by Pattie Boyd
From the start Eric had seen therapy as a threat, and in some ways he was right to. Karen encouraged me to open my eyes and see what was happening: that my life was all about Eric. And while that can be nice, and lots of couples do live for each other, he had the winning hand. He had his creativity—his work, his recording, his traveling—and I had nothing. I was taking photographs but I had little else. My identity, my sense of self, was dependent on him, and because he made me think he valued it so little, my self-esteem could not have been lower.
The baby was born in London in August 1986. I was in the south of France, staying with the Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford and his wife Angie. Angie’s sister and brother-in-law, another Mike, were also there. Angie had asked me to join them so I didn’t have to be around at the time of the birth. She was pregnant and so was Chris O’Dell. Everyone seemed to be pregnant except me. I was thrilled for them, of course, but I found it hard. I was forty-two and my marriage was on its last legs, so I had to face the unpalatable fact that I might never have a child.
One evening we were sitting on the garden wall when the phone rang. It was Eric, wanting me to know that he was the proud father of a son, Conor. He was so excited. He had watched the baby being born, and went on and on about how moving, how marvelous, how miraculous it had been. His enthusiasm was unbridled. I might have been his sister or a friend, not his jilted wife. He had no thought that this might be news I didn’t want to hear.
I went back into the garden and told Angie and both Mikes of Conor’s arrival, and as I did so, I realized that Eric had genuinely thought I would be happy for him. I am normally so good at holding things in, but that night as I started to speak I was overwhelmed with grief and pain. For the first time I let go and cried uncontrollably.
Angie and Mike were marvelous—and then Bill Wyman appeared. He had a house a quarter of a mile down the road, which was under siege from the paparazzi. He was in trouble because his girlfriend, Mandy Smith, was underage—they had started going out when he was forty-seven and she fourteen. He asked if he could come and stay to escape and was with us for about ten days while the press kept vigil outside his empty house. Angie’s pregnancy was making her feel horribly ill, I was in meltdown, and Bill was in danger of being thrown into jail, but he made us die laughing. He is the most fantastic raconteur and each night we would sit at the Rutherfords’ long dining table and laugh.
I went back to England feeling much stronger but still uncertain of the future. Lori and Conor had gone back to Italy, and Eric had this idea that we could stay together and carry on being husband and wife, the baby could live with us every so often and everything would be fine. I thought the mother might have rather different ideas. Then he thought that perhaps if Lori wouldn’t let the child come to us by himself, he could go to Italy every few weeks. He didn’t really love her, he said, and promised he wouldn’t sleep with her, just go to see Conor. I didn’t understand how it could possibly work: how could he go to Milan and play happy families, then come back to me in an empty house with no baby? The dog was no substitute. Perhaps I might have come to terms with it if I had had children, but I had nothing to concentrate on except Eric, and it was just too intense.
However, as I was going through a second bout of IVF treatment I agreed to try, and started 1987 with renewed energy, determined that our life would sort itself out. I fondly imagined that Eric’s love for me and his baby would, in time, bring us together and that I would have a share in Conor’s upbringing. A baby of my own would complete the picture. However, Lori, it seemed, wasn’t happy with the idea of us having Conor, so Eric announced that he would be going to see him in Milan once a month, starting on January 24.
While he was away I was having ultrasound scans to discover whether the implanted embryo had taken, but I couldn’t forget about what was going on in Milan.
Four days later Eric was back, full of news about what Conor could do, lit up by his funny little ways, bubbling with excitement. The pain was so deep I had to avoid looking at it. I had to keep myself constantly on the move and think about other things. I went to lunches galore, to charity meetings, to weekends away, anything and everything to escape. I was like a fish skimming the surface, flitting from one glittering distraction to the next, afraid to look into the sinister depths below, knowing that they were seething with monsters waiting to devour me. It was the only way I could survive.
