It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  The last years of our relationship were ruled by Ronnie’s alcoholism. The following is taken from my diary in 2005, but it really could have been from any year during the last decade that we were together.

  7 January

  After six days of sticking to his New Year’s Resolution and not drinking Ronnie slipped. What a shame, he was doing so good. Here we go again . . .

  17 January

  Woke today at 8.30. The old man lay still sleeping and stinking of booze but he woke feeling positive and said he was gonna get back on track. Great, I thought . . . But when we sat down to dinner R was well on his way and getting louder. I added water to his strong drink and he went mad and left the table.

  12 February

  When we got home Ronnie was horribly drunk. I had to undress him as he lay on the floor then he threw up all over the bathroom floor, so at 3 in the morning I was mopping up sick. This is fucked up. Or rather, he is VERY ILL.

  14 February

  Cooked Valentine’s dinner mainly because can’t bear to go out with Ronnie cos he’s drinking. UGGH . . .

  2 March

  Went for dinner with Jimmy and pals at River Café . . . Ronnie drunk before we even got there.

  6 March

  Ronnie drunk on sake. Very pissed. Another awful night.

  8 March

  Got a migraine last night – must have been when I saw how pissed old man was getting. Cooked dinner for Lize and Leah, Ronnie, Ty and all his pals. In the night Ronnie started to choke and gurgle. I got him out of bed and into the bathroom where he fell over like a toy soldier. Oh my, it was awful. But got him up, made him sleep on his side, he knew nothing of it!!!

  For the whole time I’d known him, Ronnie had always drunk huge amounts, but when we’d got pissed together in the early days we’d had a real laugh. Now, more often than not, Ronnie’s binges would end with him laying into me about something. Maybe his body couldn’t tolerate the alcohol as well now that he was getting older – or perhaps it was just me that he couldn’t tolerate.

  I actually find it so sad to think about the bad times. One night I was asleep when Ronnie burst into our bedroom at Holmwood, drunk as a skunk, and turned on all the lights.

  ‘There’s no fucking vodka in the house!’ he yelled. ‘Where’s the fucking vodka?’

  ‘Ronnie, please,’ I said, pulling the covers over my head. ‘I’m asleep! Just leave me alone.’

  On that occasion he really lost it. He came over to the bed and the poison just started pouring out of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll throw acid in your face . . . You’d better watch out because I know people . . .’

  It was like he was possessed (which, in a way, he was).

  After he went back downstairs I cried myself to sleep, feeling broken-hearted and totally helpless, and when he eventually woke up the next day I asked him if he remembered what had happened the night before.

  ‘No,’ he said, sleepily. ‘Was it a good night? Coffee would be lovely, Jo . . .’

  When Ronnie was on a real roll he would go on drinking for days and days until he literally collapsed from exhaustion, but when he woke up it was like I had my old Ronnie back. For the next day or two he would be absolutely great and I’d begin to relax, but then the drinking would start again and he’d be such hard work that I couldn’t imagine putting up with another day of it. But that’s typical of living with an alcoholic.

  My worst fears were coming true: the booze was making Ronnie treat me in the same way that his dad had treated his mum. And while I usually got the worst of it, he’d occasionally freak out with the kids, too. I had managed to protect them from it when they were growing up, but now they were older they were far more aware of what was going on. I remember a holiday in Barbados when Leah was upset because Ronnie refused to leave a bar. They ended up screaming at each other in the street and I had to break it up.

  I had been sucked into Ronnie’s alcoholism and had become his co-dependent: covering for him, caring for him and trying to keep our lives together while all the time I was being dragged down with him. My sister Lize would get so angry about the way he talked to me and kept asking why I put up with it, but I would just make excuses for him. ‘Oh, he was drinking last night . . . He hasn’t had much sleep . . . He’s been working really hard . . .’

  I became so caught up in Ronnie’s illness that at times I felt like I was drowning in his alcoholism. It was a horrible, hopeless feeling. I lost all my confidence and became this meek, apologetic woman who would do anything just to keep the peace. On Lize’s wedding day Ronnie decided he’d had enough at 10 p.m. and wanted to go home, but instead of staying on to enjoy myself alone I left without question. On my own sister’s wedding day!

