It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  Ronnie had taken the insane decision to stand in the road and wave his arms to warn oncoming traffic when another vehicle collided with ours and clipped his ankles, resulting in a fractured fibia. I had been trying to get the kids out when it crashed, but thankfully they escaped with a few minor cuts.

  That night I remember lying in hospital, staring at the ceiling. My dad’s just died. I’ve got Crohn’s disease. And now we’ve had this terrible accident. Things can’t get any worse . . .

  We eventually got home from hospital to find our bedroom ceiling had fallen down. Someone up there clearly had a very black sense of humour.

  It was about a year after my diagnosis with Crohn’s that the press found out about my illness: ‘Stone’s Wife In Incurable Disease Shocker,’ ran the cheery headline in the Daily Express. But the response to the article was overwhelming. Hundreds of readers sent me letters, sharing their own experiences of Crohn’s and offering advice. One in particular caught my attention – and it wasn’t just because of the erratic handwriting. The correspondent was a herbalist called Gerald Green, who said he was quite sure he would be able to put my disease into remission for life. Days later, bubbling with an optimism I hadn’t felt for months, I drove to his home in Hastings.

  Gerald’s house was called Shangri-La, although I was unsure whether the place would really prove to be an earthly paradise. I had seen various specialists, but all of them had said the same thing: it was Crohn’s and there was nothing they could do, except keep the symptoms at bay with steroids. Perhaps this would turn out to be another false dawn.

  Once we were sitting down in his cosy living room, Gerald’s opening question surprised me: ‘Tell me, Jo, what do you eat?’

  ‘Oh, pretty much anything,’ I said. ‘Ordinary stuff like chops and roast dinners, whatever I get at the supermarket. I sometimes have those slimming ready-meals. I mix up packet stuff. If I can’t be bothered to cook I like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s.’

  Gerald was nodding wisely while I spoke, then sat back in his chair and smiled at me. ‘I’m afraid, my dear, if you want to get better you’ll have to stop eating all of those foods.’

  I nearly got up and left right then, but Gerald started telling me about how the synthetic chemicals in food can cause the body’s immune system to break down and start attacking the body itself. He explained that I would have to change my diet radically – no wheat, dairy, processed food, sugar or red meat – and eat only organic produce.

  ‘And, er, is alcohol allowed?’ I asked, nervously.

  ‘Better if you don’t, but if you must then stick to organic vodka, which is the cleanest alcoholic drink.’

  To my utter relief, Gerald also told me I must stop taking the steroids. ‘Those pills will kill you before your disease will,’ he said.

  In the three hours I sat talking to him in Shangri-La, Gerald changed my life for ever. With his help, I weaned myself off the steroids, cleared my kitchen cupboards of all processed food and started obsessively to hunt down organic food – not easy, in those days. Holland & Barrett stocked organic dried goods and I met a girl who knew somebody who worked on an organic farm and she’d bring me weekly boxes of produce. It was a start. I planted my own vegetable patch in Ireland, too. Then I heard that if you make a request to supermarkets for a certain product they have to listen, so I went on a one-woman mission to get organic food on the shelves of my local Tesco. At one stage I was seeing the manager nearly every week. ‘You’ve got organic goat’s cheese,’ I’d nag, ‘so surely you can get organic butter and milk as well.’ I eventually wore him down and the number of organic products on the shelves slowly increased.

  I became obsessed – I am to this day. When I went out to a restaurant I wouldn’t necessarily go for what I fancied but instead order whatever sounded purest and least processed, which was usually fish. I tried to make every meal that came out of my kitchen organic. ‘This spaghetti Bolognese is totally organic,’ I’d say, proudly presenting it at the table. Ronnie and the kids got heartily sick of my preaching, although I noticed they didn’t have any complaints when it came to eating the food.

  As my system got rid of all the toxins my skin cleared up, I lost the extra weight, my eyes sparkled and my hair shone. Best of all, I felt like Jo again. In two months, the change in me was nothing short of miraculous.

