by Rod Stewart
In those circumstances, to be the recipient of another quirk of fortune which meant that, when you got thyroid cancer, you were rid of it within a matter of days and free to carry on . . . well, lucky, lucky man. Lucky as fuck.
CHAPTER 18
Penny.
WHEN RACHEL LEFT, the last thing I wanted to do was fall head over heels in love with a tall blonde girl in her twenties. I knew where that could lead a man of my years, and it wasn’t necessarily a happy place.
Within eight months I had fallen head over heels in love with a tall blonde girl in her twenties.
But this time I needed to be sure. Last time, when I thought I was right, I was absolutely wrong, and I really didn’t want to go through that again. I needed to take patient steps – assuming I was capable of doing that, which very little in my headlong romantic history thus far suggested that I was. I duly embarked upon something that I seemed to have been largely allergic to in my various love-related hurries down the years: a long courtship.
In the spring of 1999, four months after Rachel departed, and following the failed therapy and the swiftly aborted yoga, the misery of our separation began to lift. Through the clearing gloom I started dating again. I went out with Tracy Tweed, the Canadian model and actress, who was one of the funniest women I have ever met. I had some very enjoyable dates with Kimberley Conrad, who had recently separated from Hugh Hefner. And I went out for a while with Caprice Bourret, the American model. Poor Caprice was the victim of a sustained Sound of Music-style eviction campaign by certain of my children, who seemed to take against her, dropping pet mice in her lap and placing pictures of my ex-wife all around the house when they knew she was coming over. The relationship didn’t take off.
All these affairs were great fun, and with beautiful women for whom I had the utmost respect. But none of them was quite the right thing at the time. I wanted to find someone to love and spend the rest of my life with.
On and off during those months, I occasionally found myself wondering about a beautiful, special woman I had met, extremely briefly, in London the previous December. Badly bruised by the end of my marriage, I had been drinking with friends at the Dorchester Hotel when a tall blonde girl in her twenties had come over and asked for an autograph. She had been cajoled into doing this as a dare by her girlfriends, who were smirking on the other side of the room.
Her name was Penny Lancaster. She was twenty-seven. And yes, she was tall and blonde, and with a drop-dead figure – I later found out that she modeled underwear – but what I was also attracted to was the real and obvious warmth she had about her, and the kindness in her face. I asked her what she did and she told me she was a model and also a photography student at Barking College in Essex. I asked her if she would find it useful to photograph one of my shows and she seemed interested in that. I told her if she came to the door at Earls Court on the Saturday night, I would make sure that there was a pass for her and she could snap away to her heart’s content.
She came to the show and took pictures, but I didn’t see her, beforehand or afterwards. Carmine Rojas, the bassist in the band, went out to the front to check that she was OK, and I knew that she had given him her phone number. Every now and again, over the next few months, I would ask Carmine to pass it on to me. But he always laughed and said, ‘Oh no – she’s much too good for you, mate.’ Eventually, though, he relented and in early August 1999, nearly eight months after that first meeting, when I was back in England for a while, I called her.
I said, ‘I’m in town. Why don’t we catch up over dinner with some friends of mine?’
‘Oh, and bring along the photos,’ I added.
We met at Neal’s, a little restaurant in Loughton, not far from the Wood House. Penny, who was now twenty-eight, arrived in ‘pleather’ trousers – quite edgy, but emphatically not a skirt – a top that carefully concealed all trace of cleavage, and a jacket covering her arms and shoulders. I was immediately struck by her fresh face and girlish demeanour. I had invited my friends Alan ‘Big Al’ Sewell and his wife Debbie. I think Penny was nervously anticipating music-industry people, and was enormously relieved to find herself at the table with a couple who were so comforting, down to earth and hilarious to be around. It helped put her at ease.
At the start of the evening, I asked Penny if I could see the pictures she had taken, back in December, and she handed me a batch of prints. They were not the best concert photos I had ever seen. Penny had assumed she would be in the photographers’ pit, right in front of the stage. But the crew had put her out on the sound desk in the middle of the hall where, in the absence of a long telephoto lens, she had been reduced to taking pictures of a set of small figures jousting mistily in the distance. A lot of compensatory blowing up and cropping appeared to have gone on in the darkroom.