  You might wonder why I stuck with Ronnie through all this, but when someone talks to you so badly it eats away at your self-esteem until you don’t feel you’re worthy of anyone else. While I knew I didn’t deserve to be treated that way (and that it was making me deeply unhappy), it didn’t cross my mind for a moment to leave Ronnie. In the early years we had done all these stupid things together – tangled with the Mafia, police, drugs, prison – yet I had always been totally unafraid. It was always ‘Wooo, let’s go!’ But I wasn’t fearless now: I was full of fear. Full of fear that I was going to be on my own, that I wouldn’t be able to cope. Ronnie’s alcoholism had crushed my spirit and reduced me to an insecure wreck. And when I look back at photos of the two of us from this time, my arms always wrapped tightly around Ronnie’s neck, clinging on as if for dear life, I just think, Oh, Jo, what the fuck were you doing?

  Throughout all this I hung on to my conviction that the booze was to blame for the worst of his behaviour; in my mind all I had to do was get him to quit and we’d be back on track. In 2000, Ronnie acknowledged he had a drinking problem and, to my immense relief, checked himself into the Priory for a week, but it wasn’t long before he had slipped back into old habits. This began a pattern over the next few years of him going into rehab, staying sober for a few weeks and then relapsing. In 2002 he flew to Cottonwood, a famously tough clinic in Arizona, to prepare for the Stones’ Forty Licks tour, but straight afterwards we went to a spa for a few days and he ordered a white wine spritzer. He thought he’d be able to control it, but from there it was just a short hop back to vodka.

  Ronnie tried his best to stay clean for Forty Licks and A Bigger Bang and had counsellors and life coaches with him on the road to keep him on the straight and narrow, but he never managed it completely. During our marriage, I think the longest he ever stayed sober was about six weeks. I would see him on stage, know instantly that he’d had a drink, and my heart would sink. Mick had decreed that one of my responsibilities as Ronnie’s PA was to keep him sober, but I’d had no training in how to achieve that so it was an absolute disaster, an additional pressure on our relationship that we really didn’t need. Suddenly I was watching Ronnie at every moment of the day, petrified he was going to have a drink – and, of course, the more someone feels they can’t have a drink, the more they want one. Then Mick would find out and all hell would break loose again.

  ‘I’m so tired. I argued with Ronnie about his alcoholism till the early hours,’ I wrote in my diary, while we were on tour in Denver. ‘He’s been taken over again. On the plane R had a couple of vodkas, by the time he got to the hotel he was gone . . . He hated the room (which was nice) and marched out. Here we go . . .’

  Then I jotted down a poem:

  I hate my husband’s alcoholism, I really do.

  I hate the way he talks to me, I really do.

  I hate it when his illness takes over him, I really do.

  I want Ronnie back, I really do.

  I would work as hard as I could when we were on tour, but nothing was ever good enough for Ronnie when he was drunk. I remember many nights when we’d be in the car driving back to the hotel, with security sitting in the front pretending not to listen while Ronnie yelled at me about something or other.

  But
the instant he got up on stage all was forgiven. He was my guitar hero. Sometimes I’d stand in front of the stage, look up at him and think, I’m married to a genius. I was totally in awe of his talent. In those moments I was so proud to be his wife that it seemed worth putting up with a bit of crap. I hated the way the alcohol made Ronnie treat me when he was ‘taken over’, as I put it in my diary. And what kept me going through all the bad times was my rock-solid belief that one day I would help Ronnie stop drinking. When he was sober, our problems would be over and we would be happy together. After all, our lives over the years had been such a fabulous fairytale, surely we’d get the happily-ever-after, too.