  But then: disaster. I was at Lorraine’s house when suddenly I doubled over in pain. It was back, that same gut-wrenching agony.

  ‘I can’t believe it, not again!’ I whimpered. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  Lorraine made me an appointment with a doctor friend of her father’s, an intestinal specialist called Professor Farthing, and with a heavy heart I went to see him, fearing he’d put me back on the dreaded steroids. But after a load of tests, he came back with a surprising conclusion.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got Crohn’s disease.’

  ‘What?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘But all those doctors, the specialists, they said . . .’ I trailed off as something else occurred to me. If it wasn’t Crohn’s, why had I been feeling so terrible? Oh, God, not cancer . . .

  ‘The only way we’re going to find out what’s wrong is by having a look inside you,’ said the professor, as if reading my mind. ‘I’d like to book you in for exploratory surgery next week. Hopefully we’ll then have an answer.’

  And the answer was a perforated appendix. They whipped it out while I was in surgery, along with parts of my small and large bowel. The doctors said that all the steroids had prevented it bursting, but if I’d kept taking them they would have continued to mask the symptoms until it did burst – and that was often fatal. So Gerald’s advice to clean out my system and quit the steroids had effectively saved my life.

  ‘So I’m going to be better?’ I asked the professor.

  ‘Yes, you’ll be fine. We’re going to keep you in for two weeks, but after that you’ll be able to live a normal life.’

  I know that doctors would deny a link, but I truly believe that I’d brought my appendix problems on – in part at least – by all the poison I’d put into my system over the years: all the drugs and booze. I had treated my body terribly for the best part of 20 years, so it was no wonder my poor battered appendix had decided enough was enough. Lying in hospital after the operation, I made a vow to myself: from then on I would live a wholly organic life.

  The knowledge that you’ve cheated death changes your outlook. I wanted to be healthy and have a better quality of life. I still wanted to enjoy a drink or two, but the most important thing for me now was that Ronnie and I lived long and happy lives and enjoyed everything we had worked so hard for. The problem was, I was far from convinced that Ronnie would see things the same way, and whenever he came to see me in hospital, smelling of booze from having stopped off at a pub on the way, it never seemed the right time to talk about it. And while I recognized that the operation had been a turning point in my life, it wasn’t until years later that I saw it had been a turning point in my relationship with Ronnie as well.

  Ronnie didn’t prove to be much of a carer. I thought back to those weeks after our car accident, when he had lain in bed with his legs in plaster for days just doing coke and shouting orders at me: ‘Bring me a cup of tea! I need a drink! Get me that book!’ I had waited on him hand and foot. I tried not to feel resentful: after all, I was his wife, it was my job to look after him. And, despite the ups and downs, I was going to stick by him.

  As I was lying there after my operation, a pretty blonde Australian nurse came in, took a look at my chart and told me I needed more painkillers. As they worked through my system over the next few moments the strangest thing started to happen. I was fully conscious, but I couldn’t move my body. Even opening my eyes was a huge effort. I began to panic. This definitely wasn’t right. As the sensation intensified, I started to freak out. Eventually another nurse came into the room and it took all my rapidly dwindling strength to croak, ‘Help!’

  When the nurse
grasped what was happening, she ran out of the room to fetch help, and within moments I could hear a doctor in the room. He injected me with something else. It was the weirdest sensation, like freezing cold water shooting through my veins, and in a minute or two I was totally back to normal. I later discovered that the nurse had miscalculated the amount of drug she was administering and had given me too much. I never saw her again.

  It wasn’t until later that my sister Lize admitted to me that while I was laid up in hospital, Ronnie would invite the pretty young nurses who had been helping to care for me – including the blonde Australian – back to our house for parties. To this day I wonder if that nurse messed up the dose because she was so hung-over from partying with my husband. Who knows?

