave substance to their songs. They ran the gamut from socialites to runaways, hair dressers to actresses and artists. They were shy and bold, adventurers ready to experiment with free love and LSD, and homemakers who strived uselessly to maintain privacy. Each one saw her husband’s stardom and the temptations it held, and each met that challenge in a different way: some through forgiveness, some through acceptance and still others by walking away.

John Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, go out after the show in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11, 1964. (AP) (AP)

CYNTHIA LENNON

Cynthia Powell, punctual and prim in her sweater sets, dreamed of becoming an art teacher. Her life took a different course when she met John Lennon at the Liverpool College of Art in 1957. She and Lennon were in the same calligraphy class. He always came to class unprepared, and had to borrow her pens and brushes, often forgetting to return them.

At the time, Powell had a fiancee and was not impressed with Lennon’s antics -- until she heard him singing one day, and saw another girl touch his hair. They found common ground in the loss of their parents — Lennon’s mother had recently died and so had Powell's father -- and soon Powell broke up with her fiancee in order to date Lennon. The couple married on Aug. 23, 1962, soon after she discovered that she was pregnant. Their son, Julian, was born in April 1963.

Though she was part of his life before the Beatles became big, "I was usually dismissed as the impressionable young girl who fell for him, then trapped him into marriage," she wrote in her 2006 book, "John."

The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, thought it would hurt Lennon’s image to have a wife and child, so Cynthia Lennon kept her marriage a secret. "In fact, I was asked many times if I was John’s wife, and I had to refuse and say, 'No, no, I’m somebody else,' " she once told NPR's Terry Gross in an interview. The wedding was a minimalist affair at the Marlyebone register's office, followed by an informal lunch with George Harrison and Paul McCarthy at a nearby restaurant. Then, in a sign of what their married life would be like, Lennon went off with his band mates, spending his wedding night performing at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester, reported Philip Norman in his book "John Lennon."

Later in life, Lennon candidly admitted that he treated his wife and other women poorly, something he attributed to his jealous nature. "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically—any woman," he said in an interview with Playboy in January 1981. "I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. ... I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

He had many affairs during the course of his marriage to Cynthia, which she tolerated. In her book, she describes the "real John" as an "infuriating, lovable, sometimes cruel, funny, needy and talented man who made such an impact on the world." But their marriage collapsed soon after she found Yoko Ono in their Surrey home, wearing Cynthia's bathrobe. They divorced in November 1968.

Cynthia Lennon later married Roberto Bassanini, divorced him, and married John Twist. After Lennon's death in 1980 and her divorce from Twist, she took the surname Lennon once more, according to Billy Harry, author of the Mersey Beat. She married Noel Charles, a former nightclub owner, in 2002. He died in 2013.



John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, talk to journalists from their bed in the Hilton hotel suite in Amsterdam, during their honeymoon in Europe on March 25, 1969. FILES/AFP/Getty Images

YOKO ONO

Yoko Ono was a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a singer-songwriter, a poet, a filmmaker and a peace activist. But she is best known as John Lennon's muse.

The two met at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, while Lennon was still married to Cynthia Lennon and Ono was married to Tony Cox. Ono handed Lennon a card that said "breathe." He walked up to a piece of her performance art called "Painting to Hammer a Nail," for which people hammered a nail into a piece of wood. Since the exhibit didn't open until the following day, Ono initially wouldn't let Lennon participate, but coyly told him that he could do it if he paid five shillings, according to Jonathan Cott's biography, "Days That I'll Remember." Lennon responded: "Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shilling and hammer an imaginary nail in." When their eyes met, Lennon says, "She got it and I got it," reported the Guardian.

While his wife, Cynthia Lennon, was away on vacation in Greece, Lennon invited Ono over to his home for what might be considered their first date, according to Jonathan Cott, a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, who conducted one of the last interviews with Lennon before he died. They recorded an album in Lennon's attic studio, a strange blend of musical instruments, feedback, bird sounds and nursery rhymes, according to "The Beatles Bible."

"It was midnight when we started," said Lennon some time later, according to Cott. "It was dawn when we finished and then we made love. It was very beautiful."

"We were both so excited about discovering each other, we didn't stop to think about anyone else's feelings, we just went ahead gung-ho. What we had was more precious than anything else," Ono later said, according to Philip Norman's 2008 biography "John Lennon: The Life."

