by Jo Wood
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Are they the men who supplied you with the cocaine?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And this was the first occasion you have done cocaine?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Franco erupted in wild fury: ‘You lie! You lie!’
‘I am not lying,’ I said indignantly, then turned back to the chief. ‘Of course he’s going to say that, sir, because he doesn’t want to have to take all the blame.’ (Okay, so I do feel a bit guilty about that, but the guys were professional smugglers – and they had landed us in jail.)
On the morning of day six I was ushered into a courtroom in front of a judge. He read out a long statement and told me that I was very irresponsible because I had a young family and should know better. ‘May this experience be a lesson to you not to get involved with drugs in the future,’ he said, gravely. ‘I am not going to charge you, but you must leave this country immediately.’
And that was it. I was a free woman!
Without a chance to thank my new friends, I was immediately escorted outside where, to my utter joy, Ronnie was already waiting. We got into a car and went straight to the airport for an ecstatic reunion with the kids and Jaye. At the terminal I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror for the first time in six days, and was shocked to see that I was covered with dozens of bites, but I didn’t care. I was free!
We got a little charter to Miami and, as the plane took off, I vowed to myself that I was going to turn over a new leaf and quit the drugs – or, at least, seriously cut down. I’d encourage Ronnie to clean up his act, too. As the judge had said, the whole experience in St Maarten had been a wake-up call for me. But as we climbed into the clouds I heard Ronnie turn to one of the lawyers and say, ‘Give us a drink and a line,’ and I knew, of course, that it wasn’t going to be quite so easy.
16
‘Jo, get up! Get the fuck out of bed – NOW!’
My eyes flickered open, flinching at the light, and I struggled to sit up. Oh, Christ, my head . . . A couple of the Stones’ security team were standing in the hotel room – they must have let themselves in. It wasn’t until I managed to focus on the state of the room that I saw why they were looking so appalled. The place was absolute carnage, with empty bottles and glasses, clothes and shoes everywhere. The room was trashed. Ronnie was lying next to me fully clothed, still clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It must have been a hell of a party.
‘You’re meant to be at the gig NOW!’ said one of the guys. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes!’
Oh, Christ . . . I jumped straight out of bed, threw on the nearest clothes, then phoned Housekeeping to bring up some black plastic bags, which they did straight away. ‘Ronnie, get up, we’ve got to go!’ I shouted, desperately trying to rouse him.
As I fished our possessions out of the chaos and started chucking them into the bin bags, I tried to piece together what the hell had happened. We were in Manchester – or was it Ireland?–and had been up for two, perhaps even three days since the Stones’ last gig. Drinking, doing drugs, drinking, listening to music, smoking joints, laughing, being stupid, drinking. The last thing I remember was standing in our hotel room in the grey, early morning light, surveying the chaos and thinking, I’ll just have a little lie-down for an hour and then I’ll get started on the packing . . . That had been more than six hours ago. From that day onwards, no matter how tired I was, I always made sure I did the packing before we went to bed.
In September 1981, the Stones hit the road again in America for their Tattoo You tour, followed in the spring of the next year by the European leg. Compared to later tours they were quite short, just two or three months apiece, so I didn’t have to spend much time away from the kids, but what they lacked in length they made up for in sheer craziness and debauchery. I remember coming home from that tour being so absolutely physically and mentally exhausted I spent a week in bed.
With the kids safely in LA with Jaye, Ronnie and I went on the road and off the rails. Mick and Keith had banned Ronnie from freebasing on tour, but one day in San Francisco he went missing and Keith was convinced he’d sneaked away to cook up some freebase. He was livid. I have this memory of Keith marching through the lobby of this huge hotel, turning the place over to find Ronnie. When he eventually appeared later – denying he’d been freebasing – the pair of them had a screaming row that ended in a proper punch-up. When Keith gets mad, he gets really mad.
I wish I could remember everything that went on during that tour, but I do know there was a hell of a lot of laughter. It was after the anarchy of Tattoo You that Mick laid down the law and decided that Stones tours needed to become far more professional and better organized, and by the time we hit the road again (not until 1989, thanks to Mick and Keith’s feud over Mick’s solo career), things were very different. For now, though, it really was sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll all the way. And the craziness seemed to infect everyone involved on that tour – roadies, security, drivers, the lot.
