Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  As we entered the maternity ward, Alana was asked to pause and fill out some paperwork. To which she replied, ‘Are you fucking insane? I’m about to drop this baby on the floor.’ Again, the maternal Texan had kicked in. Less than a quarter of an hour later we had a boy, and, as with Kimberly, as I held him I was absolutely in love with him from the moment I laid eyes on him. Our Sean.

  So now we had two wonderful children, and a fabulous social life, and wealth and happiness, and so much to be grateful for, however you looked at it . . . and yet somehow it all began to go wrong.

  DIGRESSION

  Matters most serious, in which our hero confesses to a disturbing addiction.

  You understand how these things work. It’s well understood. You know the dangers, but you think you’ll just have a little dabble, just to find out what it feels like. And the warning signs are all out there but you ignore them, because you think you’re different. You think you’re the one in a million: the stronger kind of person who can control it. The next thing you know, your so-called ‘little dabble’ has turned into a raging, all-consuming habit, and you’re spending hours on the phone to a dealer, like he’s your best friend.

  But that’s art collecting. It can get hold of a person. It can take over your life and, more particularly, your walls. And I speak as someone with intimate experience of fixing himself up with late-nineteenth-century paintings. Many, many late nineteeth-century paintings.

  I’ve always loved Pre-Raphaelite pictures, ever since I was a kid: the romance of them, their colour, the classical drapery, the high drama and emotion. As a boy, they spoke to many of my most obsessive interests: knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, and, of course, tits. When I was busking in London, in my late teens, I would often set up in Trafalgar Square, outside the National Gallery, and when it rained I would drift in and wander round looking at the Pre-Raphs and the Victorians. My absolute favourite painting, though, was in the Tate: The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse. The girl in the boat, with the pale face and the long red hair and the open-mouthed expression and the detail of the embroidery and the river and the reeds – I absolutely loved it. Quite often I would take girls to the Tate just to see that one picture. It made a change from going to a coffee bar or to the cinema. And, of course, it alerted them to my thoughtfulness and sensitivity and range of interests as a human being, which has rarely been known to decrease a man’s chances of copping a feel later on.

  Britt Ekland, as I mentioned, introduced me properly to art nouveau, but it was while I was with Alana (who also had a very good eye) that I felt confident enough to make the move upfield from posters to paintings. The first painting I bought (my first ‘acquisition’, as we like to call them in the art world) was by a completely unknown Victorian artist and is called The Kiss: two lovers snatching a quick snog in a fleeting moment on a country path. I got it for £12 off a Romanian bloke in a little shop in Ladbroke Grove in the late 1970s. It’s not particularly big – about three feet tall and two feet wide in a gilt frame – and it’s nothing special altogether, but I just liked the atmosphere of it and that was the beginning of it all.

  My first really serious purchase was steered my way by Alana, who knew someone in Beverly Hills who was selling (of all things) a John William Waterhouse. It’s Isabella with the Pot of Basil, from the Keats poem. It cost me £30,000 in 1981, which felt like an absurd amount of money to be spending on an oil painting, yet I hesitate to think what it could be worth now – possibly as much as £1 million. Not that I’m thinking of selling it. When I stood in front of a Waterhouse as a slightly damp teenage busker, I didn’t particularly imagine I would ever have one of my own hanging in the bedroom. It’s a beautiful picture, first and foremost, but for me it also symbolises a bit of a journey.

  I’ve only been had twice, which is not bad going in the circumstances. I bought off an interior designer something that I thought was an original Guillaume Seignac, but it turned out to be a copy. That was just me being naïve and getting a little overexcited. Still, I like the painting, and even as a copy it’s probably worth a couple of bob. I also found a painting of the Princes in the Tower which I thought was a William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I thought to myself, ‘This is a complete steal.’ But it wasn’t a Bouguereau at all. Happily, I did manage to acquire some original Bouguereaus eventually. I’ve got a large one in the passage. And, as anyone who collects late-nineteenth-century art will tell you, there’s nothing like a large one in the passage.