The album they recorded was later titled "Two Virgins" and produced in 1968. Its cover featured the couple completely naked; it was sold in a paper sleeve.

In 1968, Lennon left his wife and their son, Julian. Ono divorced Cox in 1969. Yoko and Lennon married in March 1969. In 1973, they separated, during what Lennon famously called his "lost weekend." He left Ono for her assistant May Pang (Pang told the Daily Mail it was with Ono's blessing), but after 18 months, he returned to Ono.

The couple's only child, Sean Lennon, was born in 1975.

"I felt that I had a world in me that I couldn’t share," Ono once told the Guardian. "And so that that was the loneliness—the loneliness was created because of that. So all my life I was feeling a touch lonely until I met John. And of course John was like that, too."

Days after their wedding, the couple held their legendary "bed-in for peace" while on their honeymoon in Amsterdam and invited reporters to observe. Some called it a publicity stunt, others performance art; to John and Yoko it was a gesture signaling world peace. But to many Beatles fans, it was proof that Ono was leading him down a radical and political path. Some even blamed her for the eventual break up the band. Lennon doesn't dispute this.

"The old gang of mine was over the moment I met her," Lennon said in an interview with Playboy. "I didn't consciously know it at the time, but that’s what was going on."

While McCartney and Ono clashed in the past, in 2012 he defended Ono, saying she wasn't the reason the band split and even crediting her with inspiring some of Lennon's best work.

"When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant-garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him," McCartney told Parade magazine. "So it was time for John to leave; he was definitely going to leave."

Ono still lives in New York in the iconic Dakota building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, outside which Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Her celebrity status has not waned since his death: In September 2013 she sang songs from her latest album, "Take Me to the Land of Hell," with her band at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, and continues to work as an activist, artist and performer.

While dismissive of Ono’s "unbearable" music, Michael Kimmelman, an art critic for The New York Times, argued that history may have underestimated her role in Fluxus, a conceptual movement of the '60s that blended life and art through everyday objects and events, sometimes using humor.

" 'A Box of Smile' (open the hinged top and find your reflection in the mirror inside) may be a simple, hokey idea but it’s emblematic of her best work," he wrote. "Smile into the mirror. It is a tiny prod toward personal enlightenment, very Zen."

On the 44th anniversary of their wedding, Ono tweeted a photograph of Lennon’s blood-stained glasses and demanded stronger gun control laws.



Drummer Ringo Starr embraces his wife, Maureen "Mo" Cox, on Feb. 12, 1965, in Hove, Sussex, England. The couple married secretly in London on Feb. 11 and spent a three-day honeymoon at a friend's home (AP)

MAUREEN COX

Maureen "Mo" Cox was the bold teenage fan girl who kissed Paul McCartney on a dare. She also dated Ringo Starr's former band mate, Johnny Brynne, from The Hurricanes, but when she cast her eye on Starr, he ultimately took notice and responded.

Cox left high school at 16 to become a beautician. She and her friends from the salon often went to see bands play at The Cavern, a club in Liverpool; it was during one of these shows that Starr asked her to dance. Soon afterwards, they began dating.

She was "the least worldly of the Beatles womenfolk in the '60s," according to Beatles' press officer Tony Barrow, who described her as less glamorous than McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher, less famous than Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd and not nearly as smart as Cynthia Lennon. But she was "chirpy" with an "irreverent sense of humor," said Barrow, and "she suited Ringo down to the ground."

A friend of Maureen's, Chris O’Dell, described her as a "character" who got along with everyone. "She wasn't afraid to be her own person. She dressed the way she wanted to. Spoke the way she wanted to." O’Dell adds, "Her loyalty was one of her deepest qualities."

Ringo and Maureen married in 1965; she was 18 at the time and pregnant with the first of their three children. She took his real surname, Starkey, always called him "Richie" instead of "Ringo" and gave up her dream of owning a beauty salon to focus on being a wife and mother, noted Barrow.

Their marriage wasn't immune to the affairs and complications that plagued other members of the Beatles. At one point, George Harrison confessed his love for Starkey, which strained both of their marriages, though Starkey denied that their relationship was ever sexual and told Starr she wanted to stay together.

But that wasn't to be. They divorced in July 1975, after Starkey learned of Starr's affair with Nancy Lee Andrews.