  27

  Every time we passed through Los Angeles on tour I would always visit this fantastic organic supermarket called Mrs Gooch’s, just off Rodeo Drive. I still remember the first time I walked through its doors: for an organic addict it was like entering Nirvana. Piles of organic vegetables still covered with soil! Freshly baked organic sourdough bread! Even the air in the shop smelt like it was doing me good. I hadn’t been so infatuated with a shop since I’d walked into the Ragged Priest all those years ago – except this time I was lusting after organic carrots rather than velvet hot-pants. But the real revelation was Mrs Gooch’s huge selection of organic beauty products. Nowadays you can buy organic shampoo in Asda, but back then such products were far from mainstream in the UK, so I would bulk-buy organic face cream, toothpaste, deodorant, bath salts and shower gel to take home.

  It wasn’t until my brother Vinnie gave me a book called The Fragrant Pharmacy, about the benefits and uses of essential oils, that I had the idea of making my own organic beauty products. In the book the author, Valerie Ann Worwood, explains how you can easily make your own moisturizer, face scrubs, bath oils, perfume, even tooth powder. It sounded fun, and far cheaper than shipping those boxes back from Mrs Gooch’s. So, with the help of my new assistant, Emily, who had worked in Jamie’s office for years and would soon become my invaluable right-hand woman, we ordered a load of essential oils, base oils, droppers and bottles and I stuck a piece of wood over the bath in one of our spare bathrooms and set up my own little lab. Once I got started, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to create your own products. Take some hazelnut oil, add fifteen drops of rose and five each of camomile, lavender and lemon–et voila! I designed labels for my bottles of ‘Jo’s Oil’, burning the edges for a vintage feel, and gave them to my girlfriends as presents. As I learnt more about the different oils, I began experimenting with recipes to get them just right. It was just like 20 years earlier when I had locked myself away in the bathroom for hours at a time to freebase, except 100 per cent organic and a hell of a lot less antisocial.

  I’d had my home laboratory for a couple of years when Donna, who worked in our office, suggested that I think about producing the oils professionally. I laughed. As if I have time to do that! Who’s going to look after Ronnie and the kids? But, though I didn’t realize it at that moment, she had planted a seed.

  A few weeks after this conversation with Donna I returned to Holmwood after a trip to the supermarket. The house was totally silent. Ronnie was in his studio working on a painting and having his obligatory pint; Leah was out with her friends; Ty had gone travelling; Jamie had left home ages ago and had his own family – just as the other kids would before long. And as I stood in the kitchen, unpacking the endless bags of shopping and planning dinner, I became aware of a little voice inside my head.

  Is this it for you, Jo? Just shopping and cooking? Is this how you’re going to spend the rest of your life?

  And then, as if in reply, another voice piped up: Perhaps you should try to make a go of those oils, after all . . .

  I rang up my friend, Josephine Fairley, who had been a beauty editor before she’d started the organic chocolatier Green & Black’s, and she gave me the name of Dr Colette Haydon, a French cosmetologist. I took Colette two of the original oil blends that I had mixed in my bathroom lab, one fresh and citrussy, the other musky and woody, and we got to work. The next step was to set up a meeting with a PR company. At this point I didn’t have anything to show them – not even any visuals – but I wanted to know if they thought my concept for a line of organic yet luxurious beauty products had potential. There was already a small selection of organic products on the market, but the packaging tended to be either rather stark and minimalist or hippie-ish and homespun. I wanted to create beautiful, high-end products that felt like a luxury purchase: in other words, organic products that didn’t actually look organic.

  The meeting was a disaster. I was hopelessly out of my depth. I had travelled the world and chatted to all sorts of people, but when it came to promoting my own venture my confidence deserted me. I don’t think I said a word for the entire meeting apart from ‘Hello’. I just sat there smiling inanely, silently furious with myself, while the girls from my office, Donna and Emily, did all the talking on my behalf.

  Unsurprisingly, the PR girl was unimpressed. ‘Oh, we have lots of things like this,’ she said. ‘Wives of rock stars coming in and wanting to set up their own business. It never works.’

