Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [87]
Coming to visit me on tour was a rarity for Nell, as Roger and I had long ago come to a strict agreement that there should be no women on tour. This was a rule that applied to everybody, from the bandleader downward. And it was completely transparent. Everyone knew what it was really about. Nell, of course, was not too happy about this, which she considered very chauvinistic, and it became a frequent source of friction between us. She often told me she felt isolated and lonely. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that whenever I was on the road, I was being constantly unfaithful. I’d tell her all about it, on the basis that if I was honest with her and confessed to what I had been doing, then it would somehow make it okay. She would rail at me occasionally, but I think her main concern was to try somehow to preserve the status quo, in the hope that things would change. What was her alternative? To leave and start again with someone else?
Everything finally came to a head when I found myself falling in love with one of these girls, or at least thinking I was falling in love. “No more tequila for me boy,” I wrote in the diary on November 28. “Woke up with all the clobber on—I am in love again and it hurts.” The woman in question was a young girl named Jenny Mclean, and the unforgivable thing I did was to allow Nell, sometime early in the following year, to catch us together at Hurtwood. She left the house in a flood of tears, having packed her bags and phoned her sister Jenny to come and collect her.
A couple of days later she flew to LA, where she went to stay with Rob Fraboni and his wife, Myel. At that point I did not give up Jenny, but went on tour to Ireland, where Jen came out to visit me. On March 17, Nell’s birthday, I recorded in my diary that “the gig was great and sweet Jen flew in to make the day perfect. We talked and talked about our respective wounds.” The entry finishes with the words, “I am a bad man and I think the world better roll on without me for a while anyway. All in love is fair.”
Ironically, it was Roger who saved the day for me and Nell. When I got home from Ireland, he told me over a game of pool at his house that I should be discreet in my meetings with Jenny, or we’d get snapped by a photographer and it would be all over the papers. I said that was rubbish and ended up drunkenly betting him the ridiculous sum of £10,000 that he couldn’t get my picture in the papers. The following morning, to my utter amazement and horror, Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail announced ROCK STAR ERIC CLAPTON WILL MARRY PATTIE BOYD.
Roger had pulled a fast one. I jumped into my Ferrari and drove to his office, where I screamed at him that he had no right to make such huge decisions about my personal life. When I’d calmed down a bit, he asked me if it wasn’t time to decide whether or not I wanted to stay with Nell, or break with her forever. “How do I get her back?” I replied. He said that she wouldn’t have seen the story yet, and that I should call her and ask her to marry me. When I phoned Rob’s house in LA, Nell was out, down at the beach in Malibu. I told him to give her a simple message. “Please marry me.” When she called back later, I swore to her that I had given up Jenny, and proposed. She burst into tears and accepted.
The ceremony finally took place on March 27, 1979, at the Apostolic Assembly of Faith in Christ Church in Tucson, Arizona, the town where, the following day, we were due to play the first date of a major American tour. We had a Mexican preacher, the Rev. Daniel Sanchez, and a black organist who looked a bit like Billy Preston. The band and roadies all wore rented tuxedos, and my outfit consisted of a white tux with black edging around the jacket, a $200 white cowboy hat, and cowboy boots,