  22

  Imagine stepping out onto a stage in front of a crowd of 100 thousand fans all screaming their appreciation at you – and this is before you’ve even started doing anything. If it happened to you night after night, year after year, you’d start to think you were pretty fucking special. Now, of those 100 thousand fans, let’s assume half are women. At a conservative estimate (and rock stars aren’t a very conservative breed), a third of those women are going to want to sleep with you. So that’s tens of thousands of girls, many of them young and beautiful, ready to jump into your bed at a nod. That’s a pretty potent gift to know you have in your possession. It’s no wonder that sex and rock ’n’ roll go together like Jack Daniel’s and coke.

  On the road with the Stones there were always girls willing to do anything for Ronnie – and he never got bored of the attention. In the early days of mobiles, soon after Ronnie got his first phone and when texts were still a novelty, I sent him a message as a bit of a joke: ‘Hi, Ronnie, this is Mandy. I got your number from a friend. I’m such a huge fan, it would mean the world to me if you’d text me back!!!’

  I assumed Ronnie would immediately know that I’d sent it; after all, I was the only person who had his mobile number at that point. But moments later ‘Mandy’ got a long, saucy text in reply and I realized he hadn’t a clue who it was. I wrote back an even flirtier message and almost instantly he responded again, this time suggesting we meet up. I sent him a final one-line response: ‘It’s your wife, you fucking idiot.’

  By the early nineties we had moved out of our Wimbledon home – the place was scarred for me with the memory of Dad passing away in the living room – and moved to a beautiful townhouse a few miles away in Richmond. I loved it, but I have good and bad memories of living there. I had come to terms years ago with the fact that groupies were a fact of life on tour, but it was around this time that Ronnie’s infatuation with young girls had started to creep into our everyday lives. Whether we went out or had people to the house – which was virtually every night – Ronnie would flirt continuously and blatantly with whichever female was around, be that a waitress, another party guest or just a random girl in a bar. She didn’t even have to be that attractive.

  Ronnie started to complain that he felt trapped in the Richmond house as there wasn’t enough space and used this as an excuse to disappear to Ireland for weeks at a time while I stayed in London with the kids. Sandymount became his escape from family and responsibilities. He was so much freer than I was – like most mums, if I wanted a big night out I’d have to plan it well in advance and book a babysitter. I remember lying in bed on so many nights wondering where my husband was and why the hell he wasn’t answering his phone. When I finally got hold of him he’d usually tell me he’d been out clubbing. Why on earth would a married man in his fifties want to hang out in nightclubs? I asked myself, over and over again – and I’d always reach the same disturbing conclusion: The only reason he’d go clubbing is to fuel his ego . . . or look for a shag. But Ronnie had an answer and excuse for everything – and I always wanted to believe what he said, as I couldn’t bear the thought of the alternative. One time I went up to join him at Sandymount after one of his extended disappearances and found a drawing he’d done of our bed in Ireland with three girls asleep in it.

  ‘Ronnie,’ I said, as calmly as I could in the circumstances. ‘That’s our bed.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, I’m allowed to draw from my imagination, aren’t I?’

  The flirtations sometimes became infatuations. I could always tell when Ronnie became obsessed with a girl because he immediately turned against me. Well, of course he did – I was in the way! First there was a PR girl called Katrina. Then, a few years later, he got a crush on Lee, a girl he’d met in a nightclub. I think she was about twenty. He dropped her name into conversation the whole time, talking about how much they enjoyed hanging out together. I’d overhear him on the phone: ‘Can’t wait to see you, babe . . .’ He was never that clever about hiding it.

  Ronnie met Lee in Ireland while he was working on one of his solo albums and I could never listen to it: I wasn’t sure whether a couple of songs on it were written for me or her. Their ‘friendship’ had been dragging on for months by the time I finally got hold of Lee’s number and sent her a text, telling her she was coming between my husband and me. She wrote back: ‘I’m sorry, I won’t have anything more to do with him.’

  That wasn’t the end of Lee, though. While we were on tour in Europe, Ronnie disappeared for a night in Spain and when he finally reappeared he said to me, ‘Guess who I bumped into in a club? My mate Lee!’ Here we go again . . .

