Rod: The Autobiography (25 page)

‘OK, Cyril,’ I say. ‘We should probably turn round and go back now.’ The boat is long and the river relatively narrow at this point, but Cyril is a veteran, so he expertly brings the boat’s prow around through ninety degrees. Then he backs up and there’s a horrible grinding sound and the noise of splintering wood as the back end of my gin palace takes out a small flotilla of prettily painted rowing boats, moored beside the bank.

After this escapade I decided the best place for the boat was down in Spain, and I had it sailed to Puerto Banús in Spain. There, a trustworthy Scottish bloke who happened to be living in the town was engaged to keep an eye on it, in my absence, and have it ready for use when necessary – such as, for instance, on any weekend when I might show up intending to impress Joanna Lumley.

A car delivered us to the harbour, where, dressed lightly in linens for a weekend afloat, I walked my companion the final yards to our awaiting vessel, pointing it out in the distance, among the many shiny, expensive yachts tied to the jetties. And then, finally, we were alongside and my companion got her first sight on board.

It looked as though someone had taken a bin from outside the back of a restaurant and upended it across the deck. The boat was ankle-deep in discarded food and rubbish. Every surface
was grimy. My trusty Scottish ship-minder was asleep in a hammock beside a slew of empty beer cans. Five mates of his were dotted around the deck, similarly unconscious and stretched out to dry in the sun.

I proceeded to wake the boat-sitter by shouting at him and calling him a torrent of names, the full list of which is now lost in the mists of time, though I feel sure that at least one of them was ‘wanker’. I then walked my companion crisply back round the harbour and we checked into a hotel. Fortunately she seemed to find it funny, although I did notice that our relationship ended quite soon after.

My relationship with Dee reached its terminal crisis where it began: in Los Angeles, during a tour with the Faces. This was 1975. Dee had flown in from London to meet me that afternoon and was tired and said she was going to bed. I told Dee I had a meeting, which I did. What I didn’t mention was that the meeting was at the Troubadour nightclub with Britt Ekland.

And then the awful thing: midway through the evening, Dee decides she feels better and goes out in search of company. The next thing I know, she walks in through the door of the Troubadour, with an innocent, anticipatory look on her face which suddenly changes to one of immense hurt.

There was no big scene. Dee turned around, walked out of the club, flew back to London and moved out of Cranbourne Court, this time for good.

It was the right thing for both of us. But what a way to bring it about. How not to leave your lover.

BRITT EKLAND BROADENED
my outlook on just about everything. We were together for a little over two years, and deeply wrapped up in each other for most of that time. It all went a bit frosty at the end – and I suppose the clue there is that she tried to sue me for $12.5 million. But these things happen and, as the old expression has it, if you’re not at the fair, you can’t win a coconut. I still think of the experience as a wonderful love affair and an education that I was fortunate to have.

Britt came to see the Faces at the Forum in Los Angeles in February 1975. A year earlier, she had made her iconic appearance as a Bond girl in
The Man with the Golden Gun
, and was widely agreed to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. She wasn’t the first person you would have expected to find knocking about in a rock group’s dressing room, yet the backstage scene at some of those later Faces gigs did get extraordinarily starry. Steve McQueen came to see us when we played the Hollywood Bowl. Dustin Hoffman, too, turned out to be quite a Faces fan. In Britt’s case, her friend Joan Collins brought her. Joan Collins was married to Ron Kass, a record executive at Warner Bros., the Faces’ record label, so that was the connection. Ron and Joan then hosted a dinner, in rather more refined circumstances, at Luau restaurant in
Beverly Hills. And it was there that Britt and I sat next to each other and talked.

She was thirty-two – two years older than me, but, as was straight away apparent, whole decades more worldly. She had been married to Peter Sellers, the actor, and after that she had had a relationship with Lou Adler, who owned a record company and who produced the great Carole King album
Tapestry
. Britt had two children: a daughter, Victoria, with Sellers, and a son, Nikolaj, with Adler. Victoria was ten at this time, and Nikolaj was two. Her relationship with Adler had ended after he admitted to an affair. As Britt later put it in the book she wrote, ‘Rod came into my life six weeks after I parted from Lou and I rose back into the sky like a gull whose oil-soaked wings had been cleansed by a detergent.’

