| September 17th, 2005 09:56 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
'There's only one star in our house'
She picks Ronnie's clothes for Stones tours and cooks him organic food - for Jo Wood, it's what a wife does after 20 years of a rock'n'roll marriage
Gaby Wood
Sunday September 18, 2005
The Observer
'The other day I went out and had two martinis,' says Jo Wood, who has, among other achievements, managed to remain married to a Rolling Stone for 20 years, 'and I suffered the next day! I had such a terrible, terrible headache. I thought, Oh my God, when I think back to the old days when I could polish off a bottle of vodka easy - now I can't do it any more.' She reflects for a moment on the benefits of this new situation. 'Mind you, after two martinis I was rockin'!' she laughs. 'Cheap date!'
Jo Wood is a remarkably alluring cross between Twiggy, Nico, Barbara Windsor and, well, today at least she appears to have received some make-up tips from Keith Richards. Her eyes are shrouded in kohl, her hair is bottle blond and her legs - framed by a cut-off denim pelmet - are those of a 25-year-old, though she is exactly twice that age. She speaks in such gigglingly sweet cockney tones that you begin to imagine the current Rolling Stones tour - on which she is employed as Ronnie Wood's assistant - as a year-long, universally distributed Carry On film.
The things Jo Wood has had to put up with. There's Ronnie's alcoholism, Ronnie's lung condition, Ronnie's flirting, Ronnie's art, it's just as well she was, as she puts it, 'born with patience', because anyone else would be well beyond her 19th nervous breakdown by now. 'I still adore my husband,' she tells me after detailing their first encounter, 'I think he's great.' She pauses. 'He's hard work, but he's great.' She pauses again. 'Very hard work, sometimes.'
The current US tour - which began last month and has been getting rave reviews - has inevitably raised the question about the musicians' mysterious stamina. Namely, why are they alive when, as Ronnie Wood himself has said, 'most partygoers are dead'? Just three months ago, Wood's first wife died of a suspected drug overdose. But Jo, who once joked that the reason she looked so young was that she was pickled in alcohol, has undergone a complete conversion. She rarely drinks, she doesn't do drugs, and everything she eats is organic. Everything Ronnie eats is organic. Everything their children eat is organic. Ronnie's cigarettes are organic. Even their sheets are organic. She has, in her own phrase, 'gone organic', as if it were akin to going mad, and her zeal for it has prompted Keith Richards, who presumably knows about such things, to accuse her of having an addiction.
Now she's started her own range of organic beauty products, and she's just been signed up to write a health book, in which she will divulge all her tips on how to, as she says, 'live a nice clean life'. Or at least a nice clean later life. Jo never used to do any exercise - 'except liftin' a glass!' - and now she does so much that she thinks all the adrenaline from it is replacing her 'drink and drug buzz'. 'Must be,' she adds, apparently baffled. She does talk about organic vegetables the way others refer to narcotics ('We did about four rows,' she said of last year's home-grown corn) but anyone tempted to knock it should take a look at her. Is a rock'n'roll vet the best person to teach us about good health? Was Augustine made a saint?
I meet Jo Wood in New York, ostensibly to talk about her body oils, whose scents have, to pluck a few random examples from the accompanying literature, 'a romantic heart of Iranian rose otto', 'Egyptian jasmine' and 'the aromatic woody aromas of Moroccan cedar wood' - all allegedly inspired by her own worldwide travels - but when I ask her where she sourced her ingredients she says, 'Oh, where was it? I can't even think. My mind's gone blank.'
Though she's generally resistant to being labelled Ronnie's wife, it'll take her a lot more practice not to put herself in that bracket first. To begin with, she talks about Ronnie without even mentioning his name - 'I make him breakfast in the morning,' she tells me, as if we all knew who 'he' was. She's fond of saying that 'there's only room for one star', and clearly she has long operated on the assumption that her own life is some kind of subset of her husband's.