  Right from the late 1970s, I started doing the auctions. That scene really is addictive. The tension you feel when the picture you want is coming up is pretty intense. And you have to be careful because your ego can cause you all sorts of problems in the bidding process. I remember trying to outbid Gianni Versace once, which risked getting foolishly expensive until I came to my senses and pulled out, feeling somewhat bruised. Having a famous face can work both ways in that situation. Sometimes it goes in your favour because you frighten people off. Other times you’ll get someone who wants to show the room he has more money than you, and then you’ll get into an almighty and altogether unnecessary battle. On the whole it’s probably best for me not to be there, and I tend to let my wonderful assistant Sarah do the bidding for me, or bid on the phone. What you need is an auctioneer in a major house or two who brings the hammer down quick when he knows it’s you on the other end of the line. Not that I have ever found one who would stoop so low as to do so, you understand.

  My arch-enemy in this arena is His Lordship, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. He has a truly spectacular collection of Pre-Raphs and is very hard to compete with. I’ve gone up against him at auction for a couple of things, and the bastard has always won. But he’s a far broader collector than me. He doesn’t stick to Victorian art, he has modern stuff as well, and he makes it all work. I couldn’t put a piece of modern art on the wall because I don’t understand it and it just wouldn’t look right. But he manages it. He invited us over to see his paintings once and we had a sing-song around the piano that was most remarkable for a pissed rendition of ‘All I Want Is a Room Somewhere’ from My Fair Lady by my dear wife Penny – a stand-out moment in the history of musical theatre.

  I move pictures on when I’m tired of them and when enough time has passed for their value to have risen. That can be as much as fifteen years or more. It’s not like the stock market: you need to be patient. And you need to love what you’re buying, too. There’s no satisfaction in getting your hands on it otherwise. I never shop for the sake of it. I’ll buy because I need something for a particular wall in a particular position. I get the catalogues from the dealers and go through them, looking for something that might work. If I’m interested, I’ll speak to Sotheby’s and they’ll send over an inspection report and give me photographs from different angles.

  They put an ultraviolet lamp behind the picture so you can see where the canvas has been torn and touched up through the years. If it’s had too many tears and too many touch-ups, I probably won’t buy it. I’ve been caught out a couple of times, buying without seeing the painting in the flesh, as it were. Sometimes the colours in the catalogue reproductions are far richer than they are when you are actually standing in front of the painting, and when you get it, it just doesn’t have the bounce that you thought it had. Then I’ll set it aside and try to resell it. In general, when you look around, you can tell the expensive ones: they glow and jump off the wall at you.

  No doubt when I die, my kids are going to say, ‘What the fuck are we going to do with all this stuff?’ and then flog it as a job lot on eBay. However, all of them have, at some time in their lives, gone round the house counting the tits, or counting the swords, so there’s definitely been an educational value there. Not long ago, my son Alastair was looking at a painting of St Sebastian, martyred, with arrows sticking out of him, which hangs on the wall outside the kitchen in the house in Los Angeles, and he asked me what was going on there and why that man was naked and shot through like t
hat, and it was very satisfying to be able to explain to the little chap the whole story – that it was because he had missed a penalty.

  Sometimes, if I can’t sleep, I count how many paintings I’ve got. I go from house to house and room to room. ‘One, two, three, eight in the hallway – don’t forget that one in the loo.’ They have to be oils and they’ve got to be framed or they don’t count. No drawings or sketches. Normally, by the time I get up to about 130, I’m ready to go off.

  CHAPTER 14

  In which our hero receives an unexpected visit, falls out with his wife on a London Routemaster bus, and tries to fool Rupert Murdoch, with only partial success.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN late October 1982 the bell rang at the gate of the house in Carolwood Drive. I was out at the studio, working on tracks for what would become the Body Wishes album. Alana, who was at home looking after Kimberly, then three years old, and Sean, who had just turned two, picked up the intercom.

