Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  George hated it. Even when he got away from the fans, he said, there were screaming policemen and lord mayors, their wives, hotel managers, and their entourage. The only place he got any peace was locked into the bathroom in his hotel suite. I think the Beatles were quite frightened of their fans, who always wanted to touch them. They might easily have been crushed under such a weight of humanity.

  I was frightened of the fans too. I used to get hateful letters, particularly from American girls. Each one claimed she was George’s rightful girlfriend and if I didn’t leave him alone she would put a curse on me or kill me. One night Belinda, Mary Bee, and I—I think Cynthia too—went to see the Beatles play at the Hammersmith Odeon. Terry Doran, who was an old Liverpool friend of John and worked as his assistant, had parked John’s Mini at the front of the building and we left at the beginning of the last number to avoid getting caught up in the crowds at the end. As we went out through one of the side exits, about five girls followed us. I was wearing a disguise but they must have known who I was because as soon as we got into the alleyway that ran down the side of the building they set upon me and started to kick me. I called Terry, who grabbed one of them and wrenched her off me, but she fought like a wildcat and pulled out a chunk of his hair.

  The fans might not have liked my relationship with George but the media were delighted by it and I was more in demand than ever. So although I was always sad when George left to go on tour, I was busy with modeling jobs. I worked for Vogue with Ronald Traeger, Tatler with Jeanloup Sieff, Vanity Fair with Peter Rand, and the American magazine 16. I made TV commercials for Dop shampoo, in which I drove through a car wash in an open-topped car, directed by photographer Robert Freeman who did many Beatle album covers.

  I was also busy with the vital task of finding a cleaner. To Mary’s and my amazement, the only person who replied to our advert was a male ballet dancer. He wasn’t quite Nureyev but he was terrific with a duster.

  I counted the days until George was due back, just as I had counted the days until the end of term at boarding school. Once he got back very early in the morning and jumped into bed to wake me, smelling of exotic long-haul flights.

  On the last leg of their marathon America tour, the Beatles had met Bob Dylan in New York. They had been thrilled—Dylan was their hero and mine—and George couldn’t wait to tell us about him and how he had turned them on to marijuana. A mutual friend, Al Aronowitz, who worked for the Saturday Evening Post, had brought Dylan to their hotel. He had apparently misheard a line in their song “I Want to Hold Your Hand”: where they sang, “I can’t hide,” he had heard, “I get high,” and had assumed they were seasoned drug users. “Right, guys,” he said, as he walked into their suite. “I’ve got some really good grass.” So Dylan had rolled a joint, they had opened a few bottles of wine and had a very jolly party. George was full of it; they had laughed all night.

  Somehow George had managed to get hold of some marijuana while he was away and had brought it back for us to try. Mary and I were complete beginners so George rolled a joint and told us we had to inhale deeply. We passed it around and around, the three of us, each taking drags. It was quite dark in the room, we were listening to music, chatting away, until all of sudden we were roaring with laughter and realized we were stoned. Then we decided it would be a good idea to go and visit someone—I can’t remember who or why. Outside one of us bumped into a dustbin and we were laughing again—we just couldn’t stop. Everything seemed hilarious.

  Between tours there were always holidays, and one of my happiest was spent with Brian Epstein in his favorite place in the south of France, the Hôtel Cap Estrelle near Eze. I think he used to go there with his parents when he was a little boy, and George and I went with him several times. It was a beautiful hotel right on the edge of the water. My mother still has the postcard I sent her during our first trip:

  Dear Mummy, Colin, Jenny, Paula, David and Boo.

  Our hotel is on the right with the spot on it. It is fabulous and at one time was privately owned as a house. Where I have drawn the line is the road. The weather is so hot and the food is great,

  beside which George wrote:

  (For those who like French food)

  and then I take over again:

  George has a bad tummy at the moment.

  We had the most amazing time. Brian took us to fabulous restaurants and to the casino in Monte Carlo, which in those days was terribly glamorous. Everyone dressed up—the women in cocktail dresses with little bits of fur, and men in dinner jackets—and a huge amount of money changed hands. Brian was a rather debonair gambler, successful too. No matter which table he played at he won; very James Bond—and he looked the part. He made everything possible for us; everything glorious….

