It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  Like most brides, my memories of my wedding day are just brief snapshots rather than a detailed video. (We had an actual video, but a few weeks later Ronnie helpfully recorded the snooker over much of it.) I remember kneeling with my new husband at the altar, swapping delighted grins and stifling giggles, as the vicar droned on and on. ‘There are many stars in the sky,’ he was intoning gravely, ‘but some give off little light. Just as there are many stars here in the congregation today’–he gestured to the famous faces lining the pews–‘but always remember that stars can dwindle and die . . .’ It was a car-crash of a sermon; I think there might have been actual heckling from the direction of Peter Cook and Rod Stewart.

  When it was over, the two of us bounded out of the church, high on love and adrenalin, and into the white Bentley waiting to whisk us to the reception at a nearby pub, the Bull. But before we could head off, Keith jumped in too and, instead of the usual bottle of champagne to toast the wedding, whipped out a little packet of coke. Someone in the car behind us later told me they had watched as our three heads dipped in unison for a celebratory line. I was actually furious with myself for doing it, as I knew it would kill my appetite at the reception. Sure enough, I couldn’t eat a thing at dinner. Dad was sitting next to me and kept asking why I wasn’t eating and I had to come up with some lame excuse about being too excited. I can’t even remember what we had. Something to do with melon? God knows . . .

  It was a perfect day. Peter Cook made a very funny speech, and when the Dirty Strangers took the stage after dinner, Ronnie and Keith got up and played and then I stormed up there too, and sang ‘And Then He Kissed Me’. As well as our families, friends had flown in from all over the world, including the boys from the band (although Jerry had just given birth to Lizzie and Patti was about to have Theodora, so they couldn’t come), Rod Stewart and Kelly Emberg, Ringo Starr and his wife Barbara, Peter Frampton and Jeff Beck. For this special day, I only wanted the people I loved most in the world around me. (Our old friend Harry, Mr Mildew, had tried to bribe me with $10,000 for a wedding invitation, but I’d turned him down flat.)

  The celebrations went on until 6 a.m. and then Ronnie and I fell into bed at the Bull, still with enough energy to consummate our marriage. Lying cuddled up together, watching the sun rise, I was surprised by how different I felt now that I was Mrs Ronnie Wood. We had been together so long and been through so much that I assumed being married wouldn’t change a thing. But with hindsight I realized I’d never truly felt totally secure in the relationship until now. Our wedding rings had made it official: he was my man.

  For our honeymoon we went to the island of Bora Bora in the South Pacific. It was somewhere I’d always wanted to go, my imagination fuelled by images of vivid turquoise water, coconut palms and locals diving for black pearls – and the reality didn’t disappoint. The place ticked every desert-island fantasy. We stayed in a little hut built over the sea on stilts, beneath which you could see huge, colourful fish swimming around the coral reef. Ronnie’s not a great swimmer – he can get quite panicky in the water – so we didn’t do any diving or snorkelling, but we did go out on a boat for a day’s fishing with a handsome young local we’d met on the beach. He was very attractive, all bulging muscles and long blond curls, and so flirty and charming with me that I think Ronnie got a twinge of jealousy. We were out on the boat for hours, and eventually I announced that I was ‘dying to spend a penny’.

  Tarzan just cupped his hands and said, ‘Spend it in here, Jo.’

  I squealed with appalled laughter. ‘What? No way!’ Ronnie looked as if he was about to explode. I don’t think we saw our friend again after that day.

  It was a fabulous holiday. One day I persuaded Ronnie to join me in a fishing tournament, even though it started at 5 a.m. As we headed out to the deep waters of the Pacific the captain of the boat said, ‘Jo, you need to bring us good luck. As the only female here, you need to sit on the lures.’ So I happily sat on all of them. It obviously worked, as we landed a heap of fish that morning, including some tuna.

  By midday I noticed that Ronnie was a little peaky. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he groaned. ‘I wanna go back.’ For the rest of the holiday we kept our sea-legs on land.

