Post by moy on Nov 29th, 2009 at 1:09pm
Exclusive interview:
'Ronnie set me free', says Jo Wood
By LIZ JONES
Last updated at 12:44 AM on 29th November 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1228998/Jo-Wood-Ronnie-set-free.html
It’s a year since Jo Wood’s husband, Rolling Stone Ronnie, left her for a 21-year-old waitress. So how has she coped with being thrust into single life after 31 years of mothering four children and a wayward husband? Surprisingly well, she tells Liz Jones. And, after her stint on Strictly and a quickie divorce, she’s ready to waltz into the future on her own
'Now I can’t imagine having a bloke around, driving me nuts. I can lie in the middle of the bed!,' says Jo
When you turn up at Jo Wood’s house on a busy road in Kingston, Southwest London, you are met by a pair of imposing electric gates and a rather ancient orange spaniel who accompanies your car along the drive.
As you park in front of the house, which is rambling and gothic, a former hunting lodge for Prince Albert, no less, you notice two statues of pigs on the lawn and a Romany caravan. Two stone dogs – or are they lions? – flank the front door and inside it’s all dark parquet flooring and leaded windows.
I wait for Jo in a sitting room which is brimful of stuff: Jo Malone scented candles the size of hippos and a state-of-the-art sound system, with African knick-knacks and silver-framed photos crammed on every surface, testimony to a life well lived.
If I were a contestant on Through the Keyhole I would have guessed the owner was a rock star: I am indeed in the house of a Rolling Stone, albeit one who has been gone a year, into the arms of a 21-year-old Russian waitress. But snooping on the shelves I’m heartened to see evidence that their lives haven’t always been just about sex and drugs and rock and roll: there are box sets of Columbo and CSI.
When Jo bounces into the room, having not long got home from rehearsals for Strictly Come Dancing (she and partner Brendan Cole would be voted off the show two weeks later), she is wearing a mini ra-ra skirt, black tights, biker boots (‘Dior, about four years old’) and messy blonde hair. She has a Julie Christie mouth: big, expressive, sexy.
Jo with Strictly Come Dancing partner Brendan Cole
She is 54 but has the air (and the hair) and the energy of someone much younger. I ask if she still fits all those great clothes she wore in the 70s. She laughs. ‘In the 70s I was six stone and doing lots of drugs. I’m nine-and-a-half stone now.’
I wonder how Strictly has affected her body and her psyche, which has taken a battering, what with the aforementioned Russian waitress, Ekaterina Ivanova, known affectionately by her 62-year-old lover Ronnie as Katya. ‘My waist is smaller. I’m not so slouchy: I’ve learnt to sit up straight.
I normally train three hours a week, but this is four hours a day. I had always just jigged backstage at Stones concerts, so I loved learning to dance properly. Brendan was shouting at me today. I wanted to say,“Hey, I’m the old bird in this!”’
When I speak to her a couple of days after she has (unexpectedly) been voted off the programme, and ask whether she feels she failed, she is characteristically upbeat: ‘I have my life back! And I am going to carry on dancing; Brendan’s brother is going to give me lessons.’
I imagine she found some of the judges’ remarks hurtful. What about when Craig Revel Horwood said she moved like a hippo? ‘Like a bush kangaroo, thank you!’ Oops, I must still have the giant candles on my mind, but from this exchange I get the idea that Jo Wood is not a woman to be messed with, bossed about, belittled. Not a typical rock wife at all.
Jo found out Ronnie was having an affair by reading his texts. I tell her I can’t work out whether men are too stupid to delete them, or just plain lazy.
How did she cope when she found out? ‘Yeah, well, it was very scary at first. You know, you don’t imagine you’re going to be on your own at 53. I was like, “What’s going to happen to me now?” My girlfriends all rallied round and started taking me out.’
Katya sounds a nightmare – all those tabloid tales of Ronnie throwing her and her clothes out of their flat and on to the street.
‘It was very scary at first. You don’t imagine you’re going to be on your own at 53’
Are Jo and Ronnie still friends, I ask? Does she think he regrets leaving her, what with her perfect organic roast dinners, her nurturing, her sanity? In his autobiography he wrote of their marriage: ‘Believe me, I know how lucky I am.’
‘I have no idea, I don’t talk to him. He is my friend, and I’ll always love Ronnie in the way that he’s the father of my children and we spent so many years together. He’s off doing his thing; I don’t often hear from him. It’s like it was another life.’
Earlier this month she and Ronnie agreed a ‘quickie’ divorce, with Jo receiving a £6.5 million settlement. She says simply, ‘It’s part of the process to get done what
I need to be done.’
