In a controversial memoir, Helene Thornton, the mother of Paula Yates, claims her daughter was distrubed from day one. Hannah Stephenson reports.

HELENE Thornton hadn't spoken to her daughter Paula Yates for nearly five years when the 41-year-old died in 2000 after taking an accidental heroin overdose. There had been a rift between mother and daughter since Paula took off with rock star Michael Hutchence. This was exacerbated by tabloid revelations that TV presenter Hughie Green was actually Paula's father, rather than Stars On Sunday presenter Jess Yates, to whom Helene was married when Paula was born.

Today, the 68-year-old, a former Bluebell girl and one-time Miss Blackpool beauty queen, lives with her ten cats in the south of France. Her second husband died from lung cancer eight months after Paula and, although she admits to the affair with Hughie Green, she still denies that he was Paula's father, even though DNA tests confirmed it. She offers the bizarre and some might say far-fetched explanation that either there was a mix up in the DNA tests or that Jess Yates may have drugged her hot chocolate so that Hughie could rape her while she slept. Helene says Jess was a Jekyll and Hyde character who beat her when she asked for a divorce, once so badly that she had to have 11 broken teeth removed. She claims that when he finally agreed to a divorce, he threatened to turn Paula against her. "I think he had an influence on Paula's attitude towards me. He was very revengeful and talked about people he wanted to avenge."

Nearly six years after her daughter's death, she has written Big Girls Don't Cry, a memoir that paints a sorry picture of Paula Yates. In it, she claims Paula was a clingy, needy child who may have benefited from psychiatric help early on. Helene says she once caught her daughter trying to pull the front legs off her pet cat, causing the animal to miaow in pain.

"People say, 'Why didn't you do something about Paula?' and that I should have got her to a psychiatrist years before. But it simply never occurred to me. You didn't do that in those days."

She also claims her daughter was jealous of her. "She was very proud of having a young mother and a beautiful one," she writes. "At the same time, she suffered from jealousy and no amount of reassurance that she too would be beautiful worked."

Today, Helene rarely sees her grandchildren Fifi, Peaches, Pixie and Tiger Lily, the youngest of whom she met for the first time at Paula's funeral.

While she has dedicated the book to Bob Geldof, Paula's ex, she hasn't seen much of him either. "I wrote and asked if he'd read my book but I think he was busy with Live 8 at the time," she says.

The last time she saw him was two years ago, when he took the girls to her house in France for the first time. "I wanted to write this book firstly so that my grandchildren know me a little better," she says. "They knew me when they were very tiny and then for five years I never saw them. I did try. I went to see them, but Paula had told the nanny not to let me into the house."

She fears her daughter may have poisoned the grandchildren against her. Indeed, in her autobiography, published before she died, Paula talked of her 'unhappy childhood' and described her mother as a self-absorbed flirt with various lovers. "At Paula's funeral, one of the grandchildren said, 'You never came to see us and didn't want to see us,' which is what they had been told by Paula. But it simply wasn't true. I'm far from perfect, but I wanted them to have a kind of picture of how it was."

Surely anything negative she writes about her daughter will further alienate her from her grandchildren? Helene says: "I don't see why it should be upsetting. At some time we've all got to press the reality button, otherwise you've defended someone when they have done wrong. Making a saint out of someone because they died is not a good idea - and I don't think the girls will be surprised at what I've written. I do know that when children with solid characters grow up they will decide themselves."

Helene says she did try to heal the rift with Paula, but to no avail.

"I tried to speak to her but she always said there was a taxi waiting outside and went off the line. The rift was to do with the fact that I'm not enthusiastic about drugs and Michael (Hutchence) was. I think somehow she felt I had betrayed her because I had supported Bob when he went to court to get custody of the children. She never explained that she was leaving Bob. They always seemed marvellously co-ordinated. I didn't know Paula was into drugs."

She recalls Bob Geldof's fateful call in 2000, as he choked back sobs to tell her Paula was dead.

"It took years for me to cry," Helene says. "I was in such shock, and I think I nearly had a nervous breakdown, but you learn to pace yourself and hang in there for grim death. I lounged around, stared into space and thought, I've got to do something, so I wrote this book. You have to come to terms with it."

Paula had a yearning to be famous and it was only when that started to happen that her mother felt her drift from her in a big way, she says.

"She wanted to be accepted into the rock fraternity and you can't talk about Mum all the time to do that."

Does she think she was a good mother? "I think I was a very caring mum. I lived in terror of anything happening to Paula and was always truthful with her."

* Big Girls Don't Cry by Helene Thornton (John Blake, £17.99.

Published: 25/04/2006