Alana Stewart and I are chatting at her home in Beverly Hills when the doorbell rings and who should be standing on the step but her first husband, George Hamilton. He makes a spectacular entry, flashing his laser-beam smile, his trademark tan glowing in the fading evening light, and before we all know it, he is holding court.
He has popped in to say goodbye to Alana before heading off to Miami, and Alana offers to give him a lift to the airport.
‘Where’s your luggage?’ she asks.
‘I don’t have any,’ he replies.
‘What do you mean, you don’t have any?’ She turns to me.
‘This is the man who once brought 33 suitcases with him on our holiday. It was nearly the end of our marriage.’ ‘I’ve gone to a tailor and created a uniform for myself,’ he says. ‘I’ve decided I’m going to wear military-style uniforms to take the work out of choosing clothes from now on.’ Alana rolls her eyes. The couple divorced in 1977, although they have remained friends ever since. They co-hosted a TV chat show called George & Alana seven years ago and soon they will appear in a one-off reality programme which will follow them, their son, Ashley, and assorted children and ex-girlfriends on a boat, going around the Hawaiian islands, ‘like an extended, dysfunctional family’, says Alana.
‘People always ask about the relationship between George and me and all I can say is that I don’t really know how to explain it myself. We’re best friends and we’re each other’s family and we’ll always be in each other’s lives.’
Alana Stewart is looking fantastic. Long legs encased in white jeans; hair tousled artfully and without a scrap of makeup on her face, she is a picture of natural health and wellbeing. She refuses to reveal her age (‘I never tell people how old I am because if you don’t think of yourself as an age, you remain ageless’) although six years ago she did admit to celebrating her 50th birthday.
‘She looks absolutely fantastic for 93, doesn’t she?’ chips in George, helpfully.
She has worked from the age of 14 as a model, actress, presenter and jewellery designer and so you can feel some sympathy for her when she says, ‘I’ve spent so many years trying to create my own identity that I don’t always want to have my name attached to that of an ex-husband.’
Unfortunately, in Alana’s case, she was married to two extremely high-profile men – the first, Hamilton, and the second, Rod Stewart, now 60, who recently announced his engagement to Penny Lancaster, 33.
Much has been made of Stewart’s ex-wife Rachel Hunter’s supposed fury at the engagement, but, says Alana, ‘I think Penny’s really good for him. She’s down-to-earth and doesn’t seem crazy or neurotic and, although he’s not the easiest person in the world to be with, she seems to cope with him pretty well.
‘Rod and I are friends, although we don’t have the same kind of friendship that George and I have – Rod and I will talk a lot about the kids. We get on well, though, and one Christmas – maybe it was before he was seeing Penny – Rachel Hunter, Kelly Emberg and I all went round to his house and cooked dinner together.’ (Hunter was Stewart’s second wife; Emberg was his girlfriend after Alana.) ‘To be honest, I was a little bit surprised when he announced he was getting married, because he did say he would never do it again and he wasn’t going to have any more kids. But when you’re in a relationship with a younger woman, it’s rare that they don’t want to have children themselves, so maybe he will have more. He has five children already and five is a lot to handle, and I know that, in my case, you get to a certain age and you want to have some freedom.
‘But I suppose Rod has got to the point where he enjoys having the kids around. When we were divorced, he was travelling around a lot and didn’t get to see them as much, but now he does.
Kimberly and Sean [Stewart’s children from his marriage to Alana] are living at Rod’s and when Rachel’s children, Liam and Renee, are in town, they stay there too. I remember saying to Penny once, “You’re like a saint!”, but she’s a good sport about having all the children around and Kimberly and Sean get on really well with her.’ Some people have commented on the 27-year age gap between Stewart and Lancaster but, says Alana, ‘Since Rachel was quite a bit younger than Rod, it didn’t surprise me that he would be going out with someone younger than him. But women mature much earlier than men and, once a woman is in her mid-30s, I wouldn’t have thought she’d be that different from a woman in her mid-40s.
