It was well past midnight, but it was still so warm that I was perfectly comfortable sitting outside in just a summer dress. The buzz of cicadas and the scent of cinnamon and rose petals filled the air, and while our table was dotted with candles, the full moon would have provided more than enough light on its own.
It was 2003 and Ronnie and I were in Udaipur, our latest stop on a magical holiday around India with Keith, Patti and Jane Rose. We’d ridden elephants, shopped for saris and jewellery and stayed at the fabled Lake Palace Hotel – although a drought had dried the lake into a dustbowl when we arrived. Tonight we were at a restaurant having dinner with a large group of people, some of whom I knew well, such as our friend, Dilip, an Indian cricketer turned rock promoter, and others we had met that evening. The food was fabulous and the wine was flowing freely – a little too freely in the case of Ronnie, who had already started on the vodka. To my dismay, he was well on the way to getting wasted.
I could always tell when Ronnie was on one of his binges. He got this crazed look in his eyes, although he wasn’t able to look at you directly, and all he wanted to do was drink and tell funny stories and entertain everyone. Ronnie is an extremely lovable guy and such a charmer – if he walked in the door now he’d charm the pants off you – and he was an extremely charming drunk, too. All his drinking buddies thought he was fantastic. They would never have believed he had a darker side: ‘Ronnie ever get angry? No way!’ But while he was Mr Charisma with everyone else, the booze could make him unbelievably nasty to me and to those closest to him.
When Ronnie signalled to the waiter for more vodka I decided to risk a quiet word. ‘Ronnie,’ I said, putting my hand on his arm. ‘Don’t you think you’ve maybe had enough to drink?’
As he turned to me I knew I should have stayed quiet.
‘You fucking cunt,’ he said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. ‘Don’t you fucking tell me what to do.’
I flushed with embarrassment, acutely aware of the glances from the other guests sitting nearby, but I just tried to laugh it off. ‘Ronnie, I don’t—’
‘Didn’t you fucking hear what I said? Shut the fuck up!’
By now I knew the whole table must have heard, although I was too ashamed to look up to check. I was mortified at being spoken to like that, especially in front of people we’d only just met; I would hate them to think of me as some sort of victim. But the last thing I wanted was to make any more of a scene so I shrugged and rolled my eyes and the moment blew over. Ronnie went back to his vodka and the woman sitting on the other side of him. But as I reached over to top up my water, I caught Jane Rose staring at me from across the table. The expression in her eyes made me want to cry. She looked concerned and sympathetic but, worse than that, she looked like she felt sorry for me.
Despite the hopes I’d had for Ronnie and me to share a healthier future, our lives had taken very different paths in the years since my illness. I wanted to live a normal life when we were at home, but for Ronnie it was still all about drink and drugs and rock ’n’ roll – and the more he drank, the less I wanted to: I could cope with him better if I had a clear head. Getting pissed out of my brain didn’t hold much allure for me any more: nowadays, I got far more excited about getting into the car and driving to a lovely hotel in the country for the weekend. I tried hosting dinner parties at Holmwood, but Ronnie would always want to stay up all night, so I’d get up in the morning to find all these blokes still snorting, drinking and smoking, and wonder, What happened to my lovely sophisticated dinner party?
The last years of our relationship were ruled by Ronnie’s alcoholism. The following is taken from my diary in 2005, but it really could have been from any year during the last decade that we were together.
7 January
After six days of sticking to his New Year’s Resolution and not drinking Ronnie slipped. What a shame, he was doing so good. Here we go again . . .
17 January
Woke today at 8.30. The old man lay still sleeping and stinking of booze but he woke feeling positive and said he was gonna get back on track. Great, I thought . . . But when we sat down to dinner R was well on his way and getting louder. I added water to his strong drink and he went mad and left the table.
12 February
When we got home Ronnie was horribly drunk. I had to undress him as he lay on the floor then he threw up all over the bathroom floor, so at 3 in the morning I was mopping up sick. This is fucked up. Or rather, he is VERY ILL.
14 February
Cooked Valentine’s dinner mainly because can’t bear to go out with Ronnie cos he’s drinking. UGGH . . .
2 March
Went for dinner with Jimmy and pals at River Café . . . Ronnie drunk before we even got there.
6 March
Ronnie drunk on sake. Very pissed. Another awful night.
8 March
Got a migraine last night – must have been when I saw how pissed old man was getting. Cooked dinner for Lize and Leah, Ronnie, Ty and all his pals. In the night Ronnie started to choke and gurgle. I got him out of bed and into the bathroom where he fell over like a toy soldier. Oh my, it was awful. But got him up, made him sleep on his side, he knew nothing of it!!!
For the whole time I’d known him, Ronnie had always drunk huge amounts, but when we’d got pissed together in the early days we’d had a real laugh. Now, more often than not, Ronnie’s binges would end with him laying into me about something. Maybe his body couldn’t tolerate the alcohol as well now that he was getting older – or perhaps it was just me that he couldn’t tolerate.
I actually find it so sad to think about the bad times. One night I was asleep when Ronnie burst into our bedroom at Holmwood, drunk as a skunk, and turned on all the lights.
‘There’s no fucking vodka in the house!’ he yelled. ‘Where’s the fucking vodka?’
‘Ronnie, please,’ I said, pulling the covers over my head. ‘I’m asleep! Just leave me alone.’
On that occasion he really lost it. He came over to the bed and the poison just started pouring out of his mouth.
