Spare the Rod

Rachel Hunter keeps playing with her hair - that bushy, highlighted hair, blonde, brown, blackstreaked. She pulls it up into a clip, is combing it with her fingers, taking it down: when she leaves, the only evidence of her presence is a little metal hairgrip.

Her cheeks are slicked with blusher, her mouth glossy with candy-pink lipstick and she has beautiful, chunky-lidded pale blue eyes. To my surprise, from time to time during our lunch she positively collapses with laughter at herself.

We meet at the trendy Soho House in New York. It's late: gone 3pm, and the dining room has only three or four people in it. It has exposed bricks and raggedy paintwork, and, after a second's hesitation, Rachel takes the seat facing the room. 'Sometimes I like to look the other way,' she explains in a creamy voice, which at first sounds American, then resolves itself as New Zealand.

Doesn't she like being stared at? 'No. I've always been a very shy child anyway, and I don't like sitting in the middle of a restaurant. It's not because of who I am and what I've done - it's more because I'm a very private person. What I really don't like is when someone's sitting next to you and whispering. You think they're saying something horrible and bad about you!'

She grins and asks for the menu. Though she is a bit wary during the interview, she sometimes goes completely the other way and comes out with hilarious comments. Talking, for example, about the effect of her separation from Rod Stewart on her kids, she remarks: 'We're really resilient. We're!' she repeats, giggling. 'Thinking I'm a kid! That's a Freudian slip - I'm good at those!' Another time, discussing her penchant for rock stars - Stewart, Robbie Williams, and now, reportedly, Wes Scantlin of the American indie rock band Puddle of Mudd - she groans in wry amusement: 'That's why I need therapy! They should have an AA meeting for musicians and models!' So what is it with her and musicians? I say, and she rolls her eyes. 'I don't know! It's becoming embarrassing! It's not like I go and hang out at record companies!'

Rachel is wearing Miss Sixty jeans, a red, tie-dyed, sleeveless T-shirt spelling out 'Camp Cherith staff' in bright glitter and trendy Ugg boots. It's fascinating seeing her in the flesh, probably because there's been so much about her in the press over the years - first the child-wedding to Rod Stewart (she was 21, he was 45), then the surprisingly stable marriage that followed - their kids, Renee and Liam, are 11 and nine - and finally that picture of her, hair braided, scorching Rod with fury as he cringed away on the pavement. At 30, she left him, saying she wanted to find herself, and began an affair with actor Michael Weatherly. Rod said he would do anything to get her back. Then he met Penny Lancaster. Rachel began an affair with Robbie that lasted nine months. Now 34, she says she is happier than ever.

But has she 'found herself'? She laughs. 'I know, it was a funny statement. It just came down to the fact that, because I left home when I was 16, and travelled the world and modelled, I hadn't...' She frowns, thinking. 'It just came down to things like not knowing what smells I liked my clothes washed in! And having no boundaries. If people wanted to walk all over me they could. It wasn't anything to do with my husband whatsoever. It was two conflicting things, a woman who's trying to find herself and is, at the same time, old-fashioned and completely in love with her husband. It was just wrong timing, you know, so it's really hard.'

Does she still see Rod? 'Yeah.' She clears her throat. 'We were married nine years, I absolutely love and adore him and there always will be some kind of connection between us.'

Does she really still love him, I ask. She nods. 'Absolutely! He was a huge and really important part of my life, he's the father of my two kids and he is a wonderful, wonderful man. I just wish people would stop calling him this ageless rock star. I have an incredible amount of respect for him and he's always been good to me. I'm just very lucky to have him as part of my life.' It makes me wonder why she left, I exclaim, and she gives another wry laugh. 'Everyone says that! I know, it seems really bizarre. I just married too young. I didn't know who I was.'

I ask if she had to leave to find out what an amazing guy he was. 'No,' she says at once. 'I always knew.' The trouble is, her great guy is now with someone else. If she wanted Rod back, the dreaded Penny Lancaster would have to vamoose. 'Oh, Penny!' Rachel says, sighing, when I ask if they really do hate each other. 'I just find it funny that the papers have to keep comparing us. It's silly. You can't pick two more opposite people. She's her own individual and I'm my own individual. I've modelled for years and she's done whatever she's done and - I find it funny actually!'

Though it's been four years, Rachel and Rod are not divorced. She filed in June after she bumped into Rod and Penny at an awards ceremony in Monte Carlo and he ignored her. ('That was just weird!' she exclaims. 'But we've dealt with it in a private way.') Later she dropped proceedings. Why? 'I dunno,' she says vaguely. 'It was with a different lawyer and it kind of got messy. Rod and I are dealing with that but it'll go forward in the next six months or so. We just always get waylaid. I'm always travelling or he's doing something, so - we're, like, in no-man's land.' She maintains she doesn't want his money. 'Why do I have the right to his fortunes?' she asks. So she would only accept money to support the kids? 'Yes, and I have always made my own money, anyway.'

