Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  One day I went to see the great Norman Parkinson. He looked at my book, then looked at me and said, “Come back when you’ve learned how to do your hair and makeup properly.” I felt so humiliated. Six months later I got a job with Vogue and Parkinson was the photographer—he didn’t recognize me.

  I was lucky. The trekking around worked, and soon my diary was full of jobs. Modeling was fun. I loved trying on clothes and fiddling with my hair and makeup. We had to do it ourselves—there were no hairstylists or makeup artists and certainly no chauffeur-driven cars to ferry us around. We were not celebrities in the way that today’s top models are. For advertising jobs we even had to bring our own accessories. I have my old appointment diaries and they are full of instructions about what I had to take to a shoot. Usually it was light and dark court shoes, flatties, gloves, costume jewelry, hats or caps, and boots, plus makeup, wigs, and hairpieces. You could spot a model a mile off from the heavy bags she was carrying.

  I made lots of friends among the other models, and when one of the girls in the mews house left to get married, I moved into a flat in Stanhope Gardens with four other models. It was girly and disorganized. There were people coming and going at all hours, boys turning up to take us out—and leaving broken hearts—everyone borrowing everyone else’s clothes, so nothing was ever where you thought it was, and no system for cleaning or shopping. You never knew whether or not there would be any food. One minute the fridge was bursting, the next it was empty. I was earning three pounds an hour but often the money didn’t come through for weeks, and with rent to pay I didn’t have a lot to spare—particularly if I’d treated myself to a nice pair of shoes, my weakness. I economized on food and most of the time lived on Bird’s Eye frozen chicken pies. An invitation to dinner was a real treat.

  One night I was asked out by a boy called Peter, who had an identical twin. I shall never forget him because he introduced me to avocado pears. I had seen them but never tasted one and, as a starter with vinaigrette, I loved it. They must have been very new in Britain because I remember introducing them to George Harrison and he introduced them to Cilla Black. The next week Peter and I had another date and I thought it odd that he should have forgotten everything I’d told him the week before—only to discover it wasn’t Peter I’d been cozying up to but his twin brother. Not funny.

  One of my best friends was a model called Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot. Her brother, the gorgeous Jean-Claude, had introduced us. I had met him in the King’s Road where I had been doing a modeling job with a girl called Sonia Dean. When we had finished she said, “Let’s go to the Kardomah coffee bar,” which was a great meeting place, near Peter Jones—everyone hung out there. Off we went, and I still had all my makeup on, including false eyelashes. It was so smoky in there that my eyes watered. I couldn’t bear it, I wanted to leave, but she was waiting for some guy because there was a party that night she wanted to go to. So we stayed and, suddenly, just as I felt something sliding down my face, a beautiful young man was standing over me, grinning. Jean-Claude introduced himself—while I tried to rescue the eyelash that had made a break for freedom—and asked if I’d like to go to a party. I said, “Of course.” But I had no idea that he was the chap Sonia had been waiting for, and he’d come straight to me.

  It was a terrible party and someone stole my handbag, which I’d left on the stairs with the coats, as everyone did in those days, but Jean-Claude and I became friends. And for a little while I fondly imagined he was my boyfriend. He took some wonderful photographs of me and introduced me to all sorts of people, including his sister, Marie-Lise, and his little brother, Danny. They were from Mauritius and had a father in London, but their mother was dead.

  One night we were supposed to be going to a party at De Vere Gardens and I waited for Jean-Claude to collect me. He didn’t come and didn’t phone, and the hours went by. Finally I decided to go on my own. I arrived and found Jean-Claude already there, dancing with another girl, and I knew that that was it. I thought, She’s so pretty, no wonder he’s dancing with her. I was very upset, but I don’t think he ever realized I’d felt as I did about him. The girl was called Belinda Watson, and not long afterward Jean-Claude brought her to tea at Hurlingham Court. They eventually married and had two children—and Belinda’s mother married Jean-Claude’s father.

