Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya

by Jones, Vinnie

Tans would listen to you – but I mean really listen to you. It was never about her. She wouldn’t say, ‘Now look, I’ve had a heart transplant and I did this and that and you should do this and you should do that.’ Never. Instead, it was always about what the other person needed, who they were, how they felt.

  There’s a guy called Eamon O’Connor, a younger friend of Tans’ dad – he’s actually about my age – who everyone calls Archie. He and Tans had an incredible bond. She loved him because he’d been an underdog in his life, though he’d made good, and she loved an underdog. He loved her like everyone did and for the same reasons: because she was genuine, and kind, and warm, and would listen to you – really listen.

  Archie came over to the States to play in a golf tournament one year and one night, as everyone was going to bed, Tans said to me, ‘I’m just going to stay up and have a chat with Archie.’ She came to bed pretty late that night and the next day I asked her how her chat had gone. Tans said that Archie had opened up to her about his life. People did that with Tans, they just unconditionally opened up to her. She was an angel to a lot of people. In fact – and this is no word of a lie – people thought she was an actual fucking angel.

  There were too many times when Tans had to be an angel to me when I didn’t deserve it.

  Recently, I spoke to a psychologist, and he asked me, ‘When were you at your best? When did you feel you were a nice guy, when you didn’t want to fight, had no anger issues, didn’t jeopardize everything positive in your life?’

  My answer was this: ‘Up to when I was 16, 17, 18, something like that.’

  The psychologist said, ‘And what happened to you at 16, 17, 18?’ And the penny dropped. He said, ‘That’s when you started drinking alcohol, isn’t it?’

  Thank god Tanya knew me before the alcohol. I think that’s what ultimately saved us after things like the air rage, the neighbour. She knew the true me. I went through a lot as a kid, and she understood that. It wasn’t an excuse. It wasn’t as if I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s the fucking breakup of that, and it’s my dad and it’s my mum, and it’s the this and it’s the that.’ But she did understand it. She was the best reader of my soul.

  Now it was up to me to find the good me, which involves no alcohol.

  In ‘Where Do You Go to My Lovely’, our favourite song, there’s a line that goes, ‘Two children begging in rags / Both touched with a burning ambition / To shake off their lowly-born tags’, and when I hear those words I feel the song was written for us. For me to buy that little girl a red Bentley on her fiftieth birthday, us driving out the showroom with it … well, we couldn’t contemplate how fully our lives had changed. We used to go into hotels – I remember one in Mauritius in particular that was ridiculous – and we’d be shown to the best suite. But the minute the door closed, we’d jump up and down in glee, like we’d gotten away with something. We were still the council house kids.

  For 27 years together we were a fantastic social couple, but all I was doing was showing her off to everyone. I look at the photos of her now and I can’t believe I was hers for all those years.

  There’s one photograph in particular I adore. We were attending Matthew Vaughn and Claudia Schiffer’s wedding in May 2002. In the photo, she’s wearing this amazing pink dress, high heels and swinging a little pink handbag. She’s saying something to the camera, smiling, and I know what she was saying.

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We do this every Saturday, Claudia Schiffer’s wedding …’ That’s what she was saying to me; we were in on the joke together. Just like when she described Madonna as ‘ever so nice’. Nothing got to her. She never got too big for herself. And for some reason, she chose me.

  Tans chose me.

  I wish I could just remember Tans as she was in that photo at Matthew and Claudia’s wedding – smiling, confident, hopeful, healthy. But time was cruel to her, as it was to all of us. It’s true that in 1987, when her heart collapsed, everyone around her would have taken just one more day, one more week, one more month, maybe one more year – they’d have taken anything just to have her alive for a little while longer. What god granted the Lamont family, what god granted all of us, was more than three decades, which is a true miracle. What you want, though, is eternity with someone like Tans. When you’re given an angel, how do you let that angel go back to heaven? Well, let me tell you, you can’t.