  Ronnie was equally dismissive. ‘You’ll never get that together,’ he said. His lack of confidence in my idea didn’t put me off, though – quite the opposite. The more people told me I couldn’t do it and it wouldn’t work, the more I wanted to prove them wrong. But although I had full confidence in my concept, we didn’t exactly get off to a flying start. I didn’t have any experience in setting up a business – or in the beauty industry – so it took Donna, Emily and me a while to find our feet. Put it this way: we kissed a lot of frogs before we found our princes.

  In the early days a businessman – let’s call him Len – came to meet us to discuss a potential licensing deal. We were sitting around the table, deep in conversation about royalties and projected demand, when without warning Len abruptly changed the subject.

  ‘You know, I love nothing better than going down on a lady,’ he said.

  ‘I’m . . . Er – sorry?’ I assumed that I’d misheard.

  ‘I was just saying that I really enjoy giving head,’ purred Len.

  Donna, Emily and I looked at each other with wide eyes, clearly all thinking the same thing: What the fuck? There we were, hoping to get a licensing deal, and Len was talking oral sex. I have no idea why he brought it up; perhaps he thought us ‘ladies’ would be so impressed by his generosity as a lover that it would seal the deal. Somehow we managed to get through the rest of the meeting, but after he left we just cracked up. Needless to say we didn’t go with Len – in either sense.

  From the very beginning I was involved with every aspect of the process. I put together a business proposal and approached the bank for a loan, on which Ronnie acted as guarantor. I worked closely with Colette on the formulation of the products, using my two original oil blends as the basis. I had clear ideas about the look of the packaging too, which I wanted to have the vintage feel of the black and gold Biba logo, so I put together a mood board with sketches and cuttings for the designers.

  Once we’d got some samples of the products and the packaging, it was time to tackle the big question: would anyone actually want to buy the stuff? Our first stop was a meeting with the buyer at the legendary London department store, Harvey Nichols. By this time I had grown in confidence, yet even so I felt utterly terrified as we sat in that meeting taking her through the samples. I had invested so much of myself in the project that I knew I’d take it personally if we got a negative response.

  ‘So what do you think?’ I asked nervously, once we’d finished our pitch.

  ‘Well, I can see it’s not quite ready yet,’ said the buyer. ‘But, yes, I think we’ll take it.’

  Oh. My. God. I was so shocked that I don’t think I said anything for the rest of the meeting, just smiled and nodded; but once we got out into the street I just screamed my head off. It was such an incredible feeling. We’d done it!

  2005 was a big year for me. Not
only did I turn 50 but in October I gave birth to my fourth baby: Jo Wood Organics. The range consisted of soap, bath oil, body lotion, body spray and body oil in two fragrances, Usiku and Amka, which are Swahili words meaning ‘night’ and ‘awake’, a nod to Mum’s African heritage. We had naïvely reckoned the process would take about six months from start to finish, but in the end it took nearly three years to get the products into the stores. What really held things up was my insistence that we had to get the products certified as organic and that all the packaging should be recyclable. There was no question that we would go any other way but it meant we had to endure a few delays.

  In the run-up to the official launch I was promoting my products like crazy. At first I found the prospect of press interviews terrifying, but when I discovered how friendly and interested people were, I started to relax and enjoy myself. To my delight, my products popped up in Vogue, Elle–all the glossy mags. My friends really got behind the range, too: Jerry and Patti spread the word, and Kate still asks for one of my salt scrubs whenever I see her. I was getting such fantastic PR coverage it was worth millions in advertising.

  In August we hit the road again for the American leg of A Bigger Bang and this time I wasn’t only working as Ronnie’s PA: I was busy promoting my products as well. At every major city we stopped in, I set up appointments with buyers at the big department stores and press interviews with all the beauty editors and local TV stations to spread the word about Jo Wood Organics. Of course, when it came to getting press coverage, it helped hugely that I was the wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. I knew I had a fantastic product, but he was my foot in the door. But while Ronnie might have seemed supportive to the outside world, I never got the impression that he was particularly keen on his wife’s new venture. He liked me safely tucked away in the background, looking after him, not out there getting attention for my own achievements. Perhaps that was why he made little digs at me, telling me I was fat or that my hair looked like a dog’s ears.