That 146;60s Thing

Boyd was married to Harrison at the height of Beatlemania and there are some nice anecdotes about how the Foursome dodged the press by leaving hotels in laundry baskets. However, there is practically no insight into their world of music and just a few pages on their childlike devotion to manager Brian Epstein, who is credited with turning the lads from Liverpool into millionaires.

Luckily for readers, Boyd concentrates mostly on her two marriages and her modelling career and breezes over her troubled childhood in Kenya with an indifferent mother and a stern stepfather. Wonderful Today paints a vivid picture of the swinging 8216;60s in London; there were parties with Yule Brynner and the Rolling Stones and the age of experimentation was just beginning. Except on the beach, limbs hadn8217;t been seen before in fashion and suddenly, women could flaunt thigh-high boots. The Beatles had just discovered their spiritual side and were exploring Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

It was a wild time in a crazy decade, when uppers and downers were the norm, and LSD and heroin were just making their presence felt. Like her fashionable contemporaries, Boyd stayed mostly stoned for the next decade or so.

When it comes to her marriages, Boyd appears to be nothing more than a stunningly beautiful doormat. Harrison would openly flaunt other girlfriends that the helpless Boyd wept over, quietly accepted and forgave. Her accounts of life with Harrison are written with disarming honesty but her complete passiveness can make the reader impatient.

One can8217;t help but wonder at her candour or maybe consider the fact that, possibly, the surreal existence of being a Beatle wife made it all worth it. In the meantime, Boyd indulged in a mild flirtation with Clapton who was besotted with her and threatened to turn to heroin if she spurned him. Three years later, when she had run out of all options with Harrison, Boyd reluctantly moved in with Clapton, who, true to his word, was now addicted to heroin and alcohol. It seems almost incredible that this very beautiful but very ordinary girl could8217;ve inspired such fervour and passion in Clapton and led him to create his best works, Layla and Wonderful tonight. This relationship was much more complex and Boyd8217;s pattern of choosing abusive husbands continued.

Her accounts of being on tour with Clapton at the peak of his addiction are heartfelt and dramatic. Sometimes he8217;d be so stoned that he would lie on stage and play the chords. Boyd talks about her own rapid descent into drunkenness candidly, and her futile existence with Clapton that eventually finished the marriage. She relates stories of his erratic behavior clearly, but it seems she has no real understanding of how they drifted apart. Yet, Wonderful Today deserves to be read in the context of the 8217;60s, also because the writer was in the midst of people who created the hippie generation..