Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  The crunch came shortly before Christmas in 1981. Eric and I went to a Genesis concert in London. Eric was jumping up and down, applauding, until suddenly he said he wanted to get out, he had to get out, he had to get a drink, and became frantic, desperate. He fought his way out, climbing over people in their seats.

  That evening, I think, he realized he needed help. I told Roger what had happened. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got him into a treatment center on the seventh of January but I’m not going to tell him until after Christmas.”

  It was a huge relief: along with the drinking, Eric had been going into deep depressions and saying he didn’t want to live anymore, he couldn’t see the point in anything—and that had been a whole new worry.

  I could see Christmas would be tricky, and it was. The house was full, as it always was at that time of year, with a mixture of family, friends, members of the band or road crew, and anyone else who was at a loose end. Nigel and Jackie were with us one year and the turkey was so enormous it wouldn’t fit into the fridge so I put it in the garage. When Jackie went to get it for me on Christmas morning, Willow, the Weimaraner, had dragged it onto the floor and was chewing it. We washed it, stuffed it, and put it into the oven without saying a word to anyone.

  Usually I loved Christmas, everything about it. On Christmas Day we’d get up late and open the stockings in front of the fire with a bottle of champagne. We’d maybe go for a walk, watch the Queen on television, there would always be guitars playing and good music, snooker board games, dice, and we’d open presents. We’d sit down to lunch at about six, a great feast, pull crackers, and wear paper hats. Each year I’d experiment with a different stuffing for the turkey, find new recipes for puddings and mince pies, and track down the right wines to go with it all.

  It had been such a pleasure, in moving to live with Eric, to reclaim my role in the kitchen, but because he had so little interest in food it was an empty one. However, my brother Boo had become a chef and we would ring each other and talk about food. After he qualified he went to work for a variety of hotel groups and was abroad for twenty-six years, so most of our foodie conversations had to be over the phone, but at Christmastime we would spend hours comparing notes about what we were doing, whose recipe we were following, and what wines we were having with each course. It was always lovely when he came home on holiday, or Eric and I went to see him in America, Egypt, or wherever he was, and we could cook together.

  That Christmas of 1981 lunch was nearly ready when I realized that Eric was missing. No one had seen him for hours. I looked all over the house and there was no sign of him, so I went out into the garden. It was dark and snowing heavily, and I had visions of Eric, having passed out, lying somewhere freezing in the snow. He had had his usual liquid breakfast and been drinking steadily throughout the morning. I ran all over the garden, searching, getting more and more frightened. Finally I went up to Arthur’s house at the top of the drive, my face streaked with mascara. He said Eric had been there for a Christmas drink or six but had left some time ago. “Oh, Arthur,” I said in despair, “where is he now?”

  And Arthur said, “He’s probably in the basement.”

  I went back to the house and tried the one place I hadn’t looked, and there was Eric, slumped over a pile of logs, comatose. I tried to rouse him but I couldn’t, so I had no choice but to leave him.

  On January 7 Roger and Eric flew to America and Eric checked into Hazelden, an addiction treatment center in Minnesota. After Christmas Roger had said to him, “You’re not a drunk, Eric, you’re an alcoholic”—and for once Eric hadn’t argued. He was incredibly nervous, but he wanted help.

  I was happy to see them go, glad that the insanity we’d been living with was about to end—until I started to worry that it might change him and therefore our relationship. I was used to dealing with a drunk: how would I cope with a sober Eric? I might not even know him when he came back.

  Roger stayed with Eric the entire six weeks, living in a hotel in Minnesota and visiting him every day. I went out for a week, on Hazelden’s instructions, to join the Al-Anon group, the offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous for relatives. I found myself in a group of people who were married to or living with addicts—and they were normal people, not severely damaged or strange. They made me feel so welcome, and talked about their own alcoholic or drug addict with such incredible honesty. I had never dared tell anybody, or probably even admit to myself, that I was living with an alcoholic, and my life had become so difficult. I hadn’t felt I could confide in friends because I didn’t want to be disloyal, but I felt safe with those people, and with them I could talk about all the things I had been keeping so painfully to myself. Their experiences, feelings, dreads, and fears were exactly like mine—they might have been describing my life. We had all been keeping the same secret, living the same life, and we had thought we were the only ones.

