Rod: The Autobiography (30 page)

Ridiculous, of course: I was thirty-four, for heaven’s sake.

We were married in April, although not before I had experienced a further couple of bouts of cold feet. In advance of the actual wedding, on the day when we were due to go together to pick up our marriage licence, I disappeared off to a car showroom to look into buying a car – the sign, perhaps, of a certain lack of commitment on my part to the project. Clearly, the bachelor in me wasn’t going to go under without a fight. I didn’t bolt, though. On the day of the wedding, the bride wore cream and so did the groom – although Alana’s was an off-the-shoulder number and
mine was a suit, with a pink tie. We held the ceremony very privately among the glass and marble at Tina Sinatra’s house. Tina was the maid of honour and Billy Gaff was my best man. And then we drove down to L’Ermitage, a French restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, for the reception. Nobody had been told that the party was for our wedding. We said it was simply to celebrate the start of the American leg of my tour. We even kept the arrangements secret from Tony Toon because we realised that letting Toon in on the secret would have been like posting the plan on a billboard on the Sunset Strip. Nevertheless, people seemed to have twigged the real reason for the occasion: the pavement outside the restaurant was jammed with photographers, which tipped off most of the guests, too. We didn’t care. A great party ensued. The plan had been to spend our wedding night at the Hotel Bel-Air, but the press would probably have followed us all the way in and up to the room, so we went back to Carolwood instead, and we were profoundly happy.

Marriage worked like the click of a switch. It wiped away all the doubts, cleared away all the fear. My transgression in Australia was forgotten. I became a husband: in love with Alana, in love with the role, in love with the whole idea. I was touring America, but I was flying home every night so that I could be with her. Why wouldn’t I be happy? We were a newly wedded husband and wife, with a child on the way – a boy, of course. Roderick Christian Stewart. We had the name ready because, even though we chose not to find out the sex beforehand, we absolutely knew it was going to be a boy.

In August the baby came, arriving at the blissful end of a three-and-a-half-hour labour, during which Alana unleashed her inner Texan to a degree that even I had never witnessed. Language poured forth from her that I didn’t know existed, even in Texas. And out came, not Roderick Christian, but Kimberly Alana. And there is, of course, nothing like it. And there was, of course, nothing like her. I held her before Alana did. The doctor gave her to me and I was absolutely in love with her from the second I laid eyes on her. Our Kimberly.

So now we were parents and, at the same time, Hollywood hosts on a major scale. These were heady days. Alana’s connections had taken me, blinking rather wildly, into a social world that I had never thought I would be a part of. We had a ballroom built onto one end of Carolwood, with an upper gallery all around it, and we would throw the most amazing parties – elaborately formal affairs, with tables set for dinner and drapery and dance bands and guests instructed to dress smartly. It was our
Great Gatsby
period. On the guest list would be people like Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Albert Finney, Linda Evans, Joan and Jackie Collins, Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, with whom Alana was very close . . . it just went on and on. People say, ‘What were all those guys
like
?’ Well, they all seemed great to me, but of course I saw them only when they were drunk or stoned and having a fabulous time, and when I was the same. I never saw them the morning after.

This was when I was introduced to serious cocaine – proper, extremely high-quality stuff. It was considered so chic at the time, not least among showbusiness types, to whom its use was pretty much confined. The idea wasn’t to snort line after line and then see in the dawn, goggle-eyed and gasping. You were using it more like snuff, to pep the evening along – just a little puff of this pillowy white powder off the back of your hand. And then maybe another little puff. And perhaps another . . . But no headaches afterwards, miraculously, and no nosebleeds – and no sense for me, slightly deluding myself, that something so pure could possibly be damaging my voice. Just a rather wonderful sense of well-being and overall enhancement. Some magical evenings ensued. Late one night, after dinner when everyone else had gone home, Tony Curtis ended up in the sitting room teaching me how to do the jive with a chair – skipping it up onto one leg, twirling it around. On another evening, similarly at the end of an evening when the guests had departed, I watched my great friend Jim Cregan, the guitarist in my band, playing flamenco and dancing with Liza Minnelli.
Which would have been plausible if Jim could actually play flamenco. All in all, life appeared to have taken on the quality of an extraordinary dream.

