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Paula Fiona Boyd was born in Nakuru Hospital (Kenya) the 14th March 1951 to Diane and Jock Boyd, and was the youngest of four siblings (Pattie, Jenny and Colin).
By the time her mother Diane was 31 years old, she met her second husband, Bobbie Gaymer-Jones. Diane was very poor and Paula was the only one of her children her mother had with her: when she left Jock, she had deposited Colin and Jenny in some kind of boarding nursery school, along with Pattie, eldest sister.
Pattie, Colin & Jenny spent the next school holidays [1953] at their father’s house. In her autobiography "Wonderful Tonight" Pattie Boyd explains: "I can only imagine that she and Bobbie had baby Paula and didn’t want us hanging around. They were the perfect nuclear family – and could even, perhaps, pass off Paula as Bobbie’s.” In mid 1953 Diane left for good, but she left with Bobbie and Paula and left Pattie, Colin and Jenny behind.
Pattie explains: “As a little girl, she was utterly adored and always had the biggest present at Christmas; but she clearly remembers even at that young age thinking that when she opened the present, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be enough. She was born with an addictive personality […] – and as a teenager she was well on the way to having a problem.”
She had always wanted to be an actress and had been sent to a children’s drama school. George Harrison and Pattie went to see her on stage a couple of times, and she had parts in a couple of children’s television series, including “Swallows and Amazons”. Potentially she had a good career ahead of her. And then it started to go wrong. She and her mother started to fight over clothes: she wanted to wear really short skirts and other things that her mum thought she was too young for. Eventually Paula was sent to a boarding school but that was a disaster and only made the things worse. As soon as she left school, she went to live with an actor boyfriend.
By December 1969 Delaney and Bonnie and Friends were playing in Liverpool and Pattie took Paula with her to see them; once again, there was a fantastic party afterwards. Pattie explains: "Paula was seventeen and a bit of a wild child; my mother was finding it difficult to cope with her. She was so pretty – the prettiest of us all – creative, lively and outgoing, not cripplingly shy like Jenny and me". That night Eric Clapton fell for her. After the show all of them went to a restaurant and everyone was quite drunk and raucous. When they went back to the hotel, they left Eric and Paula dancing.
The next night Eric was playing in Croydon and again Paula and Pattie went to watch, and again there was a wild after-show party, this time at Eric`s Italianate manor house, Hurtwood Edge in Ewhurst, Surrey. Soon after, Paula moved in with Eric.
“By this time [summer 1970] Paula had gone. She had been with Eric in Miami when he was recording Layla and knew instantly it was about me [Pattie]. She had always had a suspicion he was with her only because she was the next best thing to me [Pattie] and I [Pattie] was unobtainable. Hearing Layla confirmed it. She packed her bags and took her broken heart home. She had been seriously in love with Eric, but he destroyed her pride, her self-esteem and her confidence, which were already fragile.”
She went off to stay, first, with Bobby Whitlock, who played with Delaney and Bonnie and the Dominos, “then bounced from one relationship to the next, one marriage to the next” explains her older sister Pattie.
Her first husband, Andy Johns, was a sound engineer who worked with the Rolling Stones, he and Paula had a son called William. While she was living in Los Angeles with Andy, she had been drinking heavily, and every time Eric Clapton was in town she phoned Roger and asked him to borrow her some money. Pattie decided not to give her money and she gave her dresses.
In the spring of 1973 Pattie was invited to the Bahamas by her artist friend Sheila Oldham and she decided to pick up Paula and her baby son William. “Paula was in a bad way. She and her husband, Andy, were living in a flat in Little Venice and one day she confessed to me that she had been so stoned and so out of it that she couldn’t remember whether she had last fed William an hour or a day ago. I thought if I could get her away from Andy, who was also using, I might be able to sort her out.” Paula had drugs and a syringe with her and she gave it to Pattie, who told her she would bury it in the sand, but Pattie hide it with her T-shirts. There, in the Bahamas they had a very relaxing life, they did yoga every morning and it seemed that the things were going on well. After a week Paula need her syringe, and she started digging in the sand, looking for it. Soon later Andy called Pattie to clean him up, but he was more difficult than Paula because he wanted to stay up all night drinking vodka. “He was hard work but gradually he got better, and he was so much nicer when he was clean. At least Paula was clean – for the time being. Paula had been a real worry. Since their Bahamas trip, I tried to clean her up several times” explains Pattie in “Wonderful Tonight”.
