by Pattie Boyd
I saw George again on March 12, a few days before my twentieth birthday. He had turned twenty-one the month before. There was a press photo call at Twickenham Studios and each of us schoolgirls had to stand behind a Beatle and pretend to do their hair. I made a beeline for George. He seemed pleased to see me and asked how my boyfriend was. I told him I’d dumped him. He grinned and asked me to have dinner with him.
We went to the Garrick Club in Covent Garden with the charismatic Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. He was slightly older, better educated, and more worldly-wise than John, Paul, George, and Ringo were. He was also much more to them than a manager: he had discovered them in Liverpool, shaped them, and harnessed their talent, but he had also become a father figure to them and kept a close eye on everything they did. They loved him, trusted him, and did nothing without his say-so. I didn’t resent his presence on our first date—he was good company and seemed to know everything about wine, food, and London restaurants. And perhaps if George and I, two very young, very shy people, had been on our own in such a grown-up restaurant, it would have been too intense. As it was, we had a lovely evening and sat side by side on a banquette listening to Brian, hardly daring to touch each other’s hand. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mary all about it.
And that was it. We started going out together and on my twentieth birthday, on March 17, I took him home to Strathmore Road to meet my family. We arrived in George’s beautiful silver Jaguar E-type and everyone was excited. David and Boo were away at boarding school but the others were at home and they were all Beatles fans. George sat down and told one funny story after another. He was so easy and friendly with everyone, and it was the same every time we went home. My mother adored him, and so did my brothers and sisters. Jenny used to wear horrible pink National Health glasses, which she hated, and George suggested she should wear contact lenses. He said John Lennon had just started using them, and they had made a huge difference to his life—so she followed suit. He also taught her the chords to some Buddy Holly songs she was trying to play on the guitar.
At Easter George and I went to Ireland for the weekend with John and Cynthia Lennon. We flew from Heathrow to Shannon airport in a six-seater propeller plane—my ears were in agony all the way and I have never been so relieved to feel an airplane touch down. We were going to the Dromoland Castle Hotel, in County Clare, where President John F. Kennedy had stayed—miles from anywhere with beautiful gardens and landscaping—where Brian had booked us a magnificent suite. The trip had been kept secret from the press, but John and George were in disguise and Cynthia and I walked well behind them at the airports—I was nursing an ugly, painful sty on my eyelid.
As we swept up the Dromoland Castle drive there was neither a camera nor a journalist to be seen, but that evening the manager rang to warn us that reporters from the Daily Mirror had found us and booked into the hotel.
The next morning more were hanging around outside our windows. It was the first time I had experienced anything like it, and I found it quite intriguing. Whenever we tried to go anywhere they followed us, clicking away with their cameras and shouting to us for a comment. There were no mobile phones at that time, so the reporters used the hotel phones to send their stories to their offices and the hotel manager tapped the lines and let us listen. They were saying the most stupid things about us. We had to get away—but how, without being hounded? Then the enterprising manager came up with an idea. Cynthia and I were bundled out of the hotel’s service entrance inside wicker laundry baskets. Neither the most dignified departure from a five-star hotel nor the most elegant arrival in a departure lounge, but, under the circumstances, certainly the most effective.
Cynthia and John had met at art college in Liverpool—he was the first of the group to have a steady girlfriend—and when she became pregnant unexpectedly in 1962 they married. However, Brian was worried about the effect John’s marriage might have on the band’s popularity, so Cynthia and baby Julian were kept secret. It must have been hard on her: she had always enjoyed watching them at the Cavern but suddenly she wasn’t allowed anywhere near a live performance. When John was away, which he was a lot in the early years, she wasn’t allowed to travel with him. And she had a grim time at home. John had been brought up from the age of three by his mother’s sister, Mimi, and in the early days when John and Cynthia had little money, they had lived with her. She was a bit of a snob and I gather she didn’t think Cynthia good enough for her surrogate son.
I liked Cynthia, but of all the Beatle wives and girlfriends I found her the most difficult to make friends with. She and I came from such different backgrounds; she had no career, she was a young mother, and we had no point of reference apart from our attachment to a Beatle. She wasn’t like my friends, who enjoyed a giggle and some fun: she was rather serious, and often, I thought, behaved more like John’s mother than his wife. I tended to leave her to her own devices but invited her to join me for shopping. I think she felt a bit out of her depth in the smart, sophisticated circles in which the Beatles were now moving in London. And I don’t think it helped that John thought I looked like Brigitte Bardot, or that I got on so well with him. There was a rumor—I don’t know where it came from—that John and I had an affair, and I suppose Cynthia may have believed there was something in it. It was completely untrue: we never had an affair. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it and neither, I am sure, would John.
Ringo’s girlfriend, Maureen Cox, was also from Liverpool. She was a fan whose dream had come true. She had started out as one of the hundreds of teenage girls who queued day after day at the Cavern to get close to the front of the stage for the best possible view of the Beatles and in the hope that they might catch the eye of one. Every fan had a favorite, and Ringo was hers. She wouldn’t have called herself a fanatic—she would only queue, she said, for two or three hours while some girls were there all day—but she did run after Ringo in the street one day to get his autograph when she spotted him getting out of his car. She was seventeen, had just left school and was learning to be a hairdresser. Then, one day, it happened for her. Again, she and I had little in common but she was jolly and friendly, more relaxed than Cynthia. We got on but I felt there was definitely a north-south divide among the wives and girlfriends. And I had the definite impression that the girls from the north felt they had a prior claim to “the boys.”