For the past 10 years she's been paid to be his assistant - to pack for him, to pick out his stage clothes, to cook him food. It was Mick Jagger's idea, apparently. Everyone else already had an assistant - 'except Charlie,' she adds, 'he doesn't want anyone to touch his clothes' - and she'd been coming on tour with them anyway since 1978.
She's had a portable stove specially designed to look like a large stereo. She takes it everywhere, and as soon as they get to a city, she finds the nearest Whole Foods, buys all Ronnie's organic food, and cooks it there in the hotel room for him, 'hoping and praying that the fire alarms don't go off'. She doesn't cook for everyone else ('I'm not that crazy!') but she does encourage them to stay healthy. Where once it used to be, 'Come back to my room for a drink!' now it's, 'See you down in the gym.' So this is what it's come to: organic baked beans cooked on a camping stove at the Ritz. The Good Life meets The Osbournes, perhaps.
What has she ever done for herself? 'I did this for myself,' she says, patting the Biba-esque packaging of her toiletries. 'I went home and I looked around and I thought, well my children have all got their own life now, Ronnie's in his art studio painting, and I'm just cookin'!'
Is that the first thing ever?
'I think so,' she laughs, then corrects herself. 'No, I once did a movie. It's called Love Potion Number Nine. It was really quite emotional, I remember, because having never been away from the kids and Ronnie, off I was going - only down to Devon - for five weeks. I played a drug addict in rehab.'
The film, in which she is uncredited, is an early Sandra Bullock comedy about a special formula that will make anyone fall in love with the person who drinks it. 'The director said he wished he'd given me a bigger part 'cos I was so good,' she says proudly. But she didn't do any more acting after that, because, she says, the Stones had a tour coming up.
Jo Wood's tips for a perfect rock star marriage - never show jealousy, always have sex, don't nag about alcohol - can perhaps be summed up in her phrase, 'I work at it. Ronnie responds.' Yet it would be wrong to suggest that she is a complete martyr. After all, she has a licence to keep tabs on her husband - a man who has been quoted as saying that he goes 'out to the clubs with Mick and we have a flirt. I've got a wonderful dedicated wife, but I still have a look, you know.' And she goes on tour with them because at this point, she wouldn't feel like herself if she didn't. A few months ago, she went home on her own for the first time, while they were rehearsing in Toronto, and, she says, 'When I got home I felt like I'd left most of me behind.'
Jo Howard grew up in a world of make believe. Her father was an architectural model-maker and her mother creates replicas of Victorian dolls. She is the eldest of four children, the rest of whom are now all artists and sculptors of one kind or another. She went to a convent school in Essex, which she left soon after she first saw a photograph of Twiggy. 'That was it,' she says, 'I wanted to be a model so bad!' At 16, she went to London to do a modelling course and met with some success - she was the Sun's 'Face of 1972' ('Before they did nudes, that was,' she adds demurely), and did a number of TV commercials, including a shampoo ad directed by Adrian Lyne, of 91/2 Weeks and Lolita fame. She herself proved too doll-like for the magazines she really wanted to appear in - Honey and Vogue - but she did regular work for teen magazines such as Jackie
The Seventies, she says, were her favourite decade. London was 'great', she adds, wrinkling up her nose and reminding me, for a split second, of Austin Powers. Jo lived fast: she met her first husband when she was 17, and had had her first son and divorced that husband by the time she was 20. Two years later, she met Ronnie at a party. 'Do you know who I am?' he asked her. She didn't. She'd never met a musician before. She'd never bought a Stones album. In retaliation for his remark, she told him who she wasn't. She said she worked behind the broken biscuit counter at Woolworths on Oxford Street, and before she knew it, he was staking out Woolies and failing to find her.
He found her eventually of course, because quicker than you could say 'gathers no moss' she was pregnant with Leah, and going on her first tour with the Stones at the same time. It's hard to picture this, particularly when she describes that occasion as the scene of her 'hardcore' baptism, but she will only allow that it was 'a bit wild'.