  Tans struggled with health issues every day after the transplant. She got used to it: the kidney problems, the gout, the cervical cancer, the seizures, swallowing her tongue, a blood clot on her lung. Tans fought all of it with such incredible grace; she was the strongest person you ever met. She never complained; she just felt she’d been given a gift by Dr Yacoub and Dr Mitchell and everyone at Harefield. By the German boy whose heart beat in her chest, strong and true, every day. Yes, she had to take medicines twice a day, every day; yes, she had to suffer through the fear of what the follow-up visits to Harefield might reveal; yes, the angiograms were invasive and upsetting. But you’d never get a peep out of her about any of it. Tans was built of strong stuff and I think that’s why we thought she’d outlast all of us. That’s one of the reasons that losing her has been so hard. Tans would get beaten down and she’d bounce right back up. It happened every single time, so when she had some skin cancer scares, we thought she’d beat it like she always had.

  But it was not to be. What saved her life ultimately took her life. How do you weigh the pros and cons of that? You can’t. You just do what she did: you get up every day, you make the bed and you face forwards, hopeful and sunny, at a world that has no opinion about you.

  The drugs Tans took to avoid her heart being rejected by her body also lowered her immune system and, crucially, they upped her chances of getting certain forms of cancer. One of those elevated risks was for skin cancer. After 20 years of taking those drugs, the odds get shorter and shorter that something bad is going to happen. And it did.

  Tans was vigilant about having her skin checked out; she knew the risks and lived with them, but wasn’t blasé about it. For the last decade of Tans’ life, it felt like we were at the dermatologist on a monthly basis. I had a scare with the skin cancer too, but for Tans it was much more dangerous, given her medical history. On every visit, her doctors would inspect every inch of her body, checking every little mole or blemish. They would freeze them and cut them out.

  Living in L.A., the risks were greater for skin cancer, obviously – certainly more dangerous than living in the UK. The trade-off was that she was less likely to be prone to infections, given that we lived in a much warmer, less damp environment. Of course, we had grown up in the UK back when fears about skin cancer were less prevalent; we just didn’t really consider it, given that the sun seemed to shine twice a year at most. I think a lot of people of our generation were not even remotely clued in about the risks; some of us are paying for it now, of course. Tans always wore a hat in L.A. and was religious about using sunscreen, but it was still there in the back of our minds that we had to be vigilant about it. Who knows if the sun in the UK or the sun in L.A. did the damage; we’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter now.

  For a while, after we moved to the States, Tans would go back and forth regularly to Harefield to have her heart check-ups. Back then, pre-existing conditions weren’t covered by health insurance in the States. But with the passing of Obamacare, that changed. We were always so thankful to Obama for that; it was just the humane thing to do, and it meant that Tans, for one, could now get treatment at an affordable rate in the States as well as at Harefield.

  Harefield was where she felt safest, so she’d still travel back there for her angiograms, but at Cedars-Sinai, they were able to do her bloods and give her a stress test, all that. Not having to travel as much was a great help to Tans, and at Cedars she was treated as a medical celebrity, given that they didn’t have people who had transplants who had survived for so long. By 2010 it has been 23 years, which is approaching some kind of record. Still that heart beat on, strong an
d sure, and the doctors at Cedars would come by to meet this rock star of a survivor. She remained completely modest about it; in fact, she didn’t like the attention one bit. To her, what had happened in 1987 was a miracle that she wasn’t about to ruin by being all big-headed about it. Life was precious – she’d learned that and she cherished what Dr Yacoub had given her.

  Even though she liked to shun the limelight, Tans encouraged me to do new stuff. In 2010 she convinced me to do series 7 of Big Brother. When it came to things like that, we all discussed it – me, Tans, Kaley, whoever it would affect. I really didn’t want to do Big Brother, but Tans wanted people to see the real me, not the tabloid monster I was sometimes painted as. I guess it worked out in the end; I was there for a month, right up to the last day, and came third.

  Before I went in, I promised Tans I wouldn’t drink; god only knows how it would have gone if I hadn’t avoided the booze in that situation. It was hard to leave her for so long. As ever, on the day I was leaving, she said, ‘Where’s my kiss?’ and I threw her one to catch.