Starkey later married Isaac Tigrett, owner of the Hard Rock Cafe empire, and gave birth to a daughter, Augusta. But Starkey and Starr remained close. In the early ‘90s, when Starkey was diagnosed with Leukemia, Starr frequently visited her at the hospital, according to Andy Davis, news editor of the Beatles' Monthly Book. A childhood friend said, he "could not have been more caring." She died at age 48, surrounded by her children, her husband and Starr.



Ringo Starr with his second wife, Barbara Bach, on May 16, 1983. (Pizac/AP)

BARBARA BACH

If Barbara Bach hadn't been passed over for a role in TV's "Charlie's Angels," she might never have met Ringo Starr. She was disappointed when the director gave the job to Shelley Hack and accepted a part in the comedy film "Caveman" instead, in which Starr had also been cast. She met Starr on the set in Mexico in 1980. She had seen him once before – he and her sister went to the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in 1965, but at the time she preferred Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones to the Beatles. By the time production on "Caveman" ended, she and Starr were living together, according to People magazine.

After surviving a serious car accident together in London "We decided we wouldn't spend any time apart," Starr told People magazine in February 1981. "So far the longest break was five days, and that was too long. I want to live every minute with Barbara." The two married on April 27, 1981.

A native New Yorker, Barbara Goldbach began modeling at 16 and was soon a cover girl. She changed her last name to Bach and launched her acting career as Bond girl Anya Amasova in 1977's "The Spy Who Loved Me," and quickly became an icon.

Before she met Starr, she was married to Augusto Gregorini, an Italian businessman, who was more than a decade her senior and with whom she had two children. They separated in 1975 and later divorced.

Bach has appeared in 28 films, but hasn't worked on screen since 1983. In an interview with the Weekend Magazine in 1986, she explained: "I don’t want to go back to full-time working... I’ve learned to love just living with the family." She and Starr lived in the Berkshires in Massachusetts at the time; Starr had his own recording studio and continued to work from home while Bach rode horses and looked after the family.

During a turbulent period in their marriage, Starr abused cocaine and other drugs and could become violent. “During one such instance, he severely beat Bach before blacking out,” reported Starpulse. After that, he and Bach--who was also drinking heavily and using cocaine-- spent six weeks in a rehabilitation center in Arizona in 1988, according to Starpulse. They currently live in Monaco and have been sober since.

Bach later founded the Self Help Addiction Recovery Program (SHARP) with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Pattie Boyd, and earned a master’s degree in psychology from UCLA in 1993. She is still involved in charity work, including The Lotus Foundation (which she founded with Starr) and the Romanian Angel Appeal, which was founded by Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s second wife.



George Harrison kisses his wife, Patti Boyd, on June 22, 1966. The pair separated in 1974 and divorced in 1977 after Harrison had an affair with Starr's wife Maureen. Boyd married Harrison's best friend Eric Clapton in 1979. AFP/Getty Images

PATTIE BOYD

Patricia Ann Boyd was an assistant beautician before she was discovered by a client and encouraged to try modeling. Soon after taking to the runways of Paris, London and New York, she became one of the “it girls” of the ‘60s.

LA Magazine called her “a mythical muse, a modern day Helen of Troy.” But playing the heroine to two rock legends was less empowering than one might expect.

“I felt I had to be flawless, serene, someone who understood every situation, who made no demands but was there to fulfill every fantasy; and that’s someone with not much of a voice,” she wrote in her memoir, “Wonderful Tonight.”

Boyd met George Harrison on the set of the Beatles’ first film, “A Hard Day’s Night.” She had a bit part, that of a schoolgirl taking the Beatles to London.

“On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I had ever seen,” she wrote. “At a break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him. Being close to him was electrifying.”

Still, Boyd turned down Harrison when he first asked her out, since she was dating photographer Eric Swayne at the time. But by their next meeting, Pattie had learned just how sought-after her new crush really was, and ended her relationship with Swayne. She and Harrison married in 1966.

Boyd’s relationship with Harrison at least initially was a boon for her career. The day after the paparazzi photographed her and Harrison returning from a vacation in Tahiti, Vogue booked her for a photo shoot. She also modeled for Honey, Vanity Fair, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Mirror.