Meanwhile Eric embraced the brandy again. He lurched from a state of drunkenness to oblivion in four-hour intervals now, and only woke, it seemed, to drink more and shout abuse at or criticize me. He accused me of using the house like a hotel. I could feel his pain and longed to make it better but I couldn’t help him. He was caught between the ecstasy that Conor’s birth had brought him and the agony of losing me, which he could see would be the other consequence of his child’s arrival. He wanted everything, and he couldn’t have it. It was an intolerable situation and got worse with every week that passed. I thought he was going to go mad with the drink or kill himself, and eventually I knew I had to get out for his sake as well as mine.
I told him I couldn’t do it any longer. We had to divorce. He still thought we could work it out, but I was too sad, too defeated. Angie Rutherford’s brother, John Downing, was a lawyer and he helped me find someone to represent me. I went to see several people. One asked what my husband’s hobby was and when I said, “Fishing,” he said, “Then he can’t be that bad a bloke.” He was out. And another, whose name was Raymond Tooth, frightened me so much I thought he was going to have Eric assassinated! He was also out. I paid him fifty pounds for the consultation, and every time his name appears in the newspapers because he’s handling a high-profile divorce, the article always says that he got millions for Pattie Boyd. Nonsense. I phoned him recently and said, “You owe me a lot of money for all that free advertising. It’s time you put the record straight.”
The one I settled on was much more gentlemanly—maybe too gentlemanly, given how much money he got me. He told me that on no account should I leave the marital home, so I stayed at Hurtwood Edge and Roger found a flat in London for Eric.
Eric hated the flat. He said he couldn’t work there, he needed the house. Roger told me he wanted me out. I said, “My lawyer has said I mustn’t leave the house.”
“I think you girls should have a nice holiday,” Roger said, and somehow persuaded me to go skiing in Courchevel in France. I took Nicole Winwood with me—she had recently separated from Steve. I had never skied before and loved it. Then one lunchtime our instructor, Jean Louis, said he couldn’t take us out in the afternoon because there was a whiteout and it was too dangerous. I couldn’t bear not to be busy so I asked if there was something we could do instead. We could skate, he suggested. Well, I’d done that with Linda Spinetti when Eric and her husband Henry were on tour—and sometimes we’d roller-skated on the black-and-white marble floor at Hurtwood Edge. Nicole didn’t want to skate, so Jean Louis took me on my own. For a second I lost concentration, and because I was in boots that didn’t quite fit, I went flying and broke my left wrist. I spent the rest of the holiday with my arm in a cast.
I went back to Hurtwood Edge, where Eric was living again but in a separate bedroom. It was not a happy arrangement. He was angry and things were tense between us. One morning—it was my forty-third birthday—he burst into my bedroom at six o’clock in a drunken rage and told me to get out. He was screaming and shouting obscenities at me, and so worked up that I thought he might burst a blood vessel in his neck. He accused me of not being a proper wife because I wouldn’t sleep with him, then hurled my things out of the window, still yelling at me. This was not a time to argue. I got dressed, picked up my things from the drive, got into my car, and drove to London.
I drove around for hours in a state of abject misery. I felt numb, as if I was invisible. I had been due to meet a few girlfriends for lunch at San Lorenzo, so at about one o’clock I drove to Beauchamp Place. I must have looked ghastly, my face puffy and tear
-stained, and Mara Berni, the motherly owner, asked what had happened. I told her and she gave me a little Madonna to bring me comfort—her kindness brought on more tears.
I spent that first night at Blakes, Anouska Hempel’s hotel in Roland Gardens, then Alan Rogan, Eric’s guitar technician and a friend who had often spent Christmas with us, said I could stay at his place in Twickenham for a few weeks while he was on tour.
From there I went to Nicole Winwood, who was living in a flat in Chiswick. She insisted we have a good time so I didn’t have a chance to wallow in misery. All the while I was telephoning Roger, asking him for money and somewhere I could live more permanently. Eventually he came up with two flats for me to look at. I chose a little two-bedroom affair in Queensgate Place and I moved into it in July.