  Soon after that disappointment I started going out with another photographer, Eric Swayne, who was quite a bit older than I was. We all drove to Spain together, Jean-Claude, Belinda, Danny, Eric, and I. Danny played bongo drums all the way there, and I remember pulling up at traffic lights next to a car laden with boxes of apricots and the driver giving us a box. We would stop by the road in little wooded picnic areas and have lunch—the joy of perfectly ripe Camembert with fresh baguettes and delicious red wine. We stayed in little pensions and I was shocked to find that every loo in France was a hole in the ground with a little place for your feet at either side. I was reminded of Africa and the rondavel house we had lived in where the loo was a hole in the garden. We children used to throw each other’s things into it. But that trip through France was a gastronomic awakening for me. We would eat in tiny restaurants that were very cheap but the food was wonderful, and in Spain—we went as far as Cambrils in the northeast—I tasted paella for the first time. We stayed in a very cheap flat with cockroaches, and at lunchtime a local family would come to the beach, light a stove, and make it for us. Danny couldn’t swim and it was our priority to teach him.

  I was a virgin when I met Eric Swayne. I was still sharing a flat with Jane Blackiston, who kept quizzing me about whether I had slept with anyone yet and I kept saying, “No.” I was nervous of doing it because I knew she’d get out the moral whip. Part of me wanted to stay a virgin until I got married—the convent indoctrination rubbing off on me—but another part was decidedly wobbly about the whole business of marriage. Having witnessed my mother’s experience, not once but twice, and seen how unhappy it had made her, I wasn’t sure marriage was such a good thing.

  Eric was not good-looking but quite cool—he had long dark hair and a straight, fine nose—and good company: he made everyone laugh. He lived in a flat in Chelsea Studios, a fifties building next to Chelsea football ground, with the photographer David Hurn next door. Grace Coddington, another model, who later became a legendary figure at Vogue, had the flat above. Eric was thirty and came from the East End of London. He looked up to David Bailey, who was from the same area. Bailey photographed Jean Shrimpton and they were emerging as fashion’s golden couple. I think Eric wanted to do for me what Bailey had done for Jean: he wanted to be my style guru. He wanted to show me how to do my hair and makeup and to help me with my modeling. In the end he became too controlling, and I think he was quite dark in some ways, but he introduced me to lots of photographers and it was through him that I met Bailey and Jean Shrimpton. I was such a fan that I was dumb-struck when I met her. She was stunningly beautiful and he was so funny; they were a wonderful couple. She was much taller than him and came from Berkshire—her background was similar to mine.

  Bailey had lots of girlfriends. One night Eric and I had dinner with him, Penelope Tree, another model, and the actor Yul Brynner, who, I think, Bailey had been photographing. We walked to a little restaurant in the King’s Road—it was so weird being with Yul Brynner, who had just made The King and I and, with his shaven head, was instantly recognizable. Some smart-aleck we passed in the street said, “Oh, look, he thinks he’s Yul Brynner.”

  Eric and I didn’t sleep together for quite a while. He kept asking and I kept refusing. Eventually I felt pressured and knew I’d have to give in, so although I didn’t really want to, I agreed. He was kind and sweet, but it wasn’t the big deal I had imagined. In fact, it was pretty painful and I regretted it. We didn’t use any contraception—I didn’t think about the possibility of becoming pregnant until later, when I panicked a bit. Mostly I felt I had let myself down.

  Eric didn’t have much money so we would go to restaurants like the S
tockpot, which had several branches in central London, where the food was cheap and filling. One night we were at the one in the King’s Road with a friend called Peter Kernott, when Eric noticed Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian ballet dancer, sitting at a table on his own. I said, “Let’s invite him over,” so Eric did and he had coffee with us. I couldn’t believe it—this beautiful boy. He didn’t speak much English but after we had paid the bill he invited us back to his flat in Ennismore Gardens. He gave us a drink, then began to dance, leaping into the air, arms and legs outstretched, spinning, bounding, then sinking gracefully to the floor. It was a night of pure magic.

  London was like that in the 1960s. You spoke to strangers and invited them back to your flat without thinking twice. King’s Road was like an exclusive school playground. Everyone went to the same parties, the same shops, the same coffee bars, bistros, and pubs. And on Saturdays, if you weren’t parading up and down the King’s Road, you would migrate to Portobello Road, in Notting Hill, to meander up and down looking at the market stalls and people strutting their stuff. You could find some real bargains: bits of silver, antique jewelry and knickknacks, wonderful old clothes, and pieces of lace and velvet. Everyone looked glorious and was so relaxed and friendly.

