Wonderful Tonight

"Sweet Jesus.<br/><br/>Pattie Boyd is one of the few celebrities I was <I>hoping</I> would write a memoir. Married to 2 of the most celebrated musicians of the 60s, and the inspiration for 3 iconic songs; she was “in the room where it happened “ for all the memorable moments of Beatlemania, Swinging London, and the trippy beginnings of the New Age scene. Such a memoir would have to be fascinating right?<br/><br/>Alas, Boyd proves that an exciting life does not necessarily make for an exciting memoir. You’d think, there’s no way a book about being discovered by the Beatles at 17, partying with the international glitterati, being whisked off to India, inadvertently dosed with LSD, and fought over by 2 rock god guitarists could be boring, but alas, Boyd somehow manages it. The endless name dropping and 4th grade writing style do not help: (…And then we went here. And then we flew there. We ate at this cute restaurant. We sat with Celebrity A, B, C and D. And we took a LOT of drugs!”)<br/><br/>Of course what everyone really wants to know is what it was like to be courted by both George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Apparently really, really sad. Both were manipulative, serial philanderers, prone to addiction and needlessly cruel, ( the oh so spiritual Harrison once barked “**** off!” at a flight attendant who interrupted his meditation). Boyd makes more excuses for Harrison, portraying him as the inexperienced victim of fanatical admirers and soul crushing business pressures, but Clapton frankly comes off as a sociopath. Deluging your best friend’s wife with passionate love letters, and then threatening to kill yourself with heroin if she doesn’t comply is not love; it’s emotional abuse. “Dating” her teenage sister as a stopgap is child abuse, (Boyd and company seem remarkably cavalier about older men and their 14 or 15 year old “girlfriends “).<br/><br/>While I felt compassion for Boyd, her passive acceptance of some truly horrendous behavior, her naïveté about addiction and her general dim witted approach to life (I love books! We had so many on cookery!) soon caused my sympathy to wane. It doesn’t help that she seems to view the 3rd world as one gigantic theme park and shopping mall, (not surprising perhaps for the offspring of British colonials who believed the Mau Mau rebels were “stirring up trouble “ among the “good” Kenyans). The number of cute” and “darling” and “charming” and of course “spiritual” trinkets and fakelore tidbits she acquires in the course of her travels is deeply cringe inducing.<br/><br/>I’m glad that Boyd seems to have achieved contentment , and I am sincerely impressed at how loyally she and her siblings have supported each other after a seriously unstable childhood. While she is modest about her role as “muse”, and expresses sincere regret for her mistakes (she never quite got over George) she can’t seem to acknowledge her complicity in a train wreck of a life."