I had left Hurtwood Edge with little more than the clothes I had dressed in on the morning that Eric had thrown me out and needed to retrieve more. I asked Chris O’Dell if she would come with me, and she agreed, but on the day she was busy with marital problems of her own and couldn’t come. Such was my emotional fragility that I felt disproportionately let down and miserable. At that time everything made me burst into tears; I had no confidence, I was confused and lost, and the smallest slight, even from a stranger, could reduce me to a quivering heap. In the end my mother helped. She was the last person I wanted to see—she was so emotional—and she tipped me over the edge. I left most of my stuff behind, including all my music and some Beatles white labels—worth thousands now. I walked from room to room, not wanting to be there, not knowing what to take. I came away with my photographs, my passport, and little else. I had to leave my lovely Trouper, but I couldn’t keep her in my rented flat in London and I knew Arthur would take care of her.
Eric bombarded me with letters and phone calls, which were occasionally abusive but mostly beautiful, poetic, and apologetic. “You were cut open from head to toe,” he wrote from Antigua, “and I held the scalpel. I still have it in my hand, and I will probably use it again. May God forgive me if I do—Will you help me please, Nell, stop me hurting people, and forgive me?” In another he wrote:
To the Adorable Butterfly—I can picture you in my mind’s eye (eyes?) flitting from one green and fertile bush to another giving the lesser insects a brief glimpse of what a truly pure and beautiful creature can look like, think of how much pleasure you give them, how much light you cast upon their starved souls.
But you need light too, or your wings will become brittle and dry, and your flying days will be over. Take some time and spread your wings in the sun, allow someone (me, is the healer I have in mind) to shine on you, so that your heart becomes young and vibrant again, and your wings grow supple and strong, and then fly, and I’ll meet you somewhere above all the nonsense and we will learn to live again as we are meant to—Majnun, El, Slowhand, Rick, all of ME! xxx
It was agony. I knew I had done the right thing in leaving him but I was terribly unhappy. It would have been so much easier to cave in and go back to him, to believe all his silken words and romantic images, and my self-esteem was so low at that point that I might just have done it. But in my heart of hearts I knew it would never work. Even if he managed to stop drinking, he would still have the baby. And I didn’t have the strength to cope with that. I didn’t have the strength for anything. I lurched from day to day, drinking far more than was good for me; I saw people, did things, put on makeup, and held my head high, but I was only going through the motions.
Inside I was a wreck. The Sunday tabloids produced girl after girl who was supposedly pregnant with Eric’s baby. And every day, alongside Eric’s poetry, there were upsetting letters from lawyers. The only thing holding me together was Karen. I had been seeing her for two years now and she knew almost everything there was to know about me and my life. Then one weekend Eric appeared on a television chat show and was charming, articulate, and didn’t appear to be the slightest bit drunk.
When I saw Karen on the Monday, I said, “I suppose you now think I’ve been making up all the things I’ve told you about Eric, that everything I’ve been telling you is a lie.”
“That’s not the point. What matters is how you see it and what you feel about the situation. It’s nothing to do with him or how anyone else sees it.”
And then I got it. I saw that life is about how situations affect each one of us and how much each of us can tolerate. I had reached my limit. And even though I was seeing Karen, I was still the one who had to live it.
Time passed, but I still burst into tears at the slightest thing. One day a policeman stopped me in Cranleigh for erratic or careless driving. I was already upset: I couldn’t bear going anywhere near the house or along any of the familiar roads we used to take to get there from London, but on that day I had had to go there for some reason, and when the policeman pulled me over I pleaded with him not to fine or arrest me or anything. “I’m too upset,” I said, sobbing helplessly. “I can’t cope with life.” He was so kind. He told me to park the car and calm down before I drove any further.
Soon afterward I was stopped by the police again. I had been at a charity lunch in Barnes, which had gone on for most of the afternoon, and I’d had a lot of wine. John Downing, Angie’s lawyer brother, was in the car ahead of me. We were planning to go and have dinner somewhere so I was following him. He was traveling quite fast and I was trying to keep up. As I whizzed over Hammersmith Bridge the police stopped me. John kept going—I don’t think he saw what had happened, so I was alone and frightened.
