Sally Humphreys: the new Mrs Ronnie Wood

She’s a 34-year-old theatre producer, he’s a 65-year-old rock legend — in her first ever interview Sally Humphreys explains why she said yes to becoming the third Mrs Ronnie Wood
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Nick Curtis @nickcurtis7 December 2012

No, they haven’t secretly married already. But petite 34-year-old theatre producer Sally Humphreys confirms that she and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood — 31 years her senior — will wed “earlier rather than later” in 2013. It will be a small affair in London for family and friends, though Sally confides he’s having former Faces bandmate Rod Stewart as his best man, rather than a fellow Stone or one of his children.

She shows me the simple platinum band inscribed with the word “yes” that Wood gave her, which many took to be a wedding ring. I ask if they plan to have a family together and she says: “Maybe. There are no plans but there are no non-plans.”

The day we met, another journalist emailed her to say they knew she was 12 weeks pregnant with Wood’s child. Sally replied that they must be confusing her with Kate Middleton. We laugh heartily — she has a great, dirty laugh — but then stiffens. “This isn’t going to be just a Ronnie interview, is it?” she says warily.

Well, not entirely. Humphreys has agreed to meet me to talk about Little Charley Bear and his Christmas Adventure at the Ambassadors Theatre, where her independent production company is based. She pulled this puppet-dominated adaptation of the popular CBeebies show together in a matter of months when another production fell through. This is impressive, and Humphreys deserves attention for being an increasingly powerful woman in the still male-dominated world of West End theatre production.

But she and I know I probably wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t about to become the third Mrs Wood, following in the footsteps of the late Krissy Findlay, who gave him a son, Jesse, and who died in 2005, and second wife Jo, who helped him curb his addictions to drink and drugs and is mother to his stepson Jamie and children Tyrone and Leah.

He left Jo in 2008 after 24 years to fall off the wagon with a series of increasingly improbable younger women: Russian cocktail waitress Ekaterina Ivanova, Brazilian model Ana Araujo and shop assistant Nicola Sargent.

Jo, Jamie, Jesse et al have given tacit approval to Sally but she’s suddenly been catapulted into a world of gossip and speculation, and is alternately frank and wary.

As a former head girl at King Edward VI Grammar School in Handsworth, and a graduate of the Central Television Workshop and Mountview drama school, she acted in “the usual” (Casualty, Doctors, panto) before moving behind the scenes. She met Wood “eight or nine years ago” when she was working backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and he was hanging an exhibition of his paintings nearby.

They chatted, and “his people” subsequently asked Sally and her younger brother Geraint, a music journalist, to help out on a chapter about Drury Lane in his 2007 autobiography (her older sister, Joanna, works in the food industry).

Sally and Wood kept in touch, and as an independent producer she later staged two concerts with him at the Ambassadors. She’d had an earlier brush with Stones-world when she produced a fringe play starring Mick Jagger’s son James at the King’s Head.

They finally got together earlier this year. “Ronnie was married and then Ronnie wasn’t married,” she says. “I have had boyfriends, then I didn’t have a boyfriend. It had to wait until everyone was clear. But I definitely feel like I have ended up in the right place.”

She is “not allowed” to talk about previous relationships but suggests this is her first with a significantly older man, although she has enjoyed the company of her seniors since working in “an old ladies’ boutique at 15 or 16” in her native Birmingham.

At 65, Wood is a year younger than Sally’s father Colin and two years older than her mother Alison, both retired classical musicians. Wood asked Colin’s permission to marry Sally because “he’s very traditional”. For her part Sally thinks it is “important to be married”. She insists her parents are pleased. Sally herself is just a few months older than Wood’s daughter, Leah, and she will find herself a step-grandmother to sundry Wood infants, soon to be joined by Jesse’s first child with DJ Fearne Cotton.

