Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, 61, 'runs away with 18-year-old Russian cocktail waitress'

Ronnie Wood has walked out on his wife and four children to live with a teenage cocktail waitress he met in an escort bar.



The 61-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist has fled to his mansion in Ireland with the 18-year- old Russian blonde.

His wife of 23 years, Jo, is said to have begged Ekaterina Ivanova not to take her husband away from her. The teenager is understood to have told friends that she replied: 'I am not taking him - he is leaving.'



The other woman: Ekaterina Ivanova is said to have run away with rocker Ronnie Wood following an extra-marital affair

A representative of Wood, who has battled a drink problem for years, said the girl began seeing him three months ago when he was at a low ebb, frazzled by alcohol. They have been together ever since.



Wood - who is drinking two bottles of vodka a day - met Miss Ivanova after the London premiere of the Stones documentary, Shine A Light, on April 2 in a seedy escort bar in Soho.

Within weeks the girl from Moscow had grown so close to Wood that she accompanied him back to the home he shares with Jo and their four children in Kingston upon Thames, South-West London.



At the beginning of May, Wood invited Miss Ivanova to join him at his mansion in Clane, County Kildare.



She has been writing about the relationship on the social networking website Facebook, calling Wood her 'boyfriend' and saying she is quickly 'falling in love'.

Defiant: Jo Wood, pictured at Cipriani's restaurant last night, has denied the affair claims

She also claims to have become Wood's painting muse, posing for him at the Irish house.



Wood's publicist made the extraordinary move of speaking publicly about his curious relationship with the teenager yesterday.



The publicist said: 'She is a drinking partner. When you're an alcoholic and your family are all telling you to stop drinking you simply find someone else to drink with. You can see how it happens, you end up pushing away the ones you love because you don't think straight.

'He met her in a dodgy escort bar at four in the morning when he was boozed out of his mind. I heard she worked there, but doing what I don't know. It was a very dodgy scenario.

'He's fallen off the wagon big time. He's spiralling out of control and every time he returns to his drinking it's worse than before. He's not even clear-headed enough to check himself into rehab.



'He's in a very bad way. His son Tyrone has tried to speak to him briefly, but he's not even waking up until late afternoon. He's very much spiralling.

'He's on two bottles of vodka a day and he has a size 28 waist. He's not a massive man. He's an alcoholic who has worked up his tolerance to that amount. He is in contact with Jo but until he sorts out the booze problem, it's not Ronnie. Nothing can be resolved.

' Wood was absent on Thursday night when the rest of his family went to the first night of an art exhibition run by Tyrone in Mayfair.



Asked if she thought the pair were having an affair, Jo told The Sun: 'They're not boyfriend or girlfriend - not in that way.'



However Miss Ivanova has been telling friends a very different story. One said: 'She is besotted with Ronnie. Whether or not he knows it, she plans a future with him. She has told everyone Ronnie has left his wife for her and they are a full-on item.'



Locals in Clane said that Wood had barely left the house in weeks. He used to frequent a local bar, where he would join in the odd jam session on his guitar, but that closed recently because of a fire.

Wood is estimated to be worth £70million. The cocktail waitress incident is being seen as the latest symptom of an alcohol problem which has seen him in rehab many times.

Trouble: Ronnie and wife Jo, here at his book signing event last year

The first time he emerged from the clinic, fellow Stone Keith Richards sent him a fax upon which he had scrawled: 'Rehab is for quitters.'



Wood, somewhat wounded, fired one back saying: 'Actually mate, I was in hospital.'



He had, he said at the time, been advised that he was only six months from death. He had been daily consuming two or three bottles of vodka, plenty of chilled Guinness and countless Sambucas. 'I suppose I was permanently pickled,' he said.



Richards treated it all as a bit of a joke and found it a nuisance when he lost his drinking partner. It has never been that much of an issue, however, as Wood's periods off the sauce never seem to last very long.



The trouble is that he has always been proud of his epic consumption. There has never been any publiclyadmitted shame, nor has he reached what therapists call 'rock bottom'.

Sure, his friends and drinking buddies have died - Jimi Hendrix, actor John Belushi, his first wife Krissy, comedian Peter Cook - but this has not really given him pause. Even though his wife refers to alcohol as a 'monster' with which he battles daily, he never seems to learn.



The 'affair' is being described by those who know Wood as nothing more than a by-product of his alcoholic compulsion.



'He's not run away from Jo to be with this girl,' said one. 'He's run away from Jo so that he can get ragged on vodka.'



