by Jo Wood
I tried to tell Ronnie that he should slow down with the freebase, but it was like talking to the wall. On one occasion he was having a meeting with record-company executives in our living room and kept popping out for another hit, leaving me to cover for him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I’d say. ‘Ronnie’s got a really upset tummy. My poor Ronnie’s been up all night!’ But then he would come back downstairs and I’d take one look at him, his face like a crazy man’s, and think, They must know what’s going on.
It wasn’t just the drugs: Ronnie was drinking so much, too. Probably no more than before I was pregnant, but now that I wasn’t getting wasted with him I noticed it much more. He could be very moody when he was drunk – and for his part, he hated that I wasn’t out there rocking with him. Ronnie had fallen for wild, crazy, dancing-on-tables Jo, not sober, sensible, having-a-nap Jo. In the later stages of my pregnancy we had tickets to a Tina Turner gig, but I was struck down with a really nasty bout of food poisoning. I remember dragging myself out of bed to get ready and being violently ill in the shower. It was so bad that I started to worry about the baby. Just before it was time to leave, Ronnie came into the bedroom to find me in a pale, shaky heap on the bed.
‘Come on, Jo, we’ve got to go!’ he said. ‘Get up, get yourself ready.’
‘I’m really sorry but I can’t come. I feel terrible.’
‘Well, I’m going on my own, then. See you later.’ And he turned away.
I couldn’t believe it. ‘Ronnie, I’m really ill,’ I said. ‘I think I might need to go to hospital. Are you just going to leave me here on my own? I’m eight months pregnant!’
In the end he stayed, albeit grudgingly.
Throughout all this, though, I adored my man as much as ever – and I was positive he loved me, too. I really couldn’t see much bad in him: the drugs and booze were to blame for the worst of his behaviour. It certainly never once crossed my mind that we should split up – Christ, no! I remember lying in bed one night, stroking my bump, and thinking, If Ronnie dies before I do, then what on earth will I do? How could I exist without him? And we were still having so much fun. We’d gone on holiday to Nassau when I was about five months pregnant and there’s a photo of me lying on my front on the sand looking totally normal – I had dug a hole in the sand for my bump and lowered myself onto it. There were a lot of laughs, and life was generally pretty good.
As my due date approached I had a couple of false alarms, but when eventually I went into labour, on 21 August 1983, it happened fast.
‘You’re only three centimetres dilated so you’ve got a few hours to go yet, dear,’ a nurse told me, when we arrived at the hospital. ‘You just lie there and I’ll see you later.’
As soon as she left I turned to Ronnie, who was getting busy with his sketchbook, and said, ‘I’m having this baby right now, I just know it!’
‘Sssh, keep still, I’m drawing you . . .’
Moments later, I felt the familiar pressure down below and hollered for the nurse. She checked me once again – and her shocked expression said it all. ‘We need to get you to the delivery room,’ she said. ‘Now!’
So they ran me down there and in three quick pushes the baby was out. My darling Tyrone: a calm, peaceful baby who would grow into a wonderfully sweet-natured little boy. Ronnie had suggested the name – one of our friends, a keyboard player, was called Tyrone Davis – and I had instantly loved it, although it got a mixed reception from some of our mates.
‘You can’t call that kid Tyrone!’ said one. ‘Tyrone is that big black dude who lives on the corner of the block and when there’s any trouble people say, “Quick! Get Tyrone!”’
I laughed. ‘Well, he’s just going to have to be the big white dude instead.’
It was my second day in hospital after Ty’s birth and I was sitting up in bed feeding my little boy, feeling totally in love and at peace, when Ronnie rocked up.
‘Hey, baby,’ he said, dropping a kiss on my and his son’s head. ‘I’ve bought you something.’
Oh, my honey, I thought happily. Could it be flowers? Jewellery, perhaps?
Instead Ronnie handed me a packet of white powder. ‘A little something to help you get back on track.’ It was cocaine.
