It can’t be much fun being married to a Rolling Stone. Even the long-suffering Jerry Hall threw in the towel eventually and now Jo Wood, who has been with Ronnie since 1977 and married to him since 1985, is threatening shock and awe over rumours that he has been holed up in their Irish castle with a 20-year-old Russian cocktail waitress. Part of us can’t help thinking that holing up with 20-year-old Russian cocktail waitresses is kind of the point of being a Rolling Stone but still, sisterly considerations demand that it is entirely with Jo that our sympathies lie.

Drugs and booze have been woven into the fabric of their marriage since the start: Keith Richards chopped up lines of cocaine for them in the car on the way to their wedding, and Ronnie, 61, has dropped on and off the wagon with depressing regularity. Only last month he checked himself out of the Priory in time to walk his daughter, Leah, down the aisle. But now it is reported that Ronnie, a successful artist, is on too much vodka and finding artistic inspiration in Ekaterina Ivanova, whom he met in an escort bar.

“She feels betrayed,” a “source close to Jo” was quoted as saying. “They had such a strong marriage. He’s thrown it all away with his stupid behaviour.”

Born in Essex, the eldest of four children, Jo was working as a model when she met Ronnie at a party. (At the time, Ronnie was married, and having an affair with Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s wife.) Now 53, and still stunning by anyone’s standards, she must be a tough cookie. She was the first Stones girlfriend to go on tour with the band, and the first to hang out with them in the studio: after 24 hours Charlie Watts turned to her and said “Are you still here?”

My hols: Jo Wood

Cocaine, wild parties, lethal rum and 22 raw tuna: Rolling Stone Ron's wife is on a roll

“I thought I could get Ronnie to change,” she said wistfully back in February, “but you only change when you want to.”

But in a house which may frequently have resembled bedlam, Jo managed to raise nice, polite, well-adjusted children: Leah, 28; Tyrone, 23; Jamie, 34, her son from her first marriage; and Jesse, 31, Ronnie’s son from his first marriage. She has also embarked on a successful career of her own with Jo Wood Organics, a line of bath and body unguents which, since its launch in 2003, have defied cynics by becoming bestsellers.

Ronnie, meanwhile, is reported to be heading home, with a view to checking himself once more into rehab. It remains to be seen whether his marriage can be saved, but grovelling to his rather fabulous wife might not be a bad start.

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