On 28 October 2015, my beautiful wife Karen passed away suddenly in the night. I hope you understand that I don’t want to go into any detail about what happened, because it is private. All I want to say is that she passed away completely unexpectedly and it devastated me. It’s very difficult to talk about, to be honest, but I do want to tell you all about Karen, my lil’ Georgia Peach, my soulmate and the most amazing woman I have ever met. I’ve avoided working on this chapter because I knew it was going to be difficult, but I am going to try because I want everyone who reads this book to know just how incredible she was.
I was super-lucky the day I met Karen. She was this little 5 ft tall, 95 lb bombshell, a real southern charmer. Super-sexy, super-beautiful. As you know, we just really clicked. Absolutely inseparable. She could have had the pick of anybody, and I am so lucky that she chose me.
You know some of the back-story of how Karen and I met. Once Karen joined Serious, that was an amazing period of our lives, we were designing these amazing clothes, we had all these celebrities and rock stars wearing our gear and coming over to the warehouse, we were in love and enjoyed being with each other every minute of the day, it was just amazing. I mentioned we used to party hard but work hard, too. I’ll tell you a funny story about one of our party nights …
Karen was a little bit of a tomboy when she was a kid, but apparently she was also a little clumsy. She used to tell this story of one time she was on a skateboard but she didn’t really have great balance, so she fell off and knocked her two front teeth out. She came running home and her friend was carrying the two front teeth with her, covered in blood, and Karen’s mum was obviously mortified! So as an adult, Karen always had two fake front teeth. Long story short, she had a lot of dental work done and at one point she had a little temporary tooth put in place. Anyway, one night during the mid nineties we got invited to a party that Courtney Love was throwing for the actor Ed Norton. Well, literally just twenty minutes before we were supposed to go, Karen’s temporary tooth actually cracked and fell out. Now, most people probably would not have gone out to this glitzy showbiz party, but not Karen. She was like, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be like my party trick, this gap in my teeth!’ When we arrived, the Spice Girls were there and all sorts of other celebrities. This actress came up to Karen and she said, ‘You know, you should get that fixed …’ and we just burst out laughing. That was Karen’s spirit, she made the most out of all those moments, she was a real firecracker.
Karen always told great stories, I don’t necessarily have the gift of the gab and the charm that she did. She used to tell people about this one time when she thought I was being really cool and laid-back. Why? Well, on this particular night we found ourselves sitting next to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, who at the time were one of the most high-profile celebrity couples in the world. At one point, Pammy leaned over to me and said, ‘I really like your hair,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, cool, thanks, that’s good of you to say. I really like your coat,’ and that was pretty much that. Now Karen saw this little exchange and later said that she couldn’t believe how laid-back I was. I wasn’t phased or even remotely starstruck by meeting Pammy, this globally famous superstar. Truth be told? I didn’t realize who it was.
Everybody loved Karen. Everybody just wanted to be around Karen, she brought out the best in everyone, she was the life and soul of every party. A typical southern belle. I’m not really the party guy or the social type, that was Karen. It would always be Karen making the arrangements to go out with people, and we had a whole posse of friends; when I look back and think about that period, it was just great. One time we went back to Atlanta and visited her mum and, as I was a big Dukes of Hazzard fan, Karen took me to Hazzard County. I met her brother Tommy and all her friends down there, too.
We weren’t married at that time, that came way later. Having both been married before, we just felt there was no need, we had ultimate trust in each other, we were never separated, ever. We had the new loft we lived in, which we fitted out with our own design ideas. I was never a cat person, but once I met Karen we’d always had one or two cats. We had our beloved dog Skynyrd, who sadly also passed away in 2015. Many of the other couples around us were always fighting, and they didn’t even work together and might not see each other for eight hours a day. Although we were partying a lot, we were still getting business done. Party hard, but get shit done, always. For Serious, these were the glory years, too, when the business had gone from, let’s say five hundred grand to a million bucks to two million a year – we were on fire. We were together 24/7 in a pretty stressful, demanding environment, going to all these trade shows, working on five clothing lines a year, organizing around two hundred thousand units every twelve months. We were joined at the hip, on the same page, what a team. Working together, living together, always in each other’s pockets … and I still couldn’t see enough of her.
Karen was a clever woman, too. Very clever. Serious had around ten employees and Karen would make sure the business side was always done perfectly – so intelligent. It just seemed like, fuck, this was heaven. For the next ten years, everything just clicked, you know. We opened the first Serious store that I mentioned on Melrose and then we opened the second one in ’99. We were doing more business than ever, it was just easy. Everything was flowing and then Karen found Willow – I told you that whole story. As you know, after initially passing up on the property, I went back and bought the warehouse, and I still smile when I remember coming home that night and telling her I’d bought it. Amazing memories.
