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Davy Jones is happiest he’s ever been
Still monkeying around! A third wife half his age. A new British tour with The Monkees. No wonder Davy Jones says he’s the happiest he’s ever been
By Richard Barber
Last updated at 1:56 AM on 11th May 2011
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.
Cheeky Monkee: Davy Jones and his third wife, Jessica, pose near their home in Florida
Cheeky Monkee: Davy Jones and his third wife, Jessica, pose near their home in Florida
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.
‘I missed the school play … the Christmas nativity. These are times when an entertainer works. But that doesn’t mean the guilt ever goes away.’
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.
