by Jo Wood
I had a really fabulous party at Holmwood for my fiftieth birthday in March, with a marquee in the garden, male strippers (a gift from my elder son) and Jamie Oliver himself doing the catering, but the following day Ronnie looked at me and said, ‘I never thought I’d ever be married to a fifty-year-old.’ It was the way he said it: not even with a smile and a chuckle, but a despondent shake of his head, as if I had somehow let him down by daring to get older. They were just throwaway comments, but they really hit home, making me feel increasingly insecure about the way I looked.
In Ronnie’s eyes, I think there was room for just one star in the family – and that was Ronnie Wood. When we were in LA on tour, staying at the Four Seasons, I arranged a meeting with the buyers of Neiman Marcus to see if they’d be interested in stocking my products. We didn’t really have parties in our hotel rooms that often any more, but the night before my meeting Ronnie invited literally everyone up to our room, knowing that I had to be up early the next morning. He partied tirelessly (and noisily) well into the early hours. I begged them to keep the noise down but I got hardly any sleep that night. Was it jealousy or just pettiness? I have no idea. But I’m sure Ronnie could sense that working on my business was helping me to regain my confidence and get my mojo back again. I was slowly emerging from his shadow and finding my feet as an independent woman. And, bearing in mind what would happen to me in the next few years, I’m so thankful I did.
The launch party for Jo Wood Organics was on 26 October 2005.
The Stones were still on tour, so I had to leave Ronnie in North Carolina, from where they were heading up to Canada, and fly back to London by myself. Incredibly, it was the first time I’d flown anywhere on my own for 30 years.
The party was held in Harvey Nichols’s Fifth Floor Bar, fuelled by crates of champagne and dozens of chocolate cupcakes decorated with the gold Jo Wood Organics logo. Loads of people came, not just friends, such as Cilla Black and the fashion designer, Betty Jackson, but all the magazine editors as well. It was a brilliant night, but at the end of the party, the culmination of years of hard work, I suddenly got so possessive over my products that I didn’t want anyone to take the goodie bags!
Looking back I still feel immensely proud of what we achieved. Nowadays everything organic is in the mainstream – and I do feel a little bit responsible for that. When I go into the supermarket and see shelves and shelves of organic products I think that perhaps I helped to get them there. And having seen the incredible benefits an organic lifestyle has brought to my body and mind, I’m still as ‘addicted’ (thank you, Keith!) as ever.
The day after my party I flew to Canada on a high from the successful launch. I was excited to see Ronnie and tell him how well it had gone, so I dumped my bags at the hotel and went straight to the arena. When I finally found him he wasn’t alone. He was all over a group of giggling young girls – and, judging by their body language, they obviously all knew each other pretty well. I kept my distance for a moment and heard them laughing about a party Ronnie had thrown the night before and what a wild time they’d had. I had so desperately hoped that I would come back to find that he had missed me and was thrilled to see me – but, no, here we were again. It was such a horrible feeling.
Come on, Jo, I thought wearily. Put on a smile and get over there. Go and laugh and make friends with these girls who are young enough to be your daughters . . .
It was what I’d been doing for the last 30 years, but while Ronnie and I had got older, the girls had stayed the same age. Ronnie swore blind nothing had happened with them, of course, just as he always did. And yet again I chose to ignore my doubts and fears and to believe him. The alternative was just too painful to consider.
28
In January 2008 we went on a family holiday to Kenya. I flew out first with Leah and her fiancé, Jack, as Ronnie had to stay in London for the launch of Martin Scorsese’s Stones film, Shine a Light. I was excited about returning to Kenya: we had first visited after my dad had died, a wonderful holiday during which Lize ran off with our safari guide and ended up living in Africa for six months with a pet bush-baby. This holiday was going to be a particularly special one, though, as it was the last I would be taking with my daughter before she and Jack got married in June.
When I’d been there for a few days, I called Ronnie to see how he was getting on. When he answered the phone I could hear loud music and voices in the background. He explained he was staying in a hotel in London.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘We only live in Kingston.’
‘I’m with Jimmy White,’ he said, dodging the question. ‘Man, we’ve been out drinking for days . . .’
