Hours after our perfect baby girl drowned, Rick spent the night with his mistress
In the final part of a heart-rending interview, Rick Parfitt’s first wife on the Status Quo rocker’s most shattering infidelity of all...
STATUS Quo rocker Rick Parfitt was on tour in Germany when his first wife Marietta went into labour with their second child, Heidi, a few days after Valentine’s Day, 1978. ‘I phoned him in his hotel room to tell him. A girl answered. She said: “Rick’s in the shower.” It was like somebody had punched me in the stomach.
‘I just said: “Can you just tell him I’m going into hospital because we’re having our baby?”’
Marietta pauses. Rick did not return to see his newborn baby daughter for two months, and then only briefly to avoid having to pay tax (as a British resident).
‘Status Quo were at the height of their fame. Rick was so lost in his world that his children and his wife became secondary. I think that’s why, when we lost Heidi, he suffered a big guilt complex because he suddenly realised it was too late to spend time with her.
‘He needed a scapegoat to alleviate that feeling and the scapegoat was God, who he blamed for everything.’
Marietta has never spoken about her 2½-year-old daughter’s desperately sad death 37 years ago. The pain of losing a child never disappears. She still thinks about her little girl every day.
‘When I pass a woman in the street who’s the age Heidi would have been, I think: “I wonder if Heidi would be like that.” Whether she’d be married? What she’d be doing? She was such an incredible little girl. Heaven knows what would have become of her.’
Marietta was preparing lunch on that hot Sunday at their beautiful home set in nine acres of rolling fields and woodland in Hambledon, Surrey, in August 1980. Rick, who’d risen late, was watching television in the sitting room with the couple’s six-year-old son, Richard.
‘We’d taken the cover off the pool because I was going to go swimming with the kids after lunch,’ says Marietta. ‘Heidi was in the kitchen on the worktop having titbits as I cooked.
‘Once I started doing the gravy, I put her down and said: “Go to Daddy and tell him dinner is going to be ready in five minutes.”
The sitting room was next to glass doors that led out on to the terrace.
‘After laying the table, I went into the lounge. It was only a matter of minutes later, but she wasn’t there.
‘I said: “Where’s Heidi?” Rick said, “She’s not here.” We both went calling for her right through the house, but she didn’t answer. Then I suddenly I heard our little Yorkshire terrier barking outside.
‘He was running round the pool. At that stage, your heart sinks. You run down there, there was . . .’ She stares out of the window.
‘There was just this little baby girl in the pool with her cardigan floating on the sides like wings.’
MARIETTA adds: ‘To be perfectly honest, a lot of it I can’t remember. I just have this picture of my lovely girl face down in the pool. I screamed like an animal that’s been mortally wounded. It isn’t a human sound. You’re totally out of control. You feel as if you’re being shredded, as if somebody is ripping out all your organs.
‘We got her out and Rick tried to revive her. I ran to get a blanket and called an ambulance, but being in the country it didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. I had this child in my arms wrapped in a blanket and she didn’t open her eyes any more, she didn’t breathe.’
Rick and Marietta followed the ambulance to hospital in Guildford, where medical staff were unable to revive her.
‘You don’t accept it. They told us to go home. I said: “I can’t go. I need to take my baby with me.” It was . . .’ There are tears in her eyes now.
‘When we got home, there were dozens of reporters. It was terrible. I went indoors and called my parents. They loved my children beyond anything. Having to say for the first time this word “dead” was a killer. It reverberates in your head like an echo, which goes on and on and on.
‘Rick phoned a gazillion people and the house filled up. I don’t remember who they were. I just made endless cups of tea.
‘Then Rick just disappeared. He didn’t come home that night. I think he went to see one of his old girlfriends and stayed there.’
The next few weeks passed in a blur. ‘I remember meandering through the streets buying her a white gown. I asked as many people as possible to wear white to the funeral. I thought: “I’ll never be able to give my little girl the wedding I wanted, so this is to be my celebration for her.” I didn’t want to wear black.
‘When the autumn came and the frost set in I had this panic she was going to feel cold. I could see the churchyard from our house. I couldn’t stop myself from putting a blanket on her grave. You do silly things.’ She says her son, Richard, saved her. ‘One day, he said: “Mummy, if it’s true what you said to Heidi and me that when a child dies it goes straight to heaven to live with the angels and has fun, why are you crying all the time?”
‘There’s this six-year-old looking up at me saying this. That poor little boy. God only knew what he was going through. He’d lost his sister and was losing his mum. From that moment I decided to really, really try to keep Richard safe and away from a lot of things I felt he wasn’t fit to see.
‘People dealing with their pain in the way Rick was doing cause so much chaos. I put Richard in a boarding school three miles down the road.
‘Our divorce wasn’t because of Heidi’s death. It was because of what had become of Rick and me.’
Following an on-and-off affair with a well-known model, Rick started a relationship with the Hot Gossip dancer, Debbie Ash, the sister of actress Leslie. The hellraising escalated with wild parties. Fights. Violence.
‘At the end I was physically and mentally exhausted. Rick would come home at 5am or 6am, get clean clothes and go back to town — back to Debbie Ash or whoever else he might have taken a fancy to.
‘I was getting weaker and weaker. You accept so much that in the end it kills you as a person. I didn’t know who I was any more.
‘I thought: “If I don’t get out now, I won’t survive this. What
will happen to Richard then?” That’s when I knew I had to change my life. I had to file for divorce.’