Somehow, a decade passed and Jo was misdiagnosed as having Crohn's disease. She was put on steroids for two years, which made her feel as though she had, as she puts it, lost her soul. Her condition - which the steroids had coincidentally kept at bay for an astoundingly long time - turned out to be a perforated appendix. Removing it was simple, but in the meantime, a herbalist with a house called Shangri-la had converted her to organic food. Suddenly she loved nothing better than to attend a Soil Association awards ceremony for the best organic pork pie.
The illness was, you might say, her own near-death experience, as conducive to a dramatic recovery plan as the early demise of a fellow rocker.
As it happens, Jo and Ronnie used to live in New York. Their second child, Tyrone, was born here. She can't quite remember why they moved here. They'd lived in Los Angeles before that, and she's not sure why they moved there either. Oh yes, it was Ronnie's manager. He lived in LA. (I can only imagine that certain portions of Jo's life have been edited not purely for my benefit but as a result of some bygone drenching of brain cells. She repeatedly says, for instance, that someone or other 'used to be' a friend of hers, and peers back into her memory as if searching for a lost pair of glasses.) Yes, the manager was in LA so they moved to LA. 'But it was very crazy in the Seventies,' she says with characteristically twinkly understatement. 'There was a lot of madness and drugs going on then. So it got to the point where I said, let's go to New York, I think it's going to be quieter in New York. So we came to New York, and we lived here for five years.'
The Wood family must surely have been the only people to have come to New York in the Seventies for a quiet life. The illusion was asking to be shattered. And sure enough, 'One night we went out for dinner to an Indian restaurant with a girlfriend of mine. It was Leah, Ronnie, me and my friend Melissa - I haven't seen her for years. She went to the bathroom and she came back covered in blood. She was mugged in the bathroom! I said to Ronnie, that's it. We're going home. I don't want to even be here any more. So we packed up and we were out of here in a week.'
Now they live in a mansion in Richmond, and have a house in Ireland as well. The band are obviously like family to them - the children all grew up together on round the world tours - but the Wood family proper is also an almost 1950s-style unit. They have been referred to as 'the Waltons of rock and roll', presumably because of their share and share alike mentality - Leah, for example, has said that the first person who offered her a joint was her mother. Now Leah is in the music business (her single, whose title Jo can't quite remember, is number two in the dance charts). Jesse, Ronnie's son from his first marriage, plays the guitar. Jamie, Jo's son from her first marriage, runs Ronnie's and Leah's careers, and Jo's new beauty products. And Tyrone works for Ronnie's art company. Quite a family affair. Is Jo the one who holds it all together? 'Well, it's certainly not Ronnie!' she cries, and laughs her Barbara Windsor laugh.
The night after we meet, the Stones are due to play Madison Square Garden. Later, it will be noted by New York's most influential fashion police that Mick Jagger wore a gold sequinned jacket and other clothes custom-made for him by Dior, Balenciaga, Comme des Garçons and Prada. Jagger's stage clothes are also chosen for him by his partner, the former model L'Wren Scott. I ask Jo what Ronnie will be wearing. 'Let me see,' she says, rifling through that memory drawer, 'Madison Square Garden, he'll just be wearing his jeans and T-shirt, but it depends what colour. He'll either be wearing his black or his blue jeans.'
I resist the urge to ask: And you get paid how much for doing that?
Because there is something oddly beguiling about Jo Wood's wilful patina of innocence. Though you know that of all the things she may have lost, her innocence must have been the first to go, you want to believe her when she says that she is 'a very happy girl'. 'That's all I want to be,' she tells me, as earnest as a photo story in Jackie. 'Happy.'
· Jo Wood Organics will be available exclusively at Harvey Nichols from tomorrow
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| September 17th, 2005 09:58 PM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Who's Gaby Wood? BTW, nice reading |
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