http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/news-gossip/addicted---to-a-game--of-rus...Addicted to a game of Russian roulette
Having fallen off the wagon and into the arms of a teenager, rehab is the best place for Ronnie Wood, says Barry Egan
By BARRY EGAN
Sunday July 20 2008
MICK and Keith tried to make him go into rehab. He said yeah yeah, man. It was immediately prior to the Rolling Stones world tour in early 2006, when Ronnie Wood fell unceremoniously off the wagon.
Again.
It was, he recalled later that summer, his fifth visit to rehab (the Priory in London and Cottonwood in Arizona, among others).
"Or maybe it was my sixth?" Ronnie mumbled. "What can I say? I'm an alcoholic; it's what I do. Obviously, normal people don't go out to work drunk, but for an alcoholic it's entirely normal to go to work out of your f**king brain, and that's exactly what I did. For years."
He thought for a second before appearing to reach a point of clarity in a brain fogged by decades of cocaine and alcohol abuse.
"I just think my body can't handle it anymore," he said. "I did try a little drink a while back, and I was actually physically ill. I went into an immediate depression, and felt awful, just dreadful. So that's it. I'm over it now. I am."
No one believed him, least of all, perhaps, Ronnie Wood.
This was the man who in 1984, according to the Stones biographer Stephen Davis, had a cocaine habit that was costing $5,000 a day to feed. This was the matchstick man who reportedly became so addicted to coke, he once banned his children from eating meringues in the house after he allegedly mistook a white crumb for a chunk of the drug and attempted to smoke it.
Keith Richards, that well- known party pooper and herbal tea-drinker, once became so furious with Ronnie for freebasing purified cocaine that he pulled a gun on him.
"He stormed off to get his gun," Wood recalls in his book. "I warned everyone to 'clear the decks'. Keith came back with his Derringer gun, pointed it at me and yelled, 'You f***ing bastard Woody!' But I had my own gun, a .44 Magnum. I didn't have any bullets for it but I calmly pulled it out. And that was the last time Keith pulled a gun on me -- until the next time."
There are also drunken tales of Wood and John Hurt on all-night vodka, red wine and Guinness beanos.
I met Ron a few years ago in the Shelbourne hotel and tried, unsuccessfully, to interview him. He fell asleep mid- sentence (maybe it was more to do with my interview questions than his drug intake), only to awake a full three minutes later in the exact spot in the anecdote where he had left off. I had to marvel at the genius of it all.
He then mused, not inaccurately, that he had been surrounded by people who had OD'd: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon. "All these people I used to hang out with are dropping like flies."
He recalled that he and The Who drummer Keith Moon "were hitting it really hard. I used to say to Keith, 'You're meant to take one of those tablets, not the whole bottle.' Keith would literally take a whole bottle of Valium. So it didn't surprise me when he died, when he OD'd.
"I loved drinking with Peter Cook and the lovely Monty Python, Graham Chapman," he recalled. "I loved Peter, I really miss him. I think of him almost every day when something funny happens. The last thing Peter said to me was, 'I've done my bit for the Chinese.' He meant that Chinese bird he married."
Ronnie perhaps should have concentrated on the English bird he married ...
The warning signs were there as far back as the late Nineties. In 1999, he confessed that he couldn't be "left unsupervised" -- as recent events with a certain teenage Russian lady by the name of Ekaterina Ivanova have proved.
I'm not trying to excuse his caddish behaviour, but Ronnie Wood is a member of the Rolling Stones not the British Conservative Party (possibly a bad choice, I know, to contrast Ronnie Wood with, as the Tories are historically the kinkiest politicians in Europe, but you take my meaning).
And I suspect his long-suffering wife Jo Wood had some inkling of what she was letting herself in for when she married him 30 years ago. She might have also known a thing or two about his history: drugs, drink and an alleged affair with the Canadian Prime Minister's wife, Margaret Trudeau, in the mid-Seventies.
Not forgetting that when model Jo Howard met Ronnie at a party in 1976, he was still married to model Krissy. There was also the matter of Krissy being pregnant with Ronnie's child when he met Ms Howard. A year after the child, Jesse, was born, Ronnie and Krissy divorced. Jo was cited in the divorce. (Three years ago, Krissy died of a suspected Valium OD.)
In his most recent autobiography, Ronnie recalls how even his wife-to-be Jo did not recognise him or his name when he presented himself at a party, trying to impress her.
So Jo, to recap, married someone with a history of straying, a man with a deep-rooted low self-esteem.
Psychologists would have a field day with Ronnie's mid-to-late life crisis, going back on the drink -- apparently two bottles of vodka a day -- coupled with running off with a woman a decade younger than his daughter Leah.
Admittedly, the writing was on the wall somewhat when The Sun published a story that Ronnie Wood was hiring dwarfs to perform at the wedding of Leah,29, last month.
The tabloids informed us that wedding planners were looking for male and female dwarfs, under 4ft tall, to dress as "mischievous, giggling little imps".
Sadly, it appears that Wood is the one acting like a mischievous, giggling little imp on two bottles of Smirnoff a day. The lovable rogue seemed set to drink himself to death this time -- but once again he saw the light just in time and agreed to go back into rehab.
"The AA stuff rubs off a bit," he said a few years ago when on the dry. "But once you put down the books and stop thinking you have to follow it to the letter, you realise it's down to the individual. Something clicks and hopefully you're able to say, 'Just for today, I choose not to have a drink'."
Ironically, given his present dilemma with drink, Ronnie was one of the first of his family to be born on dry land.
"All of my family, right back to the 1700s -- as far as I've traced them -- have been on the barges, as navigators or helmsmen or whatever," he told the Sunday Times in 2003, adding that his father Arthur -- apparently a man also fond of a sup -- was born on a barge called the Antelope; his mother, Elizabeth, on the Orient.
Not surprisingly, Wood named the pub in his back garden in Kildare, On Yer Father's Yacht.
(Memo to Jo: perhaps it wasn't a good idea to let your alco husband have a pub in the back garden. Most people seem to make do with a gazebo or a shed to potter about in.)
Wood was asked a few years ago, at the time of another infamous and very public battle with booze, whether it was true that his boss from the band, Mr Jagger, was furious enough to threaten him with his P45 if he didn't sober up.
"Mick is very supportive," he said then. "He didn't threaten me at all. There were stories that I was going to be kicked out of the Stones. That's all bollocks. He just came as a friend and said, 'Ronnie, you can't just have one drink can you? Please. I love you. Help yourself'."
- BARRY EGAN
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