Rod: The Autobiography (24 page)

And then there was the Christmas where I thought long and hard about the present I was going to give him. That’s always a tough one: what do you get the man who has bought himself everything? Eventually, though, after a bit of scouring around the shops, I lit upon the solution: a novelty portable fridge. Brilliant. You plugged it in and pressed a button and its door opened automatically, and it lit up and a bottle rose out of it in a cloud of vapour. It seemed to me to offer the required ‘wow’ factor. And it cost me about £300, which I thought was enough.

Elton’s present to me that year: a Rembrandt.

A drawing –
The Adoration of the Shepherds
.

A fucking Rembrandt! I felt pretty small – although not as small as Elton presumably wanted me to feel when he later referred tartly to my present as ‘an ice bucket’. It was not an ice bucket. It was a novelty portable fridge.

Anyway, I played it a bit better on his fiftieth birthday in 1997. I bought him a full-size, sit-under hairdryer like the ones you see in women’s hairdressers. Two years later, he marked my marriage to Rachel with a £10 voucher from Boots. On the card he wrote, ‘Get yourself something nice for the house.’

We travelled together a bit, too, or sought each other out
when we were abroad. The band Queen rented a house in Bel Air, Los Angeles, for a while, and Elton and I spent a long evening there with Freddie Mercury, a sweet and funny man whom I really adored, discussing the possibility of the three of us forming a supergroup. The name we had in mind was Nose, Teeth & Hair, a tribute to each of our most remarked-upon physical attributes. The general idea was that we could appear dressed like the Beverley Sisters. Somehow this project never came to anything, which is contemporary music’s deep and abiding loss.

In 1985, Elton and I were even together on a short holiday in Africa, a wildlife safari, driving out into the bush to spot the fabled ‘big five’: the elephant, the rhino, the buffalo, the lion and the leopard. The best time to do this, of course, is at an unearthly hour of the morning, which was never my best time of day back then. But there would be Elton, rattling away at the tent-flap: ‘Come on, dear.’ We shared a Land Rover and appointed ourselves ‘poopologists’: experts in the detection of animals by their poop. In the evening, back at the camp, we dressed up regally in bow ties and dark jackets for dinner round the fire.

Even on safari, Elton insisted on bringing his diamonds with him. He had a black box with various pieces of Cartier jewellery in it, worth God only knows how much, entrusted to his assistant Bob – a bit like the way the US president has someone with him with a briefcase containing the nuclear codes. One night in Africa, as we were having dinner, members of the party decided to sneak this precious box away from Bob and hide it, just to get a reaction. But Elton is a very difficult person to faze. Bob began to panic, but Elton simply said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, it’s only the daytime stuff.’

In addition to Elton’s house, the other key centre of amusement during these Cranbourne Court days was Ronnie Wood’s place, the Wick, at Richmond, a Georgian mansion which he had bought off the actor Sir John Mills. Set up on a hill and with huge bay windows out the back overlooking the Thames,
The Wick was widely agreed to offer one of the most beautiful vistas in England, if not the whole of Europe – and Ronnie Wood ends up in it. Funny old world.

The three-storey house had an oval dining- and drawing-room, carved woodwork and amazing fireplaces. Ronnie plumbed a recording studio into the basement, inherited a snooker table along with the deeds to the property and acquired a parrot, which he had taught to say ‘Fuck off’, but in terms of other domestic essentials, such as, say, a dining table, the house always seemed to me to be a bit on the light side. Mostly it appeared to function as a giant, multi-room wardrobe for Ronnie’s stage costumes, which were hanging up against most of the available surfaces, and also as a cupboard for his guitars.

It was a good gathering place, though, somewhere you might drop in at the end of the evening, where there always seemed to be a crowd, mostly hanging out downstairs in the recording studio, jamming, or listening to other people jamming, or helping out Woody on a project of his. Down there you might run into Pete Townshend; or Keith Richards, who lived in the cottage at the bottom of Woody’s garden for a while, even though he had houses of his own; or, very occasionally, Paul McCartney. I still vividly recall the sensation of leaving that studio at the end of a night, and going upstairs to discover that it had got light without my noticing – always a slightly poignant downer of a moment. And it was in that studio one evening that Mick Jagger – speaking, I assume, for and on behalf of Bianca – made a tentative enquiry about the possibility of a little light partner-swapping with Dee and myself. Well, I suppose it’s always nice to be asked, and comforting to know that you are in someone’s thoughts, but the answer had to be no. Partner-swapping wasn’t my scene, and it certainly wasn’t Dee’s.