  We did an interesting role-play. We had to make ourselves into a human sculpture with the alcoholic on his hands and knees in the middle. Everyone else leaned against him, symbolizing all the people in his life who looked after him—wife, children, mother, father, brothers, sisters, nieces, aunts, and so on. When the alcoholic gets better, he is removed from the sculpture and everyone else collapses. All the ills in a family with an alcoholic member are blamed on him and his affliction until, subconsciously, their whole way of life revolves around him. Once he is better, he is no longer the same person, and everyone else has to learn to stand up straight too.

  I found Al-Anon wonderfully helpful. I became stronger every day and, slowly, the damage began to heal. At the end of the week I didn’t want to leave. It was a nice, safe, cozy environment, and it was structured: I knew what was going to happen every day, which I hadn’t in my normal life for a long time.

  When Eric came home he was introverted and quiet; all he wanted to do was go fishing, so I became a trout widow. He was also a football fanatic, driving all over the country with Roger to watch West Bromwich Albion. And whenever we booked into hotels it was always as Mr. and Mrs. Albion. But the fishing was the worst. He would leave the house at about seven-thirty and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon—with five or six fish that he wanted cleaned and frozen. I learned how to gut them very quickly. Sometimes I would go with him and spend the day photographing wildflowers, but mostly he went alone and that was the way he preferred it. He wasn’t easy to be with. I felt he was angry—angry that he couldn’t do the one thing he enjoyed in life, which was have a drink. He couldn’t understand why it was denied him. Even after six weeks at Hazelden, I don’t think he really understood that he was ill.

  When he wasn’t fishing he was touring, and I was alone again for long stretches. I didn’t even have the pleasure of gutting his fish. He had invited Gary Brooker, who played keyboard, to join the band, so he had a fishing companion on tour and the rods went everywhere. At every stop they fished and he insisted Roger book them into hotels with fishing facilities. Another obsession was buying clothes. This was nothing new but he went into overdrive. He would go to Armani and find a nice suit, then want it in every color.

  He was on tour when a new Ferrari was delivered. At that time one of my friends was Linda Spinetti, who lived nearby. Her husband Henry played drums with Eric’s band and we spent a lot of time together while they were away. We used to go swimming and ice-skating and generally hung out together. I told Eric on the phone that the new car had arrived and asked whether I could bring it to the airport to meet him. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “That would be lovely.” So I put on a pretty dress, went to collect Linda, and off we set. The interior was cream leather, the sky was blue, and it was a beautiful spring morning. It was delicious and we were so happy as we zipped along the lanes and around the M25.

  I stayed in the car when we arrived at the airport, and Linda went into the terminal building to find Eric. Inside, she saw Roger and told him I was waiting. “What car is she in?” he said urgently.

  “The new Ferrari,�
� she said. He looked worried—he knew what was about to happen.

  Eric was furious with me. He said, “Someone has driven it before me. I can’t drive it now. I’ll have to sell it.”

  Life was very different with the sober Eric—he was very different. He had never been good at expressing himself verbally, but now he didn’t want to talk at all. He’d lost his sense of fun. The practical jokes, mad antics, and laughter had gone. It was as though he had lost his personality. Worse, I detected in him an underlying sense of injustice. I was still drinking and so was everyone around him—no one had told me I should stop, which, in retrospect, might have helped him. We both went to our respective meetings, AA for him, Al-Anon for me, once or twice a week, and he was on the Twelve Steps to recovery, but he said the only thing he wanted to do was drink and he was angry that he couldn’t.

  He stayed on the wagon for about six months. Then he went on tour and, in Copenhagen, dipped secretly into the minibar in his hotel suite, thinking no one would know—forgetting, or perhaps unaware, that everything he had taken would show up on the bill. Then he started smoking dope with some of the roadies, and once he’d done that and felt he’d handled it, he convinced himself that the odd drink wouldn’t hurt. When he came home he pretended he wasn’t drinking—I heard all of this from one of the roadies—but I soon discovered he had some coke too and I couldn’t believe that that was a good idea. I didn’t know who I could turn to for help.