Much of what went on is not for the faint-hearted: those with a squeamish disposition should probably look away while I recount this particular episode. I was in our hotel in San Francisco after one of the gigs, walking down the corridor, and I heard laughter coming from Freddie Sessler’s room. The door was open so I stuck my head in. There was a naked chick standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by roadies, while Freddie waved a bag of coke in front of her. ‘Come on, baby,’ he was saying. ‘If you want this, you gotta pull the string.’ And I realized what he was trying to make her do – in front of all those blokes: take her Tampax out. I turned round and walked straight out again.
I had a new partner in crime for Tattoo You: Patti Hansen, Keith’s soul-mate and soon-to-be wife. They had met a couple of years ago, after Keith took a shine to her when he spotted her picture in Vogue, and hooked up in the legendary Manhattan nightclub Studio 54 after meeting through mutual friends. I had never met Patti, but I knew her face from magazines and I loved her attitude. I remember reading an article in which top models had been asked their beauty secrets, and among the usual holier-than-thou responses–‘I drink 10 glasses of water a day’ and ‘I religiously cleanse, tone and moisturize’–one of the girls had said, ‘I don’t bother taking off my makeup before bed as I’m usually out partying all night.’ Now that’s my kind of chick, I thought – and the chick in question was Patti.
Keith took us to meet her when we were in New York and I remember her flying out of the door of their apartment, wearing nothing but a pair of men’s pyjama bottoms, and jumping straight into Keith’s arms. I thought she was fabulous, and adore her to this day.
Keith was crazy about Patti and one night on tour he dedicated a song to her. Apparently he said some really lovely, heartfelt things, but I wouldn’t know because at the time Patti and I were backstage getting pissed in a Jacuzzi – Keith was understandably annoyed. The pair of us got up to all sorts of mischief together. It was great having another girl to play with, especially one who was just as up for it as I was. One night, after a particularly intense few days of partying, Charlie fell fast asleep on the couch in his hotel room, so the pair of us decided it would be funny to redecorate the room around him. Trying to stifle our giggles, we swapped all the furniture round and changed the pictures, the plan being that when he woke up he wouldn’t know where the hell he was. Amazingly, Charlie slept through the whole thing. Perhaps all his drumming had made him deaf.
Of course, there were the usual groupies on tour, but by now I had perfected Jo’s patented Anti-Groupie Technique™ (i.e. kill them with kindness) and, most of the time, everyone was too high and drunk to take much notice of any hangers-on anyway. Besides, Ronnie and I were always at our best when we were partying hard together, and because of that closeness, we had a great bond.
It was 15 March 1982, my 27th birthday, and Ronnie and I were in New York on a few months’ break between the American and European legs of the tour. I didn’t really feel in the party mood
, though, as just a week earlier we had got the devastating news that my dear friend John Belushi had died. Ronnie and I had been driving from JFK airport into Manhattan when it came on the radio that he had been found dead in his room at the Chateau Marmont. A drugs overdose, the announcer had said. I was heartbroken, and what made it even harder to bear was that I felt a sense of personal guilt over his death. It turned out that the dealer who had injected him with the fatal shot of speedball – a mix of heroin and coke – was Cathy Smith, the crazy woman who used to hang around our house (the one Keith had threatened with a gun) and whom we had introduced to John. I kept torturing myself with the fact that if we’d been in LA John would have been hanging out with us, rather than with that awful woman. He was such a lovely man and very much missed.
So, my birthday was pretty subdued, as you can imagine – and that evening things got even worse. We had gone to a club with a group of friends and one of the guys brought along the model Kelly LeBrock. She was yet to find fame as a movie star in The Woman in Red and Weird Science, but her face was familiar to me from countless covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Kelly seemed terribly sweet – Ronnie clearly thought so anyway, as he was all over her that night. We shared a limo ride home, and as I sat there, watching my boyfriend outrageously flirting with Kelly, I felt desperately insecure. I could cope with groupies, no problem, but this was a fucking supermodel. Happy bloody birthday, Jo . . .