  A male voice said, ‘Is Rod there? There’s someone here who wants to meet him.’

  Outside stood a man with a camera around his neck, a middle-aged woman and an eighteen-year-old girl. The man was a photojournalist from the Sunday People newspaper in London, the woman was called Evelyn Thubron, and the eighteen-year-old was the girl that I had given up for adoption in 1963 – my daughter, Sarah.

  Her arrival was not entirely a surprise. There had been a couple of calls from the British press in the preceding months which had made it clear that someone was following up leads around the story of my adopted child. I had told Alana about those calls. She already knew about what had happened all those years ago. I had told Britt about that passage of my life, too, when we were together. The fact that I had had a child when I was eighteen and given her up for adoption wasn’t something that I hid from any woman I was close to.

  Still, the reality of Sarah’s arrival, and the manner of it, was a shock to Alana. Sarah had turned eighteen near the end of 1981 and her adoptive parents, Brigadier Gerald Thubron and his wife Evelyn, who had raised her in the East Sussex countryside, had disclosed to her that I was her birth father. And now, nearly a year later, here were Evelyn and Sarah on the doorstep – with a journalist. To an astonished Alana, the scene looked uncomfortably like an ambush. She told them I wasn’t at home and then called me at the studio.

  ‘Rod, the press were just outside the house with your daughter.’

  I was utterly confounded. It’s impossible to account for the mixture of feelings that ran through me at that point, though fear was chief among them. But I also felt affronted. Why had she come with the press? Suspecting, like Alana, that some kind of trap was about to be sprung, I called Barry Tyerman, my unflappable and clear-minded lawyer. Barry took the situation over. He got through to the journalist and spoke to Evelyn, the adoptive mother, and explained that I was ready to meet Sarah, but absolutely not in the presence of a reporter. A meeting was set for the following afternoon at the Record Plant studios.

  The next day I waited nervously in an empty back room. What would she look like? How would I feel when I saw her? How would she feel when she saw me? How would she be towards me? These questions circled in my mind. And then, finally, in came Sarah, moving very tentatively, smartly but plainly dressed: a girl so clearly mine that it was like looking in a mirror. And yet I didn’t know her. Mine, yet not mine. I would have liked to have hugged her – I would have liked our relationship to have started off like that. But the situation seemed so contrived and strange, and the room so crowded (her adoptive mother and Barry were both present), that behaving naturally was impossible for both of us.

  She stood, at first, slightly side on to me and was wary. We sat down on a sofa and I leaned in towards her as much as I could, trying to be paternal. I gave her some albums, which must have made her feel I was treating her like a fan, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was sweating and shaking. I said, ‘I hope you understand why this happened.’ I also asked her if she saw Susannah, her birth mother, at all and she said she didn’t. I said, ‘You know, I have a family now. It would be very difficult for me to make you a part of that – if that’s even what you’re looking for.’ She shook her head and said that wasn’t why she was here. She had a family, after all: sweet, lovely, caring parents. She said she just wanted to make a connection.

  In those circumstances, though, making a connection was hard. The meeting very soon broke up. Afterwards I felt drained and awful. And then I felt angry: angry that Sarah and her adoptive mother had allowed the press to manipulate them, and angry with the press for the manipulation. It should have been a warm, private reunion and it ended up being cold and somehow public. The Sunday People may have been excluded from the meeting, but it still had its field day, publishing a spread full of bullshit on ‘Rod’s Love Child’. Evelyn and Sarah both wrote me long, apologetic letters afterwards. I think they genuinely didn’t know how it would look from my end and were naïve about how the tabloid press works. But it was a badly marred beginning and Sarah and I would have to start again.

  * * *

  Alana offered me loyal support over Sarah’s re-emergence in my life, but the general picture by 1982 was that our marriage was showing some irreparable cracks. The main bones of contention were the amount of time I spent working, football, and my friends.