  Eric was cunning about his drinking and, initially, he tried to hide it from me, but eventually it was out in the open and worse than ever, escalating out of all proportion. I couldn’t bear to be around him. He was getting very angry—the lovely, gentle man who had never until now called me anything more than “a silly clown.” Now he would shout at me for no reason; if I left him at all, even if it was just to go into Cranleigh for some shopping, he would rant and rave when I got back, so unless Roger was coming down, I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. And I felt that he was always watching me. He was drinking a terrifying amount and wanted me to drink with him. When he poured himself a drink, he poured me one too; when he ordered a drink in the pub, he ordered one for me. So I drank, but not because I wanted to. I drank because that was what Eric wanted me to do and my life was all about Eric, his wants and needs. I knew it was no way to live. At night I went to bed before him, hoping I would be asleep before he came up, and cried. I’d pray he would pass out when he came to bed and not try to touch me. There were times when he was more like an animal than the loving, passionate husband I’d known, and reeked of brandy. At other times he’d come to bed, put his arms around me as I sobbed, and say, “It’s all right, it’s going to be all right.” I so wished I could believe him but I was frightened. I thought he’d end up killing one of us.

  One day I decided my long hair had to go. I couldn’t explain why at the time but I know now that that’s a classic response to emotional collapse and self-loathing. So, being a coward above everything else, I rang Jenny and said, “Let’s go to Vidal Sassoon and have our hair cut off.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  So off we went. We both had the same cut, to a length of about four inches all over, and as the hairdresser was snipping away, chatting to the stylist next to him, I thought, God, what a dreadful mistake, but it was too late. It made me look as ghastly as I felt.

  What clinched it was the day I saw a photograph Jenny had taken of me. I didn’t recognize myself. My face was puffy, I had put on weight, and my hair was limp and bedraggled. What really scared me, though, was I knew I had lost more than my looks: I had lost the “me” in me, my sense of identity. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

  One afternoon in September 1984, when Eric had passed out on the sofa in the sitting room, I packed a suitcase and left. I took the coward’s way out and wrote him a note. I didn’t dare do it any other way, and I couldn’t have done it when he was awake. I went to stay with my mother, who was then living in Haslemere, in Surrey, so she could be close to Paula, and every single day for the four weeks that I was there Eric sent me a dozen red roses.

  Then, one day, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was Eric, looking so thin, shaky, and nervous I scarcely recognized him. Evidently he had had nothing to eat since I’d left. I invited him in and he pleaded with me to come back. He said how sorry he was that he had behaved so badly, he loved me, he needed me, it would never happen again. I wanted to believe him and I wanted nothing more than to go back to Hurtwood Edge and for life to be happy and normal and for him to be the funny, sexy, fabulous Eric he had once been. Instead I steeled myself. “No. You’re still drinking. You shouldn’t be drinking. I can’t do it.”

  The most upsetting part was that I was in the midst of IVF treatment. Eric and I had been trying to have a baby since we’d first started living together, but it hadn’t happened. If ever my period was late I would think, This is it. I’m pregnant! I would be so excited and plan which room would be the baby’s and how I would decorate it, then think about which schools he or she would go to, maybe even look at one or two. Then, ten days later, my period would arrive.

  At that time I was doing some work with the National Children’s Homes and I asked about adoption. They told me that at thirty-six I was too old. I couldn’t believe it so I spoke to my doctor, who confirmed it was true. I could only adopt, he said, from a third-world country. I would have been happy to have a child from any country—I didn’t care what color, shape, or size it was—but I was frightened that Eric, in a drunken moment, might say something offensive and horrible, and I didn’t feel that I could expose an adopted child to that risk. And so, reluctantly, I decided against it.