Actually the Wick in its entirety wasn’t Dee’s scene. It tended to be full of people taking all kinds of things and talking all kinds of bollocks – which is fine if you’re partaking, but she wasn’t and I think she found it dark and slightly intimidating.
While we were there, I would sometimes look across at her and she would have the expression of a woman who was hoping the floor would open up and swallow her. It just wasn’t how she was interested in spending her time.

Also, as my working life got busier and more complicated and required greater amounts of organisation, the privacy of Cranbourne Court began to be eroded – much to Dee’s distress and disappointment. The pressure started to make itself felt, there were more decisions to make, and more people directly involved in the running of my life. One person who was around a lot, and who Dee really had reservations about, was the perfectly named Tony Toon, who was my assistant and publicist during these years. Tony wore a battered corduroy jacket and shabby trousers and resembled a down-at-heel Fleet Street hack. He was thin and substantially bald, and there was hardly ever a time when he wasn’t sucking on a cigarette, with his fingers held daintily aloft. We called him Fag-Ash Lil. He was mincing, waspish, scurrilous, incorrigible. He had this running joke where, at the end of every meal, in every restaurant, he would tell the waiter, ‘Bring me a large amaretto and a big butch man.’ He did this unfailingly. Others would come to find the joke, and his presence, irksome, but I enjoyed having him around. He made things fun.

He also made things up. You could say there are, roughly, two types of publicist. There’s the kind who sees it as their job to keep their client out of the papers, to throw the press off the scent when necessary and to limit any damage that arises. And then there’s the kind who thinks the role is about getting their client in the papers as frequently as possible, wafting the press as much scent as they can take. Tony was very much of the second school – with the additional kick that he was ready to get me in the papers irrespective of whether I wanted to be there or not, and irrespective of whether the story might be annoying or even harmful to me or people close to me. And if he saw the chance to spin a tale from a few tiny threads of fact, then he would happily seize it.

So, for instance, I would bump into Bianca Jagger in a hotel in New York and have a brief and mildly flirtatious encounter in the lobby, and a couple of days later a story would appear in one of the papers that the two of us were on the verge of moving in with one another.

Perhaps the classic Toon fabrication was the story of the thwarted love affair I supposedly had with the daughter of President Gerald Ford. Now, it was true that Susan Ford came to see the Faces play in Washington in 1975. She would have been eighteen at the time, glamorous, with long blonde hair. It was also true that she came backstage afterwards, surrounded by an army of security men.

But from those meagre details, Tony created a saga worth a week of newspaper headlines, in which our eyes had met across a crowded room, we had fallen hopelessly and permanently in love, Susan had invited me to an intimate dinner at the White House, but that fog had prevented me flying in from New York, leading me to send fifty red roses by way of apology.

Another of Tony’s tricks was the fabrication of meetings in restaurants. He would tell me that, for example, Mick Jagger had rung up, asking to go to dinner with me. And I would say, ‘Fine.’ And then he would ring Jagger and tell him that Rod Stewart wanted to have dinner with him. And Jagger would say, ‘Oh, OK, then.’ And thus this coming-together would be arranged, with both of us assuming it was at the other’s request, and Tony would accompany us and get a free meal, while also having some gossip to offer the press.

I was constantly saying to him about one thing or another, ‘But how did they find out about this?’ To which he would reply, ‘I don’t know, dear. It wasn’t me, dear. I’ll find out for you, dear.’

The tabloid guys must have loved Tony Toon. He was a gift to their trade. But for Dee, he was a less welcome presence. Needless to say, Tony’s willingness to shop stories of my dalliances, invented and otherwise, hardly endeared him to her as a force for good within our relationship. She associated him,
naturally enough, and in the broadest possible sense, with exposure. To her, he represented much of the madness that our life at Cranbourne Court had been carefully constructed to exclude.