I felt a horrible, twitchy anxiety in the pit of my stomach. What was he up to? But I knew from experience that there was no point in giving him the third degree, so I just told him I was looking forward to seeing him in a few days and left him to it – whatever it was.
Ronnie flew to Kenya with Jamie, who was still working as his manager and had proved himself the best of the lot. His business instinct was always spot-on: in a few years he’d turned Ronnie into the biggest-selling print artist in the US. When the pair of them got off the speedboat at the resort, my first thought was that Ronnie looked awful. His skin had a grey tinge and he had an infection in one eye, which was swollen and weeping. I settled him into a hammock near our little hut on the beach where he promptly fell asleep, then went back and started his unpacking. Jamie appeared at the door.
‘Mum,’ he said, quietly. ‘Do yourself a favour and break the Sim card in Dad’s phone.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘But make sure you do it, or you’re not going to enjoy your holiday.’
Jamie flatly refused to give me any other details but he clearly felt it was important, so I promised to do as I was told. Ronnie usually clung to his phone for dear life, but I noticed the charger was plugged into a socket in our room so I followed the lead to a pocket of one of his shirts that was hanging on the back of a chair with a pile of towels covering it. I retrieved the phone (I admit I thought about sneaking a look at his texts but was worried he’d wake up), took out the Sim card, gently snapped it, then quickly put everything back the way I’d found it.
Ronnie started to stir. ‘Hi, honey!’ I said. ‘How are you doing? Good sleep?’
‘Oh . . . yeah . . . hi . . .’
‘I’m going up to the restaurant for lunch,’ I said. ‘Shall I see you there?’
Some 10 minutes later Ronnie appeared at the table, absolutely furious.
‘What the fuck is wrong with this phone?’ He held it out to me, his face like thunder.
‘Ooh, goodness, don’t ask me. I’m useless with things like that,’ I said. ‘You could always use my phone or the landline?’
He spent the rest of that afternoon trying to work out what was wrong with it, but I’d snapped the Sim in such a way that you couldn’t tell it had been tampered with. His terrible mood lasted a few days, but eventually he calmed down and we had a lovely-ish holiday, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
We had been back in London for a week when I was woken at 4 a.m. by the beep of Ronnie’s phone, which was now working. He was snoring away, totally oblivious (and I was still curious about what Jamie had asked to do me in Kenya), so I reached over and looked at the screen. It was a text: ‘Hi Ronnie. Not been working. Keeping myself to myself. Please send money. E.’
I stared at the message. What the hell was that about? And who was ‘E’? I took down the number and then, in a panic at being discovered snooping, pressed delete.
When Ronnie woke the next morning I told him I’d picked up his phone in the night to stop it beeping and thought I might possibly have deleted a text by accident. He went absolutely mental–‘Don’t you ever fucking touch my phone again!’–and stormed out, but later that day I overheard him asking our housekeeper, Jenny, to get him some cash. The twitchiness in my stomach got worse.
In the months before Leah’
s wedding, Ronnie’s behaviour grew even shiftier than usual. He went to Ireland for a few days, then phoned to tell me he was back in London and had checked into a hotel – but when I got to the hotel he wasn’t there. Then, suddenly, he acquired another phone, which he said had been given to him by Steve Bing, the producer of Shine a Light (and father of Liz Hurley’s son). I didn’t want to think about his reasons for needing two phones.
Leah had told Ronnie that she didn’t want him walking her down the aisle if he’d been drinking, so to my relief he agreed to go back to the Priory in preparation for the wedding. As usual, I thought the booze had been to blame for his weirdness.
A few days into his stay, the Priory called the house to ask if Ronnie was there.
‘Of course he’s not,’ I said. ‘He’s with you.’
‘I’m afraid he’s disappeared,’ they said. ‘We can’t find him, so we assumed he must have gone home. We can’t reach him on his phone. I’m sorry, Mrs Wood, but we don’t know where he is.’
Frantic with worry, I kept trying his phone and eventually he answered.
‘Ronnie, where the hell are you?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t take the Priory any more,’ he said. I could tell he was drunk. ‘I’ve checked into a hotel in Richmond.’
