by Rod Stewart
* * *
A few weeks after Kelly had left, Arnold got a call from Pepsi, wondering if I would be interested in doing a commercial. This wasn’t a line of work that especially interested me, although down the years there had been many offers. A company in Holland, for instance, was very keen to have me endorse their condoms. And this was in the days when people could hardly bring themselves to say the word ‘condom’. I can’t think for the life of me what they thought the ‘synergy’ between me and their product was. Still, nice to be asked, obviously, though I turned that one down.
I also turned down Cadbury’s, who wanted me to advertise chocolate in the UK. In the US, however, Pampers offered the tidy sum of $2 million to use a blast of ‘Forever Young’ in a commercial for nappies – and that I did accept. But they didn’t ask me to appear. They used pictures of cute animals instead, which was probably smart. I look terrible in nappies.
But this Pepsi one was tempting. Firstly, I wouldn’t have to sing a jingle, or try to make the word ‘Pepsi’ sound soulful, or anything potentially embarrassing like that. I wouldn’t even have to be seen drinking the product and looking delighted. Instead, the idea was for me to record a proper song with Tina Turner: ‘It Takes Two’, the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell Motown number. Then Pepsi would shoot a video of Tina and me performing it, and clips from the video would be used in the commercial. And, likely as not, Tina and I would get a hit single out of it and be able to use the unedited video as promotion.
All of which was very persuasive – although not nearly as persuasive as the clinching part of Pepsi’s offer, which was that the video could be shot in the location of our choice. I think they thought I would say Burbank, or maybe, at a push, Anaheim – somewhere conveniently near to them, anyway. In fact, discussions with management took place along the following lines:
Me: ‘Where do we fancy?’
Arnold: ‘Somewhere by the sea?’
Me: ‘In Europe would be nice.’
Arnold: ‘What’s more beguiling than Cannes at this time of year?’
And so it was that, at the beginning of August 1990, I joined Arnold at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes with Don Archell, my on-the-road assistant, and, along for the ride, my great pal of long standing, Ricky Simpson, a very successful hotelier and fellow Celtic supporter. I was given the penthouse suite, which was monumental. The bathroom had a domed ceiling, much like St Paul’s cathedral – except, of course, with a far better power shower. Furthermore, if you left your pants or socks on the floor, they would magically disappear and then return, clean, in paper and cardboard packaging like presents from the great dry-cleaner in the sky. Ricky and I skipped about like schoolboys. We had clearly landed in the bachelor pad to end all bachelor pads. And, accordingly, it appeared to me that it would have been remiss not to use these lavishly appointed facilities in pursuit of the bachelor purposes for which they were so clearly intended.
There duly followed the ten-day period of excess which has gone down in history as ‘the long hot summer’. (Well, that’s how Ricky and I took to referring to it.)
Phone calls were made, flights were reserved, cars were booked, and in they came: old flames, new flames, old flings, new flings, women amenable to the prospect of a night in Cannes with a first-class return thrown in. I went through the little black book, as it were, and took my pick. As soon as Arnold got wind of these plans he packed his bags and decamped in horror to the safety of the Hotel Du Cap. Probably wise – although, in my defence, it was all accomplished in a very polished and professional manner. The arrangements had the precision and rigour of a military operation. Don Archell would drive the outgoing girl to Nice Airport, drop her at Departures, then head round to Arrivals to collect the incoming replacement. I reckon the logistics for the 2012 Olympic Games were only marginally more complex than those involved in the smooth running of ‘the long hot summer’.
We did venture from the suite occasionally. I had the video to film, of course – although that was just Tina and me romping around on a stage in a club full of beautiful people, so it wasn’t the most taxing of film roles. Tina invited us to see her sing at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, too. I liked Tina. We had forged a bond in December 1981 when she had appeared onstage with me at the Los Angeles Forum, a gig that was shown on closed circuit television in cinemas around the world and, as a result, was seen by an audience of 60 million people. It had helped re-fire her career, because of course she became a huge star again in the subsequent years. Obviously, she has that wonderful, brash, larger-than-life bravado, and that huge, concrete-cracking voice, but she turned out to be touchingly timid in the studio. When we recorded ‘It Takes Two’, we got to the end of the song and I was trying to get a call-and-response thing going between us for the fade-out, but it proved really difficult. You’d think she would eat that kind of thing up, but she was very shy about ad-libbing.
