by Rod Stewart
It was farewell, first of all, to Tony Toon, my personal assistant and self-styled publicist, but not because Alana loathed him (although she did). Tony went as the result of a poor piece of judgement on his part. During a stay in Hawaii, we found ourselves in an over-booked hotel. Alana and I had Sean and Kimberly in a room with us, and we asked Toon to share an adjoining twin room with Ashley, who was then seven. Toon, of course, couldn’t resist pulling some bloke in the bar that evening and taking him back to the room. I fired Toon in the morning.
Toon’s revenge was absolutely inspired. He fed the press a story in which, as a consequence of an evening spent orally servicing a gang of sailors in a gay bar in San Diego, I had been required to check into a hospital emergency room to have my stomach pumped. With minor variations (the quantity of the extracted fluid tends to fluctuate: seven pints, three ounces, half a quart; it’s a relatively open field), this story has stayed with me ever since. Say what you like about Tony Toon – and God rest his soul – but he was good at his job.
For the record, then (and just to put it simply and clearly for posterity’s sake): I believe I was in the Hotel Cipriani in Venice on the night of the alleged incident. I have never orally pleasured even a solitary sailor, let alone a ship’s worth in one evening. And I have never had my stomach pumped, either of naval-issue semen or of any other kind of semen. Nor of anything else, for that matter. Again, it’s all about clearing these things up and moving forward.
Also gone from the team was Billy Gaff, my manager of nearly thirteen years, since I joined the Faces. Our dispute erupted in 1982 on a private plane shuttling the band across the American Midwest in the later stages of the Tonight I’m Yours tour. I asked Gaff – clad, as I recall, in the big white fur coat which he favoured at this time – for a small advance for Robin Le Mesurier, one of the guitarists, and Gaff refused, saying there was no money available. This, to say the least, surprised me, given that we had been on the road, and earning money (or so I thought), for nearly three months. It made me very concerned about where the money had gone and how things were being organised. Gaff had a habit of going off like a rocket when questioned on absolutely anything – and this he now did. Accordingly, Gaff and I spent the rest of the flight shouting at each other, and at the next opportunity the man who was supposed to be my manager took off for Paris and stopped answering phone calls. I took the view that this wasn’t ideal. So on 3 March 1982 I sent him a telegram which said, ‘You are obviously avoiding me. Am very dissatisfied with our relationship as it stands and consider it terminated as of today. Rod.’
In order for me to get shot of Gaff formally, there needed to be a hearing before the Labor Commission. When this came around, Alana was magnificent. Despite the difficulties in our relationship, she came right to my side. On the morning of the hearing, she turned up in a black dress and a black hat with a veil, like a widow seeking justice for her freshly murdered husband – all very dramatic. Gaff, by contrast, arrived late looking dishevelled. The commissioner listened to the separate testimonies in which my side pointed out that Gaff was in violation of California law by acting as manager, record label and music publisher all at the same time – a whole pot of conflicting interests. (I had really taken my eye off the ball in allowing that little situation to arise, and I cursed myself for doing so.) The commissioner suggested that Gaff and I should probably try to sort it out between us, and a settlement was negotiated quickly enough. Gaff had good reason to settle because he could have ended up liable to pay back the commissions he had earned over the previous years, which would have been a tidy old sum. He gave up his rights in my recordings and publishing and in a batch of concert recordings and television programmes, and I gave up my 30 per cent share of Riva Records, the company Gaff had started in 1975 and which had been my label in the UK. I felt relieved to be separated from him.
I now needed a new manager, and, again, Alana did the right thing by me, suggesting that I talk to Arnold Stiefel. He wasn’t actually from the music business, but was a young, high-powered movie agent at William Morris, where he represented some of Alana’s famous friends, among others. Arnold came to the house for a meeting and explained that while he knew fuck all about the music industry, he was confident he could apply the same strategic approach to my career as he was currently doing most successfully for actors, directors and screenwriters. Actually, that rather appealed to me. Did I want a traditional rock manager? Most of them struck me as humourless bullies or shysters. So Arnold and I agreed to give it a go and he went away to extract himself from William Morris, and, while he was at it, find out what things like ‘A&R’, ‘road crew tour buses’ and ‘All Access Passes’ were all about. It turned out to be exactly the right move for both of us. Thirty glorious years later, we’re still together.