But, I ask, does she actually want to be divorced? 'Yeah!' she says. 'But it's not like it's... I'm sure therapists would read this in a completely different light, but we haven't been together in five years and we've moved on. It's just that every time we talk about it we end up laughing.' But can't they get back together? 'No!' she says, looking self-conscious. But when I ask if she's got any regrets, she says: 'I don't dwell on it too much.'

She has been seeing someone for five months. I suspect this is Scantlin, though she won't tell me his name. He is blond and scruffy and gorgeous, and she blushes when I mention his name. 'I just find it's bad to start putting relationships into the media,' she explains. 'If you don't end up together it's scandalous and if you do end up together they're following you round.'

She says she looks for guys with a sense of humour, who are 'fun and adventurous and loving and funny - the things everyone wants'. She knows straightaway if she fancies someone: she looks into their eyes and it hits her. 'Usually, if I'm attracted to someone it ends up in some type of relationship. But I don't want to be known for who I go out with and I think people think that's what I do. I'm just not that girl.'

Robbie, she says sadly, she hasn't seen in a long time. 'But he's a very special person.' Very charismatic? 'Oh, he is.' But how did she feel about the story that they set up the pictures of them naked on the sunbed? 'I don't know,' she says vaguely. 'We had a very private relationship, and I don't know why they would say that. It was no one's business as far as we were concerned.' But wasn't she really upset about it? 'Yeah, but I wasn't in England and I kind of blew it away... When you're with someone who you love being with, you don't care what's going on. They always keep trying and you have to just shut it down.' She looks more cheerful when I ask where she is emotionally. 'Really good!' she says. 'I stopped drinking 18 months ago, and I really got my priorities sorted out. I was going out a lot and I really wanted to focus: I'm on the last ten years of a really solid career.'

The priorities she got sorted were her kids and her work. Just after we meet she is due to fly off to play a lawyer in an indie film being shot in Missouri, and next month she is to play a sexy mum in another movie in Australia, a Wayne's World- esque sci-fi romp called Me and My Stupid Mate. (Her highest-profile part remains her cameo in last year's Rock Star, starring Jennifer Aniston and Mark Wahlberg.) She is also branching into TV. This year she copresented a US TV series to find America's sexiest man and woman, called Are You Hot? which was screened on ABC, and she popped up as another yummy mummy in a music video for Fountains of Wayne, the New York pop quartet.

She has just done a big shoot with Elle Macpherson for Sports Illustrated(the magazine that launched her), and has been signed as the face of Classified Cosmetics, a range of clever, spray-on make-up launched here in October. She is really pleased that the company has the vision to use a 34-year-old working mum rather than a 17-year-old girl for its ad campaign.

When she is not away acting or modelling, she says her daily routine - she lives in LA - is getting the kids off to school, riding horses or doing Pilates, having lunch, doing some work, and picking up the kids. 'Kids keep you young, don't they?' she asks. 'And then they make you feel really old! Renee goes, "Ooh you're so gross, Mum!" when I'm trying to dance. I'm like, "Hey, I go to clubs and you don't, so I know what's going on, OK!" Then she'll go, "Can't you brush your hair for one day when you drop me off at school?" I'll go out with it like a bird's nest! Most of the time they see me at my worst. And they still love me!'

She grins and attacks her scallop salad. 'But I'm a very giving person, which is sometimes a flaw, because people can take advantage. It's not a sob story, but I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and you can get slapped in the face by that. I'm very, very loyal. The other side is I can become very moody. I'll take so much, then I'll explode and I'm foul and you don't want to be around me! I'm talking, like, volcano!'

I ask if she worries about the effect of the separation on the kids. 'No,' she says, 'because you just have to be honest and make sure they have the love they need from both parents.' But she doesn't hide the fact that her parents' divorce upset her. She and her sister Jacqui were raised in Auckland. Her mother, Janeen, was an artist, her father, Wayne, worked as airline ground staff, and they fought like cat and dog. They finally called it quits when Rachel was 15. She left home a year later and suffered a breakdown while modelling, before marrying Stewart at 21.

Would she like to remarry? 'Yeah, I would,' Rachel says. 'But I think it has to be made special again. I agree with prenuptials and I agree that what you bring into a marriage you should take out, but I think the magic's gone. I think it's disgusting when women marry for money and they definitely need to be stopped.' I wonder who she might be referring to as she throws down her knife. 'I keep saying to Renee, "When are you going to get married?"' she cries. 'I've drummed it into her head: 30!'