Another associate said: 'I feel really sorry for Jo because she's taken a lot of this like a good 'un. Ronnie is not a lech, I have known him for years and I don't think he's even that interested in sex. I don't think he's had a bunk-up in ten years.



'The problem here is the drinking. He spends a lot of time in Ireland, and you know that when he's there that is what is going on.



'He can't seem to control the drink and he can't seem to control anything in his life either. It's been a series of disasters over money and managers.



'It's the sort of person Ronnie is. He always looks like the kid who didn't get an ice cream. He's kind of helpless.'

Icon: Ronnie (centre) poses with director Martin Scorsese (second right) alongside Rolling Stones bandmates Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger

Wood believes that he was born to be a drinker. He grew up on an estate near Heathrow, and would go every night to watch his father drinking, partying and playing the piano at a local pub, the Nag's Head.



Young Ronnie would sit on the windowsill with a packet of crisps and a Coca-Cola and watch his Dad pound the keys. At closing time there would be a shout of 'All back to No 8' - the Woods' home - and the party would start in earnest, with everyone taking as much booze as they could carry. After the Woods moved out, the new owners found 1,700 empty Guinness bottles in the back garden.



When Ronnie started playing with the Jeff Beck Group, he developed a fondness for red vermouth, which took the edge off his stage fright. He was, though, fairly indiscriminate in those days, and progressed through alcohol to cocaine and heroin.



It was all part of his appetite for a good time. As he revealed in his autobiography, he had a seemingly limitless enthusiasm for narcotics.



He and Keith would stay up for 72 hours straight on cocaine while the long suffering Jo, whom he met in 1977, was never more than a dabbler. Keith chopped out a line of coke for them both in their wedding car on the way to the reception. Ronnie spent a £70,000 home improvement loan on drugs, and he and Bobby Keys would stay up all day and night freebasing.



In the 1980s, when the Stones gave up touring, Ronnie's cocaine habit became immense. He and Jo were arrested in the Caribbean with 200 grams of coke.



His dealers used to wake him up in the middle of the night so that he could take hits. He ended up losing his home, his nightclub and all his investments, and hallucinating that there were people hiding in the bushes of his house.



What Ronnie really loved was a party. Those who know him say that he will always be the last to leave, even if that means staying up all night. To this day, his supporters say that his frequent departures from the wagon are always when he has been tempted to prove his credentials as a party animal - a misplaced sense of pride which has seen Jo threaten to leave him.



'He is very easily led,' says an old pal. 'Ronnie doesn't eat, he just likes a drink. Jo and the kids get seriously fed up with it.'



This time, he seems to have started drinking partly out of boredom after the end of the last Stones tour. His daughter Leah's wedding earlier this month was, of course, an excuse to indulge very heavily.



But his family have lost patience with him when he drinks, and so he tends to go to his house in County Kildare where he can knock it back in peace.



'I come from a drinking family and I always enjoy the taste of beer,' he once said.



Several of his attempts at rehab were at Jo's insistence.



She told an interviewer: 'I was at the end of my tether, thinking, "I don't know how much more of this I can take." It was every day, all night long, every night.



'Socially, everybody loved him. Ronnie was great. But when he got back home, he was horrible. I used to dread going to parties because I knew we were going to be the last to leave.'



She spoke to Jagger, who told her she had to get him clean for the Stones tour. 'Ronnie didn't agree until the day before he was due to go.



It was very emotional getting him there. It was really tough because you feel as if you're putting him into some kind of prison.' He spent almost a year clean, but in March 2004, he was admitted once again to the Priory after a night drinking with Kate Moss ended with him under the table, biting people on the ankles.



Almost exactly a year later, in March 2005, he checked into an Irish clinic after getting drunk at his wife's 50th birthday party. In 2006, after celebrating his 59th birthday party in typically riotous fashion, he checked into the Priory, in Roehampton, West London, for an intense five-day drying out session.



There were no problems on the Stones' last tour which ended this year. As usual, Jo came along and cooked him egg and beans on a portable stove in his hotel room, and made him coffees and passed him his cigarettes.



It is, of course, possible for a ageing rocker to conquer his addictions, as Eric Clapton has proved. But one of Wood's friends said yesterday: 'I don't know that Ronnie will ever straighten out.



'For him, drinking goes hand in hand with having fun, and he'd rather be dead than be boring. I remember him saying to me when he went into rehab, "The thing is, I don't want to end up being a boring b*****d like Clapton".'