‘But Richmond is five minutes away from here!’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just come home?’
‘Look, I’m coming home now, all right?’
He appeared at the door with a weird mark on his cheek, clearly wrecked. I fixed him up, but soon after that he disappeared again – just walked out and didn’t come home for days. It was such a stressful time. If I hadn’t had the preparations for Leah’s wedding to keep me busy I would have had so many sleepless nights.
I was at a promotional event in Fenwick’s, the department store, for the launch of my new product range, Jo Wood Everyday, when my close friend, Fran Cutler, rang.
‘Jo, can you talk? There’s something I think you should know.’
I’d first met Fran back in the nineties at one of Mick and Jerry’s parties and we’d instantly felt like we’d known each other for years. She’s one of my best girlfriends and I trust her totally. Fran told me she had been at a gig in Hammersmith and had seen Ronnie there with another woman. My initial thought was that the girl would have been one of a group of his mates and I told Fran as much, but she was adamant there was more to it than that.
‘I promise you, Jo, everyone in London knows what’s going on,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t. I’m so sorry.’
‘Come on, Fran, don’t do this to me.’
I was standing in the middle of the beauty hall in Fenwick’s, people hovering nearby, waiting to talk to me, and my friend was basically telling me – what? That my husband was having an affair? I’d learnt a long time ago not to listen to rumours, so I told her not to worry and that I’d call her later.
But when I got home to discover that Ronnie had disappeared again, I found it impossible to get what Fran had told me out of my mind, and when I noticed that Ronnie had left the Steve Bing mobile behind I had an idea. I dug out the number I’d copied down from the text message from ‘E’ and rang it from his phone.
‘Hello?’ A girl’s voice, but in the background I heard a man say, ‘Who’s that, then? Another of your boyfriends?’ It was Ronnie.
‘Put him on the phone,’ I said, as calmly as I could.
‘What?’
‘I know Ronnie’s with you. Put him on the phone right now.’
She hung up, so I called Ronnie straight back on his mobile.
‘What’s going on, Ronnie?’
‘Listen, she’s just my drinking buddy,’ he said. ‘She’s a really sweet girl – you’d like her.’
‘Well, if she’s a really sweet girl, why don’t you bring her home? Let’s all meet this new drinking buddy!’
And, an hour later, that was exactly what he did.
The pair of them fell out of the taxi onto our drive in a drunken heap. The girl – who couldn’t have been more than 18 or 19–seemed totally wrecked. As she picked herself up, I was staring at her, thinking, Surely my husband’s not sleeping with this . . . child? Fran must have got the wrong end of the stick. They must be drinking buddies, like Ronnie said. They can’t possibly be having sex . . .
I led them into the kitchen, where Ty, Leah and Jack, who had been at home and knew what was going on, were waiting around the table.
‘This is Katia,’ said Ronnie, beaming at us.
The girl slumped at the table and started fumbling with a packet of cigarettes.
‘What are you doing hanging out with our dad?’ said Ty. ‘He’s old enough to be your grandfather.’
‘Age makes no difference to me,’ she slurred, sticking a cigarette into her mouth, then going to the stove and lighting the hob.
Oh, go right ahead! I thought. You’ve taken my husband – why not help yourself to my gas?
She bent down to light her cigarette and–whoosh! The front of her hair went up in flames. Quickly (perhaps a little too quickly, with hindsight) I grabbed a dishcloth and damped it out. I’m not sure she’d noticed she’d caught fire.
‘Hey, let’s watch the Eurovision Song Contest!’ she suddenly said.
This was turning into the most surreal encounter of my life.
As we walked to the living room she tripped and fell, then staggered to her feet and plonked herself on my couch.
‘Ain’t she funny, Jo?’ Ronnie was looking at her fondly. ‘She reminds me of you when you were young.’
‘She does?’ Oh, God . . .
And then she passed out, swiftly followed by Ronnie.
I went back to the kitchen. ‘Jack, let’s call a cab and get her out of here,’ I said, wearily. I went up to bed, utterly exhausted.
The next day all my attempts to talk to Ronnie about the girl were met with the same response: drinking buddy, drinking buddy, drinking buddy.