‘Are you out of your mind, Ronnie? I don’t want that! And you can’t leave it here,’ I added, as he went to squirrel it away in the cabinet. ‘This is a hospital, for fuck’s sake!’
The truth was that I was in no hurry at all to – as Ronnie put it–‘get back on track’. When I’d had Leah I couldn’t wait to return to partying with the boys, but this time Ronnie had been doing so much freebase it had really put me off. I still wanted to have fun, to have a laugh and a line, but I was beginning to feel I wanted more in my life than just getting out of my skull every night. It was plainly obvious, however, that Ronnie didn’t feel the same – and Ty’s birth did nothing to change that.
Later that summer, we rented a house by the beach in the Hamptons. Friends dipped in and out, including singer, Billy Idol, and his girlfriend, Perri Lister – we’d been hanging out with them a lot in New York. During our stay a magazine commissioned the photographer, Ken Regan, to take some family photos of us for an ‘at home’ spread. On the day of the shoot I was running around, trying to get Leah and Jamie dressed, Ty snuggled up on my shoulder, when I realized that Ronnie had vanished. He still hadn’t reappeared by late morning when Ken had already set up for the first shot.
I eventually found him sitting down by the water’s edge knocking back tequila slammers on his own. I was so upset: we were lucky enough to be getting some really special photos with our new son and here he was, blind drunk, his hair sticking in sweaty clumps to his forehead. I’ll say one thing for Ronnie, though: he can certainly pull himself together when he needs to. He looks absolutely fine in the photos. But I was furious.
‘I can’t live with Ronnie any more,’ I sobbed to my friend, Lorraine. ‘He’s just gone completely insane. He spent the whole of my pregnancy in the bathroom.’
It was six weeks after Ty’s birth and we had come to England to introduce the new arrival to our friends and family. We were staying with Lorraine, now married to the rock drummer, Simon Kirke, and I was pouring my heart out to her. I was no angel, true, but Ronnie’s freebasing had got totally out of hand.
‘You know what you should do, Jo?’ she said. ‘You should put Ronnie into rehab.’
‘Rehab? What’s that?’ I had never even heard of it. This was the early eighties, remember, before a stint in rehab replaced the spa as the stressed-out celebrity’s bolthole of choice.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll find a suitable clinic and then you need to sit Ronnie down and confront him about the freebasing,’ said Lorraine. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’
But Ronnie didn’t understand. He went completely bananas.
‘Are you fucking crazy?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to be locked away in some nuthouse! No way.’
Ronnie ranted and raved but in the end, miraculously, he agreed to give it a go for the sake of the family. A few days later, Simon and I drove him to the clinic in Devon that Lorraine had recommended. I must say, even at the most serious times Ronnie could be very entertaining. On the drive down he insisted we stop off at a few pubs and he was decidedly the worse for wear when we arrived. On check-in the receptionist asked for payment of £30,000. Ronnie turned round and said, ‘Bloody hell, I didn’t know I was that ill.’ He had his blood tested, and the nurse asked what his sleeping pattern was. He said: ‘Knit one, purl one . . .’ Simon and I just stood there, trying not to snigger.
He stayed for two weeks and when I drove down to collect him I was so proud that he had stuck with it. He made me stop at the first pub we passed so he could have a pint of Guinness, but he never touched freebase again.
Now, however, we had to deal with the fall-out from the Bathroom Years. The cost of all those drugs – not to mention Seth’s highly questionable management technique – had left us completely skint. Ronnie’
s career and financial affairs were now in the hands of Nick Cowan, who would go on to manage him for the next 20 years. I liked and trusted Nick and enjoyed hanging out with him and Julie, but as a manager he would turn out to be another mistake. I would often catch him staring into space and assume he was deep in thought, dreaming up ingenious ways to make us money, but with hindsight I think his mind was just wandering.