‘In any case, I think men tend to settle down when they get older and, when they get to their 50s or 60s, they probably don’t want to chase girls around so much. Do I think Rod and Penny will stay together forever? Well, I couldn’t answer that question for anyone, but I think there’s a better chance of it now.’ One theme that emerges is how well Alana seems to get on not only with Rod’s many exes, but George’s too. At one stage, she would organise Sunday dinners for herself, Rachel Hunter, Kelly Emberg, Ruby (Emberg’s daughter with Stewart) and the rest of Rod’s clan, with Rod even popping in on occasion. ‘We haven’t had one of those lunches in a long time and the thing is, we all get on really well – Rod was the only one we fought with.’
Similarly, Alana even appears to be on friendly terms with George’s girlfriends. ‘He’s gone out with friends of mine and I always have Kimberly Blackford, his ex, over for Christmas.
People always sound surprised, but to me, it’s just a very modern way of living.’ So modern, in fact, that it has been turned into a reality show.
Alana, George, their son, Ashley, 30, Alana’s son, Sean, 25, Kimberly Blackford, 35, and her son by George, Georgethomas, five, were all filmed on holiday, travelling around Hawaii in a one-off programme to be aired in the next couple of months. ‘I thought it was going to be a much bigger boat than it turned out to be and so tempers occasionally got frayed.
‘Kimberly and I get along to a point, but she’s very much a character, and she certainly brought a little extra something to the show. She’s very statuesque and blonde and younger than George, and I can’t even describe our relationship except to say you have to see the show to understand it. It was very funny because we all have our different personalities. Sean doesn’t really have a self-monitoring system, so you never quite know what he’s going to say and George, well, he’s just George.’ Hamilton, meanwhile, has decamped to the next room, where he is tapping away on the computer. He has missed his flight to Miami and so will stay overnight at Alana’s modest, two-bedroom home before heading off again. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but he has his own room. When we did the chat show a few years ago, we used to get thousands of letters asking us when we were going to get back together, but I’m independent and I like being independent and in any case, I could never share a room with George. He always looks like he’s just been pressed, but otherwise, he’s so disorganised and messy, whereas I’m always a slob in jeans.’ The couple met while she was on a modelling assignment in Los Angeles in 1968. The handsome, perma-tanned George, ten years Alana’s senior, pinched her bottom as a chat-up line and four years later, they married. ‘We got on brilliantly,’ she says, ‘but the problem was, we just didn’t grow in the same direction.
I wanted to be out and busy and going to parties, whereas he’d done the whole Hollywood thing and wanted to be a homebody.’ They divorced after five years, sorting out the divorce settlement on the back of a napkin in a restaurant (‘I never wanted to take money off my ex-husbands; maybe that’s why we stayed such good friends’), and the following year, Alana met Rod.
She says they had a great relationship for many years and were very much in love, but when the children were born, things changed. ‘After I had Kimberly, I contracted mononucleosis [glandular fever], and when Sean was born a year later, I really got sick with the Epstein-Barr virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I had a breast implant operation after the birth of Sean, because I had wanted them to be a little firmer.
‘I’ve had them removed now, but there were days when I could barely get out of bed. Though with two babies and Ashley, I was determined to be a hands-on mother. I wanted to be there to give them their dinner and to bathe them, and then I would get ready to go out with Rod. I was trying to be superhuman, to be a great mother and to keep my husband happy, and it all caught up with me.
‘It was exactly the opposite situation from me and George, because now I just wanted to stay at home and be with the kids and Rod wanted to go out.
