Davy Jones fell in love with his third wife just weeks after they had been cast in a production of Cinderella. ‘She turned to me one day,’ he recalls, ‘and said: “Let’s run upstairs and make love.” I looked at her. “At my age,” I said, “it’s going to have to be one or the other.” ’
At 65, Manchester-born Davy may no longer be taking the stairs two at a time, but there’s little doubting the passion between him and his beautiful 33-year-old wife Jessica Pacheco.
And yet if you are to believe even half of the stories circulating in the U.S. supermarket tabloids, Davy’s third marriage isn’t so much passionate as tempestuous; perhaps even physically abusive.
It’s an accusation he vehemently denies, but as the recently reassembled Monkees prepare to tour the UK — minus original band member Mike Nesmith — Davy can’t fail to be aware that he’s stepping back once more into what must sometimes seem like the unwelcome spotlight which he first experienced when the band were formed in the mid-Sixties.
We meet at his house on the shores of the Atlantic in Florida. He and Jessica are on the beach every day, and sometimes enjoy a midnight swim.
At close quarters, Davy has weathered the passing of the years better than any of his bandmates. Maybe it’s because he’s so compact. ‘I used to be 5ft 4in,’ he says, ‘but I’ve lost an inch.’
What he has not lost is the nagging sense of inadequacy which, he says, has plagued him for his entire career.
‘Even today, I have an inferiority complex,’ he confesses at one point. ‘I always feel I’m there at the window, looking in. Except when I’m on stage, and then I really come alive.’ When Davy first got together with Jessica in 2006, his four daughters from his first two marriages were, to say the least, a little wary (his word) of the relationship.
‘First, she was half my age, and second, or so they’ve since said, they didn’t want me to get hurt any more.’
Each of his two previous wives had been pregnant by him before he’d slipped a ring on their finger. His first wife, an American named Linda, produced Talia, now 42, then Sarah, 39, whose two children make Davy a grandfather.
But the marriage fell apart in the mid-Seventies. ‘She was drifting away from me,’ he recalls. ‘She’d spend the weekend in LA. I had the kids. It was only years later that I found she’d had other interests.’
Other men? ‘Yeah.’
He admits, though, that he was far from the perfect parent. ‘I missed the school play. I missed the Christmas nativity. These are times when an entertainer works. But that doesn’t mean the guilt ever goes away.’
After his divorce in 1975, Davy went on the road with fellow Monkee Micky Dolenz and two other musicians.
‘I was single and a real rascal. But I’m not proud of the way I behaved during those times: I’ve always believed the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.’
In the early Eighties, he met an English singer called Anita Pollinger.
‘We had an affair, and then she called me from Ireland to say that she was pregnant,’ says Davy. ‘A few days later, she called to say she’d miscarried.
‘Soon after that, she fell pregnant again. I thought I ought to do the decent thing by her and we got married.’
They also had two daughters, Jessica, now 29, and later Annabel, who is 22. But Davy admits that by the time their second child came along, the marriage was struggling.
‘I thought that if we had another baby, it would help me to grow up. But I was riding my horses; I was doing what I wanted to do. I wasn’t being unfaithful — but I was putting myself first.’
He and Anita eventually separated, and by the mid-Nineties Davy found himself twice divorced. At that point, he says, he could never imagine marrying again.
But five years ago he met Jessica Pacheco in Florida — and found himself smitten. And, to his amazement, his feelings were reciprocated.
After a three-year courtship, they were married. ‘I wanted to make an honest woman of her,’ he says with a smile.
So, what of the stories that they have a tempestuous marriage?
‘Verbally, yes, sometimes we do,’ he admits. ‘But then, isn’t that true of every relationship?
‘There was the time we had a screaming match, she walked out — slamming the front door — and went to stay the night with her parents.’
But the allegations are that their differences have gone beyond shouting. Davy insists that the falling out started as the result of a joke.
He recalls: ‘I had a groom working with me at my Pennsylvania farm and there was a guy building me a stone wall. The groom’s mother works on a local magazine and was going to do an article on me.
‘I was out one morning feeding the horses, being friendly to the groom and cracking jokes to the guy working on the wall. Eventually, I said: “Well, it’s 8.15, I’d better get back inside to start the coffee and the toast. If I don’t get Jessie her breakfast in time, I’ll be in trouble.” ’
A few days later, the groom’s mother turned up for the interview. ‘When the article appeared, it said that Jessie had me wrapped around her little finger.
‘When she read it, Jessie exploded. “What’s this, David?” she said.
‘I tried to explain, but she told me I was stupid and that I should learn to button my lip. It escalated into a major row and she stormed out and drove down to Florida, leaving me to follow the next day with all the horses.’
Before he could do that, he had to honour a commitment to appear at a local pub, where the same woman journalist turned up. ‘She told me she understood that Jessie had left me. I told her that wasn’t the case and please could she stop writing false stories about me.’
But further ‘evidence’ had come to light, she said. Jessica — whose parents are Cuban — had been seen locally with what looked like two black eyes and a cut above one of them. Davy had also been sporting a shiner.
He takes a deep breath as he gives his account of events.
‘Jessica had recently been on the beach,’ he says, ‘and had forgotten to take her sunglasses. You know how strong the sun is here — it made it look the next day as though the area around her eyes was bruised.
‘Then she was applying shadow to her eyelid and her fingernail nicked the skin.’
Around the same time, Davy was walking back home and absent-mindedly walked smack, bang into a lamppost.
He has the grace to grin sheepishly. ‘I know. I know. It sounds like a classic line, doesn’t it? But it happens to be true.’ Whatever you might think of his convoluted explanation, the accumulation of all this conjecture led to a call from the National Enquirer. Word had reached them that Davy and Jessica had a verbally and physically abusive relationship.
‘I denied it, of course, but they printed the story anyway,’ he says. It coincided with the build-up to the couple’s wedding two years ago, which his four daughters — made aware of the printed allegations — duly boycotted.
‘The girls were worried for me — they didn’t know what to believe,’ he says.
Today, however, he says his wife and four daughters are reconciled. ‘The girls have seen me and Jessie together. They know how much we mean to each other. We’re inseparable.’
It must be odd, though, for Jessica that two of her stepdaughters are older than she is.
‘Jessie doesn’t mind,’ says Davy. ‘She regards all of them more as the sisters she never had.’