Over the next few weeks Ronnie started to disappear for days at a time with no explanation. I assumed it was down to drugs as he was still doing freebase, but when I tried to talk to him one evening it turned into a horrible argument that ended with him storming off. Apart from a brief phone call to tell me he was okay, that was all I heard from him for more than a week. I had no idea where he was, although I had my suspicions, and was beginning to get seriously worried. In the end, I tracked down a studio where I knew he was due to be working on some material with Jimmy Cliff, and phoned them up.
‘Oh, hi, this is Ronnie Wood’s secretary. Could I please speak to him?’
‘He’s in the studio,’ said the receptionist. Well, at least I now knew where he was.
‘Is there any way you can interrupt him? I have an urgent message from London.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said the woman. ‘But his girlfriend is here with him – would you like to give the message to her?’
His girlfriend? I was so shocked it took me a few moments to find the breath to speak.
‘Yes, that will be fine,’ I said, quietly.
She put me on hold, and as I waited, I began to think that perhaps the receptionist had made a mistake, that everything was okay and Ronnie still loved me as much as ever, but then a woman’s voice came on the line and in that moment my worst fears were realized.
‘Hello?’
I slammed the phone down. I’d recognized the voice instantly; deep down I suppose I knew who it was going to be before she had even spoken. It was Kelly LeBrock.
I fled to Keith and Patti’s apartment and holed up there. I was so devastated they kindly let me paint a huge mural on one of their walls, of people, flowers and kids. After a few days I felt ready to go back to our apartment, but I asked the model Janice Dickinson – who had become a good friend since she’d had a wild affair with Mick on the last tour – to come over for moral support. The two of us were sitting there, trying to make sense of what had happened, when the phone rang. To my surprise, it was Ronnie.
‘Hey, Jo,’ he said. ‘What are you up to?’
I couldn’t believe it. The guy was acting like everything was fine, like he hadn’t just gone AWOL for 10 days with a supermodel!
Well, two can play at that game . . .
‘Oh, you know, just hanging out. Janice is here.’
We chatted a while and then he said, ‘I think we’ll come over in a bit, okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. See you then. ’Bye.’
I put the phone down and just stared at it in disbelief. Then I turned to Janice, who was clearly desperate to know what had been said.
‘Ronnie’s coming over,’ I told her. ‘And I think he’s bringing Kelly.’
Sure enough, a few hours later, the pair of them turned up together. It was the most surreal moment, welcoming my boyfriend and his mistress into my house. Little did I know it, but the same thing would happen again almost 25 years later, but this time it would be an 18-year-old Ukrainian called Katia that Ronnie brought to meet me, rather than an American supermodel. That night the four of us got drunk and high together and nobody mentioned how fucking weird it was, but I was struggling to hold back the tears. Every now and then when Janice could see I was about to lose it, she would take me into the bedroom, touch up my eye makeup, re-do my hair – at this time it was all short and spiky, like one of Duran Duran – and do her cheerleader bit.
‘Come on, babe, you get back out there,’ she said. ‘You can do this!’
Janice was amazing that night and is still a friend to this day. She’s really great. Insane, but great.
By 6 a.m., though, I’d had enough. I felt utterly broken and defeated. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said to Ronnie. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Kelly stood up, too. ‘Take me home, Ronnie,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a cab.’
But Ronnie didn’t move.
‘No, you go on,’ he said to her. ‘I’m going to stay here with Jo.’
And that was it. He came up to our room and got into bed like nothing had happened, and that was the last we saw of Kelly. Ronnie later swore blind that he’d never touched her. I desperately wanted to believe him as I couldn’t bear the thought of the alternative, so I didn’t mention it again and our relationship was soon back on track. But although I didn’t give Ronnie a hard time, I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t tell him I loved him until he told me first. I think because he didn’t grow up in an affectionate family, he had never been one for grand declarations of love. If I asked him if he loved me he’d say, ‘Yeah, you know I do,’ but it’s not the same thing, really, is it? So it was important for me to hear those words from him, to know he truly loved me . . .
