Rod: The Autobiography (34 page)

Still, Kelly doesn’t seem too put off. She certainly doesn’t start looking round the room distractedly while I’m talking about it. Nor does she begin yawning loudly, humming, or making animal shapes out of her napkin.

After dinner, we drive back to her apartment and I walk her to the elevator. I say, ‘Can’t I come up?’ And she says, ‘No, you can’t.’ And I say, ‘I just thought maybe I could.’ And she says, ‘No, you can’t.’ So I plead with her to let me see her tomorrow. But she says she is busy. She’s going to Pennsylvania where she is in the middle of doing up a house and someone is coming to give her an estimate for some work. And I say, ‘Please don’t go. Cancel it. I’ll call you.’ And she laughs and gets into the elevator.

And then I drive back to the Mayfair Regent and a hotel suite containing a slumbering Kara Meyers.

Dear Lord. Who did I think I was? Rod Stewart?

* * *

The following morning, Kelly waited until eleven, gave me up as a hopeless case and caught a bus to Pennsylvania. I didn’t call until one and, in any case, I had a wife to fly home to in Los Angeles and a photograph inside the
New York Post
to discuss. (It mostly showed Kara Meyers’ very long legs disappearing into a taxi, but the evidence was substantially incriminating.)

Nevertheless, I was intent. I called again the next day. Kelly told me she was going to Dallas to do a catalogue shoot. I told
her I would be there. She laughed and said, ‘I’m not holding my breath.’ I flew there for no other reason at all and checked into the Mansion on Turtle Creek Hotel. She was in the Best Western. I rang her and said, ‘Come and stay over here. It’s nicer.’ She said, ‘I’m not staying in your room.’ I said, ‘I’ll get you a room of your own.’

I booked her a room and left in it a bouquet of flowers the size of a hedge, and a note: ‘For the fabulous one.’ And when I knew she had moved her stuff across from the Best Western, I knocked on the door and got ready so that when she opened it I was down on my knees on the threshold, offering in my outstretched hands a toilet roll and saying, ‘For you.’

Even in Dallas we ended up having dinner and fun and nothing else. I had to court her. She had a boyfriend and she took a lot of persuading to leave him. Over the next weeks, I called her constantly. I would find out where she was working and turn up there and surprise her. I went to photographers’ studios and blagged my way in. I gatecrashed the shoot for a Maybelline commercial and sat at the back trying to distract her. And then I would persuade her to come out to lunch or dinner, or just walk around with her, saying stupid stuff. ‘You see this crack in the pavement? We may never have this moment with it again.’

I was head over heels. She was so together. She took flights –
on her own
. I never did this. There was always an assistant with me. Never a bodyguard, because I have never felt I needed one of those, but always someone alongside me. And sometimes she would go to the cinema by herself. Again, I couldn’t have imagined doing that. She had this fabulous way of talking on a laugh, she was always up, she was as sentimental as anything; she was clearly someone who didn’t have a bad bone in her body. At dinner one time, even before we had consummated the relationship, I told her, ‘I think I’m going to marry you.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? That’s completely nuts.’ But I really thought it.

Eventually we were an item. For two years, our relationship
was long-distance, split between New York and LA. Kelly had her career and she had her apartment in Manhattan and she was too smart and organised to set it all aside casually. But even in that period, the longest we went without seeing each other was ten days. In New York we would go to the theatre and hang out with her model friends, Kim Alexis and Christie Brinkley. Which was no particular hardship, I have to say. And then, at the weekend in LA, she would come to watch me play football and go out with the boys afterwards and we would drink Mudslides until we were cross-eyed. She never had any problem being around my friends, nor with any of the raucousness and stupidity that would frequently break out. The boys in the band adored her, welcoming her warmly to the Under the Table Supper Club (a formal dining society in which, at various points in the evening, everyone would slide under the table and hide from the waiter). The band also had a bit of a thing at this time for dining in restaurants trouser-less – and occasionally, it must be admitted, underwear-less – with nudity concealed from the waiter and other diners by the tablecloth. And Kelly seemed perfectly comfortable with that, too. Nothing fazed her.

