Rod: The Autobiography (38 page)

‘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.

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 the 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.

And I nearly didn’t see them. Her friend drove up and down, failing to find the house. She was about to give up when they spotted it. A few of my friends had come back from the Roxbury for a few more drinks, including my pal Ricky Simpson and Teri Copley, the television actress and
Playboy
model, with whom I had spent the evening chatting warmly but whom I now, rather shamefully, dropped like a hot brick. Coming through the front door, Rachel tripped and went sliding across the slippery hall floor – her grand entrance. So now at least we had both embarrassed ourselves.

There was a connection straight away. She was extremely beautiful, it goes without saying, but there was something very no-nonsense about her as well. It was there in her New Zealand accent, but also in her face, which was at once very open and yet, you felt, not the face of someone who was likely to be taken for a fool. She was smart – as far removed as could be from the stereotype of the flaky model. And she already had money and fame, so she had no need to attach herself to somebody to achieve those things. That was a relief for me, because in my position that suspicion was always there: does this person really like me, the way they seem to, or does this person just like the stuff that surrounds me?

And there was a naïveté about her, too – but why wouldn’t there have been? She was just shy of her twenty-first birthday. I was forty-five. There were nearly twenty-five years between us – but that calculation is irrelevant, much though people on the outside of our relationship liked to get hung up on it. It wasn’t that she was too young
for me
. She was, quite simply, too young: too young to get married, too young to become caught up in another person’s life, which is what happened. Christ, she had barely lived. But I didn’t see it. I just sailed on.

That evening at Carolwood I believe that alcohol was consumed – certainly by me – and that dancing of a largely ridiculous nature took place. I believe that I showed Rachel around the house. I believe that in particular I showed her the dogs, the three Border collies I had at this time, which lived outside and which she was keen to see. I believe that, in a moment of high spirits, the pair of us ended up chasing through the house, pursued by the dogs. I never used to let the dogs into the nice bits of the house, because they destroyed things. That evening, I clearly didn’t care. I really
must
have been in love.

She flew back to New York the morning after our first date. I sent two dozen red roses to her agency. Then I flew to New York, on no pretext at all, so that I could see her again. I called her up and invited her to dinner. We met at the Peninsula Hotel
in Los Angeles where I had taken a room. She wore a stunning white dress. I held doors open, escorted her into the restaurant, helped her with her seat, as a proper gentleman should. Over dinner, we didn’t so much talk as gabble, covering a lot of ground in a big hurry. We were falling very fast.

But not that fast. Later that night, back at the hotel, Rachel came to bed in a T-shirt down to her ankles – a T-shirt that said, ‘Not tonight, thank you’ as efficiently as if she had come clanking out of the bathroom in a deep-sea diving outfit. A bit of a shame, of course. But a good sign, I knew. A sign that maybe we were at the beginning of something serious.

I don’t know about eight weeks to a better body, but we were five weeks to an engagement and three months to a wedding – startling even some of my closest friends, who knew and loved Rachel and saw how deeply I had fallen for her, but clearly thought we should go more slowly and were quite willing to say so. But love won’t listen to objections. I thought they were wrong and I was right, as simple as that.

The morning after our first date, I said, ‘Let’s go steady.’ She said, ‘OK, then.’ She had a modelling job at the end of that week in Fort Lauderdale. I flew down on the Thursday to be with her. The following Sunday was 9 September: Rachel’s birthday. We made a plan to go back to New York and celebrate lavishly – both her big day and our new relationship. And maybe (if I was lucky) have sex, which we hadn’t got round to yet. Not that I was desperate or anything.

The celebrations didn’t happen. Late in the afternoon of Rachel’s birthday, I got a call in New York from my sister Mary. She said, ‘Roddy, Dad’s died.’

I had spoken to him on the phone that lunchtime, New York time. We had talked about the Scottish and English football results. And apparently, not long after that, he said he felt tired and went upstairs to bed and was gone. He was eighty-six.

I don’t need to say how much his death crushed me. I wept, and Rachel held me. And it was an extraordinary situation all round because here I was, full of new love and now in mourning.
I think one refers to this as ‘mixed emotions’. But Rachel was amazing, full of comfort and support. Suddenly it wasn’t me who was the senior half of the relationship, it was her. She took control and helped me through.