  Once inside the Big Brother studio, I just did my own thing. Mostly, I cleaned. I’m very OCD, so I was cleaning everything, bleaching everything. Meanwhile, Tans and her mum were sitting up in bed at the Grove Hotel in Hertfordshire, eating room service and watching the show.

  What people didn’t know was I’d gotten to Davina McCall right before we started. She’d noticed that I was really apprehensive, and so I just asked her one thing: ‘You don’t know what’s going to come out while you’re in there, do you? People slaughter you. Will you do me a favour? When I come out the door evicted, give me the thumbs up if everything’s cool, or a thumbs down if the shit’s hit the fan, so I can prepare myself before the press get to me.’ So, when I got evicted right on the last day and came out, I looked at Davina and she gave me the thumbs up. And then I was buzzing.

  The whole thing had been insanity – people had dressed up like farm animals, Davina had dressed up like a chicken and I’d had to make up the fact that I’d been a cross dresser. (I can’t tell if that’s better or worse than dressing like a chicken to be honest.) But I’d survived one more ordeal.

  I was still able to make Tans lose sleep over things, even when it wasn’t my fault. When I was drinking, I think she was always worried what the fucking phone call would be. And it was also true that if everything was going brilliantly, she would often say, ‘Oh no, no, everything’s going too well – something bad is going to happen.’ And this time, something bad did happen; but for once, it wasn’t down to me.

  A couple of years before Big Brother, on the first night of a hunting trip to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in December 2008, I was attacked in a bar called Wileys in the centre of town. Some guys playing pool got in my face about this and that and then one of them went off and glassed me. It was a bad one; there was blood everywhere. As I went to clean myself up in the restroom, I was then approached by another guy, a friend of the first, and defended myself when it looked like he wanted to have a go too. The result was I was charged with three counts of simple assault for the second fight; the first, in which I was glassed, was eventually deemed ‘mutual combat’.

  The glassing was catastrophic. I had two large gashes on my forehead, my ear was dangling down and my nose was basically hanging off – in all, I had to have 68 stitches and it was only by a fluke that I hadn’t been blinded. I was very worried that the scars might severely affect my chances to get acting work too; I know I mostly play hard guys, but I didn’t want to look like the Elephant Man.

  After I’d been stitched up and released from jail, I went back to the hunting lodge. It was in the middle of nowhere, a Bear Grylls kind of place, and no one from the outside world would ever know I was there. I had my story for Tans all planned; I decided to say nothing about the assault, so that I didn’t scare her. I was going to just tell her that the Land Rover had gone off the road and crashed and I hit the windscreen. But bad news will catch up with you somehow, and always pretty quickly in my case. That night, I got a message to call my manager, right there in the middle of wild South Dakota, and my stomach just dropped. I knew it was out.

  The way it got out was a tiny bit funny, actually. I’d been on a pheasant shoot, but TMZ, the gossip channel, got their wires crossed, and heard it that I’d ‘shot a peasant’. So, they went digging, the bar sold them the footage of the altercation and Vinnie was yet again about to be slaughtered by the press, as well as by people who knew me.

  It’s lonely when that happens. Usually, I would raise my hand and take responsibility for the stupid things I’d done, like the air rage incident, or the time I was larking around in Ireland, bit a journalist’s nose in jest and got more headlines than the hooligans who’d forced the Ireland–England game to be abandoned that same night. And the attitude of the press was set in stone – when I’d got sent off against Georgia, one reporter wrote, ‘It was the final, unsavoury act of the season for the Jones boy’, as though ‘the Jones boy’ (I was 30 when it happened) was some kind of ill-bred servant from below stairs.

  But in this case, in Sioux Falls, I’d been set upon and nearly blinded. Unfortunately, that meant people would weirdly gloat about it. Some would say, ‘What’s he done again?’ Few people understood that the truth was that our lives were once again in turmoil. For good news – a new and exciting acting role or doing well on Big Brother or the X-Factor – the calls were scarce. But something like Sioux Falls happens, and the phone rings off the hook with, ‘What’s he been up to?’ It’s horrible. When there’s no support, you feel hellish lonely. And as hard as it was on Tans, it was terrible on Kaley and Aaron.

