He Was a FAMILY MAN

THE MONKEES FRONTMAN FELT TRUE HAPPINESS SURROUNDED BY THE PEOPLE HE LOVED

Sarah Jones McFadden fondly remembers the day her young son caught his first fish with his grandpa Davy Jones. “With my dad, you basically learned by doing it,” Sarah tells Closer. “But Harrison did catch a fish. It was one of the coolest moments for my son — and my dad. Not to dismiss anything he felt for his four daughters, but my dad lived for his grandchildren.”

To his fans, Davy was the eternally youthful frontman for the Monkees. Many of the characteristics that endeared him to admirers — his accessibility, kindness and sense of humor — also charmed the people he loved most. “He was like a kid,” Davy’s widow, Jessica Pacheco, tells Closer. “He was just always being funny.”

Davy married his first wife, Sarah’s mother, in 1967, at the height of the first wave of Monkee-mania. Rather than live a pop star life, the native of Manchester, England, moved his family to then-rural Santa Barbara County. “Growing up, it was just a small town,” recalls Sarah, who says her family lived a very “normal” lifestyle. “We didn’t have maids and nannies. We did our own chores. We rode our bikes to school.”

In the 1980s, when the Monkees experienced a revival, Davy took his whole family on their national tour. By then, he was wed to his second wife and dad to two more daughters. “We would all travel together on the bus — the entire family!” says Sarah, who credits her mother and stepmother for creating a peaceful blended family. “It was so incredible for all of us to be together. And it made my father happy because he was so family-oriented.”

Sarah has warm memories of the other members of the Monkees and their families, too. “They were a huge part of our lives,” she says. “I remember Micky [Dolenz] throwing us in the water; Peter [Tork] was always playing guitar and making jokes. Mike [Nesmith] was a shy goofball, but he also had one of the funniest, driest senses of humor.”

I WANNA BE FREE

Davy met his third wife, Jessica, in 2007 when they worked together in children’s theater. “I was so happy to work with someone so good,” Jessica says, noting that their mutual attraction was “pretty instant.” The couple married in 2009 and split their time between Pennsylvania and Florida, where Davy had a horse farm. “I got on a horse for the first time because of him,” she says.

Horses had been a part of Davy’s life since his youth. In 1996, he achieved his greatest dream by winning his first race as a jockey at age 51. “Every cell in his body was committed to horses,” says Sarah, who lost her father in 2012 after Davy suffered a massive heart attack after tending to his horses at his Florida farm.

Today, she and her sisters carry on Davy’s work by rescuing and supporting former racehorses through the Davy Jones Equine Memorial Fund. The grassroots organization also does equine therapy with PTSD sufferers. “It all started as something my dad was passionate about,” says Sarah. “But now we’ve made it our own.”

“He always had his priorities straight.”

—Sarah Jones McFadden on her dad, Davy Jones