Anyway, the afternoon before Tina’s show, Ricky and I hit the shops and treated ourselves to new shirts, new suits, new ties and new shoes, and promptly stepped out of the hotel that evening believing ourselves to look the business. Delivered by limo to Monte Carlo, we announced ourselves proudly at the door as guests of Ms Turner. Whereupon the doorman said, ‘Sorry, sir: I’m afraid you are inappropriately dressed.’ I said, ‘Really? We thought we looked rather fine.’ The doorman said, ‘I’m afraid the rule is black tie.’ We sheepishly headed off to a restaurant.
Mostly, though, the ‘long hot summer’ trip was Jack the Lad writ large – a slice of rich hedonism. So rich, in fact, that I ended up sickening myself. What’s that Woody Allen quote? ‘Sex without love is an empty experience – but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.’ That’s undeniably true, let me tell you, from a position of some expertise in this area. Yet in a quiet moment, between the comings and goings, I found myself thinking, ‘You’re a 45-year-old man and you’re flying in shags. Is this what you now amount to? Is that all you’ve got?’
I returned to Los Angeles feeling subdued. I felt even more subdued when I learned that Kelly had been seen out and about with someone. That sent a real pang of jealousy through me and caused me to panic. In that terrible way of not wanting something until you can’t have it, it brought her loss right home to me. I thought, ‘Shit, what have I let go?’
I decided to propose to her. That was the obvious solution. It had been the obvious solution all along, only I had been too foolish to see it. But, if it was going to work, I was going to need to win her round. I was going to need a big romantic gesture – something she would find charming and irresistible, something that would remind Kelly why she liked me in the first place and would bring her round.
Somebody told me that, on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, Kelly was going to be taking a boat trip with her new beau to Catalina, off the California coastline. A plan hatched in my brain. I knew, from going to Catalina myself, that little prop planes often buzzed above the beaches trailing advertisements. What if Kelly were to look up from the deck of her boat and see my marriage proposal written in the sky? Could it get any more sweetly romantic than that?
I got the number of a company that could organise a plane and a banner for me for early Sunday afternoon, which I figured would be the best time to be sure of catching Kelly’s attention. I told them I wanted the banner to say: ‘Kelly – will you marry me? RS’. That would do it, wouldn’t it?
Feeling far happier with this plan in place, I went back to the business of my week, which happened to include a night out with Sylvester Stallone, whom I had got to know well and with whom, incidentally, I almost once shared the big screen. (I was asked to appear in the 1981 football movie Escape to Victory, but I was touring and couldn’t do it. How different the history of cinema could have been.) On the Saturday, as I recall, Sly and I met for dinner and then went on to an LA nightclub called the Roxbury.
And across the floor of the Roxbury, I caught sight of a woman whose face I knew really well. And I couldn’t believe she w
as there because I had been staring at that face and wondering about that face ever since I had first seen it in a television commercial. And here was that vision off the screen made real. I had to introduce myself to her. And then I had to convene a small party back at my place so that I could invite her along with her friend and get to talk to her properly.
And she did come and we did talk, and when she and her friend went home at the end of the night it seemed blazingly apparent to me that this was the person to whom I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life.
Love at first sight? I don’t know. Love at the end of the first evening? Definitely.
I awoke the next morning glowing with excitement. In the midst of the euphoria of it all, it was at least ten minutes before I remembered, with a cold feeling abruptly passing across my kidneys, that I had arranged an airborne marriage proposal for that lunchtime.
No problem. I’ll cancel it. I call the advertising company. The phone rings and rings. I hang up and try again. Same thing. Nobody there. It’s Sunday. On Labor Day Weekend. Everybody has packed up and gone.