We flew back to London for the funeral – me, Rachel, and Ricky Simpson, who knew my dad well. Rachel stayed behind in Epping while I went to the service. She had never met him, of course – and that was a huge additional sadness to me, that Dad hadn’t seen me with the person with whom I thought I would be happy and settled for life, that he hadn’t finally seen me come good and make a go of it. But Rachel also didn’t come to the funeral because we knew how much the press would have made a distraction out of her being there.

As it was, the day was about Dad. There was a funeral procession to Highgate Cemetery. My brothers and sister and I organised a floral tribute in the shape of a football pitch. Gordon Strachan and Kenny Dalglish and a host of other footballers sent flowers and the respects of Scottish football. A Highland piper led the hearse and people stood still in the streets, as if all of Highgate had stopped to watch Bob Stewart set off down Muswell Hill Broadway for the last time.

We worried most of all about how my mum would be after this. She was finding the world to be a very confusing place by then. But in fact she was fine. She seemed to assume, for the most part, that Dad had just popped up to the bookies.

Is there a bookies in heaven? I’ll know where to find Dad if there is.

* * *

My dad’s death may have had the effect of speeding things up even further between Rachel and me. After the funeral, we flew back from London to New York, I helped Rachel pack up her apartment and then we flew back to Los Angeles and she moved in to Carolwood so that we could live together.

Almost immediately, though, she had a modelling commitment to fulfil: another shoot for
Sports Illustrated
with Elle Macpherson, in Puerto Rico. The job meant she would be away for three weeks while I was recording in LA. It was an agonising prospect for both of us. But work was work. Still, there was always the phone. We were virtually never off it for those weeks. I guess that was really the period when we found out about each other properly, talking for hours – about our lives, our families, stupid stuff and serious stuff, nothing and everything. Rachel’s phone bill at the end of the three-week trip was $10,000.

When Rachel’s job had finished, I took a Lear jet down to Puerto Rico to collect her. And then we took the plane on to Nassau in the Bahamas, where I had chartered a boat for the weekend. The plane hit some turbulence on the way, but we agreed that we were so happy that if we fell out of the sky and died, right there and then, we wouldn’t care.

That night, on the boat, our relationship was consummated. As a gentleman, I must insist upon my right to draw a gauzy veil over those proceedings. I can tell you, though, that as dawn’s rosy fingers began to illuminate our lovers’ bower, both of us found our attention drawn to an unsettling sight: a long, brown stain, midway down the bed sheet. There was, for both of us, a period of flustered self-examination: ‘Surely I haven’t . . . surely we didn’t . . .’

Closer investigation revealed the mark to be the remains of a complimentary chocolate, left on the pillow but brushed aside unseen in the haste of our passion.

Back in Los Angeles, I proposed to Rachel during a picnic in a park. And on 15 December 1990, a little over three months since I had mimed to her at the Roxbury nightclub, we were married. The service was at the Presbyterian Church in Beverly Hills. My brother Don was best man. The ushers were mostly my football mates from the Exiles, and I got them to wear sunglasses and carry white canes, so that, as they showed the guests to their seats, they would be performing an impression of the blind leading the blind. When Rachel arrived at the altar
she performed the wonderfully romantic gesture of giving me a thick, thumb-and-forefinger pinch on the bum. As we left the chapel, kilted pipers played ‘Scotland the Brave’.

And afterwards, the guests were invited to what the embossed invitations explicitly declared to be ‘a piss-up’ in the Four Seasons Hotel. On the seating plan for the reception, the tables were given names of football teams. The wedding feast was roast New Zealand lamb with mint sauce, roast potatoes and sprouts. The cake was in the shape of the Houses of Parliament with a three-foot-tall Big Ben and a kiwi fruit on the roof. Long John Baldry came, and Ian McLagan. Ronnie Wood couldn’t make it, unfortunately, because he was recuperating after his latest car crash. (Woody’s ability to wipe cars the length of walls is almost without equal in the Western world.) And when it was time for the groom’s speech, I stood up and told the room, with feeling: ‘I’m as happy as a dog with two dicks.’