We put the photographs aside and ordered food and talked, and the evening went pretty smoothly right until the moment when Penny got up to use the bathroom and knocked two glasses of wine over on the adjacent table. This convinced her she had blown the date completely, but in fact it simply made the night feel even funnier and warmer.
As we walked out to the cars, I asked Penny if we could meet the next day. She said she would love to, much to my excitement, but that it was her granddad’s birthday and she was taking him out to the Theydon Oak.
I said, ‘That’s my pub.’
Penny said, ‘What, you own it?’
I said, ‘No, it’s where I go. I could see you there.’
She said, ‘I’m sure my granddad would love to meet you.’
I said, ‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’
The next day, not long after two in the afternoon, the intercom buzzed from the front gate.
A hesitant female voice said, ‘I’m looking for Rod?’
‘Yeah, this is Rod.’
‘Er, it’s Penny? You said you would meet me and my granddad?’
I was confused. I thought we had a date for the evening. I buzzed them in and went out onto the drive. Penny explained that her birthday treat for her grandad, Wally, was lunch, not supper. Furthermore, after the lunch had come and gone without any sign of me, Wally had stood up and said, firmly, ‘We’ll go over there. We’ll go over to Rod Stewart’s house.’
Penny had said, ‘We can’t just . . . go over there.’
And Wally had said, ‘He said he would come. And if he said he would come, we should hold him to his word.’
I shook Wally’s hand, apologised to him profusely for the misunderstanding, and then we had a long chat. In later days, when Penny and I were eventually together, Wally and I would slip off for a pint every now and again. He had been a fireman in the war, and people who have stories from that era have my ear straight away. He once told me, ‘I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think much of your music, but I like your taste in art.’
He had a photo of himself, sat in the driving seat of my Lamborghini, which he used to take to show people at the British Legion. The poor old boy was knocked down by a bus and killed on his way to pick up his pension at the age of ninety-five. He had that photo in his pocket that day and it went to his grave with him.
After that missed lunch, Penny and I saw each other a few times, but the relationship built very slowly and tentatively, over many months. At this point, Penny was engaged to someone with whom she had been in a relationship for ten years. She was always completely open with me about that. Recently, she said, things had not been going too well, but she was torn about letting this person go. I told her I would be there to talk to her, if she wanted me to, about her sadness over that breaking relationship and I explained that I had just been through a break-up of my own. The more we talked, the more I realised how altogether smitten I was with Penny - yet I was proceeding very cautiously, too, and wanting to get everything absolutely right. It was a long time before we kissed for the first time. This happened at the Wood House one afternoon, after tea. We talked about Pre-Raphaelite art, which Penny had been studying as par
t of her course. I showed her the paintings in the room we were sitting in, and then the ones in the corridor outside. The tour continued with the paintings on the stairs, and then slowly onwards until we were looking at the paintings in my bedroom. A laden silence fell. And then, on an overwhelmingly romantic impulse, I asked Penny if she would lie back across the bed. She hesitantly did so. Then I walked round until I was directly behind her, on the other side of the bed, put my hands on her shoulders, leaned forward and kissed her, upside down. She reached up to my face and began to kiss me back. Then I stood up, took her hand, helped her to her feet and said, ‘Come on.’ And with that the art-history tour resumed.
And that, dear reader, was the birth of ‘the upside-down kiss’ which, to this day, Penny refers to as ‘the most romantic and seductive meeting of lips’ she has ever known. Try it one day.