To mark our first wedding anniversary, in April 1980, Alana and I had a sit-down dinner in the ballroom for a hundred guests, catered by Chasen’s – caviar, Château d’Yquem wine, the works – the room all beautifully draped and dressed. Elton flew in for it, and David and Dani Janssen were there, and Gregory and Veronique Peck, and David Niven Jnr, and Jacqueline Bisset, and Johnny Carson, and Billy Wilder, and Tita and Sammy Cahn. A swing band set up on the gallery, and nobody below knew they were there until after the dinner when they launched into some Glenn Miller and everybody got up and danced. Freddie de Cordova, the producer of
The
Tonight Show
, rose and said it was the best party he had ever been to in Hollywood.

Gregory and Veronique Peck, incidentally, were our next-door neighbours, and you couldn’t have asked for nicer ones. They never once complained about the noise of my band rehearsing in the garage. Indeed, I went over and apologised to them about it one time, and they said, ‘Oh, no. We like to sit out on the terrace and listen.’ They cut a hole in their fence so that I could go through and use their tennis court whenever I fancied it.

Gregory came to see me in concert once, too, at the Forum in Los Angeles in 1979. He brought Fred Astaire with him, and when they took their seats the house lights were up and the whole place rose for them. I was so proud that I had an audience who would do that. They both came backstage afterwards and Astaire said, ‘Now, tell me, who does your choreography?’ I had to say, ‘Well . . . you know . . . I just sort of make it up as I go along.’ Which, of course, he would have worked out for himself. But it was very charming of him to ask.

So, life was, in so many ways, extraordinary. And very quickly Alana was pregnant again. Kim was only about four months old when it happened. Alana didn’t know it was possible to
conceive while you were breastfeeding. And when the baby came, we were in Malibu, somewhat inconveniently. When I was on tour, back at the start of 1978, Alana had found us a beautiful beach house on a relatively deserted stretch of sand, with 270 feet of beach frontage and only a handful of neighbouring properties. It looked like a miniature version of the Sydney Opera House, a big clam shell, and as soon as I had seen the photographs that Alana sent, I wanted it. We had great times at that weekend house in those early years. Alana used to say it was the only place she ever saw me properly relax. I can be restless. I need to be moving or doing things. But there I felt happy for once to be still, to have tea with the kids outside, sitting in the sand. It was a family place, when so much of the rest of our lives was filled with other people and moving around.

Anyway, it was in the beach house that weekend in September 1980 that Alana went into labour that second time, which sent us chasing into central Los Angeles from Malibu up the Freeway, with Alana in serious danger, it occurred to me, not merely of having the baby in the car, but also of ruining the upholstery. With these two thoughts in mind, my foot was flat to the floor, and before long the lights of a police car were flashing in my rear-view mirror. I pulled over and, without thinking, and even as Alana was shouting ‘No! No! Don’t do that!’, I jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran back towards the police car – which is, of course, the last thing you should do when pulled over by traffic cops, unless you want to give them the wrong impression. A police car door duly opened and a cop climbed out with his gun pointing straight at me. I was shouting, ‘My wife’s having a baby!’ The cop seemed to recognise me – or at least he lowered his gun and came towards the car, looking in at Alana, who was now shouting, ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital! I’ve got to get to the hospital!’

The cop said, ‘We’ll call you an ambulance, ma’am.’ Alana, really now feeling that the baby was emerging, screamed, ‘There isn’t fucking time! Get me to the fucking hospital or I’ll fucking drive there myself!’ At this, the cops seemed to decide she was
not to be reasoned with and provided us with a police escort, lights flashing, all the way to Cedars-Sinai.

As we entered the maternity ward, Alana was asked to pause and fill out some paperwork. To which she replied, ‘Are you fucking insane? I’m about to drop this baby on the floor.’ Again, the maternal Texan had kicked in. Less than a quarter of an hour later we had a boy, and, as with Kimberly, as I held him I was absolutely in love with him from the moment I laid eyes on him. Our Sean.

So now we had two wonderful children, and a fabulous social life, and wealth and happiness, and so much to be grateful for, however you looked at it . . . and yet somehow it all began to go wrong.