If Cynthia Lennon and Maureen Cox were the homemakers, Boyd was their opposite: a party girl. Harrison introduced her to marijuana and, according to Boyd, she was with the Beatles when their dentist John Riley served them coffee laced with LSD.

Boyd was the inspiration for many of Harrison’s songs, including “Something,” “I’d Have You Anytime” and “Let it Down.” But their marriage wasn’t perfect. Two things upset the balance of their relationship: one was a trip to an ashram in India to see the Yogi Maharishi Mahesh in 1968, and the other was the couple’s extramarital affairs.

Boyd had introduced Harrison to transcendental meditation, but says that Harrison took his practice to an obsessive level, and had also started drinking and using drugs.

One night Harrison’s best friend, Eric Clapton, confessed that he was in love with Boyd, who was still married to Harrison at the time. Clapton’s hit song “Layla” is about his unrequited love for his best friend’s wife. After that, Harrison became more blatant in his extra-marital dalliances, going so far as to profess his love for Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen Cox, in front of both Starr and Boyd. This betrayal was crushing for Boyd and may have been what finally drove her to leave Harrison for Clapton in 1974. She and Harrison divorced in 1977.

“When I left him for Eric, he had said that if things didn’t work out, ever, I could always come to him and he would look after me,” she wrote in her book. But Pattie’s marriage to Clapton was no more successful than her marriage to Harrison. The couple married in 1979 but broke up in 1984 because of alcoholism and infidelity. Since then, she’s focused on her own creative pursuits, mainly photography.



George Harrison and his wife Olivia are seen in London in Sept. 8, 1978, six days after their wedding. Olivia gave birth to their son, Dhani, on Aug. 1 that year. AFP/Getty Images

OLIVIA ARIAS HARRISON

Olivia Arias, the daughter of a drycleaner and a seamstress, was working as a secretary at A&M Records when she met George Harrison at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, not long after Pattie Boyd left him. They started dating and Arias eventually moved into his Friar Park estate. She gave birth to their son Dhani Harrison in August 1978 and the couple married a month later.

One of the few Beatles wives to keep her private life fairly private, Arias founded the Romanian Angel Appeal in 1990 and devoted herself to her husband after Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997. Two years later, a deranged man broke into their home near Henley-on-Thames, Friar Park, England; he stabbed Harrison in the chest multiple times, puncturing his lung. Arias hit the intruder with a heavy lamp, and he turned on her as well.

Though his throat cancer had been treated with two rounds of chemotherapy, Harrison developed lung and brain cancer as well and died in November 2001.

Arias was characterized as a “fresh, forthright, no-B.S. kind of gal—loving but not unduly reverent,” by Vanity Fair. Yet, speaking after his death, she seemed impressed by her husband’s spiritual side. Arias spoke about how Harrison felt about the cancer and relinquishing control, saying that he once told her, “You know, you can’t just at the end of your life start thinking about God, you have to practice. It’s not something you just stumble upon, you know, consciousness and self-realization, you have to work for it.”

Arias was devoted to her husband, but she wasn’t blind to his flaws. In a documentary, she co-produced with Martin Scorsese, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” she admitted there were “hiccups” in their marriage.

“He liked women and women liked him,” she told the Daily Mail. “If he just said a couple of words to you, it would have a profound effect. It was hard to deal with someone who was so well loved.”

Arias also produced a memorial concert in his honor at the Royal Albert Hall in London a year after his death. The event starred Harrison’s best friend Eric Clapton, fellow Traveling Wilburys member Jeff Lynne, former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and other prominent musicians including Tom Petty, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, and Harrison’s son Dhani. Proceeds from the concert were donated to Harrison’s Material World Charitable Foundation, and a video of the event won a Grammy in 2005 . Since then, Arias has continued to work in Harrison’s memory: She wrote the book “Concert for George: A Celebration of the Life of George Harrison” in 2006, and a second book in 2011 based on her documentary film.



Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda, attend the French fashion house Chloe's Spring/Summer '98 collection designed by their daughter Stella on Oct. 15, 1997. Linda died of cancer in 1998. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

LINDA EASTMAN

Linda Eastman was a receptionist at Town & Country magazine when she got her break, snapping photos of The Rolling Stones at a promotional party where she was a guest. She would go on to photograph B.B. King, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, The Who, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and of course the Beatles, becoming the first female photographer to see her work—a photo of Eric Clapton—featured on a Rolling Stone magazine cover in 1968.