Jane Asher was the girlfriend with whom I felt most at home, but because we both had heavy work commitments she was also the one I saw least. She came from a professional family, had grown up in London and, like me, had been privately educated. The family lived in Wimpole Street; her father was a psychiatrist and her mother a music teacher—her brother Peter became half of the pop duo Peter and Gordon. She was three years younger than me but we got on well and I’ve always been pleased to see her whenever we’ve met. She had been an actress since the age of five and had met Paul when she was seventeen, shortly before I met George. She had gone to interview him, as a celebrity writer, for the Radio Times, and they fell in love at first sight. Soon afterward Paul moved into a room at the Ashers’ house.
In May Brian arranged a holiday for us all. He split us up into fours, and that was usually the way we holidayed from then on. Paul and Jane, Ringo and Maureen went off to the Virgin Islands, while John and Cynthia, George and I went to Tahiti, where we planned to spend four weeks island-hopping on a boat. It was a good way to split the group. John and Paul were the closest in some ways and immensely creative together, but they clashed if they were in each other’s pockets for too long. We were traveling under pseudonyms—as we always did, although the names changed. On this occasion Paul was Mr. Manning, Jane Miss Ashcroft, Ringo was Mr. Stone, and Maureen Miss Cockcroft. John and Cynthia were Mr. and Mrs. Leslie, George was Mr. Hargreaves, and I was Miss Bond. To complete the disguise, Cynthia and I wore wigs and dark glasses—and, to my intense irritation, I had another sty. John called it “holiday eye.”
We took a private plane to Amsterdam, and fro
m there flew to Honolulu via Vancouver, where we had to refuel. We spent just twenty minutes on the ground, but by the time we reached Honolulu our cover was blown. For the two days we had to wait before we caught the connection to Tahiti we escaped to a secluded beach in the north of the island where no one knew us—or so we thought. It was incredibly hot so George asked me to cut his hair. When I’d done it I chucked the trimmings into the wastepaper basket. I heard later that the cleaners had found them and were the proud owners of George’s locks. There and then I learned to think like a spy, leaving no trace.
When we arrived in Tahiti, a wall of heat hit us as we stepped off the plane. The little airport looked as though it had been carved out of the jungle, and some prettily dressed local girls were waiting to greet us with rum punch in coconuts and garlands of frangipani flowers that they draped around our necks. It was terribly exotic and exciting. But it was followed by a long wait in the hot, steamy lounge, for the person who would take us to Papeete, where we were due to meet the boat. Because Brian had organized everything, none of us knew the details. We never did: we set off like small children, trusting that the grown-ups would have everything under control. At that moment, though, it was as if Nanny had vanished. We were helpless. Finally someone led us to a vehicle and we were on our way.
The boat wasn’t quite what we’d expected. It was very basic, a rather elderly wooden fishing boat with no stabilizers. The locals were so excited to be taking us on the long trip around the islands that they had given the generator a coat of paint. The boat was crewed by six burly Tahitians with few teeth and no English, so communication was minimal, but we climbed aboard, made ourselves comfortable in our cabins, and, in the late afternoon, set sail. It was absolutely glorious until we were out of the harbor heading for one of the islands.
Suddenly the wind got up, the sea grew rough, the heavens opened, and we found ourselves in the middle of a tropical storm. The boat rolled from side to side and rode up and down on huge waves that drenched us as they crashed over the hull. Great bolts of forked lightning lit the sky, followed by earsplitting cracks of thunder. We went down into the cabin to get out of the rain, which was coming down in sheets, but the stink of new paint on the generator mixed with diesel fumes from the engine made me feel so sick that I had to go back on deck. George and Cynthia stayed below but John couldn’t stomach it either and we lay on the deck, holding on for dear life, watching the crew wrestle with the sails. After more than an hour the storm eased, and as darkness fell the sea calmed and the wind dropped. We felt so exhausted and so ill that we went straight to our bunks and slept.
The next morning we looked out of the porthole to find we were in paradise. We had dropped anchor in the lee of a beautiful coral island in a tranquil turquoise lagoon, and the crew was swimming in it, spearing fish for lunch. I wanted to stay there forever. The water was aquamarine and so crystal clear that the seabed appeared no more than four inches from the surface and the shoals of multicolored fish were as visible as if they had been in a tank. Clean white sandy beaches and coconut palms beckoned. We swam and snorkeled, sailed from island to island and sunbathed; we read books and the boys played their guitars. At night, after the sun had gone down in a crimson sky, we ate and drank under the stars, then lay in our bunks listening to the soothing sound of wood creaking and the rigging tapping the mast. Days slid by as we sailed from one island to the next. Each time we lifted the anchor to leave, dolphins leaped into the air to escort us to a break in a coral reef, playing beside the boat until we were in open sea when they would leap again as if waving farewell.
