| 23rd December 2007 05:16 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Till death — or Keith Richards — us do part
Published: Dec 22, 2007
As Mrs Ronnie Wood found out, being wooed by a Rolling Stone means dating other members of the famed rock band as well, writes Andrew Donaldson.
TheTimes
http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Article.aspx?id=667143
A romantic rendezvous in a Paris hotel ... what better way to start a new relationship? Or so it must have seemed for Josephine Karslake, an out-of-work British model and single mum who’d scraped together enough money to buy a ticket to Orly Airport and get a taxi to the chic L’Hotel on the Left Bank, where she was to meet Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood.
When she arrived, at about 8pm on a summer’s evening in 1977, she was told the hotel was full and that there was no reservation for a Mr Wood. Stranded and broke, she was eventually given a tiny maid’s room on the hotel’s top floor.
The guitarist eventually arrived, at 4.30am — only to realise that he didn’t know Karslake’s real name.
She modelled under the name “Jo Howard” and, according to the desk clerk, there was no one of that name at the hotel.
Luckily, there was only one guest who’d signed the register with the initial “J”, and Wood managed to convince the desk clerk to ring up this person. When a woman answered, the clerk asked, “Are you Miss Karslake? Are you also Miss Howard? Do you know Mr Wood? He’s here.”
Unfortunately, as Wood reveals in his engaging new autobiography, Ronnie, so was fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards.
He writes: “I knocked on her door. She opened it, I walked in and so did Keith. He went straight past Jo to a tiny table, never said a word, took out a spoon and started cooking up a hit. Jo stood there speechless, with her mouth wide open because she’d never seen anything like this. Keith shot up, then looked at her and said, ‘You must be Jo, hello darling,’ and gave her a kiss. Jo glared at me. I simply said, ‘You have to excuse my friend, we go everywhere together.’ ”
Richards stayed with the couple for three days, in a room the size of a phone booth with a tiny single bed. “Jo kept asking me, ‘When are we going to get rid of Keith?’ But we couldn’t leave him there alone, in an opiate haze ... On the third day Keith, who was feeling fresher, suggested, ‘We’ve been here three days, why don’t we move to my flat?’”
Richards’ apartment was in complete disarray but, as Wood points out, it had “more bedrooms than our cupboard abode .”
The couple were not yet out of the rough.
“Keith gave us his bed,” Wood recalls, “and Jo got busy straightening out the place and we made our nest. We shut the door, leaving Keith alone, got out of our clothes, jumped into bed, and broke it in half.
“We were thrown onto the floor and pinned up against the wall and couldn’t get up. Keith heard the crash, raced in and found us both naked against the wall.
“We were all cracking up. That’s how our life together began. And although Jo would go home every week or so to see her son [Jamie], we spent the next five months in Paris, madly in love.”
Thirty years later, Ron and Jo are still together. The couple were married in 1985, and have two children, Leah and Tyrone. Their relationship — given Wood’s chaotic life and history of alcoholism and drug abuse in particular and the infidelities that are part and parcel of the rock lifestyle — is one that appears particularly blessed.
Both were married when they first met. Wood, in fact, was having an affair with Pattie Boyd, then George Harrison’s wife and soon to be Mrs Eric Clapton. Harrison, in turn, was seeing Wood’s wife, Krissie.
It had been a spur-of-the- moment arrangement. “One night at George’s house,” Wood writes, “I took George aside and told him quite seriously that when it came time for bed I would be going to Pattie’s room. Seemingly unflustered, he pointed to the room Krissie and I were staying in and said, ‘I shall be sleeping there.’ ”
But Wood fell for Jo instantly when he met her at a party.
She reminded him “of a young Goldie Hawn, great bottom and all” and, he adds, “I had to meet her, so I got Krissie a Quaalude sandwich. She liked that and fell asleep, then I said goodbye to Pattie and went off to find this woman.”
Jo wasn’t that impressed when Wood introduced himself. He admits that she caught him about “to give that bum a good grope”.
Later, he pulled her into a bathroom, telling her he had something important to tell her. “Baffled by me, she walked in and as soon as she did, I slammed the door, locked it, and said, ‘Do you want a line?’
“Rejuvenated and recharged, my confidence raised, I presented her with an unmistakable offer. ‘Give me a kiss.’