Penny was very quiet in those early days, perhaps a bit intimidated. I would quicky learn how she wasn’t really shy at all. I would learn this in particular in late 2008, when I was invited to play at the sixtieth birthday party of Prince Charles at Highgrove House and looked out from the stage to see Penny dancing to ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ with the Prince, our host. He asked her to dance in the hope of encouraging everyone else out onto the floor, which certainly worked. Afterwards, he asked her, ‘Where did you get your dance steps?’ To which Penny replied, ‘My dad.’ In the same show, I looked out again – this time during ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ – and saw that Penny had now been swept up by Prince William, who asked for, and got, her permission to ‘dip’ her in a formal flourish at the end.
It was quite a relief to Penny to be invited back among royalty after what had happened a couple of years previously. I was playing at a special event at Windsor Castle to honour patrons of the Prince’s Trust charity, for which Penny and I are ambassadors, and Penny was seated next to Prince Charles at dinner. When the waiters appeared at Penny’s shoulder with the main course on a platter, the Prince was mid-anecdote. As she served herself, Penny continued to hold the Prince’s eyeline, as she believed protocol demanded, missed her plate completely and heaved a portion of meat onto the tablecloth between them. The Prince merely said, ‘Oh, don’t worry – I do that all the time,’ and casually covered the mess with his napkin. What a bloke.
Anyway, it was one of the things I quickly grew to love about my adorable wife – that you never quite knew what she would do next, or when that little look of mischief would glow in her eyes, the naughty mixed with the nice. On tour in Australia eight years ago, we were driving back to the hotel on a really hot day, slightly woozy after a tour of some vineyards, and suddenly there was a stunning vista of endless fields with huge wheels of cut hay stacked up in them. This inspired Penny to leap from the car, jump over the fence and start running, gradually shedding items of clothing as she went, right down to her underwear, before climbing a distant hay bale on the horizon and turning back to wave. That, in turn, caused me to jump from the car and set off after her, shouting wildly and joining her on the hay bale where we embraced. By now two or three cars had pulled up behind ours so the driver called us back. We ran, gathering Penny’s clothes along the way, and flung ourselves into the back seat, laughing like fools.
On those nervous early dates, however, I was constantly reassuring her that it was OK if she talked. Quite early in the relationship we spent an evening at Ronnie Wood’s house in Wimbledon. Woody is very friendly with Jimmy White, the snooker player, who was a big deal in the sport in his day, and a bit of a lad. Somewhere in the evening, White said, ‘I need a volunteer for a trick shot.’ Penny, thinking perhaps that this would be a good moment to come out of her shell and show herself to be game, said, ‘I’ll do it.’
For this trick, she had to lie on her back across Woody’s snooker table, with the back of her head on the baize and a golf tee between her teeth. White put a red ball on the golf tee and declared that, from the other end of the table, he would hit a jump-shot with the white ball which would take the red ball off the tee and put it in the left-hand pocket beyond Penny’s head.
I was looking at this and thinking, ‘You’d better get this right, pal.’
Crack! The white ball leapt away from White’s cue, missed the red ball and smacked against Penny’s jaw. From the sound of it, I was imagining broken teeth, though actually she was only bruised. White was profusely apologetic but I was furious. I said, ‘We’re leaving.’ And we did, amid much frostiness.
Our devotion to each other grew over a series of romantic voyages abroad. Very early on, I whisked Penny away to the Bahamas for a holiday with a group of eight old friends of mine – potentially intimidating and alienating for her, but she fitted right in. To surprise her on her arrival, I had a whole new wardrobe of Dolce & Gabbana clothes and shoes waiting for her in the guest room. Getting the right size shoes presented me with a problem, but I solved it brilliantly: by trying them on myself. If they were slightly too tight on me, I knew they would be perfect for Penny. And I was right.
We also went driving through Provence in the south of France in my convertible Lamborghini, just the two of us – a trip we would repeat several times over the years and which eventually inspired us to seek a place down there that we could constantly go back to. It was Penny who flew to France several times on what turned into a four-year property-hunting mission and who eventually found us the perfect house in the hills above Nice, which we own and love to this day.