‘I’ll throw acid in your face . . . You’d better watch out because I know people . . .’
It was like he was possessed (which, in a way, he was).
After he went back downstairs I cried myself to sleep, feeling broken-hearted and totally helpless, and when he eventually woke up the next day I asked him if he remembered what had happened the night before.
‘No,’ he said, sleepily. ‘Was it a good night? Coffee would be lovely, Jo . . .’
When Ronnie was on a real roll he would go on drinking for days and days until he literally collapsed from exhaustion, but when he woke up it was like I had my old Ronnie back. For the next day or two he would be absolutely great and I’d begin to relax, but then the drinking would start again and he’d be such hard work that I couldn’t imagine putting up with another day of it. But that’s typical of living with an alcoholic.
My worst fears were coming true: the booze was making Ronnie treat me in the same way that his dad had treated his mum. And while I usually got the worst of it, he’d occasionally freak out with the kids, too. I had managed to protect them from it when they were growing up, but now they were older they were far more aware of what was going on. I remember a holiday in Barbados when Leah was upset because Ronnie refused to leave a bar. They ended up screaming at each other in the street and I had to break it up.
I had been sucked into Ronnie’s alcoholism and had become his co-dependent: covering for him, caring for him and trying to keep our lives together while all the time I was being dragged down with him. My sister Lize would get so angry about the way he talked to me and kept asking why I put up with it, but I would just make excuses for him. ‘Oh, he was drinking last night . . . He hasn’t had much sleep . . . He’s been working really hard . . .’
I became so caught up in Ronnie’s illness that at times I felt like I was drowning in his alcoholism. It was a horrible, hopeless feeling. I lost all my confidence and became this meek, apologetic woman who would do anything just to keep the peace. On Lize’s wedding day Ronnie decided he’d had enough at 10 p.m. and wanted to go home, but instead of staying on to enjoy myself alone I left without question. On my own sister’s wedding day!
You might wonder why I stuck with Ronnie through all this, but when someone talks to you so badly it eats away at your self-esteem until you don’t feel you’re worthy of anyone else. While I knew I didn’t deserve to be treated that way (and that it was making me deeply unhappy), it didn’t cross my mind for a moment to leave Ronnie. In the early years we had done all these stupid things together – tangled with the Mafia, police, drugs, prison – yet I had always been totally unafraid. It was always ‘Wooo, let’s go!’ But I wasn’t fearless now: I was full of fear. Full of fear that I was going to be on my own, that I wouldn’t be able to cope. Ronnie’s alcoholism had crushed my spirit and reduced me to an insecure wreck. And when I look back at photos of the two of us from this time, my arms always wrapped tightly around Ronnie’s neck, clinging on as if for dear life, I just think, Oh, Jo, what the fuck were you doing?
Throughout all this I hung on to my conviction that the booze was to blame for the worst of his behaviour; in my mind all I had to do was get him to quit and we’d be back on track. In 2000, Ronnie acknowledged he had a drinking problem and, to my immense relief, checked himself into the Priory for a week, but it wasn’t long before he had slipped back into old habits. This began a pattern over the next few years of him going into rehab, staying sober for a few weeks and then relapsing. In 2002 he flew to Cottonwood, a famously tough clinic in Arizona, to prepare for the Stones’ Forty Licks tour, but straight afterwards we went to a spa for a few days and he ordered a white wine spritzer. He thought he’d be able to control it, but from there it was just a short hop back to vodka.
Ronnie tried his best to stay clean for Forty Licks and A Bigger Bang and had counsellors and life coaches with him on the road to keep him on the straight and narrow, but he never managed it completely. During our marriage, I think the longest he ever stayed sober was about six weeks. I would see him on stage, know instantly that he’d had a drink, and my heart would sink. Mick had decreed that one of my responsibilities as Ronnie’s PA was to keep him sober, but I’d had no training in how to achieve that so it was an absolute disaster, an additional pressure on our relationship that we really didn’t need. Suddenly I was watching Ronnie at every moment of the day, petrified he was going to have a drink – and, of course, the more someone feels they can’t have a drink, the more they want one. Then Mick would find out and all hell would break loose again.
‘I’m so tired. I argued with Ronnie about his alcoholism till the early hours,’ I wrote in my diary, while we were on tour in Denver. ‘He’s been taken over again. On the plane R had a couple of vodkas, by the time he got to the hotel he was gone . . . He hated the room (which was nice) and marched out. Here we go . . .’
Then I jotted down a poem:
I hate my husband’s alcoholism, I really do.
I hate the way he talks to me, I really do.
I hate it when his illness takes over him, I really do.
I want Ronnie back, I really do.
I would work as hard as I could when we were on tour, but nothing was ever good enough for Ronnie when he was drunk. I remember many nights when we’d be in the car driving back to the hotel, with security sitting in the front pretending not to listen while Ronnie yelled at me about something or other.
But the instant he got up on stage all was forgiven. He was my guitar hero. Sometimes I’d stand in front of the stage, look up at him and think, I’m married to a genius. I was totally in awe of his talent. In those moments I was so proud to be his wife that it seemed worth putting up with a bit of crap. I hated the way the alcohol made Ronnie treat me when he was ‘taken over’, as I put it in my diary. And what kept me going through all the bad times was my rock-solid belief that one day I would help Ronnie stop drinking. When he was sober, our problems would be over and we would be happy together. After all, our lives over the years had been such a fabulous fairytale, surely we’d get the happily-ever-after, too.