“For me this was love at first sight, the absolute.”
The domesticity that came when the couple set up home in Los Angeles in the late ’70s was at first more blissed-out than blissful — probably because Keith Richards was as much a part of the relationship as anybody else.
Once, lounging around the pool, Richards rolled a joint. Jo’s mother, Rachel Karslake, was visiting and, somewhat outraged, demanded that the guitarist explain himself. “You want some?” he replied, holding it out to her. She threw it in the pool.
“It took some time to calm Keith down and explain to Rachel why doing that to Keith was really a bad idea,” Wood writes. “Finally ... Keith moved over to the diving board where he ... rolled two joints. Rachel never took her eyes off him. When he was done, Keith offered one to Rachel: ‘There’s one for me to smoke and this one is for you to throw in the pool.’ ”
Wood and Jo’s daughter, Leah, was born shortly after this incident. There was a party going on at the LA home when she went into labour. Later at the hospital, when Wood and Richards were asked by a nurse who the father was, they answered, “We both are.”
Tyrone was born in 1983. “After his birth, while Jo was still in the hospital, I offered her a line of coke to celebrate. But she was now in a different place, a maternal, breast-feeding place with our son in her arms. She told me to stop being ridiculous and get it together.”
This was proving more difficult than anticipated — especially as far as Wood was concerned. The couple were now living in New York. The years there, he recalls, were “like one very long party, with lots of alcohol and lots of pills and lots to smoke. We had also done a little bit of downtown [heroin] together back with Keith in Paris. I don’t do needles, so we were smoking it.”
The children could not help noticing the drugs — particularly as guests often passed out in the living room. “Once Jamie noticed someone on the sofa, thought the man looked familiar and stared until he recognised Christopher Reeve, who was out of his brain. He came running back to us, crying, ‘You’ve destroyed Superman.’ ”
But, Wood says, the children were happy and funny — if mischievous. “One morning, Leah and Jamie came into our bedroom to wake Jo and me, found us sleeping nude, fetched their paint brushes, painted my willy green and called it my pickle.”
It was Richards who suggested the couple get married. They were in Jamaica at the time, in September 1984, and he had booked a table for them at the most romantic restaurant on the island. When she accepted his proposal, Wood says, it was Richards who “was probably the happiest of all”.
They were married in a tiny church in Denham, Buckinghamshire. Richards and Stones drummer Charlie Watts were Wood’s best men. Guests included Rod Stewart, Bill Wyman, Mandy Smith, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck and Peter Frampton — which had an unsettling effect on the vicar, who started babbling, “There are many stars in the sky, but some of them only give off little light, and there are so many stars in the congregation today, but never forget that stars can dwindle and fade ...”
“Oh my God, it was awful,” Wood says. “[Comedian] Peter Cook was sitting right near the front, couldn’t believe what the vicar was saying, and started preaching back at him. ‘The triangle ... God ... self ... Holy Grail ...’ Suddenly the whole congregation started whispering and sniggering.”
After the service the newlyweds jumped into a Rolls-Royce to be taken to the reception. “Just as we were about to drive off, Keith grabbed his fish and chips that he’d brought with him and jumped into the car with us. He pulled out his blow and gave us a hit each. The watching congregation saw our three heads dip out of view as we ‘toasted’ our wedding ...
“Nothing changed when we got married. We’d just rubber-stamped our relationship.
“Before our wedding we didn’t mind not being hitched, there was something kinda cool in us two just dating with our kids scampering about. I often feel like that with Jo, right like I did in the early days of our relationship. In fact, I kept asking Jo to marry me years after and I’ll keep asking her forever.”
Wood’s battles with drugs and alcohol have, in recent years, been well documented. “I’ll always battle the demons,” he says, “but right now I seem to be winning. My head is finally in a good place ...
“I feel blessed to have the support of my family and friends in everything I do — there have always been people to pick me up, carry me further, and help me ... I’ve driven them crazy, no doubt about it, but for some reason they stand by me. Must be my good looks.”
Ronnie, by Ronnie Wood, is published by Pan MacMillian
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 23rd December 2007 02:37 PM |
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| open-g |
Yeah - I enjoyed that read.
thanks for posting. |
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