by Pattie Boyd
It was hard to go from being a rock star’s wife, with someone to take care of everything, to being an ex with nothing. Going down is so much harder than going up. Leaving Hurtwood Edge for a tiny rented flat in Queensgate Place with practically no furniture was a comedown and my friends were horrified that Eric’s manager had thought such a very small place adequate for me. But my self-esteem was so low I didn’t question it. I was busy adjusting to my new life. I had been an alcoholic’s caretaker for so long that I had forgotten how to live for myself. In losing Eric I had lost my role, and if I wasn’t Mrs. Clapton anymore, who was I?
One day I picked up the phone and rang an old friend from modeling days, Amanda Lear. She was Salvador Dalí’s muse and was living in the south of France. “Amanda, hello,” I said. “It’s Pattie. I used to be Pattie Boyd.”
“You still are!”
“Oh—am I? I suppose I am.”
Gradually I began to pick up the pieces with old friends. I saw Edina Ronay and Dick Polak. Like most people, they hadn’t been to Hurtwood in years. Edina always remembers Eric coming home from the pub pissed one lunchtime and insulting my cooking, as he often did, and their small daughter Shebah saying, “You can’t talk to Pattie like that,” and Eric being lost for words. And I saw Jose Fonseca and Dick Kries. They came to the flat one evening and I was complaining about the size of the dining room, which wasn’t large enough to swing a cat, and Dick, who owned the Casserole in the King’s Road, said, “But people can still come. They don’t need to sit down at a table for dinner. As long as everyone’s having fun and you make a nice meal, it will be fantastic.” And I thought how clever he was. He had expanded my mind on a social level. Buoyed up by that, I gave a big dinner party, to which Zandra Rhodes came, and Dick, Jose, Belinda, and others, and we sat on rugs and cushions on the roof and it was just so nice to see friends.
I caught up with Mary Bee again, and Chris and Anthony, and Ringo and Barbara, who were living in Ascot but had an office off Walton Street, and I began to see quite a lot of Rod and Francesca, too, the couple I had met in Sri Lanka.
I also saw a lot of Jill Wetton, now Briggs, whom I had met with Angie Rutherford a few years before. She reminded me of my sister Jenny, and it turned out they had been born on the same day. At that time she was married to John Wetton, a musician with King Crimson, who was an alcoholic. We discovered we were living similarly secretive lives and became very good mutually supportive friends. She was very much on a downward spiral when we first got to know each other and I sent her to see Karen.
While I was distracted by friends I could be relatively cheerful, but when the music stopped I was still on my own, the flat and my life hauntingly empty. To make matters worse, I had to go into hospital. I had been suffering from severe abdominal pain and ended up having an operation for fibroids. The doctor advised a hysterectomy at the same time, and because I was so low and so depressed by the failure of two attempts at IVF, I agreed. One evening I was feeling very miserable—I’d had far too much to drink—and suddenly longed to talk to Alfie O’Leary, the kind, gentle giant who looked after Eric. They were on tour in America, and when I finally got through to his hotel room and heard his friendly Cockney voice, I was so overcome with grief I couldn’t speak. I sat holding the phone to my face sobbing helplessly, unable to say a word. Eventually I had to put the phone down. Years later he said to me, “Did you phone me while I was on that tour?”
I was so embarrassed that I said, “No, no, it wasn’t me.”
One day my mother came to see me in the flat. I had just bought myself a white sofa—everything in the flat was white—and I said, joking, “All I need now is a white kitten.” The next week she turned up on my doorstep with Polo. He was white, Turkish, had one green and one blue eye, and was quite the most adorable, intelligent cat I’ve ever had. He was the one glimmer of sunshine in a very dark phase.
One night in October, Belinda came to supper. I gave her gravlax as a starter, we chatted away, and she admired Polo. When she was leaving I went out into the hallway to say a final farewell and a gust of wind slammed the door behind me. What to do? I had left candles burning and the kitten inside, but no locksmith was going to come out at that time of night. There was no alternative but to relax, spend the night at Belinda’s, and sort it out in the morning.