A few weeks before the wedding, Ronnie and I went to the Myar clinic, a health farm in Austria, for a bit of R and R – and, considering I drank nothing but herbal tea and ate only dry bread and sheep’s milk yogurt, I’m definitely not talking Rock ’n’ Roll.
We arrived in our room and were unpacking when Ronnie pulled out a stuffed owl from his suitcase and laid it tenderly on our bed.
‘Ronnie, what’s that?’
‘This? Just my little owl.’
‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But why on earth have you got it with you?’
It wasn’t even a nice stuffed owl – it looked cheap and highly flammable.
‘Oh, it’s just from some fan.’ He shrugged.
‘Ronnie, you’re nearly sixty-two. Why would you bring a stuffed toy on holiday? It’s just weird.’
He eventually agreed to put it back in his suitcase, and we had a nice week together – until the last day. I strolled back to our room in a relaxed haze after a wonderful massage and walked in to find Ronnie sitting with our dinner and, to my astonishment, a large neat vodka.
‘I just got this as a little treat for us!’ he said.
Quite how he’d found vodka at a health farm I have no idea.
Sunday, 1 June, was Ronnie’s 62nd birthday. The whole family was there: all the kids and their kids. In the morning, Ronnie and I dug up new potatoes and picked cabbage from the garden, then Jack and I cooked roast lamb and chicken. When we’d finished eating, the grandkids crowded around Ronnie at his end of the table and led the chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. All the next week, the two of us hung around Holmwood together. I was finishing decorating one of the rooms; Ronnie was watching TV, sketching, playing the guitar – with not a single sip of booze, a single line of cocaine. Please, I kept telling myself, just keep it up . . .
It was the night before Leah’s wedding and the house was full. My siblings and their families were all staying; my best friend Lorraine had flown in from New York with her kids; there were people camped out in every room. The reception was going to
be held in a huge bamboo marquee in our garden, where we would be hosting an organic dinner for 150 and an after-party for at least double that number. I was so excited about our daughter’s wedding day, and preoccupied with everything I still had to organize, that I didn’t really have time to worry about my strong suspicion that Ronnie was drinking again. At least he wasn’t visibly drunk. That evening I cooked a huge dinner for everyone, then slept with Leah in her bed. It was lovely to be able to cuddle up with my daughter on her last night as a single woman.
I was up early the next morning to deal with the invasion of caterers, florists, makeup artists and hairdressers. There still seemed to be an awful lot to do and I was standing in the garden deciding exactly where a gorgeous display of lilac, white and orange flowers should go when Mum came bustling over.
‘Josephine, I need to speak to you.’
‘Not now, Mum, please.’
‘It’s important. It can’t wait.’
I sighed. She wasn’t going to give up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Well, I came downstairs last night at about two to get a cup of tea, and as I walked past the breakfast room I could hear Ronnie on the phone.’
‘Yes?’
‘He was saying, “Don’t worry, darling, just wait until the wedding’s over. Then everything will be sorted and we can be together.”’
My first thought was: Katia. Oh, God, I really didn’t have time to deal with this now . . . Perhaps Mum had made a mistake. Besides, whatever had been going on with that girl, I was pretty sure it hadn’t been some big romance. The thought of a teenager going out with a man of Ronnie’s age was too ridiculous.
‘Mum, I’m sure you misheard. Don’t worry.’ And I left it at that.
It was a beautiful service at Southwark Cathedral and the reception was a huge success, but although I’d had a wonderful day, I felt weirdly unsettled. Maybe it was because of what Mum had said to me, or perhaps because I’d had to rush to get ready and didn’t feel confident about how I looked in my orange vintage dress. But there was also a strange feeling in the air, a sense that something was ending. Jimmy White had come over to me at one point and put his arm round me. ‘I just want you to know, Jo,’ he said, ‘that you are and always will be a really good friend of mine.’ Later, when I’d asked Ty if he’d seen Ronnie (who had, unsurprisingly, disappeared), he had said, ‘Mum, you know I’ll stand by you whatever happens.’ I was confused, tipsy and emotional, but it was Leah’s day and there were hundreds of guests to entertain, so once again I put my fears to one side and partied until 6 a.m.