This was the 1980s, the era of big hair. It was simply in the air at that time: the circumference of your hairdo expanded by at least four inches in about 1982 and stayed that way for three or four years, whether you wanted it to or not. It was something to do with the economy, probably. Anyway, my hair had certainly never been bigger than it was in 1983. Kelly, too, when I first saw her on the screen in
Portfolio
, had truly massive hair. She didn’t always wear it that way, though. And when she didn’t, I would spend a lot of time teasing it and fluffing it, trying to make it bigger. It seemed to me just wrong to be living in the 1980s and not trying to maximise the bigness of your hair.

We began spending a lot of time together in England. I hadn’t owned a house there since I had sold Cranbourne Court, the giant country pile where I had lived with Dee Harrington
until the mid 1970s. I had kept that house for a little while after I moved to America and members of my family had gone to live there and look after it. But it was way too big – possibly even dangerously big. One day my sister Mary went up in the attic and accidentally knocked the ladder down behind her. And, my parents being pretty deaf by then and the house being so huge, Mary couldn’t attract anybody’s attention and was stranded up there for hours. It could have been the last we ever saw of her.

This was the period when my dad had access to my former driver, Big Cyril, and to my six-door, tinted-windowed Rolls-Royce, which had once belonged to Andrew Loog Oldham, the former manager and producer of the Rolling Stones. Dad would depart from Cranbourne Court in his suit, tie and carpet slippers and, driven by Big Cyril, head for the betting shop in Ascot. Or at least that’s what he did until the day he landed a really stinky bet, copping several thousand pounds on a tiny stake, and was quietly advised by the management (who now suspected him of being some kind of insider) that they no longer wished for his business. If Dad couldn’t use the bookies in Ascot, then Cranbourne Court really had lost its purpose.

In 1986, though, in the pages of
Country Life
magazine, I found the Wood House, a lovely late nineteenth-century English manor house in the countryside not far north of London. It stood in what had once been the vast estate belonging to Copped Hall, now derelict and away on the horizon, a huge mansion and a former hospital for wounded army officers. This part of Essex had been Winston Churchill’s constituency when he was an MP, and the legend was that he had stayed at the Wood House and that during the Second World War he had stood at its upstairs windows and watched German bombing raids on London, back when I was a newborn and Adolf Hitler was at the end of his tether, trying and failing to kill me.

The place had rolling lawns and a lake and a paddock for horses and a large amount of privacy and, crucially, a flat-ish area off to one side which my trained eye immediately told me
would lend itself to a long-imagined and deeply personal project of mine: the creation of a full-size football pitch. I bought it and we moved in, and I still remember the first meal Kelly and I ate in this newly acquired home, sitting in the bay window of a gorgeous, broad, wood-panelled room, with just a few items of furniture in boxes and wrappings around us, plus the snooker table that the owners had left behind, and, ahead of us, the exciting and romantic (if slightly expensive) prospect of making this place our own.

So, if everything was so perfect and so well set up, why did I end up floating off and fooling around with another woman? The woman was Kelly LeBrock, the film actress. It was nothing serious, just a fling. She invited me to a film premiere and I, by way of return, invited her to join me on a boating trip to Catalina Island whereupon a certain amount of alcohol was imbibed and relations of an intimate nature ensued. We decided afterwards that the outing had been such a success that we really ought to repeat it. And she was a lovely woman, a rose raised in England, and very fastidious about intimate cleanliness, as I recall. As soon as anything got going in that direction, one would be packed straight off to the showers, quicker than in a boarding school after games. But it was all conducted lightly, in the spirit of seizing the day and other things – altogether typical of the dalliances I used to have. When it came to beautiful women, I was a tireless seeker after experiences. ‘Miss Inbetweens’ was the phrase I had for them. And Miss Inbetweens would arise because the opportunity came very easily to me, and because the opportunity looked like fun, and because in those days I simply didn’t know how to resist. And also because I thought I could get away with it.

I’m not trying to cover myself in excuses here, but this was Kelly LeBrock. She was the star of the movie
The Woman in Red
. And what was
The Woman in Red
about if not the complete irresistibility of Kelly LeBrock? If, in the mid 1980s, you could have found me a solitary heterosexual man of sound mind, married, attached or single, who would have declined the
opportunity to spend some time on a boat with Kelly LeBrock if he thought he could get away with it, I would have . . . well, I would have looked that person right in the eye and shaken him firmly by the hand because he was obviously a better man than me.