Of course, I was a rock singer when Dee met me. Her first glimpses of me, remember, were behind the scenes with the Faces. She knew very well what the scene around rock bands was like, and she understood that the chances of me remaining faithful to her while I was out on tour were remote. But in the beginning, touring was a separate world and Cranbourne Court was our reality. It was a barrier against the madness of the rock world. Increasingly, though, the rock world was climbing over the barriers and coming into our lives and into our house. Without doubt the explosion of my fame after ‘Maggie May’, and the extent to which it made me a piece of public property, created some deep fractures in our relationship. I don’t think fame changed
me
very much; I think I remained pretty down to earth – maybe even quite remarkably so, in the context. But fame definitely changed the world around me. The adoration that suddenly starts coming at you from all angles, and from total strangers, can be very pleasant when you’re the object of it but enormously troubling and unsettling for the person that you’re with. When we were out together, people would have no qualms about talking to me as if Dee wasn’t there. Women would openly flirt with me right in front of her. We would try to go to the theatre together and end up running out halfway through because people were saying, ‘Ooh, look – there’s Rod Stewart’. Jealousy, resentment, anxiety: these things definitely entered the relationship at that point and had a corrosive effect.

Our life was all about me and my schedule. We had this country idyll, and then all of a sudden helicopters were continually landing on its grass to spin me off to places: promotional trips, recording, touring. I had a band and a solo career at this point, remember, so I really was furiously busy. A lot of the time, when I was away, Dee was left alone, rattling around in that enormous house. And she was approaching her mid twenties
and beginning to think, ‘Well, what about me? What am I doing with
my
life?’ She sometimes said she wanted to get a job, but I really didn’t want her to. I told her that people would say, ‘You know that man who owns the big white house? He sends his girl out to work. How mean must he be?’

These tensions burrowed their way into the relationship and began to pick it apart. The joy of it began to be lost for both of us. There was a huge and growing ocean between us, and the relationship really needed to end, but neither of us could end it. By 1974, we were arguing with increasing frequency – and with increasing frequency those arguments were ending with Dee walking out in anger and frustration and going back to her parents. I would then be contrite and want her back, but – always pitifully afraid of confrontation – I would get my mate Micky Waller, from the Jeff Beck Group days, to phone her up and say, ‘If Rod rings, will you talk to him?’ And if it turned out the worst had blown over, I would be straight on the phone, quietly asking her out to lunch at the pub in High Wycombe, and then pleading with her to return. And then the cycle would start again.

During one of those separations – a six-week one, this time – I went to a football awards ceremony and met the actress Joanna Lumley. This was before the television series
The New Avengers
made her name – and lest anyone wish to add her to the ‘long line of blondes’ with which my name has been continually associated, let the record state that, at this period in her life, she had black hair.

She was also very well educated and altogether rather posh: I remember her referring at one point to ‘the family tapestries’, and wondering if she meant the carpets, until it eventually dawned that she didn’t. She was, therefore, not the first person you would have imagined consenting to hang out with someone who could easily have been mistaken for a rock ’n’ roll urchin. But I’ve always enjoyed a challenge, and there seemed to be a bit of a spark between us; and if this was going to come down to class, I was always able to wheel out what I thought was an
extremely upmarket line: ‘Would you like to come and spend the weekend with me in Spain on my boat?’

It was true, I had a boat: a thumping great seventy-foot-long, Dutch-built number with a steel hull, which I christened
The Gay Intruder
. At first it was docked on the Thames at Richmond and I decided that the nice thing to do, for its maiden voyage, would be to take my mum up the river one Sunday. I asked Cyril, my driver, if he thought he could handle a boat. ‘Of course I can,’ he said. ‘I was in the navy.’

So we board, and set off smoothly up the river under Cyril’s highly competent captaincy, and there really couldn’t be a nicer way to spend a warm afternoon with one’s mother than gently floating on the water, drinking wine.