We finally got married on Karen’s fortieth birthday, 5/1/05, a double header in Las Vegas. We didn’t really tell anybody; the fact was that as we’d both been married before we didn’t feel like making a big deal of the actual day, so no one was there. It was just Karen and me. We got married at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
We travelled the world together. We went to the Far East and Europe, and Karen loved England, she completely fell in love with the country, she loved the history. She’d read all these novels from classic literature, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and so she loved when we went to places like Chatsworth. We talk about Willow being a hundred and ten years old and that’s a vintage building for the US, but in England that’s nothing. Karen loved how old England was in places. She loved Bakewell, for example, this sleepy little northern town with its market and all the history. I really enjoy visiting England these days, too, and I think you have a different view of Britishness when you live overseas. Some of that is real fun – like I always chuckle when I see five workmen standing around one guy digging a hole, and you’ll have all five of them sipping a brew, talking. Karen loved all those cultural differences.
One time we were driving down this typical English country road, pretty narrow, bordered by these high drystone walls, and there was an old geezer on a mobile wheelchair in the middle of nowhere. That’s not exactly what we were used to in LA! Another time, on a trip for my sister’s wedding reception, one morning we were in this hotel and we fancied going into Bakewell to have a look around. So we spoke to this old geezer who owned the hotel, this typical English gent, you know, Prince of Wales houndstooth check tweed suit, this brigadier in his seventies. We asked him how to get to Bakewell, and he said, ‘You see that big tree there at the end of the field? You walk to that and then turn left and follow the wall down, then turn right on the main road into Bakewell.’ Now these are not nice, wide American roads, these are pretty narrow country lanes with these really old dry-stone walls on either side which are probably three feet tall; there is no sidewalk, so you would be kind of walking on a muddy roadside edge, taking your life into your own hands. So we start off on this walk and about half a mile down the road this Golf GTi comes whizzing by. I didn’t think anything of it, but this car suddenly pulled up, turns out it’s my uncle David on his way to Bakewell! That’s some ‘small-world’ English shit right there. That wouldn’t happen in LA, but it was typical England for me. So we hopped in the car; he’d never met Karen but he’d heard all about her, of course. He called her a little firecracker and off we went to Bakewell.
I’d always gone to Bakewell as a kid, so that day was real nostalgic, a proper trip down memory lane. Uncle David showed us around, and Karen loved the town. Bakewell is picturesque, the river runs through it, all that quaint stuff. We went to the local pub, this is October time, so of course it’s getting dark there by four o’clock, and it was like one of these Hammer House of Horror movies where the mist rolls in and the fog descends over a picturesque little village, people scatter and all of a sudden it’s kind of desolate. Of course it’s raining. Obviously, we didn’t want to walk four miles back to the hotel, so we had our fish and chips and a pint and then asked the bar keeper, ‘Hey, can we get a cab, please?’ And he says, ‘You’ve just missed one, I can get you one tomorrow if you want.’ Just missed one – a cab! We were like, ‘What the fuck?!’ Karen was laughing so much.
All these special places, these stately homes that my mum and dad had showed me as a kid, which I had no interest in then, all of a sudden we were like, ‘Wow, let’s go to Chatsworth.’ Karen fell in love with that particular place. As a kid, you don’t appreciate that sense of history because it is always there. So going back was a way of revisiting my past but also broadening our horizons. Truth be told, I never felt like moving back to England, though. Karen always romanticized about moving there, but for me there is just so much to keep me busy in LA.
Karen really liked visiting Sheffield, too. My mum loved her, my dad loved her, the whole family loved her, and she fell in love with my family. She talked to Mum and Dad more than I talked to them, and I always thanked her for that. She’d call my mum at least two or three times a month, and whereas I’d have like a ten-minute conversation with Mum, Karen would have an hour-long chat! When we’d be staying with my sister, I’d go to bed at midnight, but they’d be up until one or two, drinking and talking. People would tell Karen stuff they wouldn’t even tell their own mum. Everyone confided in her and loved talking to her. Karen herself was from a big and very loving family, one of five kids. She was really close to her mum, and she’d call her every single day.
She also loved London, staying at the St Martin’s Lane Hotel. We were making money, but we didn’t live extravagantly, we just liked tasteful things. I would always buy her whatever she wanted, maybe some jewellery, or she would sometimes get facials and treatments. Even so, Karen didn’t really want that much.