We had been introduced to Nick in LA by a shady businessman, let’s call him Harry, and somehow he, too, had become tangled up in running our affairs. I’m not sure what his official role was, but it was Harry who put us on a tight budget, giving me just $200 a week to run the household and feed the family. I was instantly suspicious of him, especially because the money he gave me always smelt of mildew. Once on tour he tried to talk his way into Keith’s hotel room, but Keith couldn’t stand him and said he would only let him in if he paid him 50 thousand in cash. A short while later Mr Mildew reappeared with a suitcase stuffed full of dollars. We were scrimping at the time, so this made me furious. I grew to distrust Harry big-time, but I was too young and too naïve to know how to deal with it. It was a struggle to keep to our tight budget, and it was new to us, but I was finally learning to live within our means – although occasionally I’d spot a fab pair of shoes and have to splurge. Ronnie found it much harder: he had no concept of money. Bill Wyman recently told me about the time Ronnie went to the guys in the band to ask for a loan, as we couldn’t pay the kids’ school fees. After pocketing the cash he went straight out and bought himself a Rolex.
Then one day a debt collector turned up on our doorstep in New York and our problems suddenly got much worse.
‘You owe Seth Bigland a hundred and fifty grand for cocaine,’ grunted this heavy, who was almost as wide as he was tall. ‘And I’m here to see that he gets it.’
It turned out that Ronnie’s ex-manager had ended up in jail after police had raided his home and found a huge vault containing a coke lab and dozens of guns and bombs. I was just surprised that sex-mad Trixie, his wife, had let the officers get out fully dressed.
My first instinct was to go straight to the police and tell them this bloke was trying to extort money from us. After all, we had done nothing wrong; we didn’t have anything to hide. But Nick Cowan was adamant we should get out of the country while he and Harry cleared up the mess, so we packed up the family and got on a flight to Mexico.
I can think of worse places to be a fugitive than an ex-president’s house on a beach in Cancún. Ty was six months old and we spent our days playing with the kids in the surf and hired a jeep to explore the area, which was then largely an undeveloped expanse of palm-fringed white sand. It was our second visit to Mexico that year, as a few months earlier the Stones had gone there to film a video for their new single. Over the years I had nagged and nagged Mick to let me appear in one of the videos and, to my amazed delight, this time he finally gave in. The song was ‘She’s So Hot’–although in the video I look far from that. I was to play a little old lady in a grey wig, shawl and long floral dress alongside Bill Wyman as my equally doddery husband. Gee, thanks, Mick . . .
On the day of the shoot I was shown to the set, where Bill and I were going to be sitting in front of a large window in our rocking chairs. I couldn’t understand why the scenery was surrounded with all this plastic sheeting until the director yelled, ‘Action!’ I heard a loud rumbling, then thousands of gallons of water broke through the window with such force that I was pushed off my chair. I was drenched, and the shock you can see on my face in that video is entirely genuine.
We were in hiding in Cancún for six weeks, and when we got back to New York the Seth problem had disappeared – but our financial situation was worse than ever. We were trying to sell our house in LA and, thanks to Mick and Keith’s spectacular fall-out over Mick’s solo ambitions, it looked highly unlikely there would be another Stones tour for the foreseeable future, which meant Ronnie’s main source of income had dried up.
We needed to make some money – fast. Ronnie was an undeniably talented artist and had always enjoyed drawing and painting as a hobby, and now seemed like the ideal time to see if he could make it work as a day job. He borrowed an art studio in San Francisco and for two weeks he shut himself away and threw himself into his work. That first creative frenzy produced some great woodcuts of Chuck Berry and John Lennon that Nick Cowan had no trouble selling, and pretty soon the money started to dribble in.
By Tyrone’s first birthday it really felt like Ronnie and I were back on track. After Ty’s birth he had given me a beautiful ring set with five diamonds: ‘One for each of us.’ Sure, we’d had a few bumps along the road, but I knew our love was still rock-solid. Things were good – no, they were great. As our seven-year anniversary approached in September 1984, we went to Jamaica to stay with Keith and Patti to celebrate. And it was here that my life would take another totally unexpected turn.
18
‘Ronnie, what the hell is wrong with you?’