I went back to America in due course and invited Penny over, periodically, for short breaks together. In between, we shared endless long distance phone calls, sharing our inner thoughts and talking about anything and everything. She was finishing her photography course at Barking College. I would tell people, ‘My girlfriend’s got her school holidays, so she’s coming out.’ I loved the appalled reaction that this got. It must have been strange for Penny, though. One minute she was at college in Barking and the next she was flying down to Miami and getting driven across the tarmac to the Lear jet where her pouting, posing boyfriend was waiting for the fifteen-minute flight up to his house in Palm Beach.
Our emerging relationship was difficult for both our families. My brothers and sisters were initially suspicious and worried about a repetition of my relationship with Rachel. Meanwhile, Penny’s brother Oliver was clearly anxious about his sister consorting with a rock star. He would eventually come to know me as the fine, upstanding gentleman that I am, of course. But in the meantime, we decided the best way to remove some of these understandable familial tensions was to arrange for me to meet her dad, Graham. Graham is the same age as me, and a lawyer. Neither of us was quite sure what to wear for our dinner date. In the end, Graham came dressed like a rock star – denim and leather – and I came dressed like a lawyer in a dark suit with a perfectly pressed shirt and a well-knotted tie. We hit it off straight away, though, and ended up back at my house in Epping, drinking whisky and listening to Sam Cooke records.
I knew of Penny’s desire to have children. She was honest with me over how she felt about children and how much she hoped to have them. And I was honest with her about how, at this time, I felt I really couldn’t have any more kids, or get married or move forward with anyone in a serious way. We both said we were having fun and it didn’t matter; that we would just let this relationship take its course. But I knew I couldn’t make her 100 per cent happy for that reason.
Also, Penny had to make up her mind to leave a person she had been with for a long time – a person with whom, perhaps, she could have stayed and started a family. She was once crying in my arms because she was in anguish about this decision, and I suggested that she go and sit down by the lake for a while and just try to clear her head. As she sat there, a swan rose up off the water and flew away, and, after it had passed, a solitary white feather floated down and landed beside her. Is it too fanciful to think that this was a sign? It was certainly a happy coincidence and an inspiring sight. Penny came back to me in the house, resolved and holding the f
eather. She still has it.
After Penny separated from her boyfriend, it would have been so easy for me to say ‘Move in with me.’ Again, though, with great restraint, we went slowly. Penny went home to live with her dad, not far from the house in Essex. The bed she was sleeping in there was the one she had had when she was eight. Her feet were hanging over the edge and the springs were gone. So I bought her a new bed, causing a small commotion in the neighbourhood when the van from Harrod’s turned up to deliver it. On reflection, this may have been the least romantic gift I have ever given a woman: a new single bed, to enable her to carry on living at her dad’s house.
Eventually, I suggested that she move into the little guest cottage at the end of the drive in Epping – bringing her closer, but still not bringing her right in. But then there was a wonderful period of three weeks when Renee and Liam were staying over and the Wood House was being redecorated. So Penny, the kids and I all lived in the guest cottage together for a while, sharing the two bedrooms very snugly. Renee and Liam would come into our bedroom in the morning and do trampolining on the bed. Penny took them down to Southend on the Essex coast, sugared them up good and proper and let them see how Essex does the seaside: the beach, the deck chairs, Peter Pan’s Playground. This clearly brought her enormous pleasure, but it made me ache to think she would never do things like that with her own children. Why couldn’t this relationship have happened sooner?
But, of course, there was this overriding need to be sure – for both of us. We would be out on tour, walking hand in hand around towns and cities, and we’d find ourselves wanting to go into a church. There wouldn’t be a service on, but something kept drawing us into churches and we both felt compelled to sit there quietly for a little while and to pray. And it wasn’t something we questioned one another on; it was just an urge. Something just drew us in. We’d be in New York, and on a mission to do something or go somewhere, but then we would pass a church and find ourselves saying, ‘Let’s go in.’ And we’d sit at the back and bow our heads for a bit. We only opened up to each other about this after we had got married, but it turned out that, as we sat side by side at those times, we were both praying for us to find a way to be together in the future. Still, at this time we didn’t discuss it. We would pray and then hold hands and leave.