  One day we hired bikes and set out to explore the island (or, rather, the island’s bars). Ronnie bought me a beautiful black pearl. But really it was all about the drinking. Southern Comfort and lemonade and Cuba Libres were our holiday tipple. Nowadays I wouldn’t touch either as I find them revoltingly sweet, but back then those were our drinks of choice. On our first day Ronnie got so drunk he had the most violent attack of hiccups. After trying every remedy we could think of to get rid of them, he came up with a fantastic idea. ‘I’ll stand on my head,’ he declared. And with that his legs flew up into the air as he wildly tried to get his balance. Unsurprisingly, he ended up in a heap on the floor. Our honeymoon might have been low on textbook honeymoon romance, but it was definitely high on fun.

  19

  Although the restaurant scene in New York was booming in the eighties, one of the few dishes you couldn’t get was a decent curry. So when a new Indian restaurant called Nirvana opened in midtown Manhattan soon after we got back from our honeymoon, we immediately booked a table for a Jalfrezi fix. The kids came too, with a friend of mine called Melissa.

  The evening started really well. The restaurant was situated a few floors up so you got into an elevator off the bustling Manhattan sidewalk and, moments later, emerged into a spice-scented oasis, as if you’d just been magically transported to India. The kids had got stuck into the poppadums and we were looking at the menus when Melissa excused herself to go to the loo, which was on the floor below. A waiter came to take our order, then our drinks arrived, but Melissa hadn’t reappeared. ‘What the hell is she doing?’ I whispered to Ronnie. Then, as I was starting to worry, the elevator doors slid open and Melissa flew into the room, covered with so much blood that her white blouse had turned red.

  Once we had calmed her down, she explained what had happened. When she’d walked into the Ladies she’d come face to face with a guy holding a big chunk of wood. He’d demanded all her money and she’d given him the $20 she had in her pocket, but as she’d turned to go he had whacked her on the back of her head before running off. For me, though, the most disturbing part of the story was that when she’d got back into the elevator, looking like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street, none of the other occupants had blinked an eyelid. I guess this kind of thing wasn’t that uncommon in New York in the days before Mayor Rudi Giuliani cleaned up the streets.

  Later that night, after I had taken poor Melissa to hospital to get her head stitched up, I was lying in bed, thinking, I really don’t want my kids to grow up here, when I heard a loud crash outside. Ronnie had gone to the studio, so I stuck my head out of the window and saw a gang of kids smashing the hell out of an expensive car. I shouted, hoping to scare them away, but instead they just waved their knives at me – and that was when I decided the Wood family had to get the fuck out of the Big Apple.

  I’d actually been feeling homesick since arriving back in New York. I loved our place on West 78th Street and had just finished putting in a fab new kitchen, but I’d spent so much time with our families at Christmas and the wedding that I realized now just how much I’d been missing them. Ronnie could work on his art and music anywhere; it felt like the only thing keeping us in New York was that Keith and Patti were nearby. The following morning I said to Ronnie, ‘We’ve got nobody here. All our family is in England. Can we please go home?’

  And he just went, ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  We didn’t even bother waiting until we’d put up our house for sale, just packed all our worldly goods and flew back to England to stay with Lorraine and Simon until we found a place of our own. Keith was not happy that we were leaving Manhattan – in fact, he was furious – but the time was right for us to go home.

  By the end of 1986 we’d found a lovely house in Wimbledon. It wasn�
�t at all grand, but it was cosy and homely with a studio/den in the garden for Ronnie. All our possessions had been in storage and when the boxes arrived at the new house they were accompanied by a couple of Customs officers; I guess the fact that Ronnie was a Rolling Stone was enough to make them suspicious. As the removal men brought in the crates, they would pick a box at random and go through it with forensic diligence. This would have been nothing more than a minor inconvenience but for the fact that while I was packing up the house in New York I had found a huge lump of hash, about the size of a CD case but an inch thick, and stashed it inside a cushion. I knew we would be in serious trouble if they found it – not exactly the start to our new life in England that I had hoped for. In an attempt at organization I had labelled each box with a letter, so when the Customs officer turned his gaze on Box H (‘H’ for hashish, obviously) my heart was thumping so loudly I was sure he must be able to hear it, but then–thank God–he waved the crate past. ‘Just bring that box upstairs,’ I said, as casually as possible to the removal man, then hid it out of sight until our visitors finally left, thankfully none the wiser about the cannabis cushion.