We’d been at Keith and Patti’s house in Ochos Rios in Jamaica for three blissful weeks, but in the run-up to our anniversary Ronnie had been acting really weird. Sort of shifty and twitchy, as if he was up to something he didn’t want me to know about. I’d tried to ignore it and dearly hoped that whatever it was would just blow over, but if anything he was getting worse – and now that the two of us had some rare time alone together, I was determined to find out what was up.
We were having an anniversary dinner at a restaurant Keith had described as the most romantic on the island. Our candlelit table was right next to a waterfall and surrounded by lush greenery twinkling with fairy lights: all pretty idyllic, except that Ronnie had barely spoken to me since we’d sat down and was now staring at the menu as if it was written in Chinese.
‘Ronnie?’ I tried again, raising my voice over the rush of water. ‘Please, just tell me – what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ he muttered, still avoiding eye contact.
The waiter came over, pen hovering expectantly over his pad, but Ronnie irritably waved him away and went back to the menu. And then, just as I was giving up any hope of a romantic evening, he suddenly blurted out: ‘Jo, will you marry me?’
Well, I certainly hadn’t been expecting that.
It wasn’t the first time Ronnie had proposed – during the early years of our relationship he had frequently popped the question, but I had always turned him down. Not because I didn’t love him enough – the man was my whole world and I adored him – but he had never asked in a way that was romantic or even sincere: usually just a drunken ‘Come on, Jo, marry me.’ More to the point, I was perfectly happy being his girlfriend; after all, marriage hadn’t exactly worked out well for either of us the first time round. So, because I’d turned him down so many times, I’d assumed Ronnie had given up asking, but now, as I looked at his gorgeous little face peeking over the top of the menu, all hopeful and worried, I just thought, Well, why the hell not?
‘Oh, all right, then,’ I finally said. ‘Now, are you going to have the fish or the chicken?’
Keith always claims full responsibility for our wedding. Flush with happiness after his own marriage to Patti, he had apparently been nagging Ronnie about proposing to me the whole time we’d been in Jamaica. He virtually jumped on us as soon as we walked in the door after dinner. ‘So come on, come on, did you do it, then?’ I don’t really know who was happier that night: the future Mr and Mrs Ronnie Wood or Cupid Keith.
I arranged the whole wedding from scratch in three weeks. We returned to England in December for Christmas and, with Lorraine’s help, threw everything together in time for the big day, which was to be 2 January 1985. I designed my white lace and satin dress and had it run up for just £300. I carried a bunch of red roses: the scarlet woman getting married. Leah and Domino, Lorraine’s daughter, were bridesmaids, wearing little lace dresses, my sister Lize was chief bridesmaid in a vintage lace dress, and Jamie and Jesse were our pages. I put them �
� and Ronnie – in tuxedos and red bow ties, and found a vintage knitted outfit with a red woollen cap for Ty. I really enjoyed getting the whole thing together.
I had wanted to be married in church, but being a Catholic/Jewish-ish divorcee made this out of the question, so we decided to get the official bit done in a register office, then go for a blessing in a C of E church. We picked one in Denham, Buckinghamshire, not far from where Ronnie’s parents lived so we could use their address. In the run-up to the wedding Ronnie and I had to meet the vicar every week so he could talk to us about the sanctity of marriage and the importance of regularly attending church, blah blah blah . . . Pretty much wasted on a couple who’d been living in sin for seven years and had already clocked up four kids between them.
On the night before the wedding I went to the theatre and dinner with the girls, then stayed at Lorraine’s house, sharing a bed with Lize. Meanwhile Ronnie took his mates, including the comedian, Peter Cook, and my brother Paul, out for his stag. The group roamed around various seedy joints in Soho, but because it was New Year’s Day nothing much was open and after they’d been thrown out of a strip joint for rowdy behaviour, they ended up drinking champagne in the lobby of the Ritz. They stayed there, boozing and banging away on the grand piano, until the hotel’s genteel clientele started wandering down for breakfast. Paul was so epically hung-over that day that he barely remembers surviving the wedding.