  I loved Alana’s friends, and regarded them very quickly as friends of my own. The circles that Alana moved in, and the LA high life that she was able to show me, were hugely attractive to me, and I threw myself into that world and the fun I could have there. But I was still, at heart, a north London bloke who wanted to knock about with his football pals and the guys from the band. These chaps were far less glamorous than the people with whom Alana was used to socialising, and she preferred not to have them in the house if she could help it. And if they did show up, or if I brought them back, she would often freeze them out. I think she saw them as a corrupting influence, encouraging me to stay out late and drink – and she definitely had a point. But when I told her that our life revolved around her friends, but not mine, she would say that she found my friends less interesting than her friends. Then I would call her a snob – which was perhaps unfair, although Alana could definitely be choosy. She was the first person I ever met who, when people invited us to places, felt no compunction about asking, ‘Who else is going to be there?’

  There couldn’t have been a clearer demonstration of the social divide beginning to open up between us than an incident after a show at the LA Forum in December 1981. I played four nights there that year, and for the last of them I hired a London Routemaster bus to take my friends and family to the show. It wasn’t quite your typical London bus: it was fitted with a bar downstairs, ensuring that everyone arrived at the venue smashed. I then decided to join everyone for the journey home afterwards. Alana couldn’t see where the fun would be in travelling on a rickety old bus surrounded by my mates, and wanted us to take the limo. I thought she should be with me. Our argument continued on the bus, where eventually I suggested that she could always get off. Which Alana promptly did, despite the fact that we were somewhere in Inglewood at the time, miles from home, in the middle of the night. Police eventually rescued her from a phone booth, and my brother Don drove down to the police station to collect her and bring her home, weeping all the way.

  The point was, though, in this period in our marriage there was less going out and partying altogether – and this was another source of friction. About six weeks after Kimberly was born, Alana went down with mono-nucleosis, and in the busy first year of Kim’s life she never really had the chance to get over it properly. Then, shortly after Sean was born, she contracted Epstein-Barr virus, which can make you constantly tired and listless. I was less sympathetic than I might have been. I was full of energy and I wanted her to keep up with me. She was whacked out and, in any case, now wanted to spend her time at home with the children.

  So, typically, I would go off to play football with the Exiles on a Sunday. And then
maybe the team would have a bit of a drink afterwards, and by the time I got back it would be mid afternoon and the lunch would be dried up in the oven and Alana would be steaming with fury. And then there would be two whole days when we wouldn’t speak. She couldn’t see why I wanted these outlets, and I couldn’t see what had become of the fun-loving girl I had met who loved to stay up and party. Well, obviously what had become of her was that she was now the mother of three small children, two of them mine. But I simply wasn’t ready to think about it maturely.

  I began referring to Alana as ‘the War Office’. Sessions in the Cock ’n Bull pub would often end with me standing up and saying, ‘Right, time to don the tin helmet and head home.’ The guys in the band, meanwhile, knew Alana as ‘And Then the Wife Showed Up’. They grew used to feeling slightly chilly when she walked in. We would be having fun larking around . . . And Then the Wife Showed Up.

  It didn’t help that we were both stubborn and headstrong and we didn’t have the first clue how to compromise or talk about things. Instead we would become angry and silent. It never got violent, except on one occasion, in a hotel room in Cannes, where Alana, in a fury, threw a telephone receiver at me. Alas, it was on a curly elasticated lead, and it returned like a boomerang and clonked her on the forehead.

  One morning, we awoke to find the words ‘Alana Piranha’ daubed in black paint on the outside wall of our house – an eerie moment for both of us. We never found out who did it, or why. A perception had grown in certain quarters, though, that Alana was behind the sacking of two people who worked for me. That wasn’t true. Two people who had been with me a long time, and who were close to me, did get fired in this period, but there were good reasons for it and they had nothing to do with Alana.