Then she married David Philpot, a drug dealer, and had two daughters, Emma and Cassie, but that relationship didn’t last either. “She embarked on a life of drink and drugs, which has been a constant source of worry for us all but my mother in particular. Sadly, it destroyed not just her youth but her potential to develop her talent into a career.”
In 1974, when she was married to David Philpot, her second husband, Pattie kidnapped her from her flat with the help of Alfie O’Leary and Roger, and took her to Brighton. Once David telephoned Pattie and told her to bring back his wife, but Pattie wanted to get Paula away from him because he was a heroin addicted too. By that time Paula had her son William (Emma and Cassie weren’t born yet), and the boy came to stay with Pattie and Eric every weekend.
Once, Paula went to stay with Pattie and Eric, she had collapsed on the floor and her son William (who was seven), was shaking her trying to wake her up, then Pattie heard William’s cries and she went to help her sister.
All family wanted to help her and her mother took her to Scotland, where she was working for a while.
When Emma was born, Paula suffered a post-natal depression and she began to drink again. When Emma was two, Paula realized they would all die if they stayed in London, so they decided to live in Cork and there Paula got dry for months. Sadly, one day she went to a party with some Irish girls and had some beer. The next day she woke up in a psychiatric institution and was terrified.
She splitted up with David and came back to England with three children and had nowhere to live, so the council put her into bed and breakfast accommodation until they found her a house in Haslemere. Then Paula met Graham and she began to drink again. Her daughter Emma had rows with her and when she was seventeen she left home. Cassie didn’t spoke to anybody until she was twelve. Just before Cassie’s seventeenth birthday, Paula went to leave with Graham in a narrow street and left Cassie behind. Pattie visited her niece but she felt she was a poor substitute of her mother.
By 2002 Paula’s family took her into treatment against her will. Jenny was working for a well respected addiction clinic in Arizona and managed to get Paula a place. Pattie told Paula to go there. “[Paula] burst into tears. ‘I’m [Pattie] staying the night with you and we’re leaving tomorrow to go and talk to the others in London’ She was terribly upset, but after a while she said “Thank you. I do need to go”.
In an interview to Pattie Boyd on Sunday August 10 2008 at the Independent.ie:
Julia Molony: "We chat for a while about the era she was part of. The trailblazing, the excess, the bed-hopping, wife-swapping and the casualties along the way, which include her sister Paula, a heroin addict."
Pattie: "I don`t know where she is. I was trying to get her into treatment while I was in America, she kept escaping. And drinking. I couldn`t control it because I was miles away. And my brother is away, another sister is away, and my mother is too old and she gets too distressed. To have an alcoholic and a drug addict in the family is one of the most debilitating things. Although it pulls us all together, it causes such huge anxiety. Because, until that person really wants to take care of themselves, there is nothing you can do. You all have to go through the motions, and we do it to the best of our ability. But, at the end of the day, it`s like hitting your head against a brick wall. You can`t do a thing."
Sadly, Paula died November 8th 2008 in Worcester, aged 58.
1952 - Paula with her sisters Pattie and Jenny, with her brother Colin and with her mum Diane in Kenya
1953 - Nanny Salomé holding Paula who is with her brother Colin and her sisters Jenny and Pattie. Kenya.
1966 - January 20 - Paula Boyd attended at her sister's Pattie wedding with George Harrison at Epsom Register Office, London. In the pics we can see as well Louise Harrioson (George's mum) and Paula & Pattie younger brothers Robert and David Gaymer-Jones.
1967 - Between July 22 and July 30th, Paula went to Greece with her sister Pattie and husband George, Jane Asher and Paul McCartney, John and Cynthia Lennon with their son Julian and Alex Mardas.
Circa 1969 pose of new model Paula Boyd, 18, a recent graduate of the Cherry Marshall Modelling Agency had only been modelling about two months by early 1970.
1970 - April 1st - Vogue magazine - Paula Boyd modelling with sisters Pattie and Jenny
Circa 1972 - Photo of Paula Boyd posing with her boyfriend Bobby Whitlock from the inside gate-fold of his first solo album.
1994 - Mother Diana and her twin brother at their joint 70th birthday celebration at Diana's home in Devon, England. (L to R) John Drysdale, 70, (Paula's uncle, Diana's twin), Colin Boyd, 48, Paula, 43, Jenny, 46, Robert "Boo" Gaymer-Jones, 39, David Gaymer-Jones, 40, Pattie, 50, and Diana, 70. From the collection of Pattie Boyd.
*Information from "Wonderful Today", Pattie Boyd's autobiography written with Penny Junor. Pictures from Pattie Boyd's Yahoo Groups ruled by Lynn Mayes*
