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| Fryer, 1949 |
Rock guitar legend Eric Clapton didn't get cheated of drama when he learned of his biological father Edward "Ted" Walter Fryer (1920-1985), a seductive Montreal-based drifter with a great talent for music.
Clapton's well-publicized search for his dad raises tantalizing questions about the role of biology in determining our fates.
Eric Clapton was born on 30 March 1945, the result of Patricia Clapton's brief fling with Edward Walter Fryer, a low-ranked soldier stationed in England.
Patricia Clapton maintained an elaborate ruse to make her son Eric believe that she was, in fact, his sister. Eric's grandparents raised him, pretending that they were his parents.
Clapton's father Edward was already dead by the time researchers determined his identity but Edward Walter Fryer passed down to Eric an artistic temperament and musical talent.
Edward was born at 4066 Hampton in NDG to a family with English roots and of the Presbyterian faith. His dad was 23 when Edward was born but nothing else is known of his parents or siblings.
Edward was a 20-year-old enlisted soldier during World War II when on 14 September 1940 he wed Audrey Beryl Clark, 21, in Montreal. She worked as comptometer, or data entry clerk and was an Anglican from
278 Melrose in Verdun.
In March 1944 Edward, while on duty in England, made news as a 23-year-old Canadian private as he passed some idle time away at a guardhouse drawing up facsimiles of British cash currency.
Fryer changed the motto on the 1 pound note to "make money in your spare time." He swapped the eight drawings with other soldiers in return for cigarettes.
All were aware that the money was not real but someone reported Fryer, leading authorities to slap him with a counterfeit-related charge.
Fryer denied criminal intent and his punishment - if he received any - was never publicized, although one report cryptically stated that he was "bound for another 12 months."
Fryer impregnated Patricia Clapton, 16, three months later, in June 1944.
Theirs was described as a one-night-stand. Yet it is possible that Fryer was aware that he had impregnated young Patricia, as he showed little interest in returning to Canada and missed the ship ride back home in 1945, leading Canadian military authorities to classify him as Absent Without Leave and dishonorably discharge him in September 1946.
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| Eric Clapton & Patricia |
Fryer did not emerge from the war unscathed. He returned deaf in his left ear and had a large scar on a leg, among other injuries.
Edward Fryer and his Montreal wife Audrey didn't last long after his postwar return, as the couple divorced on 15 January 1948, at a time when divorce was rare in Quebec and entailed a complicated process. Their cause of divorce was listed as adultery.
Fryer was soon embroiled in an intimate relationship with Muriel Edna Glass (1920-2006) a leggy showgirl who had caught his eye with her can-can show as dance soloist with the Red Triangle Revue, which performed for members of the Canadian armed forces in Montreal.
Glass, described in one article as "attractive," worked as a model according to their 1949 wedding certificate.
Fryer listed his employment as "painter-decorator" and "packer" as he and Muriel lived at
1928 Prudhomme in NDG, a home demolished 15 years later for the Decarie Expressway.
Just 19 months after sliding a wedding ring onto Muriel Glass' glamorous finger, Fryer ghosted in a conspicuous manner, leading newspapers to publish missing persons report.
A newspaper article of 5 October 1949 noted that Fryer had gone missing and suggested that he might be suffering amnesia from a war injury.
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| Cecilia Dupras |
But it appears more likely that he simply walked out on poor Muriel.
The couple filed for divorce 15 months after Fryer's disappearance.
The cause for divorce was listed as adultery but it's possible that Muriel was the cheating party, as she remarried a few months after and later moved to Calgary.
Fryer again proved his talents at seducing gorgeous bombshells when playing piano for a touring band known as Cecilia and Her Escorts.
Fryer trekked across North America tinkling the keys while doubling as boyfriend of the femme fatale bandleader Cecilia Dupras. The two never wed but had two children together, Sandra, in 1957 and Edward Jr. in 1959.
The band toured North and South America and the Caribbean but their romance fizzled out as Dupras asked Fryer if he'd stay in the band while she married a different musician from the group.
Fryer stayed in the band only until they could find another pianist and then left the band in 1964 in London, Ontario. Dupras later retired to Vancouver.
Once again Fryer didn't stay lonely long, as he coupled up soon after with Yvonne Colson, a single mother of two, who had met him at a show in Florida in 1965.
"We noticed this cute guy playing the piano. He asked if we had requests. I said 'Let's Fall in Love?' and from then it got serious," Colson said later.
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| Fryer |
Fryer was booted from the States for working without a visa and Colson moved with him to the Toronto area and lived with him for 11 years, giving him a daughter Eva Jane Fryer in 1968.
Fryer made ends meet by accompanying lounge singers and playing in strip clubs and airport bars. He sang like Nat King Cole and was partial to middle-of-the-road standards and could play songs by ear after one listen.
He could also draw and paint signs as well as any professional.
Fryer and Colson and the three kids lived in Brantford, Sault Saint Marie, Peterborough, and Toronto before splitting in 1971.
Colson later said of Fryer:
He never planned for anything. He was a very selfish man. He strictly wanted what he wanted and didn't care who he walked on to get it. I think he was a very lonely man. He could con the horns off a billy goat. in In 1969, we were living in Florida, working hotels, and he met my boss's daughter in law. He talked her into leaving her three babies and they took off. He was up in Ottawa, playing the Holiday Inn. So I flew up there and got her back with her husband and her kids, but she left again and went with him."
That's when I said that's it, no more. But I never got any child support. The judge would let him go every time. In 1974 or 1975 he phoned me and talked me into meeting him. We met outside of Toronto. He told me he tried to kill himself driving himself into the gorge at Niagara Falls. I didn't believe him. So I phoned the police and they sent me a copy of the newspaper. He rented a Duster and gunned the engine. But a bank of trees stopped him from going into the gorge. He spent a couple of days in the hospital.
By the mid-70s both Fryer and Eric, the son he didn't know, were a mess.
While Fryer was in his suicidal blur, Eric had already long enjoyed massive fame and been dubbed "God" for his guitar skills in supergroups like Cream but had swapped a heroin addiction for a serious drinking problem, manifesting a psychological damage partially caused by never knowing his father.
Some time later - year unknown - Fryer met his final romantic partner in Sylvia "Goldie' Nickason, who would spend time on the sailboard he docked in Lake Ontario. The two sailed to Florida frequently.
Nickason recounted their first encounter in a later interview. "All we had to eat was a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. But we had a nice sunset to watch that night and Ted took me in his arms and said, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing right now.'"
Fryer died of leukemia in 1985.
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| Fryer with Goldie |