  I’d blame the booze for the worst of Ronnie’s behaviour. There was a time when he went off to Los Angeles to do some recording with the Stones and after two weeks – during which I’d heard worryingly little from him – Keith rang me up.

  ‘Jo, get your fucking arse over here now,’ he said.

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘Your husband is out of control,’ said Keith. ‘You need to get out here and sort him out.’

  It turned out Ronnie hadn’t been going to the studio to do his overdubs and had even checked out of the hotel where the rest of the boys were staying. My brother Vinnie, who had gone out there to look after him, was beside himself because he hadn’t a clue where he was.

  I flew to LA the next day and when I finally found Ronnie, he was in a terrible state. He had spent the past week downing bottles of whisky and hanging out with a hooker. ‘She’s just my mate,’ he said defensively, when I caught up with them in their hotel room. ‘We’ve been drinking together and went to this crazy party up in the Hills . . .’

  I managed to get Ronnie back on track by making sure he ate and slept and took his vitamins, but he wanted the hooker – his ‘drinking buddy’–to stick around. I had to be nice as pie to that weird bird, all the while hoping and praying she hadn’t been shagging my husband. She most probably had. But I never knew anything for sure and Ronnie always trotted out the same line: We’re just drinking buddies.

  But while I put on a brave face and turned a blind eye to whatever was going on, it made me increasingly unhappy. I loved Ronnie so much that I always wanted to believe what he said, so I forgave him. But with each of these passing flings, or infatuations or whatever they were, the more insecure I felt about myself. I began to feel ugly. It chipped away at my self-confidence. If I’d known then what I do now I’d have made sure I was more independent in our marriage and kept more of a sense of my own identity, but I was so caught up with looking after Ronnie and raising our kids – the people that gave my life meaning – that I didn’t focus on myself at all.

  I often think that if it hadn’t been for my kids I’d have ended up a total mess. Jamie, Ty and Leah, not forgetting Jesse, were, and remain, the most important things in the world to me. They helped keep me sane through the insanity of my life with Ronnie. He got so much public adoration that I think he struggled with one-to-one relationships. He was in his own world, at the centre of his universe, and the rest of us were in his orbit. It is very hard to get love from a performer who is adored on such an enormous scale. So it was the kids who were my great love, my stabilizer and my reason to keep plugging on through
the tough times. When I was having a bad day I would gather them up in a huge cuddle, shower them with kisses and think, If it wasn’t for you, my babies, I’d probably have lost the plot a long time ago . . .

  My three children were growing up into such different characters. There was Jamie, Mr Extrovert, whose naughty streak would get him into trouble in a few years’ time. From a young age he had boundless confidence. I remember once there was a problem with the tube on his journey home from school, so he knocked on the door of the first house he came across and asked if he could use their phone to call me. He’s never had any fear. Jamie was the strongest academically of the kids, so it was unfortunate he got expelled from school for smoking pot. He took the blame for some other lads, though, which is typically loyal of him.

  Leah could make anyone laugh. She had loads and loads of friends at school – and still does today. Everybody loved Leah. She was queen bee. When we were in New York, her teacher called me one day and told me Leah would only play with the girls whose dresses she liked. It was a relief when we came back to London where they had school uniforms! I was really proud that she stayed on at school to do her A levels.

  And then Ty, my cute little honey. From a young age he was incredibly self-sufficient. I would put his cereal and milk on a tray in the bedroom and in the morning he’d get out of his little bed, come into our room and make his cereal, then turn on our TV and watch cartoons while we had a bit more sleep. Like me, he hated school. The first day I left him at the nursery near our home in Wimbledon he cried and cried, and it just broke my heart. From then on, I would let him bunk off school at the feeblest of excuses.

  ‘Mum, I’m not feeling too well today,’ he would say.

  ‘That’s okay, darling. You stay at home.’ Just like my mum had done with me.