We had so much fun—it felt as though we did nothing but laugh. On one of the islands, John and George borrowed our black wigs, dressed up in some oilskin macs they had bought in Papeete, and made a funny little 8-millimeter film about a missionary—John—who comes out of the ocean to convert the natives.
After four weeks we took a flying boat back to Tahiti, then picked up a Pan Am 707 on its way from New Zealand to Los Angeles. Incredibly, we were the only passengers and slept lying flat on the floor; there were no flatbed seats in those days, not even in first class.
When we arrived at Heathrow the press were waiting for us, and I was amazed to see in the next day’s newspaper photos how healthy we looked. Days later I was booked by Vogue to be photographed by David Bailey wearing skimpy clothes showing long brown limbs. They were some of the best he ever took of me.
George and I spent as much time as we could together. I hated having to go off on location for photo shoots as much as I hated him going away on tour. I loved being with him. He was so beautiful and so funny. We would go out with Mary Bee and her boyfriend to clubs like the Ad Lib, which was full of musicians, or Annabel’s, which George liked because it was members only and he could eat Steak Diane and drink fine wines, or we would go to see Jean-Claude and Belinda, or Tony and Mafalda Hall—Tony was a DJ, working for the BBC, and Mafalda was his French wife. Their home was in Green Street, which was where George was living when I first met him, and he and Tony had been neighbors. Tony played great American music on his program and at home.
Mary Bee had a friend called Ronan O’Reilly, who was embarking on something exciting: we were told to turn our radio on to a certain wavelength at a certain time in the morning. Radio Caroline, the first pirate radio station, was broadcasting from a ship ten miles offshore.
Other friends we would row were Dick Polak, a photographer, and Edina Ronay, the actress daughter of Egon, the restaurant guru. Dick and Edina lived on the top floor of a house in Redcliffe Square with no lift and no remote door release. When you rang the bell, they would look out of the window to find out who it was, and if they liked the look of you they would throw down the keys.
I almost forgot that George was a famous pop star. As far as I was concerned he was just my boyfriend—I saw the Beatles performing for the first time on Ready Steady Go! It was the pop show on television, presented by Cathy McGowan, and everyone watched it. There was George, doing what he did. I couldn’t believe he looked so different, almost as if he was in uniform. Until then I’d had no experience of people who adopted a stage persona that was entirely different from the private one.
I had never met anyone like George before, or experienced anything like the glamorous world he inhabited. One weekend we went to Paris with Mary Bee and her boyfriend, and stayed at the George V. Mary and I arrived ahead of the boys and were shown to a massive suite with sumptuous furnishings and huge beds. We skipped from room to room, saying, “There’s a room, and there’s another room, and another room, and another—and all of them for us.” Then we ordered tea and had hysterics when it arrived on a silver salver, everything so grand and grown up.
It was very different from life in Oakley Street.
I remember taking George there for the first time. Mary’s and my little bedroom with twin beds was directly off a tiny square hall. When we came in, Mary was sitting up in bed reading a book and wearing a hat. She didn’t normally wear hats in bed; she didn’t normally wear hats full stop. The poor girl had had no idea I was bringing George home, and when we popped our heads around the bedroom door, I’m not sure which of them got more of a fright. He wasn’t impressed by our choice of music. We played him “My Boy Lollipop” by the Jamaican artist Millie Small, which we both thought was great. He couldn’t believe we liked such an awful song.
Whether it was our choice of music or the cramped conditions, George didn’t like coming to the flat and he told me to look for somewhere bigger for Mary and me to share, which he would rent. I found an adorable house in Ovington Mews, a cul-de-sac just off the Brompton Road. You drove into the mews through a huge archway and the house was near the end. It had a small drawing room and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom above; tiny, but perfect for Mary and me, and we were happy there. This was where Mary and I learned to cook in earnest, and if George was coming we would make a surprise dinner, which meant endless phone calls to Mary’s mother.
&
nbsp; The house was very close to George’s own flat in William Mews, Knightsbridge, which Brian Epstein had bought for him and Ringo to share. Paul had a flat in the same building, while John and Cynthia were in Emperors Gate, not far from the Cromwell Road. One day I was in George’s flat on my own and someone rang the bell. I opened the door and a weird-looking man tried to force his way in. I didn’t know whether he was a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness, but he was most insistent. I said, “This is outrageous,” and he burst out laughing. It was Paul in disguise.
The Beatles were away on tour for much of 1964 so our time together was intermittent. Soon after we had got back from Tahiti, they flew to Denmark, then Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. And the day we moved into Ovington Mews, in August, they set off for two months in America—the longest, most ambitious, and most exhausting tour they ever did. They went to twenty-four cities in the States and Canada, played thirty-one concerts—and each one was sold out. Everywhere they went they had to be escorted by police and motorcycle outriders. Screaming fans were everywhere, invading the stage, invading their hotels, invading their lives, and no one could hear the music, either on or off stage. As their U.S. agent remarked at the time, “The Beatles and Elvis are in show business. After that, any comparison is just a joke. No one, before or since, has had the crowds the Beatles had.”