"They'll always be personal," Pattie Boyd said, casting an eye over the framed images against the walls of the Great Hall Gallery on Queen St. W., waiting to be hung for the Toronto opening today of her travelling photography exhibition, "Through The Eyes Of A Muse."
"I know how they smelled when I was taking the pictures."
"They" are George Harrison and Eric Clapton, the two fabulously talented, obsessive, emotionally abusive and spectacularly self-centred guitarists to whom Boyd was sequentially married in 1966 and 1979, and for whom the two friends, love rivals and Brit rock icons wrote, respectively, the songs most people consider their signature pieces: "Something" and "Layla."
Locked away since they were taken and unearthed only four years ago at the behest of friends who were scouting for previously unseen images of pop's glory years for an exhibit, Boyd's most intimate mementos have lost none of their potency for the 64-year-old former model, the archetypal "rock chick."
They were captured during the quieter moments in the otherwise turbulent and spectacularly eventful, though mostly unhappy, times chronicled in her 2007 memoir, Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (Three Rivers Press/Random House Canada, $16.95).
"It was like opening Pandora's Box, lifting a lid on a life I'd kept secret for 40 years," said Boyd, whose autobiography, co-written with British journalist Penny Junor, was published, coincidentally, at the same time as Clapton's bestselling memoir. It recounts many of their shared experiences, but often from a startlingly different perspective and with equally startling candour.
"Pictures are so powerful," she continued quietly.
"In some ways these belong to the world now, but they'll always be part of me. I was concerned at first that they were too intimate ... I felt I shouldn't, or couldn't share them with strangers.
"But when I looked at them objectively, the way a photographer should, I also saw how very beautiful they are. I thought others might enjoy the beauty in them as well."
Shot decades before Boyd took formal training in photography (she's currently working on portraits of artists in many disciplines who survived the 1960s and are still working and thriving), the pictures in her Beatles- and post-Beatles-era exhibition display affecting naiveté, joy, idealism and innocence.
Those qualities belie the ugly reality of relationships with her men, her prime subjects – one withdrew into mysticism, the other was a howling drunk and a heroin addict – who cheated on her flagrantly, were impossibly demanding, treated her as chattel, ignored and neglected her for months on end (often without money), and yet were also alternatively romantic, passionate, tender, helpless and inspiring.
Already seen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Sydney and, most recently, Dublin, "Through The Eyes Of A Muse" provides financial sustenance – the prints are for sale – for Boyd, who claims in her book that she was "outlawyered" by Clapton in her divorce settlement in 1989.
Apart from a cottage in West Sussex, where she still lives, the famous muse found herself high and dry, cast out of the fabulous lifestyle and fantastic homes she had enjoyed for so long. The $2.2 million advance she is reported to have received for her memoir helps her survive, but at considerable emotional cost.
No stranger to public scrutiny Р"When I first heard `Layla' I was terrified that everyone would know what it was about, that Eric was confessing this great passion for me while I was still with George," she said РBoyd couldn't stomach the idea of an expos̩ until Junor, a seasoned writer, came on board and relentlessly coaxed information from her.
"Talking about myself was difficult," Boyd said. "I was extremely self-conscious at first. I haven't done anything praiseworthy. Talking about myself goes against my grain.
"Still, I feel I was more honest in my book," she added.
"I thought Eric's interpretation (of their relationship) was harsh and not very romantic. But then I didn't realize till I read his book how fundamentally unhappy he was."
Blind submissiveness and a self-destructive need to forgive, habits Boyd said she learned from her mother's relationship with two overbearing men, her father and stepfather, allowed her to enable unconscionable behaviour from Harrison and Clapton, whose early fame and wealth inhibited their emotional and social development.
"I was partly to blame. I allowed the bad behaviour. I had such low self-esteem ... I didn't know how to fend for myself," she said. "We were all so wild and free. I never thought it would end in failure. I never looked ahead ... or maybe I did, or I wouldn't have kept all the negatives of these pictures."
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