You understand how these things work. It’s well understood. You know the dangers, but you think you’ll just have a little dabble, just to find out what it feels like. And the warning signs are all out there but you ignore them, because you think you’re different. You think you’re the one in a million: the stronger kind of person who can control it. The next thing you know, your so-called ‘little dabble’ has turned into a raging, all-consuming habit, and you’re spending hours on the phone to a dealer, like he’s your best friend.

But that’s art collecting. It can get hold of a person. It can take over your life and, more particularly, your walls. And I speak as someone with intimate experience of fixing himself up with late-nineteenth-century paintings. Many, many late nineteeth-century paintings.

I’ve always loved Pre-Raphaelite pictures, ever since I was a kid: the romance of them, their colour, the classical drapery, the high drama and emotion. As a boy, they spoke to many of my most obsessive interests: knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, and, of course, tits. When I was busking in London, in my late teens, I would often set up in Trafalgar Square, outside the National Gallery, and when it rained I would drift in and wander round looking at the Pre-Raphs and the Victorians. My absolute favourite painting, though, was in the Tate:
The Lady of Shalott
by John William Waterhouse. The girl in the boat, with the pale face and the long red hair and the open-mouthed expression and the detail of the embroidery and the river and the reeds – I absolutely loved it. Quite often I
would take girls to the Tate just to see that one picture. It made a change from going to a coffee bar or to the cinema. And, of course, it alerted them to my thoughtfulness and sensitivity and range of interests as a human being, which has rarely been known to decrease a man’s chances of copping a feel later on.

Britt Ekland, as I mentioned, introduced me properly to art nouveau, but it was while I was with Alana (who also had a very good eye) that I felt confident enough to make the move upfield from posters to paintings. The first painting I bought (my first ‘acquisition’, as we like to call them in the art world) was by a completely unknown Victorian artist and is called
The Kiss
: two lovers snatching a quick snog in a fleeting moment on a country path. I got it for £12 off a Romanian bloke in a little shop in Ladbroke Grove in the late 1970s. It’s not particularly big – about three feet tall and two feet wide in a gilt frame – and it’s nothing special altogether, but I just liked the atmosphere of it and that was the beginning of it all.

My first really serious purchase was steered my way by Alana, who knew someone in Beverly Hills who was selling (of all things) a John William Waterhouse. It’s
Isabella with the Pot of Basil
, from the Keats poem. It cost me £30,000 in 1981, which felt like an absurd amount of money to be spending on an oil painting, yet I hesitate to think what it could be worth now – possibly as much as £1 million. Not that I’m thinking of selling it. When I stood in front of a Waterhouse as a slightly damp teenage busker, I didn’t particularly imagine I would ever have one of my own hanging in the bedroom. It’s a beautiful picture, first and foremost, but for me it also symbolises a bit of a journey.

I’ve only been had twice, which is not bad going in the circumstances. I bought off an interior designer something that I thought was an original Guillaume Seignac, but it turned out to be a copy. That was just me being naïve and getting a little overexcited. Still, I like the painting, and even as a copy it’s probably worth a couple of bob. I also found a painting of the Princes in the Tower which I thought was a William-Adolphe
Bouguereau. I thought to myself, ‘This is a complete steal.’ But it wasn’t a Bouguereau at all. Happily, I did manage to acquire some original Bouguereaus eventually. I’ve got a large one in the passage. And, as anyone who collects late-nineteenth-century art will tell you, there’s nothing like a large one in the passage.

Right from the late 1970s, I started doing the auctions. That scene really is addictive. The tension you feel when the picture you want is coming up is pretty intense. And you have to be careful because your ego can cause you all sorts of problems in the bidding process. I remember trying to outbid Gianni Versace once, which risked getting foolishly expensive until I came to my senses and pulled out, feeling somewhat bruised. Having a famous face can work both ways in that situation. Sometimes it goes in your favour because you frighten people off. Other times you’ll get someone who wants to show the room he has more money than you, and then you’ll get into an almighty and altogether unnecessary battle. On the whole it’s probably best for me not to be there, and I tend to let my wonderful assistant Sarah do the bidding for me, or bid on the phone. What you need is an auctioneer in a major house or two who brings the hammer down quick when he knows it’s you on the other end of the line. Not that I have ever found one who would stoop so low as to do so, you understand.