  Eventually my GP sent me to see Professor Ian Craft, who had just opened a fertility clinic in London. The in vitro fertilization procedure had been pioneered by Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, and Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby,” was born in 1978, so in 1984 IVF was still in its infancy. I wasn’t sure how keen Eric was on the idea, but Professor Craft understood his reluctance. It was a common problem, he said, and he would be happy to talk it through with Eric. Eric wouldn’t do that, but he did go along with the IVF, and its indignities. However, he wouldn’t alter his lifestyle to improve the outcome: he didn’t cut down the drinking or the smoking, both of which can affect sperm count—which was never investigated. I had all the tests, and I was the one at whom the finger of inadequacy was pointed.

  Eric didn’t welcome the process because it was unnatural, and I couldn’t argue with that, but I thought that if science had progressed so far, we should take advantage of it. And I did so want a child. I had watched my sisters and my friends have their babies; it seemed so unfair that I couldn’t. Each time I got as far as having an embryo implanted, I would be full of excitement and optimism, convinced that a new life was growing inside me. Then I had to face up to the fact that it had failed.

  After a month with my mother I moved to a little house in Devonshire Close Mews in the West End, which Roger paid for, and started to make contact with my friends, most of whom I hadn’t seen in years. When I tried to ring Belinda, there was no reply, so I went round to her flat and discovered she had moved. And then Marie-Lise was killed in a horse-riding accident, which knocked me for six. She had been living with the actor John Hurt since 1967 and they were both old friends from my days with George. Before John became famous he had acted in small fringe theaters; George and I went to see everything he did. When John was cast as Bob Champion, the jockey who had cancer and went on to win the Grand National, he had to learn to ride, so Marie-Lise taught him. They were out together one day, without hard hats, when a gust of wind spooked the horses. Marie-Lise was thrown over a hedge and onto a road. She died instantly.

  It had been Marie-Lise who told me I needed to wear glasses. All my life I had been nearsighted but never known it. It might explain why I was so cripplingly shy—I couldn’t see people properly. One day I was looking out of the window in her flat and put on a pai
r of glasses she had left lying around. Suddenly I could see the road sign outside. Marie-Lise sent me straight to an optician.

  Chris O’Dell was in London, now married to a lovely man called Anthony Russell. I saw a lot of them. His parents owned Leeds Castle in Kent and we had some wonderful weekends there. Over the last two years I had also become friendly with Carolyn Waters, married to Roger Waters, the bass guitarist and singer with Pink Floyd. She and I had known each other vaguely in the sixties when she’d worked in the Apple shop with Jenny, but we hadn’t spoken until she telephoned one day out of the blue when Roger wanted Eric to guest on his first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. He didn’t know Eric, so he had asked Carolyn to ring me. We arranged to meet and became friends. They would come down to Hurtwood Edge with their children, and Carolyn’s birthday was around Christmas so we went to them for great parties.

  The next year Roger and Eric appeared in a series of concerts in aid of ARMS—Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis. Our old friend Ronnie Lane was suffering from the disease and Eric helped to organize a series of concerts in London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, which Glyn Johns agreed to produce. He got Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Kenny Jones, and Steve Winwood among others; Carolyn and I went to the one at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and afterward we all went to the Hard Rock Café in Green Park. We were sitting in a booth, chatting away, when the dreaded twin, Jenny McLean, appeared and said hello to Eric. I freaked, and although Carolyn had no idea who she was, she got rid of her instantly.

  She and Roger lived in a beautiful house in East Sheen, on the outskirts of London, and quite often her brother, Will Christie, was at the house. He was a lovely man, very good-looking, kind, and gentle. He was a photographer so we immediately had something in common and he gave me a lot of help with and advice on cameras. He got me using my Hasselblad, which had confounded me: it had two shutters, one on the body, the other on the lens. I didn’t know how or when to use them until he showed me. He and I had first met at a mutual friend’s wedding, and when Eric was on tour we met again at a party at the Natural History Museum. The paparazzo Richard Young was there and the next day there was a photograph of us in Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail with a story about how we had become good friends and Will was helping me with my photography. I don’t know who spoke to Richard Young, but when Eric saw it he was furious. He and I were still together but things were bad between us. He wanted to know what was going on. “Oh, God, El, he’s just a friend. Nothing’s going on.” I don’t think he believed me.