Rod Stewart and the daughter he gave up for adoption before she spiralled into drink and drug addiction reveal how they have reconciled at last
- The 73-year-old rockstar mocks daughter, 55, telling her ‘put that phone away’
- He later rolls his eyes at her as she expresses concern about his injured foot
- The scenes unfolded this week at a record store signing for Rod’a latest album
The teasing, warm-hearted relationship between Rod Stewart and Sarah Streeter is one that will be familiar to many fathers and daughters.
‘Put that phone away,’ he remonstrates with mock sternness, while she has a fit of the giggles.
Later, the 73-year-old veteran singer rolls his eyes as Sarah, 55, confides she is worried about Rod’s foot, which he injured while playing football with his two young sons, Alastair, 12, and seven-year-old Aiden.
The affectionate scenes unfolded this week at a record store signing for Rod’s latest album, Blood Red Roses, an event to which Sarah and her husband Chris had been invited. The trio met beforehand for drinks at London’s Dorchester hotel, a favourite haunt of Rod’s.
‘It was lovely having a catch-up, just the three of us,’ says Sarah.
The teasing, warm-hearted relationship between Rod Stewart and Sarah Streeter is one that will be familiar to many fathers and daughters
The encounter is further evidence of the ongoing bond between Rod and his eldest daughter — a girl he fathered aged just 17. She was given up for adoption and he played no part in her life for a very long time.
For years, their estrangement caused Sarah — who only learned of her birth father’s identity as a bewildered 18–year-old — a great deal of pain.
Yet, as the Mail first revealed five years ago, following the death of Sarah’s adoptive parents — her mother Evelyn died in 2007 — a tentative reconciliation took place and, over time, it has blossomed into genuine mutual affection.
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‘It’s evolved a lot in the last few years,’ says Sarah today. ‘It’s taken its time because he’s not just my dad, is he? He’s a big star. So, of course, that makes it difficult, especially when, like me, you lack confidence.
‘But, over the years, it has become much more relaxed and now he’s just ‘Dad’ to me. You can’t get away from the fact that he’s Rod Stewart the star, but when we’re together I put that at the back of my mind. I’m not engaging with that person but with Rod the man — my dad. I feel like I am a genuine part of his extended family, which is wonderful.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by 73-year-old Rod, who has spoken warmly of Sarah in recent interviews, touching both on his own guilt over the past and his pleasure that they are now in touch. ‘She calls me Dad and I call her my daughter … we’re doing our best,’ he said last month.
What Sarah, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her famous father, has been unable to reveal until now is quite how extraordinary their rapprochement is, unfolding as it has against a backdrop of drink and drug problems about which she has never felt able to speak openly before.
Rod Stewart in the early 1960s with Susannah Boffey the mother of Sarah Streeter their daughter
She was, she now falteringly admits, a serial abuser of cocaine and alcohol for much of her early 30s, and while she managed to recover, the death of Evelyn saw a grieving Sarah fall into a desperate downward spiral that at one point left her addicted to crack cocaine.
‘Why I’m still here I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I carry a huge amount of guilt about what I put people through. The way it affected my family and loved ones was terrible.
‘But I’ve chosen to talk about it because I think it’s important to be honest, and to show that even if you hit rock-bottom you can get over it.’
Her famous father, meanwhile, has been nothing but supportive. ‘I confided in Rod about it quite early on and he was very concerned,’ she says.
‘It’s not all new to him, of course. His eldest son, Sean, has had drug problems in the past and Kimberly had issues with alcohol although they’re all doing really well now.
‘There’s no judgment from him at all. I don’t talk about it a lot now but he always asks me if I’m all right.’
Sir Rod Stewart with his wife, Penny Lancaster and children Alastair and Aiden after he received his knighthood in recognition of his services to music and charity at Buckingham Palace on October 11, 2016 in London
Fans may wonder whether it was Sarah he had in mind when he wrote Didn’t I, the single he released from his new album about a parent comforting a daughter who’s relapsed into a drug addiction.
‘I think it was actually about Sean but it shows how in touch Rod is with it all,’ she says.
The difficulties Sarah has faced over the course of her life are, of course, in stark contrast to the glamorous trajectory followed by her famous father, a man whose starry 50-year long career has encompassed not only international success but a glittering array of glamorous girlfriends and model wives.
Married three times — first to Alana Stewart, by whom he had Kimberly, 39, and Sean, 38, then to Rachel Hunter, mother to Renee, 26, and Liam, 24, and latterly to Alastair and Aiden’s mum Penny Lancaster — Rod has had six children in wedlock and a daughter, Ruby, 31, by model Kelly Emberg.
Sarah, of course, came along before any of that, the product of a teenage love affair between Rod and his art student girlfriend Susannah Boffey.
When Susannah got pregnant, both panicked and, as was often the way back then, Sarah was given up for adoption.
Sarah Steeler said she was ‘one of the lucky ones’ as she was raised in rural Sussex
Sarah would be the first to say that she was one of the lucky ones. Raised in rural Sussex by Evelyn and Gerald Thubron, whose biological son Colin is now a highly respected travel writer, Sarah had a happy childhood, entirely unaware that the famous singer who topped the charts in the Seventies was her father.
It was a profound shock when she learned the truth from her adoptive parents, and while Sarah and Rod did meet a handful of times when she was in her 20s, their relationship never really took off.
By the late Eighties it had fizzled out, with the pair apparently unable to reconcile their very different worlds. For nearly two decades there was barely any contact at all.
It was during that time that Sarah, who works as a carer, first developed a drug problem which saw her become addicted to cocaine. ‘I was single, in my late 20s, and I got in with the wrong crowd,’ she says. ‘I think it was not having a child: there was this massive hole in my life.