  Jaye didn’t come to England with us: she stayed in the States and went to work for Mick and Jerry. I missed her hugely, of course: she had been an absolute life-saver over the years. I hired a very sweet girl called Myfanwy to be a part-time nanny, but she left after six months and the agency sent an Australian girl in her place. Well, that was a disaster. On her day off I had expected this girl would want to get out and see London, but instead she’d spend the day sitting on the couch watching TV. ‘Don’t mind me, Jo. I’ll just have these tinnies,’ she’d say, cracking open a beer. One day I came downstairs at breakfast time to be met by the most rancid stink – and there was the nanny, just about to give Tyrone a mouthful of scrambled eggs. ‘Those eggs must be off!’ I screeched, grabbing the spoon. ‘Can’t you smell them?’

  She stared at me blankly. ‘Nah, I don’t eat eggs,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe they were meant to smell like that.’ She was gone the next day.

  That was when I turned to my sister Lize, then in her early twenties, and asked if she’d like to move in with us to help look after the kids. The arrangement worked brilliantly for everyone: Lize got a pad in London (the cottage at the bottom of our garden) and a job, while I had someone I trusted completely to help babysit the children and look after them when we had to take brief trips abroad for Ronnie’s fledgling art career. She lived with us for several years.

  While Wimbledon might have been a big change in terms of location, it was business as usual as far as our lifestyle went. We always had a houseful, with people coming and going: Terence Trent D’Arby was a regular guest, Keith crashed with us for a bit and Bobby Womack came to stay, too. But our most frequent visitor – who would become a regular fixture in our lives – was the snooker player, Jimmy White.

  The kids had all settled into their new schools and had easily adjusted to life in Britain. I’d been waiting to collect Leah from school on an afternoon a few days before Christmas when I noticed a man standing nearby whom I recognized instantly. It was Jimmy, whose match Ronnie had recorded over most of our wedding video.

  ‘My husband is a big fan of yours,’ I said to him. He seemed lovely and I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Ronnie I’d met him.

  I found him in his studio. ‘Ronnie, guess who I met today at the school and who’ll be at the nativity play tomorrow?’

  Needless to say Ronnie was in the audience the following day – and not just to see Leah playing Mary.

  Ronnie and Jimmy instantly hit it off and arranged to go out drinking together the following day. Ronnie didn’t reappear for another 24 hours, by which time it was late on Christmas Eve. God knows what the pair of them got up to, but it can’t have been very much because they were so monumentally legless when they eventually staggered home.

  Jimmy started hanging out so much at our house that he might as well have moved in. Now, I love Jimmy, but he and Ronnie just spent their time getting blind drunk. Ronnie, too, had settled back into British life, and knew every pub in our area. It was through Jimmy that Ronnie met another snooker legend, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, who was even more of a nutter. On one occasion his chauffeur sat outside our house for a whole day, waiting to take Alex to see his two young kids, while he boozed and went down the betting shop with Ronnie. In the end I had to go behind his chair and tip him onto the floor to get him to leave.

  I’d try to stay up with Ronnie for his all-night sessions with Jimmy and the boys, but I just couldn’t do it any more – and, in all honesty, I didn’t really want to. I wanted a normal life in which my husband didn’t come to bed at five o’ clock every single morning. So many times I’d be lying in bed in the early hours thinking, Is Ronnie ever going to come up to bed?

  One morning I came downstairs to the kitchen and spent a good few minutes trying to work out where an awful smell was coming from. I went and found the boys, who were still up from the night before. ‘Ronnie, I think there’s a problem with the drains,’ I said. ‘There’s the most terrible smell in the kitchen.’

  ‘Oops, sorry, love, that might have been me,’ said Jimmy, from where he was slumped in an armchair. ‘I threw up in your dustbin.’