A divorced mother of one living in New York City, Eastman met Paul McCartney during a photo shoot in London in 1967. They chatted at a concert at the Bag O’Nails and again at the launch party for the Beatles’ eighth album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.”

A few days later in New York City, they met at the home of Nat Weiss, a longtime family friend. McCartney asked her for her number as he was leaving and phoned before she arrived home. Because he was flying out of New York the next day, he invited Eastman to ride with him to the airport in his limo. Weiss, who was in the car that day, told “The Beatles: The Biography” author Bob Spitz about the change he saw in McCartney when he was around Eastman.

“Paul’s whole demeanor—that cocky defensive shield he wore like armor—melted away, and for a moment he seemed fairly human,” said Weiss.

Shortly before they met, McCartney was engaged to Jane Asher, a sophisticated well-loved child star and socialite. But Asher caught McCartney in bed with another woman and broke off the engagement.

Asher was poised and classy but Eastman was a supremely confident American with a “congenial hippie-chick looseness,” according to the Daily Mail.

Plus, she was genuinely excited about rock n’ roll music and wasn’t intimidated by the trappings that accompanied it -- the drugs, the press, and the pretty girls. When a stunning T.V. actress came up to his hotel room and professed her love for McCartney while Eastman was there she “seemed amused,” Weiss told Spitz. McCartney was drawn to the “slight rebelliousness” he saw in her.

However, some of McCartney’s fans, still stuck on Asher, blamed Eastman for their split. While Eastman shared Asher’s highborn pedigree—(her father Lee Eastman was a prominent entertainment lawyer and her late mother was the heiress to the Lindner department store fortune ) Linda “was a woman with baggage. She had a kid. She was divorced. She was American. She was not conventionally pretty,” J.D. Heyman, a reporter for People magazine, told the History Channel in an interview for the documentary “The Beatles Women.”

Eastman ignored her critics. In 1968, she moved to London to be closer to McCartney. They married in March 1969. Their daughter Mary was born in August that same year. Their second daughter Stella was born in 1971, and son James came in 1977. McCartney adopted Eastman’s daughter Heather from her first marriage to geologist Melvin See, and The McCartney family made a home together in the Scottish countryside. She officially became “Lady McCartney” when her husband was awarded a knighthood in 1997.

Their marriage lasted 29 years -- a millennium in rock ‘n’ roll terms. In that time, they spent only 10 days apart, when McCartney was arrested and jailed in Tokyo under marijuana charges, according to The New York Times.

After the Beatles broke up, the McCartneys made music together: They recorded an album, “Ram,” and Linda McCartney joined her husband’s band Wings as a keyboard player and singer. She also was part of a little-known group called Suzy and the Red Stripes (which was later found to be Wings with Linda McCartney as lead singer).

A strict vegetarian and animal rights activist, Linda McCartney wrote two vegetarian cookbooks and designed her own line of frozen vegetarian meals in 1991. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995; the disease quickly spread to her liver, and she died on April 17, 1998, at the McCartney family ranch in Arizona. She was 56 years old.

After her death, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) created the Linda McCartney Award. On April 10, 1999, Paul McCartney held a “Concert for Linda” at the Royal Albert Hall in London, performing alongside stars like George Michael, Elvis Costello, Tom Jones, and the Pretenders. The event raised more than $2 million for cancer research.

Paul said Linda is the inspiration for all of the love songs he wrote during their relationship, including “Maybe I’m Amazed.”



Paul McCartney arrives with fiancee Heather Mills at the 58th Venice International Film Festival on Sept. 4, 2001. The pair had a daughter in 2003 and divorced in 2008. (Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images)

HEATHER MILLS

Heather Mills, a model turned activist and philanthropist, met Paul McCartney at a charity event in 1999. The two made their relationship public in 2000, and married in a $3.2 million private ceremony in 2002, in a 17th Century chapel in Ireland.

In her teenage years, Mills, a runaway from a broken home, found herself working as a semi-successful model. She later took a break from modeling one year to visit Yugoslavia, where she witnessed the devastating injuries wrought by land-mines.