This is awkward. I have hired a plane to carry a banner saying ‘Marry me’. I can’t very well hire a second plane saying, ‘Sorry – scratch that. RS’. What am I going to do? Pray for a hurricane? Get out there on a boat with a large gun and shoot the fucker down?
No. What I’m going to do is spend Sunday wincing in anticipation and with my fingers crossed.
And what do you know? Come Sunday, my grand, absurd and doomed marriage proposal went up, fluttered across the sky and came down again, entirely unseen by its intended recipient. Truly, there is a God.
And just as well for Kelly, who, as it must surely be clear by now, deserved someone far better than me.
DIGRESSION
A brief digression in the course of which our hero, among other things, steals a car, has an affair with a performance artiste and gets into a fight in a bar, but only finds out about it later.
In the now-famous words of Kelly Emberg, ‘Who do you think you are – Rod Stewart?’
Yes, I did think that and continue to do so. But I’m not the only one. It turns out that quite a lot of people think they’re me. Or, if they don’t actually think it, they are happy to pretend to be me. You would be surprised about some of the places I show up. And you would be equally surprised about some of the things I get up to when I’m there. I certainly am.
For instance, in the summer of 2012, Arnold got a call from a journalist on the Chattanooga Times Free Press asking him for some clarifying detail on a number of sightings of me over a twelve-hour period in the Chattanooga area, where I had been happily signing autographs, chatting in a hotel lift and posing for photographs with local well-wishers. Arnold had to concede that it was, indeed, a bit of a scoop for the paper, given that I was in the countryside just outside London at the time.
The article duly ran, under the headline ‘Rod Stewart Lookalike Dupes Chattanooga’. Quite right, too. ‘Rod Stewart Signs Autograph in Chattanooga’: not much of a story. ‘Bloke Passing Himself Off As Rod Stewart Signs Autograph in Chattanooga’: that’s a story. Apparently people were convinced in particular by the ‘white Capezio shoes’. Twenty-five years ago, maybe. ‘I shook his hand, I bought him another beer,’ said the owner of a café. So he did. And, at the same time, so he didn’t.
It seems that it’s not too hard to convince people that you are Rod Stewart. Get the hair and the nose right, and you’re well on the way. There were perhaps a few early stirrings of this kind of thing way back in the days of Steampacket, in the mid 1960s, at the start of my career, when Brian Auger would go round a club at show time, rounding up the band, and would regularly come up behind me in the bar and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Come on, Rod, we’ve got to go on,’ only to find it wasn’t me at all, but some bloke with my haircut.
So I don’t suppose I should have been too surprised, many years later, when a sheriff rang Arnold from somewhere in a back bayou of Louisiana and solemnly announced, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to inform you, but we are holding your client in a cell following a drunken brawl in a bar.’ Arnold empathised, saying, ‘That’s appalling. But also surprising. Because he’s sitting right across from me in my office.’
And then there was the Rod Stewart who was so convincing in and around Manhattan that he pulled the wool over the eyes of Jann Wenner, the esteemed creator and publisher of Rolling Stone, and certainly a man who knew me well. In 1985, Jann called Arnold and said, ‘I am totally insulted. My wife and I were just coming out of the Plaza Hotel, and standing right in front of us was Rod Stewart. And I said, ‘Hello, Rod,’ and he completely froze me out and walked off. I don’t understand. Have I offended him?’
Arnold’s explanation of my actual whereabouts at the moment of this supposed callous insult – California – failed to satisfy Jan.
‘Arnold, come on. I know Rod Stewart’s face when I see it.’
In the end, to convince him that I was indeed a long way from the Plaza Hotel, Arnold eventually got Jann to call me at the studio in Burbank where I was recording and I was able to set his mind at ease.
This seems to have been the same highly plausible guy, incidentally, who almost managed to land himself a Ferrari in New York by pretending that he was me. He had driven it out of the showroom before someone thought to run one final check. The impostor was picked up eventually by the police after committing a traffic violation. Apparently, his English accent was perfect. Hats off to him for nerve, though. Using your resemblance to a well-known singer to knock off a supercar is taking the notion of a tribute act to a whole new level.