Our relationship paid the price. I don’t think Rod understood how sick I was and it must have seemed to him like it was all in my head. We weren’t really communicating well with one another by that stage and if we had a fight, instead of talking things through, we would just get angry and not speak for a couple of days. Rod and I eventually separated, although it was a separation that was meant to give us time to work things out. Instead, Rod met Kelly. I like Kelly a lot now, but I certainly didn’t like her then. Far from it. But it’s always easier to blame the other woman rather than your partner, and so I had a lot of anger and resentment towards her during that time. The thing was, she was always great with my kids – very sweet and kind-hearted – and I think that helped a lot and, gradually, I started to like her. I don’t know if I was still in love with Rod at the time we split up, but I definitely didn’t want my marriage to break up. I just started to realise, though, that we wanted different things.
‘I wanted to live in Los Angeles, not in England, and since we were both so stubborn, it was hard to work things out. I’ve changed a lot since then. I used to think that people should behave in a certain way, but as I’ve got older I’ve realised that you just have to let people be themselves and either move on or not. I can still be hard-headed though. My daughter, Kimberly, definitely takes after me.’ Kimberly Stewart, Rod’s 25-year-old daughter, is a successful model, but Alana’s two sons haven’t always fared quite so well.
Both Ashley and Sean have had to overcome serious drug and alcohol addictions, a fact that resonated harshly with Alana, given that her own mother had died of a drug addiction and that her father was an alcoholic.
‘Sean’s doing really well now, touch wood, but I think he’s always been desperate for Rod’s approval and has always wanted to feel special in his eyes, and now he and Rod have a good relationship.
I’m really proud of Rod, too, because he’s much more understanding of the kids now than he was before.
‘It’s not easy growing up in LA with the temptations this town has, especially when you’re also in the shadow of well-known parents and when your family life isn’t always stable. But hopefully, he’s okay now.
‘Ashley went through exactly what Sean did, and, because my mother died, I was always terrified that the same thing would happen to my children.
It was like going through a bad dream. I always felt it was my fault; that I could have been a better mother. But despite all the guilt, I had to learn that their addictions were a disease.’ Ashley, an actor and singer-songwriter who co-wrote Robbie Williams’s hit, Come Undone, is, says Alana, also better.
‘Although it’s so scary, because with addictions like this, you just never know.’ Alana’s own childhood in the small town of Nagadoches in Texas was anything but idyllic. Her father left when she was one (she never saw him again) and her mother, who was trying to find work, left Alana in the care of her grandmother, who looked after her until she began modelling at 14.
Her relationship with her mother swiftly deteriorated. ‘My mother was a very tortured soul who was addicted to prescription drugs. I always had this dream of the perfect home and, because I never had it, I tried to create it with my own kids when I was older and that didn’t work out either.’ There is no man in her life at the moment, ‘and to be honest with you, since Rod, there have been no real, long-lasting relationships. After Rod and I broke up, my focus was on the kids. I had three children and I was a single mum and, because their fathers were away travelling so much, it really didn’t leave me much time to go out dating. Now, though, I certainly don’t go for younger men because they remind me too much of my sons.’ For the most part, Alana is quite content to go about her work. She and her friend, actress Valerie Perrine, have come up with an idea for a show ‘which is like Desperate Housewives, only ten years on. It’s about three sexy women living together in one house and it’s pretty outrageous and irreverent.
We’re calling it Hot Flashes and a couple of cable networks have expressed a real interest in it. And who knows?’ she adds, I might get a couple of kids to appear in it and maybe an exhusband or two.’ George, still pottering about next door, would be perfect for the part of the debonair rouE courting one, or all three, of the aforementioned women.
Since he and Alana clearly still adore each other, doesn’t she harbour any regrets about their split? ‘If we’d stayed together at the time, maybe we’d have stayed together for another 30 years.
But who can say?’ she teases. ‘You just never know what might happen in the future.’ ‘Hey!’ the man himself interrupts, ‘you’re going to boycott the wedding, aren’t you?’ referring of course to Stewart’s forthcoming nuptials.
Alana sighs at him, rather as one would at a pesky dog.
‘I don’t even know if I’ll be invited.’ But it would be quite entertaining for the rest of us, I think to myself, if she were.
