Highgate-born singer and songwriter Rod Stewart – who has had three wives – wrote at length about his penchant for adultery in his 2012 autobiography.
Looking back, he wrote that he seemed “hell-bent on becoming the Last of the Great Philanderers”. Yet his actions still “haunt” him.
Some rich folks go into philanthropy. Others go into philandering…
He met his third wife Penny Lancaster in 1999, when she was 27. He was 53, and wooed her with the “most romantic and seductive meeting of lips” she’d ever known.
Rod Stewart admits to numerous ‘horrible’ affairs and ‘really unpleasant’ behaviour
In 2012, Rod Stewart’s autobiography (titled simply Rod: The Autobiography) came out.
In it, he writes about the various peaks and troughs of his romantic life.
He has been married three times, first to actress and former model Alana Stewart, née Collins. The collapse of his marriage to Alana had “nothing to do with any other woman,” he claims.
Yet, a few years into their marriage, he met Kelly Emberg. She “took [his] breath away,” and consequently he lied as a way to convince her to go on a date with him.
“The idea that I was always cheating on my wife while we were together is rubbish,” Rod insists. But that doesn’t rule out cheating at all.
He and Kelly started going steady. He bought them a house with “rolling lawns, and a lake, and a paddock for horses”. Then, he started cheating on her with another woman, also named Kelly.
A month before she was due to give birth to their child, Kelly Emberg discovered that Rod had been routinely cheating on her with yet another woman, a model whom he doesn’t name in his book.
The model knocked on the door of the home Kelly Emberg shared with Rod Stewart and, when confronted, said she was “obviously giving him something you’re not”.
Rod claims the shame of what he did to Kelly “haunts” him even to this day.
What led him to become a serial adulterer?
Rod writes in his book that his affairs were “purely about sex”.
The relationship he had with the unnamed model – the one who spoke so discourteously to the mother-to-be of his first child, Kelly Emberg – was “heading nowhere at all”.
And yet he “couldn’t stop slipping away to see her. Horrible, horrible behaviour,” he admits.
That scene in particular was “really unpleasant, a mortifying testament to how [bleep]-happy I was in those days. The shame of what I did to Kelly still haunts me, to the point where I was reluctant to mention it here” – as in, in his autobiography.
He writes of a “little demon” in his head.
To his credit, he was faithful to his second wife, Rachel Hunter, though he admitted after their separation that she was “too young”, and that their marriage ended in “delusion on my part”.
He met Penny Lancaster in 1999. They married in 2007, and have two children together.
Rod has experienced a few health scares recently, causing him to cancel gigs in Las Vegas and elsewhere. But he is back. 23 years after his last appearance at Glastonbury Festival, he is taking the stage for Sunday’s legends slot.
Catch Rod on the Glastonbury Festival legends slot on Sunday at 7:15pm on BBC One and iPlayer.
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