I had a terrible fear of authority, and for the first time in nearly twenty-five years there was no one to call, no one to help me. No Brian Epstein, no Peter Brown, no Roger Forrester. I was on my own and in deep trouble. The policemen made me blow into a Breath-alyzer and, of course, I was over the limit. Once again the floodgates opened. I pleaded with them to let me go. I promised I wouldn’t do it again—the usual old story—but they took me to the police station in the back of the patrol car. I was charged with drunk driving and had to appear at Richmond Magistrates’ Court. Fortunately it was the day before Margaret Thatcher won her third general election so the newspapers were full of her and my conviction went unreported. I was fined and banned from driving for a year.
It was a wake-up call. I should never have been driving and I shudder to think that I might have injured or, worse, killed someone. I was far safer on public transport, but it had been twenty-five years since I’d sat on a bus or found my way onto the Underground. I had to ask my friend Belinda, whom I had tracked down after a few phone calls, to show me how it worked: stations and ticket buying had changed since the sixties and I was frightened to go alone, afraid I’d be mugged or recognized, and that people would wonder why I was traveling on the tube. Once upon a time I had been so brave, so fearless—I was the girl from Africa who was game for anything—but now I was afraid of everything. I felt vulnerable among so many strangers, and the roar of the trains coming in and out of the tunnels made my heart pound. My confidence was shot.
However, the Underground was clearly the fastest way to travel around London, and once I got over the initial fear, I became quite expert. But every journey was a trial. At every station enormous posters of Eric would be staring at me from the walls, up and down the escalators and along the tunnels.
It wasn’t just the Underground. I would go into shops and they would be playing Eric’s music and the tears would start to flow. It was like one of those horror stories—I couldn’t get away from him, he was haunting me—everywhere I turned he was there. I felt as though I was falling apart, losing my sanity. I was walking around but I didn’t feel part of the world everyone else was walking around in.
I met friends for lunch and felt as though I was in a bubble, watching us eating and chatting: I had nothing in common with their world of husbands and children. I could hardly speak, and if anyone spoke to me I was lost for words and the tears would come. It was scary but I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. I thought alcohol mi
ght dull the pain, and cocaine ease the depression, but all they did was make matters worse. I just wanted to go to bed and sleep.
I was having a breakdown. I was grieving—not just over the loss of my marriage to Eric, but finally, after all these years, the loss of my marriage to George. I had gone straight from George to Eric without taking a breath, and I had always wondered, in my heart of hearts, whether I had done the right thing. When things had been bad between George and me, when he was ignoring me, I had taken the easy option and let Eric seduce me. I knew I should have fought for my marriage to George.
I remember bumping into him in the late seventies at a party Jim Capaldi gave at Maidenhead. Jim was a founding member of Traffic and drummed with both Eric and George. I had had no idea that George and Olivia would be there, but it was so nice to see George and there was something about him that night, something I can’t put my finger on, that made me realize nothing had fundamentally changed, that we still loved each other. It was warming and lovely to know that the feeling was still there. Eric and I were playmates, but George and I were soul mates, and I had let something special go without analyzing what was happening between us.
Now, though, I had all the time in the world to think about what I had lost. And I wasn’t just grieving the loss of my marriages and husbands: I was grieving the loss of any potential pregnancy. I was forty-three, about to divorce for the second time: the likelihood of my ever having a baby was almost nonexistent, and that was the hardest pill of all to swallow.
In the garden of my home after a party in 2000. Left to right: Rod, me, Jenny, Ringo, and Barbara.
FOURTEEN
Fighting Back
Shortly after I left him, Eric went into rehab for the second time. As I’d hoped, the shock of my leaving had pushed him to the edge of the precipice. In AA terminology, it was “tough love”: giving up on someone you love so that they have to face what they are: while you’re with them, however bad the relationship, a little part of them says they must be okay because you’re still there, still with them. You enable them to carry on with their destructive lifestyle. By detaching yourself—with love—they have no crutch to lean on and must either collapse and die or learn to stand on their own two feet. It was the people sculpture we’d done at my Al-Anon classes at Hazelden. Eric, I knew, was on the point of collapsing and dying. And I know it was as painful for him as it was for me, but I like to think I may have saved his life a second time—the first when he nearly drowned in the Greek islands.