The cracks in the marriage, however, were getting wider. In the summer of 1982 we all went down to Spain for a holiday and to watch Scotland take part in the World Cup. My dad, my brothers, my brother-in-law and I would set off for the games and, invariably, arrive back at the house very late, the worse for wear. Alana and I ended up having a screaming argument about this in front of my dad, who got very upset on my behalf. His position was, ‘Doesn’t she understand? This is the World Cup. Why can’t the men have this one day to do what they want to do?’
Of course, it was more than just one day: it was three – one for each of the group stage matches. But you take his point. Also, could I just say that this was the World Cup at which, for fifteen dizzying minutes, Scotland led the mighty Brazil. Final score: 4–1 to Brazil. Even so, it stands to reason that the summer of 1982 was an uncommonly festive time for the Stewart family. Not that I could ever communicate this to Alana.
Another burden on the relationship was Alana’s increasing interest in things psychic and spiritual. This was an area she had been drawn to all along, but the early 1980s really were a high tide for this kind of thing in California, and her attraction to it became quite pronounced for a while. She took to buying ‘wishing candles’ from the House of Hermetic store in Los Angeles. The idea was that you made your desires somehow become reality by stating them as fact, or writing them on slips of paper and placing them under these candles. I wasn’t sure about the science of this. If she could have drummed up a couple of results for the Scottish team, I might have been able to come on board. But in the absence of that . . . not really.
She also took herself off to various self-discovery meetings at which you might whack a leather bag with a broom handle while shouting about how much you hated your father. Numerology became a concern of hers, too. Alana had a close friend called Linda who claimed to be psychic, and Alana liked to consult Linda over the flight numbers of planes that we were travelling on, and the numbers of hotel rooms that we were booked into, just to check that they were OK, that we weren’t somehow flirting with cosmological disaster by checking into suite 342, say, rather than suite 343. Personally, I thought this stuff was as close to bonkers as made no difference, but it’s whatever works for you, I guess. What was definitely true was that it was evidence of a further lack of common ground between me and Alana.
* * *
In the late summer of 1983 I went to a preview screening of a film called Portfolio, a docudrama set in the fashion world, featuring models from the Elite agency. As moments in movie history go, it wasn’t exactly Citizen Kane, but a face on the screen took my breath away. I really wanted to meet her. To get the date, my people told the model’s people that I had written a song for her, which was a downright lie. But it got me into a restaurant with Kelly Emberg.
Before the date could happen, though, at the beginning of September, I was invited for a week of partying and a football match at Elton’s house in Windsor, England. I enjoyed staying at Elton’s. You had to be prepared to move an awful lot of priceless Victorian dolls off your bed before you could get into it, but you were always made to feel very comfortable. The scene during this week was extremely lively but also – it possibly go
es without saying – a touch gay. Accordingly I had arranged for Kara Meyers, a beautiful and charming American model of my acquaintance, to fly in and keep me company in Windsor.
I had met Kara on tour in June 1983 as the result of an extraordinary coincidence. We were playing in Berlin, and on the day of the show I had gone to sit in a café, opposite which a fashion shoot was taking place. I spotted her, and thought she looked lovely; she was busy and didn’t see me at all. I didn’t think anything more of it. Later, I was onstage and I went to pull someone out of the crowd to sing ‘Hot Legs’ with me – and there, right in the crush at the front, was Kara, the very same model I had spotted. So up she came, and, overcoming some initial reluctance, danced and gave it some serious ‘I love you, honey!’ into the microphone on cue.
When the song finished, I made sure she was taken to the side of the stage and invited her to dinner, where I learned that she was a former squeeze of Prince Albert of Monaco. We spent a very sweet, and entirely chaste, night together. I saw her again a fortnight later, when the tour moved on to Paris, where she was living at the time. Then, when she moved back to live in New York, I continued to see her on and off, for a couple of years.