The marriage was in trouble long before Katya came along. In 1990, Jo fell ill with what was thought to be Crohn’s disease. She was pumped full of steroids, but only got worse. Desperate, she turned to a herbalist, who prescribed only organic food. This was at a time when to eat organically – especially in the world of rock music – was deeply unfashionable.
Jo hasn’t eaten junk food, salt, sugar, milk, for years, and says, ‘I am sure this is what has made me stronger. I’m always surprised when I come across people who have good jobs, who are educated, and they eat junk.’
She now runs a business producing organic toiletries and candles (she plans to expand into ‘some really cool organic baby stuff’ next year), but while her conversion transformed her health, it drove her and Ronnie – an alcoholic who writes in his autobiography about learning how to freebase cocaine – apart.
‘I think that’s where we started to differ more and more. I wanted him to be sober, he didn’t want to be. And he didn’t like being told not to drink. It wasn’t just me, it was the kids as well. We wanted him desperately not to be like that any more.’
They were together for 31 years, married for 24. As well as Leah, who has a baby daughter, Maggie Dylan (she’s Jo’s sixth grandchild), and Tyrone, there is Jamie from her first marriage, and Jesse from Ronnie’s first. How does it feel to be alone, children grown up, single for the first time in her life, free of a man who admitted that he cleared the plates from the table only once?
‘Ronnie seems so long ago now. Time does heal everything’
‘After a while I started to think, “This is quite nice, I can come home when I want, I don’t have to cook.” I realised, “Jo, you are actually taking care of yourself.” Now I can’t imagine having a bloke around, driving me nuts. I can lie in the middle of the bed!’ She makes a starfish shape. ‘It seems so long ago now. It’s amazing: time does heal everything.’
Does she like the fact that she can let herself go a little? ‘No! I’ve got more time to concentrate on myself. I used to have to organise Ronnie’s clothes before we went out, then just grab something for myself. Now I put on make-up just in case…’
Has she been seeing anyone? ‘I actually haven’t. It’s not a good idea for me to go from a 30-year relationship into another one. I want to stay single – not for very long, but for a while so that I can be me. I’m not ready to fall in love with anybody yet.’
I tell her that while Ronnie has come out of the affair looking ridiculous, she has emerged as a bit of a goddess. Is that why she did Strictly? To make him realise what he has lost? To forge her own identity?
‘I wouldn’t say that, because my identity has always been there. I was the [Sun newspaper’s] Face of 1972. I had all that attention then. Maybe [doing Strictly] was about showing you can get over a broken marriage and get out there and do things, but I’m still the same person.
'I think I could do anything after this. I’m definitely at the beginning of another chapter. The whole experience has made me more confident because I couldn’t just sit at home and feel sorry for myself.’
What is life like outside the Rolling Stone bubble? ‘My friends are still my friends; I spoke to Charlie Watts a couple of months ago, Keith [Richards] and Patti. The idea of life outside the bubble was the scary part, to find I hadn’t got that sort of protection. There was all that stuff in the papers and I thought, OK, I’ve got to be strong about this for me and for my family.’
I wonder if she’s going to leave the big house. ‘No! I’m turning it into a pop-up restaurant, Mrs Paisley’s Lashings, in December. It will only seat 35, and most of the vegetables will come from the garden [Jo will hire a chef and be maîtresse d’]. I’ve got some great truffles. It’s going to be fabulous.’
Can anyone come, even if they aren’t Kate Moss or Sarah Harding (the supermodel and the Girls Aloud singer are Jo’s best friends)? ‘Yes, but you have to book,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be a-mazing!’
I remind Jo that her lifelong motto, her secret for a successful marriage, had been: ‘Never show jealousy, don’t nag about alcohol, compliment each other and always have sex…’
I tell her it is all a bit sad to have ended like this. ‘In one way it’s sad but in another it’s given me a whole new life, and maybe these things are meant to happen. I could have stayed with him and our relationship would have got worse, but it didn’t happen.
'He set me free. I would never have left him, and I think somebody out there said, “It’s time for Jo to get out and enjoy her life.” I really don’t think I’ve been happier in years. I am strong enough to live without him.'
Scenes from Jo’s rock-wife life ...