  We went to clubs like the Arethusa, ate in restaurants like the Picasso and the Casserole, all in the King’s Road. You would go for lunch and find yourself still sitting chatting to your friends at dinnertime and no one would hassle you to leave. Then there was Mr. Chow’s restaurant in Knightsbridge; he was going out with Grace Coddington and later married Tina Chow, whom everyone fell in love with. We went to quirky little boutiques, like Granny Takes A Trip, owned by Nigel Waymouth, who was a painter, and John Pearce. They sold paintings, posters, and clothes—crushed velvet trousers and fitted jackets with thin arms in wonderful greens and burgundies. Everything was very tight and men wore boots, jackets, and shirts with big collars—Regency, almost. There was an amazing number of new shops for men, who were refusing to be like their fathers. I loved Hung On You, and the shirtmakers Deborah and Claire in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge, Foale & Tuffin for dresses, and Anello & Davide for boots. And Mary Quant, and Ossie Clark, and then there was Biba, Barbara Hulanicki’s brainchild, first in Abingdon Road, then Kensington Church Street.

  We went to the Chelsea Antiques Market. On the first floor there were secondhand clothes, delicious silks and chiffons. Jenny Kee, an Australian Chinese girl, had a stall there, as did Australian Jenny and wonderful Swedish Ulla Larson. There was another great market in Kensington High Street and a shop in Langton Street where we used to buy afghan coats. And patchouli oil—that was the smell of the sixties for me. We wore it all the time—probably to take away the terrible smell of those afghan coats!

  London belonged to the young. All the old class structures of our parents’ generation were breaking down. All the old social mores were swept away. No one cared where you came from or what school you’d gone to, what accent you spoke with or how much money you had. All that mattered was what you could do, what you could create. Bohemian baronets smoked grass openly, dukes’ daughters went out with hairdressers, and everyone put two fingers up to the conventions of their youth and the expectations of their families. The capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy. Everything was possible—and money was not the key to every door.

  Painters, poets, writers, designers, admen, media figures, and, of course, musicians expressed themselves with fearlessness, freshness, and freedom. They wore fabulous frocks and flowery shirts and grew their hair long. They weren’t going to knuckle down and wear the uniform of their class. The rule book had been thrown away. A new age and a new value system had been born. People wanted to experiment and have fun. And, to use the old cliché, make love not war. As long as you were young, beautiful, and creative, the world was your oyster. It was a golden age, an exciting time to be alive. As a model, working for the most successful photographers in London, I was in the thick of it.

  One of the seminal books of the sixties was the coffee-table Birds of Britain, a collection of photographs of the girls whom photographer John D. Green thought epitomized the decade. I was on the front cover and most of my friends were in it. The introduction was written by Anthony Haden-Guest, who, I thought, had painted a perfect picture to set the scene:

  Consider them [English girls] now, Resplendent! Sauntering, strolling, sitting, driving around the chosen streets and squares of Central London…warm vortices of flesh, supercool in sunglasses and flaming in a rag-bag kaleido-scope of stuffs and styles. Swathed in tulle and velvet and lace, sheathed in plastic and poly-vinyl, silk and satin, throw-away paper shirts and everlasting metal-alloy dresses. Like Venus in furs, or Hell’s Angels in leather, they shimmer past, in Courrèges, in Vietnam combat-kit, in Gary Cooper denims, in antique Hussar Regimentals…Grandmother’s formals swoop to the ground in a scarlet Niagara, or the hem disappears into a swirl of miniskirt, beneath which limbs flicker like jack-knives and glimmer like trout.

  Limbs hadn’t been seen before, except on the beach. Miniskirts were revolutionary. Women had been covered up in sensible tweeds and twin sets. Suddenly they were flaunting themselves, wearing luxurious fabrics, bright colors, huge hats, beads, big belts, buckles and thigh-high boots. You could wear what you wanted, do what you wanted, express yourself in any way that felt right—and in the “in” parts of London, such as Chelsea and Notting Hill, no one turned a hair. Although homosexuality was still illegal until 1967, gay and bisexual men no longer felt the need to hide. Pregnant women were no longer ashamed to show their expanding tummies. Young mothers ditched old-fashioned prams and carried their babies in papooses on their backs. They breast-fed in public too.

