Cornwell’s childhood abandonment

Patricia Cornwell is famous for thinking up elaborate plots, said Bryan Appleyard in The Times (U.K.), but the crime novelist’s real life might be stranger than anything she’s written. When Cornwell was 5 years old, her lawyer father walked out of their Miami home on Christmas Day, and, she says, “everything just went to hell.” Her mother, Marilyn, took to religion and became obsessed with evangelist Billy Graham. She drove her three children 800 miles to rural North Carolina, burned their clothes, and made the kids walk up to the Graham house with a note that read “Please raise my children. There’s going to be a flood.” The Grahams found a foster home for the kids, while Marilyn descended into psychosis and ended up in a mental hospital. “My mom had been so humiliated and ashamed, when it wasn’t her fault,” says Cornwell, 65. “It was the smart thing to do. Who better to give us to, right?” Twenty years ago, Cornwell—by then a wealthy author—decided to offer Marilyn a form of closure, flying her mom in a helicopter to the Graham house, where they were greeted by Billy’s wife, Ruth. Marilyn is now in a care home. “I’m only telling this story now because I don’t think my mother will be in a position to have anybody read it to her where she is, thank goodness.”

Stewart’s lessons in lust

Rod Stewart isn’t shy about discussing his bedroom adventures, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). At the height of his fame in the 1970s, the British rocker had a string of relationships with beautiful women—including Swedish actress Britt Ekland.

“It was a hedonistic era,” he says. “The shagging era!” Now 76, Stewart concedes that his libido “is not quite what it used to be. But I really love women. I loved Marilyn Monroe when I was 8 years old. I used to clip pictures of her out of the newspaper.” He lost his virginity at age 17, to a woman he met in a beer tent at a jazz festival, an encounter that inspired his timeless hit “Maggie May.” Stewart doesn’t care that, in the #MeToo era, tales of womanizing rock stars are met with a more judgmental eye. “I did nothing wrong. I never forced anybody to have sex. In fact, sex was always there, and it became boring. There were a lot of beautiful women, but we had nothing to say at the end of the evening. I longed to be in a romance that was a lot deeper. And I found it.” He’s referring to his third wife, Penny Lancaster, whom he met in 1999 and married in 2007. A British former lingerie model, she is now an auxiliary police officer. “She wants to look after the city she loves, which is London. She’s 6-foot-2, so I don’t have to worry about her.”