Three years later, they faced each other in court. ‘Rick had a lawyer, and then more lawyers, and then a QC. I thought we were having the court hearing about finances, but when I got into the stand the first question his QC asked me was: “Mrs Parfitt, tell us how you satisfy your husband in bed?”
‘I wouldn’t and couldn’t address a subject like that in public.
‘I looked at my QC, who asked the judge to intervene. The judge declined. There were 15 men sitting there in that courtroom. I thought: “What are they trying to do to me?”
‘It went on for two hours. The same happened the following day. I finally broke down and wasn’t able to say a whole sentence without stammering. Eventually, I turned to Rick and said: “You’ve taken everything I have. The last thing left to me is my dignity. Do you really want to allow these guys to take that, too?”
‘They totally and utterly destroyed me and he let them. Nothing mattered to me after that. I didn’t care what financial settlement the judge might or might not award. I just wanted to get out.’
Marietta walked away from their marriage with a £168,000 lump sum and £2,600-a-year child maintenance after their gorgeous family home had been sold. She was told Rick was in terrible debt, mostly to the Inland Revenue.
‘Status Quo were at the peak of their success at the time. Goodness knows where all the money he was earning went.’
Marietta began renovating houses to make ends meet and didn’t see Rick for years. ‘Richard didn’t see him either. There were no Christmas presents. No birthday presents. Rick would arrange to see him and then not show up. That was very difficult for him.’
FOR the first time in our interview Marietta seems angry.
‘Richard began to suffer with terrible tummy pains,’ she says. Numerous medical tests followed and he was diagnosed with the horribly debilitating Crohn’s disease. He received treatment but, at 15, the condition flared up again.
‘The doctor said that although not much was known about Crohn’s it was believed to be connected to stress. I wondered if Richard was suffering because he wasn’t seeing his father. I didn’t want Rick back in my life, but I knew, for Richard’s sake, that I had to contact him.’ Rick, who was by now with his second wife Patty, agreed to meet Richard and soon father and son forged a loving relationship. Marietta concedes she found this tough.
‘We had a nice little house and little car, but his dad booked flights to football matches and raced cars. When you’re a 15 or 16-year-old boy with a father like that, of course you want to be with your dad. I didn’t cope very well.
‘Eventually my son, who is very wise and very kind, said to me: “If you can’t cope with the past, why don’t you and Dad sit down and talk it through?”’
Rick and Marietta finally met on neutral territory in a hotel in Weybridge, Surrey. ‘We went through our marriage together and Rick said, in absolute amazement: “No, did I really do that?” He genuinely had no recollection.
‘I walked out in a compete daze and thought: “Good God, I’ve spent all these years and given all I have and he doesn’t even remember. Was it worth anything at all?
‘But I had to cope with it for Richard. Rick being Rick decided he was freshly in love with me again. He told me he’d separated from Patty and showered me with presents. This went on and on. He said: “I really want us to get back together.” ’
Surely she told him to take a hike? Marietta looks down at her hands.
‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘Rick could be very charming. I agreed to give it a try. If nothing else, I thought it would be really good for Richard —and Rick can be the most charming man in the world when he wants to be.’
The relationship continued for three years with shared moments in Germany, where she had begun to work for her father, and England.
It ended as dramatically, and cruelly, as in the early days.
Marietta recalls: ‘one weekend in 1997 I was due to meet a friend in London, when she phoned to say: “Don’t worry if you can’t make it, you’re obviously in the hospital.”
‘I asked her why and she said: ‘Don’t you know? Rick’s in intensive care. He’s had four heart bypasses today.’
Marietta drove immediately to the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, North London.
‘He was there with all the tubes and everything. He was really weak. I held his hand and said: “Don’t speak. I just want you to know I’m here.” The next morning, I got a call from the group’s management saying: “Please refrain from visiting Rick. He’s got a new girlfriend and you’re not doing him any good.”
‘That’s how I got to know our relationship had finished. I was unbelievably sad because I hadn’t expected that at all and to be told by management rather than him . . .
‘But what can you do? My phone calls to him were blocked and I had far too much dignity to cause a scene. once Rick made up his mind, there was no point of return.’
Marietta never met Rick’s new girlfriend. Within three years he had returned to his second wife Patty, but left her again when he became secretly engaged to fitness instructor Lyndsay, whom he married in 2006.
Yet still Rick and Marietta weren’t able to sever their bond completely, and would speak and visit each other occasionally.
Marietta last spoke to Rick four days before he died on Christmas Eve at the age of 68 when he Skype called her in Germany from his home in Marbella.
TWO days later, Richard called from Miami where he was on holiday with his wife Rachel to say he was flying to Spain because his father was dying.
‘I said: “Come on, don’t be stupid, Dad’s not dying. I spoke to him a few days ago.” He rang me back an hour or so later. Rick had died. I couldn’t believe it.
‘I was sad and angry because I thought: “Why didn’t he slow down? There was so much he had to look forward to: a new album, an autobiography and, of course, all his children.”
‘And, why now? Why at Christmas? Then you think: “This can’t have happened.” You feel helpless because you can’t turn the clock back.
‘What makes me really cross is I’m absolutely certain that had I received more support from people around him when I was trying so hard to wean him off the drugs, he’d still be alive today.
‘I know Rick was a grown man who should have thought more about those of us who loved him when he chose the life he did.
‘But more than him I blame the people who facilitated and encouraged that life. To my mind, having lived through it, they are just as responsible for his death.’