The next morning we looked out of the window at a scene of total devastation. It was the night of the 1987 hurricane. There were cars squashed under fallen trees, chimney pots, roof tiles, and bits of masonry in the streets, and no one could go anywhere. When I finally got back into the flat, having found a locksmith to let me in, the candles had burned out and Polo was full of gravlax.
The process of building myself up again, reconstructing a degree of self-esteem, was slow. John Downing took me to parties where people didn’t want to talk to anyone unless they were going somewhere fast. It was the eighties and the idea of someone like me saying to them with a big smile, “No, I don’t do anything,” was not what they wanted to hear. At first I thought it was funny, that they were being silly, and then I grasped that I was the one who was wrong, not them. I wasn’t working. I amounted to nothing. I felt empty, useless. I felt as though I had been in a dream all these years and had achieved nothing. I was looking at my life from their perspective and all I could see was someone who was sad, crushed, and low. Every thought was negative.
What was more, I was so ignorant about the practical everyday things that everyone else took for granted. I didn’t know I had to buy a tax disc for my car, or a television license. I didn’t know about water bills or rates, and I’d never paid an electricity or telephone bill.
Eric was giving me a limited amount of money to live on, but I knew that once the divorce was finalized it would stop and I would need a job. My education hadn’t been the best, and I knew I was probably unemployable, but I had to try.
I rang David Mlinaric, the interior designer, to see if I could be his assistant, but he already had one. I rang Charles Settrington, now the Earl of March, who was a brilliant still-life photographer, and asked if I could work as his assistant. He laughed and said, “But you’re Pattie!” No one would help me, or believe I needed help.
Then I met a friend of Jenny’s who had done a nutrition course at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. It sounded interesting and, loving food and cooking as I did, I decided to enroll. I went to all-day lectures once a month for a year. It was based on the idea of healing people through diet and minerals, the premise being that if you eat the right food, your body and mind will be well. I had immense difficulty keeping up with the note taking. It had been a long time since I was at school and my brain wasn’t in that mode anymore, so my notebook was full of half-finished sentences. But I did a lot of homework, studying and reading about the subject. I ate copious amounts of brown rice, no bread, no dairy products, and my friends laughed at me. But apart from making me bossy about what everyone ate, I knew that in order to properly diagnose and treat people, I would need medical training, so that was the end of my career in nutrition.
Roger Forrester swears to me that I was not unfairly treated in my divorce from Eric, but I feel sure he ran rings around my lawyer. Eric came to see me and looked so fragile I felt sorry for him—but he was always a good actor. I agreed, maybe foolishly, to settle out of court, so all I got was a modest flat and a similarly modest lump sum to invest and live on. Talk of “millions” that I had reportedly been given was unfortunately wrong. In theory I was entitled to 50 percent of his earnings during the time we were together, and those, it seemed to me, were conveniently low; the biggest income he ever had was from Unplugged, the album he released just after we separated. According to Roger, who is only too happy to point it out now, my mistake was that I didn’t insist on sharing in future royalties on the songs Eric wrote while we were together. If I had, the last eighteen years might have been very different. I am always overdrawn at the bank.
I found a two-bedroom flat overlooking the river at Thames
Reach in Hammersmith. It was built by Richard Rogers, whose architectural practice and, more important, his wife’s restaurant, the River Café, was next door. As I was trudging around potential flats I discovered how strongly I had been influenced by my Kenyan childhood: I needed a vista—I couldn’t bear to look out onto other flats or roads. Although the flat was small, the views were spectacular toward the old Harrods Depository, a lovely Victorian building, rather Turkish in a way, a wildfowl sanctuary, and a long stretch of the Thames. At night the sun would set behind the dome of the depository, throwing the most beautiful light.