‘Coke filled that hole.’
While Sarah insists those feelings were nothing to do with her famous father, it is impossible not to speculate that a sense of rejection played some part as she watched his glamorous life unfolding at a distance.
Her addiction, which she says lasted just a year, was overcome with the unstinting support of her adoptive family — only for it to be replaced with a burgeoning addiction to alcohol.
‘It’s classic addict behaviour — you replace one addiction with another,’ she says. ‘I developed a massive drink problem — I’m talking vodka for breakfast. It was incredibly painful for Mum.
Sir Rod Stewart celebrating after the release of his latest album gives a deeply moving interview about the daughter he gave up for adoption
‘My brother Colin paid for me to go to the Priory in Brighton, but I walked out after two days to get some drink — and, of course, once you do that you can’t go back. So all that money went to waste.’ She hit rock-bottom when she woke one morning thinking she was going to die.
‘I was so very ill,’ she recalls. ‘I thought I can’t do this any more, and, most importantly, I had to stop doing it to Mum.’
Again, with her parents and Colin’s support, she managed to recover and found domestic contentment when, 17 years ago at the age of 38, she met her husband Chris, a supermarket manager.
‘He was my lodger and I ended up marrying him,’ she smiles.
Her happiness was not to last long: in 2007, Evelyn died at the age of 97. ‘I knew she couldn’t go on for ever, but the pain of losing her was beyond what I can describe,’ Sarah says.
In its wake, distraught and lost, someone she knew offered her crack cocaine. ‘He said ‘Try this’ — and that was it, there was no going back, I was addicted,’ she says. ‘It was the one thing that took the pain away.
‘Chris was distraught when he realised. He felt so helpless.’
Sarah’s addiction raged for years — she confides she was still taking the drug when she first reconciled with Rod — but once more, through sheer force of will and the pleas of both Chris and Colin, she managed to kick the habit only to replace it again with drink. It left all her closest relationships dangling by a thread.
‘I tried to hide what I was doing from Chris, but of course he knew,’ she recalls. ‘At one point he said he would have to leave if I couldn’t sort myself out. I think that’s what shocked me into taking action. I just forced myself to stop. It wasn’t easy. You’ve got to want to do it.’
The encounter is further evidence of the ongoing bond between Rod and his eldest daughter — a girl he fathered aged just 17 (pictured at latest album release)
She has now not touched a drink for two years, or drugs for several more, but their legacy has cast a long shadow. ‘It’s been a big part of my life — it shaped who I am now,’ she admits. ‘When something like this has happened, you always feel vulnerable.’
It is not without irony that this later dark period was counter-balanced by Sarah’s growing connection with Rod, who got in touch with his daughter following Evelyn’s death.
‘Looking back, I can see that he was in a difficult position while both my adoptive parents were still here. I think he didn’t want to upset them by encroaching on their territory after all these years,’ she says.
In time, as the pair relaxed into a more cordial if irregular contact, Rod took to referring to himself as ‘Dad’ in cards and emails he sent.
‘He was the first one to use the word, which was strange at first as Dad was the man who brought me up, but it’s amazing what a little bit of time does and I have got used to it,’ she says. Over time, those tentative early meetings — sometimes over lunch, sometimes over a coffee when Rod is in London — blossomed into a more relaxed affair.
‘We meet up from time to time when Rod’s in town — he still spends a lot of time abroad and he has eight children altogether, so fitting us all in isn’t easy,’ Sarah smiles.
‘But we also exchange friendly emails, and while I’m not good with phone calls, I could pick up the phone and call him any time.
‘I don’t, because I don’t need to — but just knowing I can is enough.’
Rod also helps his daughter out financially, transferring a sum of money to her each year, although she declines to say how much.
‘I didn’t ask for it, it just happened,’ she says.
‘It’s not life changing money but it helps, and it came at exactly the right time. To start with it got us out of debt, which I’d run up because of the drugs, and now it’s there for us to spend on whatever we like — which is great.’
Sir Rod Stewart celebrating after his latest album, Blood Red Roses, claimed the Number 1 spot on this week’s Official Albums Chart
Over the years, Sarah has now met all but one of her half-siblings as well as having enjoyed several get-togethers with Rod and Penny, who she describes as ‘lovely’. She acknowledges, however, that while her half-siblings have been friendly, she is unlikely ever to be close to them.
‘My sisters, especially, are very glamorous and very beautifully turned out. I wasn’t brought up in their world and I suppose I feel a bit self-conscious with them.
‘It’s a shame I haven’t met Sean because I think we would get on. We’ve a lot in common as we both have had problems with drink and drugs and both built a new life. But there’s time for that.’
In recent years, Sarah has also re-established contact with her birth mother. The pair had long had a troubled relationship.
While Sarah met Susannah around the same time she first met Rod, their relationship did not take off then either, and they publicly fell out five years ago when Susannah, now 74, accused her former lover of romanticising their teenage fling in a song on his album Time, which contained a number of intimate, apparently autobiographical songs.
Susannah said: ‘The reality is that he’s got a daughter whose life he messed up for a long time — and my life, too.’
At the time her sentiments were condemned by Sarah, but now she says: ‘I tried to put myself in her shoes, and the more I thought about it the more I thought that she did have a rough time and she was always going to struggle to forgive him.
‘I realised that if that was me, I don’t think I could either.’
The two are now in email contact, and Sarah is planning to visit her in France, where she lives. ‘I would definitely like to see her again,’ she says.
‘As you get older, you start thinking about things differently. I just want peace in everything.’
It’s a peace that has been hard fought-for at times, but it’s something that Sarah is determined to hang on to — as, it seems, is her famous father.
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