  Extraordinary, exciting people were around—David Hockney, Celia Birtwell, and Hockney’s boyfriend Peter Schlesinger, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, and the Rolling Stones. There were comedy clubs—the Establishment, the Round House, the Living Theatre—and comedians like the outrageous Lenny Bruce. There was nudity on the stage, exhilarating, extravagant musicals like Oh! Calcutta! and Hair, which shocked the establishment and had the young dancing in the aisles. On television That Was the Week That Was took an irreverent look at politics, while the Australian journalist Richard Neville caused regular outrage with Oz magazine. Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, and Peter Cook poked fun at it all in the new satirical magazine Private Eye.

  We were breaking new ground in every area, embracing everything that presented itself, and, I suppose, living without a care for tomorrow. People were traveling to places like India and Afghanistan—the beginnings of the hippie trail—and bringing back exotic clothes, jewelry, and drugs. We had no role models: we had no idea that drugs were potentially dangerous or that our friends might end up addicts or kill themselves with an overdose. We had not yet seen anyone spiraling out of control.

  Most of the people I hung out with were photographers, rock ’n’ rollers without the music. I worked with some, people like Michael Boys, Brian Duffy, Terry Donovan, Barry Latigan, John French, David Bailey, and Maurice Engles, and others I knew as friends. They were mostly men but there was one woman photographer, Sarah Moon. Some made us look better than we actually did—Barry Latigan was brilliant at that. He had come from South Africa to work as Michael Boys’s assistant.

  I was doing a lot of work for Michael at the time and remember going to Portugal with him for a shoot. It was January and he thought it would be warmer by the sea in Portugal than it was in England. It was freezing. They had to revive me with brandy and by the end of the day I was feeling no pain. Then Barry took photos of me. All the models loved working for him because of his knack with lighting.

  I didn’t have overweening self-confidence, and I don’t think any model did. I was flattered when people said or wrote nice things about me, but I saw beautiful girls every day and, compared with people like Jean Shrimpton, I felt I was way down the pecking order. That is the negative side of modeling. You have to look re
ally good to get the jobs, so you put yourself into a situation that feeds your insecurities. If you don’t get a job, you think it’s because you’re not pretty enough. It allows you—in fact, it forces you—to concentrate on your flaws, and that’s destructive. A girl who doesn’t have to rely on her looks for her living is far more confident, and confidence is attractive—her looks are not integral to her self-esteem. Ours were.

  A good photographer made the world of difference. I didn’t get on with Patrick Lichfield because he couldn’t communicate with his models in the way that others did. It was so frustrating: he would say, “Do something—go,” which is impossible. An actress is given a role to play and comes up with a great performance for the camera. A model needs to be given a role to play, otherwise she has to rely on the clothes she is wearing, which may be uninspiring. You need to be told what to do and how to look, and the good photographers would encourage us, egg us on, telling us how beautiful we were, how sexy, that the pose was perfect.

  Bailey was a sexy photographer, and it was easy to appear sexy with him because we reacted to what was coming from him. There might be other people in the studio but modeling is a one-on-one relationship, between you and the photographer, and you need to feel that he and the camera are one.

  In those early years I worked long hours. Sometimes I had three or four different jobs in a day and frequently wouldn’t finish until seven-thirty or eight in the evening. It was a mixture of advertising and fashion, working directly for magazines like Honey, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, or newspapers. I did a lot of fashion spreads for the Daily Telegraph, also The Times, the Mirror, and the Express. In addition there would be the occasional catalogue shoot, which was always rather dull: the clothes were usually unexciting, but we would shoot over several days so the money was good. Soon I had an agent in Paris too, called Paris Planning, and I remember going to see them for the first time and being told how mignonne, or cute, I was. I stayed in a small hotel in the sixth arrondissement and did the round of photographers with my portfolio, struggling with taxis and schoolgirl French, but again, it paid off. A single job for Elle magazine paid four hundred francs. But it was more fun to have company, and on subsequent visits other models came too—I remember doing a job with Sandra Paul, who married the politician Michael Howard, and Pauline Stone, who married Laurence Harvey.