Every year I used to give a lunch party on the Saturday of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Belinda would do a huge flower arrangement and I would make an enormous risotto and lots of different salads, and friends would come and we’d sit on the balcony and be so busy talking, drinking, and smoking that often the boats would pass and we’d miss them. I had lovely parties at Christmas and dinner parties too. The only problem was that the people I’d bought the place from had put down lovely Provençal tiles on the floor and I had metal chairs—excruciating for those in the flat below—so guests moved them on pain of death. I tried to make friends with the occupants beneath me, a German couple, but unsurprisingly they soon moved out.
The divorce, on the grounds of infidelity and unreasonable behavior, was finalized in 1989. It seemed to have dragged on for a ridiculously long time, which again I attributed to Roger. When I discovered that he and Eric had sworn affidavits, I realized that although he had been my ally when I was trying to get Eric off the booze, he had switched sides and I had been divorcing them both.
The day the decree absolute came through, Carolyn Waters, Nicole Winwood, and a few other friends insisted on taking me out to celebrate. We went for dinner at a French restaurant off Soho Square. There was champagne, excitement, and toasts to “Being Free!” and I was smiling, laughing, and keeping up the banter, but I felt as though I was wearing a mask. Inside I was so sad. I didn’t feel there was anything to celebrate. All I felt was a sense of overwhelming loss. Interestingly, I now know that when George and I were breaking up he founded the record label called Dark Horse (which he said described him), and after I left Eric, Eric wrote a song called “Behind the Mask.” Both seemed to say the same thing.
The antidote was to keep busy and try to find a way to earn a living. Since photography was the one thing I knew and had done for years, albeit as an amateur, I decided that that was the way to go. With Simon Kirke, a musician (who had drummed with Free and Bad Company and toured with Ringo’s All Starr Band), I signed up for a three-month course in photography and printing. It was run by a husband-and-wife team—he was Latvian, she French—and two or three times a week we went to their house just outside Wandsworth. On some days they had models for us to photograph in the studio, and on others we did location work. We printed in a darkroom where they had about six enlargers. At the end of three months I had the confidence to start taking photos professionally.
To begin with I turned my sitting room into a studio and practiced on nieces and nephews, other family, friends, and their children. I took shots for anyone who needed photographs. Then someone started a modeling agency for older models and asked if I would join them. I didn’t want to model again but I said I’d take the photos and that was what I did. However, the agency was ahead of its time and that little burst of activity came to nothing, but it was good practice.
In the midst of all of this a girlfriend said that a friend of hers was having a designer clothes sale at her house near Guildford and I must go. The friend turned out to be a photographer by the name of Lesley Deaves (now Aggar) and she and I became friends. It was fun to have someone to compare notes with, and since she was living in a large house in Shamley Green with a darkroom and I had no space in my flat to do any printing, I installed my enlarger in her darkroom and we had a wonderful time processing our film together and criticizing one another’s work, which was very helpful. She was in the process of breaking up with her husband so we had other things in common and plenty of spare time on our hands.
We joined the Royal Photographic Society, went to lectures, took exams, and had to present our work before a panel of judges in a little theater in Bath, which was a bit of an ordeal but we came away feeling very proud of ourselves with LRPS after our names. We went on some lovely photographic trips led by people with even more letters after their names. Once we went to Spain to learn darkroom techniques. It was a bit odd, I suppose, to go to sunny Spain to shut yourself up in a darkroom but we visited an amazing place in the hills behind Málaga with the most extraordinary rock formation. We photographed a Jurassic Park—a square mile of giant rocks with a few little rock plants here and there but otherwise nothing.