  Another morning I had just opened my eyes when I heard a loud banging at the front door. Jamie answered it and I heard a woman’s voice saying angrily, ‘Where is he?’ It was Maureen, Jimmy’s long-suffering wife and mother to his five kids. I jumped out of bed and went to the bedroom window in time to see Jamie leading her to Ronnie’s studio, where the boys had spent the night drinking and playing music. When Maureen finally managed to wake him up, Jimmy smiled up at her and said, ‘Morning, love! Cup of tea would be nice.’ He was so drunk he thought he was at home in bed. As you might imagine, he didn’t get that cup of tea.

  Although we were now based in London, we still spent a lot of time travelling back and forth to the States. In January 1989 Ronnie was invited to play at the inauguration ball of President George Bush Sr because one of his key political advisers, Lee Attwater, was a fan. After the ball we headed off to a Washington blues club with a little group, including the square-jawed secret-service guys who had been assigned to us for our stay. After a really long night, we got back to our hotel at 5 a.m. The place was deserted except for a guy who was polishing the floor. I was desperate to get to my bed, and reached the elevator first as the others dawdled along behind me. I spotted something on the floor and bent down to pick it up. It was an envelope that was covered with columns of pencilled numbers – and when I peeked inside I saw that it was full of cash. A lot of cash.

  I tucked it into my bag, and when we got back to our room I went straight to the bathroom to count it. One thousand, two thousand . . . seven thousand . . . eleven thousand–$12,000. I couldn’t believe it. A thousand dollars for every year I’d been with Ronnie. It was a sign – it must have been meant for me all along!

  I went back into the room. ‘Guys, you’ll never believe this,’ I said. ‘I’ve just found an envelope with three thousand dollars in it!’ (Well, come on – if I’d told them how much was really in it they would have expected me to share it!)

  The secret-service guys – Brad and Chip, or whatever their names were – went straight down to Reception to ask if anyone had reported losing any money, but nobody had.

  ‘If I was you, Jo,’ Brad told me, when they got back, ‘I’d hold on to it. From the look of that envelope, it’s either drug or gambling money. Either way, I doubt anyone will be coming to ask for it back.’

  And despite us leaving our contact details with the hotel, they never did. So I put that money into my Halifax account – and it’s still sitting there to this day.

  20

  We’d been in Wimbledon a couple of years when Nick Cowan, Ronnie’s manager, approached him to front a new live music club in Miami. I was instantly suspicious: we weren’t asked to invest any money and I knew that Harry was inv
olved so it was bound to be a bit shady, but Ronnie loved the idea. The club was in the up-and-coming South Beach area – well, up-and-coming might have been pushing it. It had once been a beautiful art-deco neighbourhood, but the buildings – like the area’s aged residents – were now elegantly crumbling away. But the potential was definitely there, and when we saw the derelict hotel that was proposed as the site for the club, we agreed to take on the project. Woody’s On the Beach was born.

  I suggested Biba’s Barbara Hulanicki, whom I had idolized since I was a teenager, to design the interiors. (Barbara moved to Miami to work on the project and still lives there, so at least someone got something positive out of it!) She created a very cool deco-themed hangout with an impressive bar, a VIP room and a huge stage. The waitresses wore sexy little bra tops and skirts with the Woody’s logo. Bobby Keys was appointed the club’s musical director. Then we started rocking.

  We had the maddest times at Woody’s. It was all about the music and the good times. We were flown back and forth from London to Miami at great expense, but at no cost to us. Ronnie and I would pop over to Woody’s, get the craziness out of our systems, then be much better behaved when we got back to London – well, I would, at least!

  After one of those mad trips we were staggering through Customs at Heathrow, totally exhausted, when a voice barked, ‘Hey, you two, over here.’

  The Customs guy took an instant dislike to Ronnie. ‘I’m going to find out what you’ve had for breakfast,’ he said menacingly.

  The fact that Ronnie sniggered didn’t really help. As the man started rooting through our bags, I turned to Ronnie. ‘Have you got anything on you?’ I whispered.