It turned out that I couldn’t get away with it, though. Kelly found out about Kelly. Kelly Emberg and I were eating at the Ivy in LA. Kelly LeBrock, whom I had not seen for some time, was on another table. Kelly LeBrock, daringly, perhaps even provocatively, sent the waiter over with a message. (Remember: this was an era long before the invention of texting.) On the scrap of paper, she had written, ‘I miss you.’ And Kelly (Emberg) read it.

Short of being found actually in flagrante (which, astonishingly, never happened to me: I wonder what odds you could have got on that), I could hardly have been caught more red-handed. And let me tell you, if you haven’t been there, after a hand-written note revealing your affair has been dropped onto a table in front of your girlfriend, then take it from me that it’s very difficult to find something appropriate and calming to say. You can’t really sit there and say, ‘Trust me, in a few years’ time we’ll look back and laugh about this.’ Nor can you very well fold the piece of paper back up again, drop it on your empty plate and say, ‘Well. Anyway. Coffee?’ I simply started up the usual train of utterly see-through denials and protestations of innocence, which continued as we left.

The worst of it was that, a year or so before this happened, Kelly E. had been offered a part in a John Hughes movie – had accepted it and gone through the whole rehearsal process, right up to the point of shooting the thing, only to be taken off the picture because another actress had suddenly become available. The film was called
Weird Science
and the actress who replaced Kelly was called . . . Kelly LeBrock. Kelly E. was not the sort of person to carry a grudge; in fact, she was the precise opposite of that sort of person. But I don’t suppose her feelings about my secret affair were especially improved by the coincidence.

Kelly went back to New York, extremely betrayed, confused and upset. I realised I had been an idiot to risk losing her and began calling her and pleading with her. trying to charm her into coming back. She stopped taking my calls, which drove me even more insane. I was on the phone to her assistant in tears at least a couple of times. Eventually I got to speak to her again, and I told her that I had been a fool and that I was serious about her and that nothing like that would happen again and that we should go to Spain that weekend and make everything better. She was meant to be doing a photo shoot for Tom Ford, but I persuaded her to drop it and come to Spain with me. While we were there we patched things up. And we decided we would have a baby, which would pull us together like we were supposed to be.

The conception may even have happened there and then, in sunny Spain. At any rate, towards the end of 1986, Kelly was pregnant. Pregnant with a girl. We both knew as much. Well, we didn’t know it. But we both said it. Kelly wanted to call her Ruby. I had a small problem with that. In cockney rhyming slang, the ancient vernacular of my home city, a ‘ruby’ is a curry: Ruby Murray – curry. So you might say, ‘Shall we eat in tonight, or shall we go out for a ruby?’ As I explained this to Kelly, I could see from the blank expression on her face that the confusion was unlikely to arise in America. Nor in many other places, really. And it was, I had to agree, a very pretty name. I set my objection aside. Ruby it was.

We went to tell Kelly’s parents. There I was, going down to Texas to inform some Texans I had never met that I was having a child out of wedlock with their daughter. I figured I would be lucky to get away without being shot or lynched, or possibly both at the same time. In fact, they were nice, understanding people. Kelly’s father was a giant, but gentle with it, fortunately. Her mother was more formidable – and had an amazing singing voice, as it turned out. Some years later we were in the Ritz hotel in New York for the new year, and she got up and sang and the hotel offered her a contract for a residency, on the
spot. She declined it. Anyway, at that first meeting, I turned on the charm. There was talk of marriage, which seemed to settle a few nerves. And I meant it.

On 17 June 1987, at six in the morning, Kelly went into labour and we rushed in a panic to Cedars-Sinai hospital only to be told that the baby wasn’t going to arrive for at least another twelve hours. I was in the middle of shooting a video, so we agreed that I might as well go away and get on with it during this intermission and then come back to the hospital in the evening for the main event. At the video shoot, a few glasses were quaffed to celebrate the baby in advance, so I was in somewhat enthusiastic spirits when I returned to the hospital that evening. I had dutifully gone with Kelly to what seemed to me like several hundred birthing classes – done the breathing exercises, watched the videos, bought the pre-maternity T-shirt, you name it – so I considered myself amply prepared for the important events that were about to unfold. However, as I moved confidently towards the bed, a member of the medical staff put a firm hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Stand back, Mr Stewart. We’ll take over from here.’ Cost me hundreds of dollars, those classes.