However, the story of our return flight at the end of that weekend of pleasure chez Elton is pretty typical of the farcical situations that I seemed unerringly to get myself into in those days.
We were due to fly out to New York on Concorde. Kara was originally booked on a flight departing a couple of hours earlier, but I got it changed so that I could spend a couple more hours in bed with her in Windsor and then, with any luck, another night in New York. Of course, as Arnold, my manager, who was travelling out of London with me, patiently pointed out, I couldn’t exactly stomp through Heathrow Airport with a tall blonde model in tow without being likely to excite the interest of the press and, shortly thereafter, my wife. So it was arranged that we would travel independently to the airport and that Kara would be seated away from me on the aircraft.
All goes well. Kara and I get through the airport without appearing to be any kind of item, despite the fact that, in a plane-load of mostly suited businessmen, Kara is wearing a black leather jacket, a tiny red leather skirt and red patent-leather high heels. Still, we take our seats on the plane, innocently separated by three rows, and I feel I can relax. Kara and I can leave the plane and no one will ever know.
However, as we wait for the plane to pull off the stand, I notice that Arnold has turned a shade of grey normally only seen on people who have been dead for some time. He says, ‘Don’t look round now, but have you seen who Kara is seated next to?’
I look round. Kara is sitting next to Rupert Murdoch.
Brilliant. My secret date and Concorde stowaway is chatting cheerfully to the man who owns practically every tabloid newspaper in the Western world. I wonder, briefly, about making a run for it, but Arnold has begun to calm down. ‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘The doors of the plane are about to close. Even if Murdoch catches on, he can’t get to a phone before we land.’ (Remember that this was in the days before mobile phones and phones on planes.)
At this point the captain makes an announcement: there is a small problem with the plane, so if everyone would be kind enough to return briefly to the lounge . . .
Back in the lounge, fearing that Rupert Murdoch is even now pumping coins into a phone box, Arnold makes some counter-tactical phone calls of his own. The ideal ploy would be to get a plausible ‘Rod Stewart girlfriend’ figure to be on standby to meet me at JFK, throwing the press completely off the scent and enabling Kara to exit unnoticed. But it’s the middle of the night in New York. The best Arnold can come up with is Sandy Harmon, who happens to be a beautiful woman but who also happens to be short, dark-haired, middle-aged and Jewish.
I say, ‘Sandy? Sandy Harmon?’
Arnold says, ‘Throw yourself into it. Act it. It’ll be fine.’
At JFK, the swarm of photographers is so thick that there are police sawhorses in place to control the crowd. Arnold’s decoy duly performs her meet and greet, but the photographers have spotted Kara, their intended prey, and they pour after her out of the airport.
I have a limo waiting. Kara makes it into a taxi and joins us, as instructed, at the Mayfair Regent Hotel. She is pretty sure she hasn’t been followed. A short while later, I look down from the window of my room. Parked by the pavement opposite the hotel on 63rd Street is a flatbed truck, loaded with paparazzi.
And, of course, I have a date. I shamelessly inform Kara that I have to leave for a business meeting and tell her to make herself comfortable in my absence. I then escape from the hotel through the service doors at the back of the building and arrive, embarrassingly late, for my first dinner with Kelly Emberg, with whom I immediately fall in love.
The following afternoon, when I get out of the car at Carolwood, Alana, who has seen the newspaper pictures of ‘Rod’s mystery JFK blonde’ is standing on the drive looking thunderous.
* * *
The break-up was slow and torturous and dotted with doomed attempts at reconciliation. We went back and forth: again, my terrible problem with finality. We decided to live apart for a while, to see if it would help. But, of course, I was now starting to see Kelly Emberg without Alana knowing, so the experiment was inevitably flawed. I moved out of Carolwood and rented a house in Beverly Hills but I was rattling around inside the place and feeling miserable. So I moved in with Jim Cregan, who was living in a small house in the Hollywood Hills, just off Sunset Boulevard, and was also recently separated from his wife. It was nice to have someone to take a cup of tea to in the morning – although, as I always grudgingly said, as I set the mug down beside the bed, ‘I bet Elvis wouldn’t have done this.’ I was there for five months. In the afternoons I would pick the kids up from school, take them back to Carolwood and play with them in the pool, and then leave again, feeling wretched: the routine of the separated dad.