From left: Jo and Ronnie’s wedding day, 2 January 1985; Jo wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress, 1975
At home with Ronnie, 1991
With Jamie, Jesse, Tyrone and Leah, 1988
Jo, Ronnie and children (from left), Jamie, Leah, Tyrone and Jes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1228998/Jo-Wood-Ronnie-set-free.html#ixzz0YHDoac9L
'Ronnie set me free', says Jo Wood
By LIZ JONES
Last updated at 12:44 AM on 29th November 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1228998/Jo-Wood-Ronnie-set-free.html
It’s a year since Jo Wood’s husband, Rolling Stone Ronnie, left her for a 21-year-old waitress. So how has she coped with being thrust into single life after 31 years of mothering four children and a wayward husband? Surprisingly well, she tells Liz Jones. And, after her stint on Strictly and a quickie divorce, she’s ready to waltz into the future on her own
'Now I can’t imagine having a bloke around, driving me nuts. I can lie in the middle of the bed!,' says Jo
When you turn up at Jo Wood’s house on a busy road in Kingston, Southwest London, you are met by a pair of imposing electric gates and a rather ancient orange spaniel who accompanies your car along the drive.
As you park in front of the house, which is rambling and gothic, a former hunting lodge for Prince Albert, no less, you notice two statues of pigs on the lawn and a Romany caravan. Two stone dogs – or are they lions? – flank the front door and inside it’s all dark parquet flooring and leaded windows.
I wait for Jo in a sitting room which is brimful of stuff: Jo Malone scented candles the size of hippos and a state-of-the-art sound system, with African knick-knacks and silver-framed photos crammed on every surface, testimony to a life well lived.
If I were a contestant on Through the Keyhole I would have guessed the owner was a rock star: I am indeed in the house of a Rolling Stone, albeit one who has been gone a year, into the arms of a 21-year-old Russian waitress. But snooping on the shelves I’m heartened to see evidence that their lives haven’t always been just about sex and drugs and rock and roll: there are box sets of Columbo and CSI.
When Jo bounces into the room, having not long got home from rehearsals for Strictly Come Dancing (she and partner Brendan Cole would be voted off the show two weeks later), she is wearing a mini ra-ra skirt, black tights, biker boots (‘Dior, about four years old’) and messy blonde hair. She has a Julie Christie mouth: big, expressive, sexy.
Jo with Strictly Come Dancing partner Brendan Cole
She is 54 but has the air (and the hair) and the energy of someone much younger. I ask if she still fits all those great clothes she wore in the 70s. She laughs. ‘In the 70s I was six stone and doing lots of drugs. I’m nine-and-a-half stone now.’
I wonder how Strictly has affected her body and her psyche, which has taken a battering, what with the aforementioned Russian waitress, Ekaterina Ivanova, known affectionately by her 62-year-old lover Ronnie as Katya. ‘My waist is smaller. I’m not so slouchy: I’ve learnt to sit up straight.
I normally train three hours a week, but this is four hours a day. I had always just jigged backstage at Stones concerts, so I loved learning to dance properly. Brendan was shouting at me today. I wanted to say,“Hey, I’m the old bird in this!”’
When I speak to her a couple of days after she has (unexpectedly) been voted off the programme, and ask whether she feels she failed, she is characteristically upbeat: ‘I have my life back! And I am going to carry on dancing; Brendan’s brother is going to give me lessons.’
I imagine she found some of the judges’ remarks hurtful. What about when Craig Revel Horwood said she moved like a hippo? ‘Like a bush kangaroo, thank you!’ Oops, I must still have the giant candles on my mind, but from this exchange I get the idea that Jo Wood is not a woman to be messed with, bossed about, belittled. Not a typical rock wife at all.
Jo found out Ronnie was having an affair by reading his texts. I tell her I can’t work out whether men are too stupid to delete them, or just plain lazy.
How did she cope when she found out? ‘Yeah, well, it was very scary at first. You know, you don’t imagine you’re going to be on your own at 53. I was like, “What’s going to happen to me now?” My girlfriends all rallied round and started taking me out.’
Katya sounds a nightmare – all those tabloid tales of Ronnie throwing her and her clothes out of their flat and on to the street.
‘It was very scary at first. You don’t imagine you’re going to be on your own at 53’
Are Jo and Ronnie still friends, I ask? Does she think he regrets leaving her, what with her perfect organic roast dinners, her nurturing, her sanity? In his autobiography he wrote of their marriage: ‘Believe me, I know how lucky I am.’
‘I have no idea, I don’t talk to him. He is my friend, and I’ll always love Ronnie in the way that he’s the father of my children and we spent so many years together. He’s off doing his thing; I don’t often hear from him. It’s like it was another life.’
Earlier this month she and Ronnie agreed a ‘quickie’ divorce, with Jo receiving a £6.5 million settlement. She says simply, ‘It’s part of the process to get done what
I need to be done.’