So what does that make me? Fairy Liquid, I guess. I’ve been called worse.

Of course, you’ll be asking, ‘But what did you see in the full-lipped, blonde, Swedish film star and internationally recognised Bond girl?’ She was, of course, staggeringly beautiful. In public she could come across as slightly grand and actressy, but a lot of that was self-consciousness in the face of the attention that she always got. In private, you couldn’t have met a more genuine and down-to-earth person – always pitching in at other people’s houses, helping with the cooking, doing the washing up. She was very house-proud altogether, in fact. It was a surprise to people who didn’t know her when she answered the door in Marigolds. The boys in the band loved her – she would make them eggy bread when they dropped in – and my family adored her as well. We spent the Christmas of 1976 at my brother Don’s house in Cambridgeshire, Britt and I in the single bed in the spare room, twelve of us rammed around the table in the dining room for Christmas dinner. My mum got confused and called her ‘Dee’ once or twice, but Britt couldn’t have cared less.

We were very intimate, very quickly. The night of that first dinner, we went on to a party at Cher’s house, but we were so
absorbed with each other that we didn’t talk to anyone else. I think we went out for dinner again the night afterwards and then, later in that week, we had our date at the Troubadour where Dee came in and discovered us. By that point I knew I was falling in love. Britt was drop-dead gorgeous, a beauty without compare, although less tall than I tended to like them. And she seemed exotic and a thousand times more cultured than me. Also – I have to admit this component of it – she was famous, a big, big star at the time. I had never been out with a famous woman. There was something very exciting about that aspect of it. I guess I was star-struck.

In the early heat of our relationship, we spent a lot of time having sex in the Malibu beach house that Lou Adler owned. During enforced spells of separation, Britt would send me love-notes and letters in packages which also often contained a pair of her knickers. My word, how email has changed things.

We weren’t apart that often, though – not at the start. In those days, pre-music video and pre-MTV, you spent a lot of time hopping from country to country, and from television station to television station, touting your wares. And Britt largely put her career on hold and came with me on those trips, which made it a lot more fun. We turned it into an international adventure.

I called her Poopy and she called me Soddy – which was sweet in private, although, like many aspects of our relationship, it became public knowledge and set a few people’s teeth on edge. And during one interview she came out with that line about us being the new Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and I cringed and wanted to die, knowing perfectly well that no one would even consider the possibility that she might have been joking.

The papers were all over us. The mixture of British rock star and Swedish film actress seemed to be some kind of recipe for tabloid delirium. They couldn’t get enough. But even that could be quite exciting for us at times, especially when we were devising ways to give them the slip. To avoid detection, we
booked into hotels and restaurants as Mr and Mrs Cockforth. The idea that we liked the attention and went after it a bit . . . well, there’s some truth in that as well.

When she was in Rhodesia, as it then was, doing some filming, she urged me to write her a romantic letter. So I sent her a telegram which said, ‘Tired of pulling me plonker. Please come home. Love, Soddy.’ It was, though, a genuinely romantic time. We took a cruise on the
QE2
, which was something I had long fantasised about doing, and packed lots of 1930s outfits to wear. One of the items was an authentic straw boater that Britt had bought me at Harold’s Place, an antique clothing store in Beverly Hills. That’s the boater I’m wearing on the sleeve of the
A Night on the Town
album, and I really wish I wasn’t. But we’ll come on to that. Let’s just say for now that maybe I would have looked less of a ponce if I had worn another gift Britt gave me: a lion-skin rug, complete with the stuffed head and a full set of dentures. We spread it on the floor of the flat that we rented in Beauchamp Place in London and tripped over it continually thereafter.

