The shocking dark side of Eric Clapton’s 1979 marriage to Pattie Boyd
People act like the saga of Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd had a happy ending.
From pretty much the very moment that Clapton met his best mate George Harrison’s girlfriend at a party in 1964, he fell desperately in love with her. He spent the next six years privately pining after her, despite Harrison marrying her during that time. In 1970, Clapton confessed his feelings for Boyd in a letter to her, and while Harrison and Boyd were having marital difficulties, they had a brief affair. However, Boyd patched things up with Harrison shortly afterwards.
This only made things worse for Clapton, who channelled his obsession with her into arguably his best work, the Derek and the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, but people think that the saga came to an end when Harrison and Boyd split for good in 1977, and Clapton married her in 1979 – the dogged nice guy finally got the girl he longed for after decades of waiting… High fives all around, true love wins out in the end, right?
A cursory glance at the whole story reveals something very different just below the surface. The story of Clapton and Boyd feels less like true love and more like Clapton’s obsession and entitlement eating away at her psyche until it finally broke. Especially when you take into account how, in 1979, Clapton wasn’t exactly a catch. His drinking and drug use became a problem sometime in the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, Clapton was, by his own admission, a monster.
There’s the infamous story of his racist tirade in Birmingham in 1976, something that he himself called “unforgivable” decades later, but if we want to talk unforgivable, let’s talk about his acts in the early 1980s. Somehow, his drinking and drug addiction made him even worse and arguably culminated in him committing marital rape on several occasions. Something that, again, he himself admitted to in an interview with The Sunday Times in 1999.
He admitted, “There were times when I took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement. I had absolutely no concern for other people. Everyone used to walk around me on eggshells. They didn’t know if I was going to be angry or whatever. When I’d come back from the pub, I could come back happy, or I could come back and smash the place up.”
Boyd was no fool. She and Clapton had been very close for the better part of a decade and a half when they married; this would have been no surprise to her.
Yet after a high-profile divorce and 15 years of her closest friend haranguing her to be with him, it makes sense that she’d be vulnerable enough to see him as the devil she knew. Within a few years, though, Clapton had proved that he could get even worse than his horrific behaviour in the 1970s. After years of this treatment, however, they finally divorced in 1989.
Clapton himself doesn’t shy away from what he did over those decades, yet he does credit the behaviour to his addictions. Not enough people seem to realise that drugs and alcohol don’t just corrupt people, it exposes them at their worst. Yet still, people see his marriage to Pattie Boyd as the end of a love story, rather than the start of something truly awful.