If you ask the world what it thinks of Sir Rod Stewart, you’ll get a thousand answers, each one a little louder and a little more colorful than the last. Some will tell you he’s the last true rock star, a gravel-voiced legend who swaggered out of Highgate with nothing but a mop of blonde hair and a dream, and conquered the world with his irresistible blend of charm, cheek, and heartbreak anthems. Others will talk about the women, the wild nights, the marriages, the scandals—Rod the rogue, the playboy, the “last of the great philanderers,” as he once famously called himself. But if you really want to know the man behind the myth, you have to listen to Rod Stewart himself—especially when he’s finally ready to tell the truth about the “horrible” affairs that have haunted him for decades.
In his 2012 autobiography, simply titled Rod, Stewart doesn’t just settle old scores or polish his legend. He rips open the curtains and lets the harsh daylight in, laying bare the messy, complicated, and often painful reality of a life spent chasing pleasure—and running from shame. “I seemed hell-bent on becoming the Last of the Great Philanderers,” he writes, half-winking, half-wincing, as if he can’t quite believe his own audacity. But for all the bravado, there’s a rawness to his confessions that lingers long after the final page is turned. This isn’t just another rock star’s tell-all. It’s a reckoning.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Rod Stewart has lived a life that would make most mortals blush. Three wives, countless lovers, and enough broken hearts to fill Wembley Stadium twice over. He’s been called everything from a lothario to a legend, and for years, he wore those labels like medals. But as he’s grown older—and, some might say, wiser—the weight of his past has become harder to shrug off. The shame, he admits, “haunts” him still.
It’s a strange thing, watching a man who’s spent his life on stage finally step into the spotlight of his own conscience. In the pages of his memoir, Stewart is unsparing—sometimes shockingly so—about the ways he’s hurt the women who loved him. Take his first marriage to actress and model Alana Stewart. Rod insists the collapse of their union “had nothing to do with any other woman,” but even as he protests, the ghosts of old affairs seem to crowd around him, whispering reminders of the truth he’s tried so hard to outrun.
But it’s his relationship with Kelly Emberg that stands as the most damning evidence of his old ways. “She took my breath away,” he remembers, and for a while, it looked as if Rod had finally found someone to tame his wandering heart. He bought them a house with rolling lawns and a lake, a fairytale setting for a love story that was already starting to unravel. Because even as he was building a life with Kelly, he was slipping away to see another woman—also named Kelly, as if the universe itself was mocking his duplicity.
The lies piled up, each one heavier than the last. And then, just a month before Kelly Emberg was due to give birth to their child, the truth exploded in the most humiliating way imaginable. The other woman—the unnamed model who had been sharing Rod’s bed—showed up on their doorstep, uninvited and unapologetic. When confronted, she coolly told Kelly, “I’m obviously giving him something you’re not.” The words landed like a slap, and Rod, for once, had nothing to say. “Horrible, horrible behavior,” he writes now, the shame still fresh after all these years. “The shame of what I did to Kelly still haunts me, to the point where I was reluctant to mention it here.”
It’s easy to dismiss these confessions as too little, too late. After all, Rod Stewart has built a career—and a persona—on the very behavior he now claims to regret. But listen closely, and you’ll hear something different in his voice: a kind of weary honesty, the sound of a man who’s finally run out of excuses. He doesn’t try to blame his affairs on drink or drugs, or the pressures of fame. He doesn’t pretend he was misunderstood, or that the women in his life were somehow at fault. If anything, he’s brutally clear-eyed about his own failings. “My affairs were purely about sex,” he admits, the words landing with the thud of a gavel. The relationship with the unnamed model “was heading nowhere at all,” he says, but still, he “couldn’t stop slipping away to see her.”
Why? That’s the question that hangs over every page of his autobiography, every interview, every late-night confession. For Rod, the answer is both simple and devastating. There was, he writes, a “little demon” in his head, an itch he couldn’t scratch, a hunger he couldn’t satisfy. The result was a trail of broken promises and broken hearts, each one a little harder to live with than the last.
To his credit, Stewart doesn’t try to rewrite history. He owns his mistakes, even as he cringes at the memory of them. “That scene in particular was really unpleasant, a mortifying testament to how [bleep]-happy I was in those days,” he writes, the words heavy with regret. It’s not just the women he hurt who suffered; it’s Rod himself, haunted by the knowledge that he could have—and should have—done better.
But if his past is littered with regrets, there are also glimmers of redemption. Stewart is quick to point out that, with his second wife, Rachel Hunter, he was faithful. The marriage didn’t last—Rod admits she was “too young,” and that their union ended in “delusion on my part”—but for the first time, he tried to break the cycle of betrayal. It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t save the marriage, but it was a start.
And then came Penny Lancaster. When Rod met her in 1999, he was 53 and she was 27—a pairing that raised more than a few eyebrows. But for all the jokes about age gaps and rock star clichés, there was something real between them from the very start. Rod wooed her with what she later called the “most romantic and seductive meeting of lips” she’d ever known, and after eight years together, they married in 2007. Two children and countless challenges later, they’re still together—a testament, perhaps, to the possibility of change, even for the most incorrigible heartbreaker.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Rod has faced his share of health scares in recent years, forcing him to cancel gigs in Las Vegas and elsewhere. But if anything, those brushes with mortality have only deepened his appreciation for the life—and the love—he’s managed to hold onto. This summer, 23 years after his last appearance at Glastonbury, he’s taking the stage for Sunday’s legends slot, a living reminder that some stars never really fade.
And yet, for all the adulation, all the applause, there’s a part of Rod Stewart that will always be looking over his shoulder, haunted by the ghosts of his past. The shame of what he did to Kelly Emberg, the pain he caused Alana and Rachel, the countless unnamed women who crossed his path and left a little piece of their hearts behind. It’s a burden he carries with him, even as he belts out “Maggie May” to a sea of adoring fans.
Some might say that’s the price of fame, or the inevitable fallout of a life lived at full throttle. But for Rod, it’s something deeper—a reckoning with the man he was, and the man he wants to be. He’s not asking for forgiveness, or even understanding. He’s simply telling the truth, finally, after all these years.
In the end, that’s what makes Rod Stewart’s story so compelling—not the affairs themselves, lurid as they may be, but the honesty with which he recounts them. He doesn’t flinch from the ugliness, or try to dress it up as something glamorous. He knows, better than anyone, that the real cost of philandering isn’t measured in headlines or gossip columns, but in the quiet moments of regret that linger long after the music has stopped.
So when Rod Stewart steps onto the Glastonbury stage this Sunday, don’t just see the legend, the icon, the last of the great rock stars. See the man who has finally learned to face his own reflection, warts and all. The man who knows that the greatest challenge isn’t winning over a crowd, but making peace with your own past. The man who, for all his faults, is still standing—still singing, still searching, still haunted, but, at last, unafraid to tell the truth.