She knew about paintings and antiques. She could put a name and a date to things. I thought I knew about paintings and antiques, too, prided myself that I already had an eye, but I didn’t really. It was Britt who taught me to look. She introduced me to lamps and vases by Émile Gallé, these fabulous, late nineteenth-century art nouveau constructions in engraved coloured glass, which we decided to start collecting. We would set off together on lamp-hunting trips to Paris, armed with thousands of francs in cash. We spent hours in French markets, haggling with sellers. At least Britt, who spoke French beautifully, haggled. I stood off to one side saying helpful things like, ‘You want
how
much? I could buy a new one for that.’ It didn’t always help to be famous when you were looking for bargains. You could drive up the asking price just by coming through the door. Sometimes the best thing to do was to leave and send someone else back later.

She started me on the therapeutic benefit of professional
massage, something I had been squeamish and terribly British about before then. (‘What? You let a stranger touch your naked body – and you don’t end up having sex with them?’) And, a little more controversially, she started putting make-up on my face. Quite a lot of make-up. Thick black rings around the eyes. I looked a complete tart. This did not go unnoticed by the other members of the Faces. The band began greeting Britt’s arrival with the shout of ‘Avon calling!’

She got a far rougher ride from Faces fans, who thought she was turning my head. Because her arrival coincided with the band’s death throes, it was only too easy to paint her as the Yoko Ono at the scene of the crime. This couldn’t have been more wrong. Britt did nothing to break up the Faces. We were doing a perfectly good job of that ourselves, thank you very much, and had been doing so since well before she arrived.

I also got a bit of a working-over in this period. The double whammy of film-star girlfriend and my eventual emigration to Los Angeles seemed to piss a lot of people off – not really among the general public, who, I think, didn’t really give a monkey’s, but certainly in the British press, where it was widely alleged, in a sneering manner, that ‘Rod’s gone all Hollywood.’

This used to irritate me something rotten. For the previous four years I had been living in a mansion in Windsor that was on the scale of a public library, with a fleet of cars in the garage and a kitchen the size of a basketball court, and nobody had really gone off at me for betraying my roots. So I had to think that a lot of this flak was arising from pure small-minded prejudice about Hollywood. I resented the assumption. Just because I had gone
to
Hollywood, it didn’t automatically follow that I had gone ‘all Hollywood’.

And just because I was wearing a lot of make-up . . . and posing in a straw boater with a champagne glass . . .

All right. I may have lost the thread a couple of times in that period.

But fuck it: I was the son of a north London plumber for whom life hadn’t necessarily earmarked a spell of splendour in
the California sunshine alongside a Swedish film star, and bugger me if I wasn’t going to have some fun, and worry about forgiving myself for it later, if then.

That Christmas, Britt and I went to a party in Beverly Hills thrown by Cubby Broccoli, the producer of the Bond movies. It had been something like eighty degrees during the day, but the house and the lawn around it were thick with artificial snow and the trees hung with lights and baubles. It seemed incredible to me that I was there at all, let alone on the arm of one of the world’s most beautiful women. It was a black-tie do and I really remember, as I got out of the car and walked through this fake but fabulous scene with Britt beside me, feeling that this was probably one of those moments in my life when it would be a good idea to pinch myself.

* * *

By then, I was a resident of Los Angeles. In April 1975, when my relationship with Britt was just getting going, I left England and became a tax exile. This didn’t go down particularly well with the British press, who thought I was betraying the land of my birth. It didn’t go down especially well with Elton John, either. Round at his place one evening, I told him I was thinking of quitting Britain and he called me a traitor and put on Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance Marches’ at a volume so high that we couldn’t talk over it.

However, hear my plea: the particular rate of tax from which I was exiling myself was 83 per cent. You can surely imagine how much it was paining me to have that much gouged out of my earnings on an annual basis. And it wasn’t just me. Joe Cocker was on my flight out of Heathrow, headed the same way, and Eric Clapton was on the next one out. In fact, people from all walks of life seemed to be abandoning Britain for places where life cost less. The ‘brain drain’, they were calling it – though not in my case, necessarily.