“There is an age gap. I would prefer it if there wasn’t but there is,” she admits. “But maybe I’m a bit older and he’s a bit younger at heart.” One columnist suggested Sally would find herself a carer rather than a bride within 10 years. “Actually, I think that’s good in a way,” she ripostes brightly. “That’s what people should be doing, looking after each other. On the other hand, I could be struck by lightning or knocked down by a bus. I can’t not allow good times now because in 20 years’ time it will be different.”

She says she isn’t jealous of Wood’s distant past, the years spent dodging Janis Joplin’s advances and competing for groupies with Rod Stewart. “No, you can’t be jealous of a past, because I wasn’t part of it. It’s there, so you deal with it, or walk away. His three girlfriends since his split from Jo is not an excessive number, but if it was 23...”

Wood had problems with cocaine until 2002 and has been in and out of rehab for alcoholism more recently. Humphreys says “the drink and drug boat passed me by” so abstinence is not a problem.

But she doesn’t see herself as the guardian of his sobriety either, and simply notes: “He’s in a good place, not drinking and playing well.”

Humphreys is not a model like Wood’s former wives or trashily glamorous like some of his conquests, but she makes her £35 dress from Joy look expensive.

Wood, meanwhile, has been described as looking like a “wizened cockatiel”, and (by the journalist Grace Dent) as “a medical cadaver left in a hedge”. Humphreys finds such comments “disrespectful, spiteful and rude. He is phenomenally talented and very funny. He’s an artist and a musician, and he’s very entertaining. People always say, would you still be going out with him if he was a bin man. Well, if the bin man could play guitar and paint pictures and was hilariously funny, yeah, I would.”

She is briefly angry. “You read these unkind comments,” she says, “opinionated articles not backed up in fact, about this horrible old man who dyes his hair and doesn’t put his teeth in... it’s just lies.”

Then she starts a sentence about the difference between the public perception and reality with the phrase “there are two Ronnies”, and cracks up. She worries that she is trashing his rock ’n’ roll reputation when she tells me he is kind and caring. Does he make big, romantic gestures? “I can think of several, but I’m not telling you,” she says.

Actually, their life sounds reassuringly boring. Yes, she went with Ron to his induction to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in April, and to Paul McCartney’s wedding to Nancy Shevell, but in between she “came to work every day, saw the same people, did the same things”.

While she was watching the dress rehearsal of Little Bear Charley, he was performing to thousands with the Stones in New York, but she had no worries he’d go Awol. A friend texted her after watching the band’s recent show at the 02 to ask how they were celebrating. “People assume it’s party, party, party, but we were watching Taggart and eating cheese,” she says. All the Stones are usually tucked up before the crowd has left the stadium.

She and Ron love a good TV thriller or box set, and are currently working their way through Homeland and Hunted. Sally loves to bake (she’s made cakes for Michael Crawford and James Earl Jones) while Ronnie knocks up a great Sunday roast. She walks to work every morning from the Holland Park home she’s shared with him since May, but it takes five times as long if he comes with her on his way to his Bruton Street studio. Not because he’s past it, but because of the people stopping him for autographs and photographs, she adds hurriedly.

Although her taste runs more to Dolly Parton than the Stones, she knows her way around the band’s blues influences, and claims there’s not that much of a cultural gulf between her and her intended. Sure, he is mystified by Twitter, “but I work in theatre, which isn’t exactly whiz-kid stuff”.

She hopes to stage an American play next year, and would eventually love to transfer a production to Broadway, but says it wouldn’t occur to her to ask Ron to invest any of his estimated £25 million fortune in her work, much less approach his richer friends like Jagger and Paul McCartney. “People say, are you a gold-digger, are you this, are you that,” says Humphreys. “I’m not. If I was, I wouldn’t be at work every day. But I suppose only time will tell.”

Sounds like a Stones song. Lucky Ron.

Little Charley Bear and his Christmas Adventure is at the Ambassadors Theatre until December 24 (0844 8112 334, theambassadorstheatre.co.uk).

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