Karen never said ‘no’; she was just always so super-supportive. Any ideas I had for Serious, she always backed me up; buying cars, super-supportive; buying Willow and getting into the film business, building the Porsche collection, taking part in Urban Outlaw, just always so supportive. Don’t get me wrong, she certainly didn’t just agree with me all the time to keep the peace. She was a very intelligent woman with fantastic creative ideas and interesting opinions. And if she didn’t agree with something I was suggesting, I would know about it. That’s the way it should be. She might have voiced her opinion or said what she thought, she was outspoken, she was a Taurus, so I guess, at times, she could be kind of stubborn, just like I was. However, that was only because she cared so much and wanted to look out for me and for everything that we had created together. So in that sense our relationship was really straightforward. Also, Karen was always a good judge of character. She would sometimes say, ‘Magnus, you know that guy … I don’t really like him’, or ‘I think these guys are taking advantage of you’, and she would always be right. I’m more of the kinda ‘grab it and run’ type, but she would be that wise voice of caution, looking out for me, always.
We didn’t want for anything. I remember buying Karen a Volkswagen Type 3 Karmann Ghia Notchback for her birthday and the ’67 E-Type Jag, too. That was the least I could do. If I wanted a Mustang or a Ferrari … Karen never, ever said no. She completely had my back, didn’t take any bullshit. I’d like to think I reciprocated; I certainly tried to. I remember one story before she had closed Hooch down, this local guy had a retail store and he wasn’t paying her, so I went over there and basically threatened to kick the guy’s ass if he didn’t pay her. I’m like, ‘Fuck, why are you picking on this little girl, what the fuck are you doing here, taking advantage of her? It’s time to pay up.’ So, you know, we had each other’s backs. And you probably won’t be surprised to hear that we were always faithful to each other, never deviated. We were together twenty-one years until she passed away, and she was always my rock.
Writing this book, I have naturally watched a lot of the videos and clips again. I actually watched Urban Outlaw for the first time in the best part of a year and hearing her voice was very sad. Someone said to me that she is immortalized in that film, which is a nice way to think of it.
One of the common threads in everything we did together was the pursuit of ‘freedom’, the ability to do what we wanted to do, when we wanted to do it. We weren’t planning to work for ever; we were sort of working towards this goal of early semi-retirement in our mid fifties, travelling the world or maybe getting a place in New York or who knows where, but we had so much more to give each other. That particular book wasn’t written. The journey wasn’t over. We created so much together, we had the most amazing times together and then suddenly she was gone. All the success we had, we had together, and we couldn’t have done it separately. Karen and I just brought out the best in each other. We were the spark for each other. She was my soulmate. It’s hard to believe she’s not here. However, she is still with me; she might not be physically by my side, but she is with me every moment of the day.
The number of people who came out for Karen’s service was just incredible. We kinda winged the service, you know. It wasn’t a religious service; it was a celebration of life. We did a slide show and rented this great little place that was modelled on an English chapel which I know Karen would have loved. There’s a big cross on the top of the nearby hill and we had driven by it for twenty years and never gone there, but ultimately that was where her service was.
That day was just an outpouring of love for Karen; the amount of people that came and the flowers were very touching. Everyone was welcome to speak and tell stories about their life around Karen. The common theme was that everyone said, ‘Karen brought out the best in everybody.’ We hadn’t seen some of these friends for ten years, but they all came to her service. It didn’t matter whether you had known Karen for twenty years or twenty minutes. People kind of had that same reaction of, ‘Wow, she’s really special.’
I have a tattoo of the day that Karen passed away, 10-28-15. We had matching Skynyrd tattoos to honour our dog. I also have the Hooch logo and her signature tattooed on me, after she signed her name on me and then the tattoo guy inked over it. We also actually tattooed each other, believe it or not. I also have one that says ‘Karen Forever’, which was my very first tattoo.
The memories of Karen are inked on my mind just as the tattoos are on my skin. We made the most out of every moment. Now that she’s not with me, it completely endorses the way we lived when she was here. Every day was cherished, every moment and every little adventure was enjoyed. When I look at photos, we are pretty much kissing in every one, and if we are not kissing then we have the biggest smiles on our faces. There was never a single day that we regretted. That’s an amazing statement to be able to make, but I genuinely mean it.
She was just a beautiful blessing to everyone who knew her. Most of all me. I used to think, Dude, you’ve hit the jackpot. She’s sexy, she’s charming, clever, supportive, kind, she is the life and soul of the party … everyone wants to be around her.
There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss her.
Like the tattoo says, ‘Karen Forever …’