And let’s not forget the cabaret singer and performance artiste who called Arnold to see if he would be coming to the concert of her song stylings for which engraved invitations had been sent out under my name. Arnold was, naturally, keen to learn a little more. The singer/artiste lowered her voice slightly and told Arnold that she thought he ought to know that, for the last five months, she had been having a series of secret and passionate liaisons with his client in her New York apartment, for which I would fly in very much on the QT.
Arnold asked, ‘What does he look like?’
‘Rod Stewart, of course,’ said the singer/artiste, slightly impatiently.
‘So, how tall is Rod Stewart?’ enquired Arnold.
She said, ‘He’s five foot eight.’
Arnold said, ‘Well, he seems to be losing three of his best inches on the plane ride over, because the last time I looked, my client was five foot eleven.’
The singer/artiste was still adamant. ‘But he sings to me. He serenades me in bed.’
Arnold said, ‘What does he sing?’
She replied, ‘He hums the theme from the film Romeo and Juliet.’
And with that single detail the guy was busted. When it comes to humming during moments of intimacy in the boudoir, I’m much more of a Beethoven’s Fifth man, myself.
Get it right next time.
CHAPTER 16
In which our hero loves, loses and gets his heart broken. With incidental thoughts on sore throats, drinking deeply from the back of Ronnie Wood’s car and amusing an audience the size of Switzerland on a beach in Brazil.
I FIRST SET eyes on Rachel Hunter in a commercial she made for a fitness video, Sports Illustrated’s Super Shape-Up. The advertisement was being heavily rotated on US television in the summer of 1990, and if it’s possible to become addicted to a two-minute infomercial with a synth-driven backing track, then I was an addict. Life had to stop whenever it came on. The ad also starred Elle Macpherson and Cheryl Tiegs, but the one who caught my attention was the girl in the metallic Lycra with the gorgeous shock of curls who preached the virtues of ‘body-sculpting’, which, the voice-over suggested, was a good way to ‘tighten up those frustrating areas that won’t go away’. I thought I had seen a goddess.
I was watching this commercial one day, for the umpteenth time, suffused with a romantic, heart-struck glow and musing wistfully on th
e wonders of love and all its glories, when Malcolm, my assistant, came and stood beside me. When the ad had finished, and Rachel Hunter had promised ‘eight weeks to a better body’, Malcolm made the following glittering utterance: ‘I’d rather be in that than the army.’
Extraordinary to think that from these unpromising stirrings grew a romance that redefined the term ‘whirlwind’, an eight-year marriage and a separation that left me as emotionally broken as I have ever been.
Coming across Rachel in the Roxbury Club that Saturday night was a sensational fluke: my video dream made flesh. I had that weird, double-take feeling: ‘It’s her. Off the telly.’ I could hardly just let the moment go. So, smoothing my jacket, checking the knot on my tie and gathering all the immense quantities of suavity in my possession, I went across to her and . . . did the naffest thing I could possibly have done at this moment, which was to mime one of her area-tightening exercises from the video.
What was I playing at? Why didn’t I just calm down and use my usual ice-breaker in these circumstances? I had long ago discovered that if you wanted to open a conversation with a woman in a club, you simply had to go up to her and say, in your best cockney accent, in a tone of genuine curiosity, ‘Hello, darlin’ – what you got in that handbag?’ Or you could try the slightly more colourful variation, ‘Hello, darlin’ – what you got in that basket?’ It worked for me every time – and never better, indeed, than when the woman in question hadn’t actually got a handbag/basket.
On this occasion, though, reason deserted me and I mimed. When I had finished miming, Rachel attempted a sympathetic smile as a cold wind whistled and a ball of tumbleweed blew through the club. But at least she didn’t turn away. She was with a girlfriend. I told them I was having a little gathering at my place at the end of the evening, if they fancied coming along, and I gave them the address on Carolwood Drive, hoping but hardly expecting to see them.