  We did everything we could to shield them from the bad press, but once in a while it was impossible. I remember Tans calling me screaming from her car that the paparazzi had shown up at Kaley’s infant school because they knew they could find Tans there at pick-up time. Tans understood they might show up when she and I were out in public, but at Kaley’s school? We were big enough to deal with it, but it’s completely unfair on the kids and the rest of the family. But whatever the morals of it all, the simple fact remained: Tans was going to find out what really happened in Sioux Falls and once again she’d be scared and upset. According to Kaley, she and her mum were at Norm’s gas station on Sunset Boulevard at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. My manager called Tans, and I don’t know what he said, but it was something that scared her so much that she threw the phone at Kaley. Kaley talked to him and then explained to Tans what was going on. By the time they got home, the videos of the assault had been posted and Tans watched them and knew straight away it wasn’t my fault this time. She said to Kaley, ‘Given his past record, it’s harder for people to believe; people will read the headline before they watch the video, and that will be that. But this one wasn’t him.’

  I flew back to Burbank airport the next day and the second Tans saw me she burst into tears. The ride home was brutal; I was still in bandages and Tans was freaking out, but she supported me 100 per cent on this one. She knew that if I was in the wrong, I’d hold my hand up and say so; I didn’t, because I wasn’t in the wrong.

  There were bigger forces at play, though, bigger than just an assault charge. At the time we were working on getting our citizenship and if I’d been convicted, it would have been curtains for us. My previous convictions in the UK had never resulted in jail time and were not considered crimes of ‘moral turpitude’, as the Americans call it, so they wouldn’t necessarily count against us in our application. But this incident in South Dakota could be bad. If I was convicted of assault in this case, I faced little or no chance of getting citizenship and once again a dream would have been over.

  As it was, after a one-day trial in May 2009, I was cleared of all the charges. This didn’t stop my assailants suing me, of course. I paid one off to get rid of him, but the one who glassed me bolted before he even gave his deposition when he realized he didn’t stand an earthly.

  Back in Los Angeles and healing up,
we had to face what Tans was going through with her cancer. And it was about to get much worse.

  16

  THE BLOW-UP HEART BALLOON

  We’d kept the house at Hunter’s Oak, Hemel Hempstead, and we’d also bought Tans’ grandmother’s house on Gander’s Ash. One day, when Tans was doing it up, she’d been taking the vacuum cleaner upstairs when she thought she’d pulled something in her side. She was in a lot of pain.

  We flew to Dubai not long after, and the pain was getting worse. It was unlike her to complain, but she was in so much discomfort – truly awful, awful pain. And the pain brought on some fears and doubts in Tans – she’d sometimes say, ‘You won’t leave me, will you, Vin?’

  Tans had been treated for her skin cancer, and it seemed to have gone well, but when we got back from the Middle East, around April 2015, Tans went to have an X-ray and it turned out her ribs were cracked. Of course, the doctors asked her if she’d fallen, or had had an accident or something, but she couldn’t think of anything. This is one of the brutal things about cancer: Tans had beaten the melanoma, or so we thought, but the cancer had then snuck back into a different place. Now it was her ribs – the tumours had made the bones so brittle that they’d cracked – and there were worrying shadows on her lungs too.

  This was a terrible turning point. We were supposed to be going to La Quinta, our place in Palm Springs, for the weekend, when she got the phone call that the cancer was back. I remember she was crying – her hair had just grown back after the skin cancer treatment and now she knew she was going to lose it all again. And honestly, from that moment on, the battle would be pretty much a constant thing. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were facing a long road, with a terrible destination.

  For the rest of her life, I don’t remember Tans not having some kind of treatment, whether it be chemo or radiation. Her mother would always fly over, and if she was coming for a while, and it wasn’t Christmas, then it signalled that something was very wrong, and that Tans was very scared.