Bono said no to being Tiger Lily’s godfather ‘as he was Bob’s friend’
Paula Yates’s former publicist disputes U2 frontman’s account in his absorbing memoir
BONO has been accused of rewriting history in his new book in a bid to maintain his ‘squeaky-clean’ image.
The U2 frontman’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, was released to much fanfare this week.
But a passage in which he discusses his friendship with INXS singer Michael Hutchence and his wife Paula Yates has been deemed ‘absolutely absurd’ by a friend of the tragic couple.
Paul ‘Bono’ Hewson writes that he and wife Ali were asked to be godparents to Hutchence and Yates’s first and only child, Tiger Lily.
But, he says, the spiralling and welldocumented recreational drug use of the Australian singer and his TV presenter wife made it an impossible proposition for the Hewsons.
However, Yates’s friend and former right-hand woman Gerry Agar-Fennell
told the Irish Mail on Sunday this week that the real reason the invitation was rejected was because Bono was still close friends with Yates’s exhusband, Bob Geldof.
In his memoir, Bono writes: ‘It should have been the greatest honour, when Michael and Paula called on my wife Ali and me to ask us to be godparents to Tiger Lily.
‘But we were wigged out. They were in freefall, spiralling down the vortex of a recreational drug use that had become hard work for everyone.
‘We nervously tried to explain that while they were in the condition they were in, we’d rather not play the role of best friends.
‘We’d rather be best friends, and that meant being truthful.’
But Agar-Fennell, who quit as Yates’s publicist before she died of an overdose in 2000, told the MoS this week: ‘Bono’s trying to come across as squeaky-clean in his book – it’s so awful and wrong, it’s absolutely absurd.
‘He says he grew uncomfortable around them because of their drug use. But I never saw that.’
She claims she was in the house when Hutchence made the call to ask Bono to be godfather, and the U2 star had said: ‘Look, I’ve got this friendship with Bob, it’d tear it up if I accepted, it isn’t gonna work. I’m sorry mate.’
She added that, just a couple of weeks after Bono turned down the godfather offer, he was happy to holiday with the couple in the south of France.
‘They were thick as thieves,’ she said.
Agar-Fennell also claims the couple’s friends dismissed her concerns about Yates and Hutchence’s continuous drug use.
‘I was alone in trying to help them,’ she said. ‘I went to all their friends to ask for help, including Bono. But they were all too busy partying, saying they loved each other.’
Her account comes a few weeks ahead of the 25th anniversary of the INXS singer’s death, aged 37. He was found hanged in a Sydney hotel room in what was declared a suicide. Three years’ later, Paula Yates died of a heroin overdose in London, aged 41.
Their daughter Tiger Lily – now 26 and living out of the spotlight – was taken into the foster custody of Bob Geldof, to live with her three half-sisters.
‘It should have been the greatest honour’
‘They were as thick as thieves’
Yesterday Bono said he ‘deeply regret[s]’ turning down the godfather offer.
‘But there was a young child involved and we just didn’t want to feel, whilst they were on this very self-destructive path, that we could just be there going, “Yeah, everything’s fine. Let’s be the godparents,”’ he told RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor.
On his late friends, Bono added: ‘There’s a point where suddenly you’re not playing with fire, the fire is playing with you... [Hutchence] was just brilliant and suddenly then he disappeared into this hole.
‘And he met somebody who utterly adored him, Paula.
‘It was very hard because she also loved Bob Geldof and we were in the middle of that. That was a hard moment. It was all just getting a little messy. We’re just not for that.’
Bono did not respond to a request for comment on Agar-Fennell’s claims.