The best trip was one to Venezuela that we saw advertised in the Royal Photographic Society magazine. We flew across Angel Falls, the highest free-falling waterfall in the world, and in the Canaima National Park we walked behind a waterfall that must have been about a quarter of a mile wide. We wrapped our cameras in polythene bags and edged our way slowly along a slippery wet ledge with nothing to hold on to, shouting to each other above the thunderous roar of the water, mesmerized by the swirling white mist. One slip and we would have been dead. Our tour leader was called Ed Paine. He had worked for the Vestey family and loved South America with a passion. We also had a teacher, the top man from Jessops, the chain of photographic shops. With Ed in charge, we never knew what to expect, just that we would be laughing.
One day he took us hang gliding in Mérida, a charming university town sandwiched between two mountain ranges and two rivers. We drove to the top of a mountain, walked to the edge of the cliff, and looked down at the riverbed miles below. I thought, There’s no way I’m going to do this, it’s much too scary. Then I thought about my life: it’s been really interesting, really nice, I’ve got lovely friends, we’re all going to die at some point and, quite frankly, I’d rather die jumping over this cliff in Mérida than in Bond Street or at home. This is far more glamorous, so I’ll do it!
By this time one or two people in our party had had a go and were raving about it. You didn’t do it alone: there were young kids, who turned out to be medical students, all rather gorgeous, who jumped with you in a double harness and pulled the strings. So I said yes, strapped myself into my harness, clutched my camera tightly, ran toward the edge, closed my eyes, and jumped. When I opened my eyes I was floating. The day before, we had been to a condor conservation area and seen the young birds learning to fly. They were huge and would try to lift off, fail, run along the ground, flap their wings some more—and finally they soared into the air. I felt like a condor.
We came down on a jutting piece of land, and I did as I was told and ran as we landed, then more frantic running and we took off again. I had wanted to go back to where the group was but my co-pilot said no, there weren’t enough thermals to lift us, so we floated down and down, and then more running as we touched the ground.
At that moment I saw why we’d been so short of thermals: six fabulous American fifties cars were parked with their roofs down, and several gorgeous girls—lots of red lipstick, dark hair, radios cranked up—were leaning against them, waiting for the boys. Two or three others came down and landed in the same place. Then the boys, the girls, and the music disappeared into the night, leaving us stranded, not speaking a word of Spanish, and not knowing the name of the place where we were staying. We sat by a tree in the pitch dark, and eventually Ed Paine rescued us.
After that, we stayed in a place miles from anywhere, where we were given soup for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Bit odd, but I love it when things are different from what you’re expecting. After two weeks of hard work, Lesley and I, with a couple of other girls, decided to take a week off and went up to the north coast of Venezuela opposite Margarita Island and the Los Roques Archipelago. We stayed in a private guesthouse—with a million mosquitoes—and after breakfast our host would pack a delicious lunch for us
in a basket, and a boatman would take us to a different desert island with the softest, whitest sand. There, he would put down the picnic basket, string up a hammock for each of us, and leave us for the morning. We would play in the sea, snorkel, wander through the mangrove swamps and waterways, and in the afternoon he would pick us up and take us to the other islands to see the birds. I saw my first scarlet ibis: they roost at the tops of trees, and what I’d taken for hibiscus blooms turned out to be hundreds of sleeping scarlet ibis.
Encouraged by my teacher, I began to approach newspapers and magazines with ideas for spreads. OK! magazine commissioned a collection of photographs of Richard O’Brien, who had written The Rocky Horror Show and was appearing in a television program. He was a friend so I did the shoot in his house, then a writer interviewed him. I did a Christmas feature for the Sunday Express and borrowed beautiful china and table settings from Thomas Goode, and got Lyn Hall of La Petite Cuisine to make the food and write the recipes. Unfortunately many of the publications I contacted wanted to turn me into the feature and would send along a photographer to take photos of me taking photos. Or they would want me to model for them, which wasn’t what I wanted at all. It became easier to do travel photography, which gave me a wonderful excuse to go to exotic places. I have never been brave enough to travel on my own (or go to the cinema by myself) but I am pretty fearless when it comes to destinations. I love experiencing new things—that’s what life is all about—and I’ll try everything that’s on offer.