I waited for a whole year before I broke that vow. I stopped myself saying it so many times, but in the end I couldn’t hold out any longer. Well, what can I say? I was crazy about the guy.
17
Just before Christmas in 1982 Ronnie and I had a few weeks in Barbados. It was a holiday of two halves – the first part was about family, then Jaye took the kids home, and Ronnie and I had a bit of a wild one – thankfully, we managed to avoid prison this time. We befriended a vacationing gang of English firemen and together we hung out and partied together, fuelled by rum and coke (the drug, not the beverage, obviously). It wasn’t long after we got home that I started to feel suspiciously queasy.
I can’t possibly be pregnant, I thought. Not after all that partying . . .
Then one chilly January morning I winced as the cold sent pain shooting through my nipples. A visit to the doctor confirmed it: I was pregnant!
I went to find Ronnie to tell him the wonderful news: not difficult to do at this time as he was so deep into freebase that I always knew exactly where he would be. I trotted down the corridor and stuck my head around the bathroom door.
‘Honey, I’m pregnant!’
‘Fantastic!’ He beamed. Then went back to sucking the pipe.
By this time we had moved our family to New York. We had been spending more and more time in the city because Keith and Patti were now living there, plus Ronnie had managed to disentangle himself from Seth Bigland’s clutches and had a new manager, an English solicitor called Nick Cowan, who was based in Manhattan. We found a fab brownstone on West 78th Street with plenty of room for the kids and Jaye: as she was originally from New Jersey, she was happy to head east with us. I loved being in walking distance of the Anglo-American school where we enrolled the kids – and, of course, the shops. After those months of freebasing, it had been a relief to leave behind the madness of LA for t
he relative calm of NYC.
Although the pace was a little less crazy, we still had a houseful on most nights. I might find myself cooking shepherd’s pie for Bob Dylan (a sweet guy, but very quiet) or whipping up spag bol for David Bowie. Other visitors to the Wood residence at that time included Robin Williams, Andy Warhol (who hardly said a word all night, just went round taking photos) and Michael J. Fox. Our old freebasing buddy from LA, Sly Stone, stopped by whenever he was in town or out of jail, and on one occasion turned up wearing red leather trousers and a leather jacket with padded shoulders. ‘Oh, my God, Sly,’ I howled, on seeing the shiny monstrosity. ‘What the hell is THAT?’
Physically, it was a really easy pregnancy: I didn’t get any morning sickness and – as I’d been through it twice before – I knew exactly what to expect. But in many ways it was the hardest of the three. Ronnie was almost totally absent for those nine months, which was ironic as he was always at home. He had little interest in anything besides freebasing – and the more he withdrew from me, the needier I became. Chuck my raging hormones into the mix and you can imagine that my emotions were all over the place.
In the early stages of the pregnancy we went with Nick Cowan and his girlfriend (later wife) Julie to see John McEnroe play tennis at Madison Square Gardens. I remember saying, as we sat down, ‘I’m in a foul mood so nobody talk to me.’ The three of them chatted away for the entire match and – as commanded – didn’t say a single word to me. My grouchiness lessened, but then I felt totally ignored and unloved. In the end I said, in a small voice, ‘Can somebody please talk to me now?’
While I was pregnant, my daily routine almost looked like that of a normal mum. It was quite a novelty to be going to bed at night and waking up in the morning. Ronnie would still be awake, of course, having been in the bathroom freebasing all night. When he went to bed, I’d give the kids their breakfast and Jaye would take them to school while I got on with the household chores. At some point, usually just as the kids were getting home, Ronnie would emerge and I’d cook him breakfast. He’d often spend time drawing with the kids, which they loved, but I never felt able to leave Ronnie alone with them. If I needed to get some groceries I’d take them with me to the store rather than getting him to babysit. The problem was he had a very short fuse, especially when he’d been drinking, and would go ballistic about the most utterly trivial things, like if one of the kids touched his cassettes; but when it came to the important stuff, like manners and discipline – things you’d want a father to be strict about – he would totally ignore it. It was important to me that the kids loved their dad and didn’t see a bad side to him, and it was easier to manage if I was around.