Parties continued at Carolwood to which I wasn’t invited. Malcolm, my assistant, would say, ‘They’re in there, drinking your wine.’ I would drive past and see all these cars parked up outside and think: ‘These people are having fun in my house.’ But deep down I didn’t mind. After all, if Alana found someone else, maybe that would magically solve everything. Jack Nicholson seemed to be on the scene and I had hopes for him and Alana – and, indeed, they did get together for a while, but only later. One afternoon I was coming out of the house after dropping in to see the kids, and there was John McEnroe about to pull into the drive. He caught sight of me and drove off again, and I wanted to run after him up the street and shout, ‘No, no, come back, it’s fine. You’ve got nothing to fear from me.’
Then one day Alana called me from New York, after a dinner with friends, and said, ‘Who is Kelly Emberg?’
I said something about her being someone I occasionally ran into. Alana said, ‘You need to tell me the truth.’ We agreed to have dinner at Carolwood, and I told her that I had feelings for Kelly but that I didn’t want to break up our marriage and lose her and our children. Alana told me that I would have to figure it out.
On it went, for weeks on end, with me knowing that I wanted out, but then going back to see the kids and feeling torn and miserable and being totally indecisive and frustrating Alana immensely. In December 1983 we made a last attempt to mend things. We rented a house we had used before on Old Church Street in Chelsea, and attempted to have the perfect London Christmas, which was, perhaps, always going to be a bad idea. I flew out from LA in advance with the kids. Alana, who was in the middle of filming a role she had in a TV series called Masquerade, arrived on Christmas morning. But the mood between us was flat and wouldn’t rise. When I went to visit my parents, I didn’t take Alana with me. Later, the conversation got around to Kelly and I confessed that I was still thinking about her. Alana packed her things, and the kids’ things, and left.
That Christmas in London was the penultimate straw. The last straw was not long afterwards, in early 1984, when Al
ana discovered that the party I was taking to Hawaii for a short break in order to work on some music also included Kelly. Alana filed for divorce that day.
It was March 1987 before the divorce was finalised. Under its terms, I bought Alana and the children a house in Brentwood and got Carolwood back. What had my dad said about being too young to marry at thirty-four? It turned out he had a point. It turned out that Alana, too, had a point when she accused me of failing to grow up. It would be a little while yet.
DIGRESSION
In which our hero helps bring ‘soccer’ to his adopted land, loses a few balls in the ocean, and investigates the wisdom of combining Mudslides and vitamin shots within a sporting fitness regime.
I have associated football with home since childhood, when the football teams my dad ran were all through our lives and all around our house. It’s like the song says: wherever I wash my strip – that’s my home. Inevitably, then, part of growing to feel completely at home in LA when I moved there was finding a football team to play in. I joined a bunch of expat Brits who played a pick-up game every Thursday night on a patch of ground which used to be a fire station in Beverly Hills. These guys were electricians, carpenters, salesmen: blokes trying to work their ticket in America. No stars here – apart from me, I guess, for whom no exceptions were made and for whom no quarter was given. We’d play for a couple of hours and then adjourn to the Cock ’n Bull pub on the Sunset Strip for refreshment. And here were sown the seeds of what duly became, in 1978, the legendary Los Angeles Exiles football team, who were to enjoy their most fruitful period under the stewardship of the equally legendary Lionel Conway, possibly the most competitive man on God’s earth.
We toyed with becoming the Hamilton Academical All Stars, in honour of the obscure Scottish league side, and consideration was also given to the name Cocaine All Stars, but, wisely, we settled for the Exiles. We moved to a pitch in Malibu, but got fed up with the ball running away down a cliff. We then found a field at Manhattan Beach. I managed to persuade Puma to give us some free shirts because, as is widely accepted, you can’t be a proper team without the matching shirts. And soon we found a place in the Pacific Soccer League. Training on Thursday nights, games on Sunday mornings: back in the old routine and happy as could be.