Mills first found fame in 1993, when her left leg was amputated below the knee after a police motorcycle crashed into her. She chose to continue her modeling career in spite of her amputation, and established the Heather Mills Health Trust, an organization that recycles used prosthetic limbs and advocates for the removal and banning of land mines. After she married McCartney, she added animal rights advocacy to her catalogue of causes. Her memoir, “A Single Step” published in 2002, chronicles Mills difficult upbringing, her accident, her philanthropy and her rags-to-riches journey as well as her romance with McCartney.

Their daughter, Beatrice Milly McCartney, was born in 2003, but the marriage quickly fractured. The couple waged a nasty divorce in 2006, which was settled in 2008. Mills blamed McCartney’s fashion-designer daughter, Stella, for the split, telling the Herald Sun newspaper that Stella was “jealous” and “evil.” Mills fired her lawyer and chose to represent herself in court, citing cost as the reason. The judge, Justice Hugh Bennett, awarded her a fifth of what she requested, which was still around $33 million, along with $15 million in real estate but along with the figures of the settlement, the judge allowed the court to release the court judgment, which included commentary that was highly critical of Mills.

“I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid.” Bennett wrote. He added that many of her requests for flights and clothing were “ridiculous," and "unreasonable, indeed exorbitant,” according to People magazine, and her former publicity company, Parapluie, pointed out that her public allegations against McCartney were false.

Mills divorce from McCartney wasn’t her first. She was briefly married to Alfie Karmal, a dishwasher salesman, from 1989 to 1991. “She has a very tender, caring, compassionate side, which is what makes her so attractive in the first place,” Karmal told the Daily Mail years after their divorce. “But she also has this other fiery, confrontational side and a very elastic relationship with the truth.”

Since her divorce from McCartney, Mills has been a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” and “Dancing on Ice.” While she didn’t win the competition, Mills’ dancing proved once again her disability was no match for her willpower.

http://www.biography.com/people/heather-mills-240972 Mills also won a World Cup silver medal in New Zealand’s slalom skiing event in 2013. But her dream of competing in the Paralympic Winter Games shattered after she threatened an Olympic official and was obliged to resign, reported the Mirror.

Along with her athletic endeavors, Mills continues to develop her business side: In 2009, Mills bought Redwood Wholesale Foods. It has since won awards as one of the top-rated ethical vegetarian food suppliers in the world by the Ethical Company Organization, a UK-based self-sustaining company. She also opened two vegan cafes in Brighton, according to Ecorazzi.com, a site focused on celebrities, the environment and social change, and The Argus, a regional British newspaper.

Mills remains a dedicated animal rights activist who lobbies against using cat and dog fur in clothing and protests seal hunting in Canada. She is also a member of PETA and a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations.



Paul McCartney announced his engagement to Nancy Shevell, left, on May 7, 2011. The two began seeing each other after meeting in Long Island's Hampton area in late 2007. (Ian West/PA Wire/AP)

NANCY SHEVELL

Nancy Shevell, 51, the Jersey-born vice president of her family’s trucking business , served on the Metropolitan Transit Authority board from 2001 to 2011. Trucks were part of the natural fabric of her childhood. “While other kids would go feed ducks at the park, we would go to my father’s truck terminals, to places like Pennsauken, every single weekend,” she told the Newark Star Ledger. She was married to New York attorney Bruce Blakeman, for more than 20 years. They had a son, Arlen, and divorced in 2007.

The second cousin of renowned TV journalist Barbara Walters, Shevell credits Walters with formally introducing her to Paul McCartney in 2007, a few months after McCartney’s divorce from Mills and while Shevell was separated from her husband. Their families are old friends - -both have summer homes in the Hamptons. Shevell and Linda Eastman McCartney both fought breast cancer at the same time, according to ABC News. Linda lost her battle in 1998. Comparisons between McCartney’s past and present wives are inevitable. Rob Shuter of the gossip website Popeater told ABC News that Shevell “comes with all the skills that Linda [Eastman] had to learn and Heather [Mills] never learned…. Nancy [Shevell] is not as bubbly or as full of life as Heather was. But she comes with fewer problems.” The Daily Mail reported Shevell is adventurous the way Eastman was, given that her high school year book listed skiing and flying as some of her interests.

Shevell and McCartney were engaged in 2011 and her new fiancé wrote a love song for her, “My Valentine,” which played during the first dance after their wedding later that year. They said their vows at the Marlyebone register's office in England -- the same office where McCartney married Eastman in 1969 -- and invited just 30 guests.