The marriage was in trouble long before Katya came along. In 1990, Jo fell ill with what was thought to be Crohn’s disease. She was pumped full of steroids, but only got worse. Desperate, she turned to a herbalist, who prescribed only organic food. This was at a time when to eat organically – especially in the world of rock music – was deeply unfashionable.
Jo hasn’t eaten junk food, salt, sugar, milk, for years, and says, ‘I am sure this is what has made me stronger. I’m always surprised when I come across people who have good jobs, who are educated, and they eat junk.’
She now runs a business producing organic toiletries and candles (she plans to expand into ‘some really cool organic baby stuff’ next year), but while her conversion transformed her health, it drove her and Ronnie – an alcoholic who writes in his autobiography about learning how to freebase cocaine – apart.
‘I think that’s where we started to differ more and more. I wanted him to be sober, he didn’t want to be. And he didn’t like being told not to drink. It wasn’t just me, it was the kids as well. We wanted him desperately not to be like that any more.’
They were together for 31 years, married for 24. As well as Leah, who has a baby daughter, Maggie Dylan (she’s Jo’s sixth grandchild), and Tyrone, there is Jamie from her first marriage, and Jesse from Ronnie’s first. How does it feel to be alone, children grown up, single for the first time in her life, free of a man who admitted that he cleared the plates from the table only once?
‘Ronnie seems so long ago now. Time does heal everything’
‘After a while I started to think, “This is quite nice, I can come home when I want, I don’t have to cook.” I realised, “Jo, you are actually taking care of yourself.” Now I can’t imagine having a bloke around, driving me nuts. I can lie in the middle of the bed!’ She makes a starfish shape. ‘It seems so long ago now. It’s amazing: time does heal everything.’
Does she like the fact that she can let herself go a little? ‘No! I’ve got more time to concentrate on myself. I used to have to organise Ronnie’s clothes before we went out, then just grab something for myself. Now I put on make-up just in case…’
Has she been seeing anyone? ‘I actually haven’t. It’s not a good idea for me to go from a 30-year relationship into another one. I want to stay single – not for very long, but for a while so that I can be me. I’m not ready to fall in love with anybody yet.’
I tell her that while Ronnie has come out of the affair looking ridiculous, she has emerged as a bit of a goddess. Is that why she did Strictly? To make him realise what he has lost? To forge her own identity?
‘I wouldn’t say that, because my identity has always been there. I was the [Sun newspaper’s] Face of 1972. I had all that attention then. Maybe [doing Strictly] was about showing you can get over a broken marriage and get out there and do things, but I’m still the same person.
'I think I could do anything after this. I’m definitely at the beginning of another chapter. The whole experience has made me more confident because I couldn’t just sit at home and feel sorry for myself.’
What is life like outside the Rolling Stone bubble? ‘My friends are still my friends; I spoke to Charlie Watts a couple of months ago, Keith [Richards] and Patti. The idea of life outside the bubble was the scary part, to find I hadn’t got that sort of protection. There was all that stuff in the papers and I thought, OK, I’ve got to be strong about this for me and for my family.’
I wonder if she’s going to leave the big house. ‘No! I’m turning it into a pop-up restaurant, Mrs Paisley’s Lashings, in December. It will only seat 35, and most of the vegetables will come from the garden [Jo will hire a chef and be maîtresse d’]. I’ve got some great truffles. It’s going to be fabulous.’
Can anyone come, even if they aren’t Kate Moss or Sarah Harding (the supermodel and the Girls Aloud singer are Jo’s best friends)? ‘Yes, but you have to book,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be a-mazing!’
I remind Jo that her lifelong motto, her secret for a successful marriage, had been: ‘Never show jealousy, don’t nag about alcohol, compliment each other and always have sex…’
I tell her it is all a bit sad to have ended like this. ‘In one way it’s sad but in another it’s given me a whole new life, and maybe these things are meant to happen. I could have stayed with him and our relationship would have got worse, but it didn’t happen.
'He set me free. I would never have left him, and I think somebody out there said, “It’s time for Jo to get out and enjoy her life.” I really don’t think I’ve been happier in years. I am strong enough to live without him.'
Scenes from Jo’s rock-wife life ...
From left: Jo and Ronnie’s wedding day, 2 January 1985; Jo wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress, 1975
At home with Ronnie, 1991
With Jamie, Jesse, Tyrone and Leah, 1988
Jo, Ronnie and children (from left), Jamie, Leah, Tyrone and Jes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1228998/Jo-Wood-Ronnie-set-free.html#ixzz0YHDoac9L