  George and me on our wedding day, January 21, 1966, at Epsom Registry Office.

  FIVE

  Mrs. Harrison

  The fans were making life intolerable for us, and not only when the Beatles were performing. None of them could go into or out of their flats without being grabbed, mauled, and begged for autographs at any time of day or night. Brian decided they needed to move and asked the band’s accountant, Dr. Walter Strach, to find suitable houses. Walter’s home was in Weybridge, Surrey, thirty miles southwest of London, so it was to that area that they migrated.

  John and Ringo bought grand houses in St. George’s Hill, an exclusive estate that housed the rich and famous in safety and seclusion. George didn’t like that idea and chose instead a modern four-bedroom bungalow in Esher, called Kinfauns, about fifteen or twenty minutes’ drive from the others. Paul couldn’t bring himself to move so far out of London and bought a house in St. John’s Wood, convenient for the EMI recording studios in Abbey Road.

  Kinfauns had been built in the early 1960s in what had previously been the walled vegetable garden of Claremont Girls School, which had once belonged to Lord Clive, founder of Britain’s Indian empire. With the addition of a fourteen-foot-high gate, it was very private. The gate was operated manually, though, and it wasn’t long before the marauding fans discovered where George lived. Hordes of girls used to hang about outside, waiting for me to go out. If the gate was ever left open, they would come onto the grounds. They also discovered that if they put stones into the sliding mechanism it wouldn’t shut properly and they could squeeze through. Since we never locked any doors, the occasional one got into the house. I kept finding clothes missing and once George gave me a beautiful Piaget watch that disappeared. I presume some fan took it. Once when my brothers David and Boo were staying they woke up to find two girls in the drawing room. David was delighted.

  The house was surrounded by three-quarters of an acre of garden, which Maurice, the gardener, looked after. Neither George nor I knew anything about gardening and had no particular interest in it. The only thing I remember planting was a climbing rose in the area by the swimming pool where there were white wooden slats to screen it off. I was so thrilled when it grew big and beautiful that I took a photo one summer’s day of the two of us standing in front of it. I went to great pains to set up a tripod but George got bored waiting for the shutter to close and it caught him looking away.

  I was living in Ovington Mews when George bought Kinfauns but I helped him furnish it. We went off and bought big black leather sofas and other furniture from Habitat, which Terence Conran had recently opened in Fulham Road. It was one of the first shops to specialize in good modern design and had everything from beds to butter knives. We bought a teak dining table and chairs, and a pine table for the kitchen, which was where we ate most of the time. When the lease on Ovington Mews came up for renewal, Mary Bee moved to Cornwall. She had had a disastrous affair and found herself a job as an au pair by way of distraction. Meanwhile I moved into a little flat that George rented for me in South Audley Street.

  He was still doing a lot of touring—during the first three years that I knew him the Beatles averaged three long tours in each, one British, one American, and one that took in s
everal other countries. When they weren’t touring they were recording. The Beatles were producing about three singles a year, and one album, which represented many hours of studio time. They were often in the studio from eleven in the morning until eleven at night, if not midnight.

  Eventually I abandoned the flat in London, where I was lonely on my own, and moved in with George. London was only forty-five minutes away—a quick whiz down the A3—easy to get to for work or play. The latter meant parties, clubs, discos and dinners, theater sometimes, and films. Cubby Broccoli, the James Bond producer, owned a small private viewing theater and we were invited to whatever new film was showing. We sat there with Scotch and Coke and the finest smoked-salmon sandwiches. Also we liked to go to Parks, a restaurant in Beauchamp Place, owned by an Irishman called Tom who cooked fantastic food and decorated it with flowers. He would get tulips and turn them inside out—whence the line in one of John Lennon’s songs about “bent-back tulips.” We usually went out as a group, with other Beatles and friends, and often my sister Jenny was with us and her boyfriend, Mick Fleetwood.

  About a year after I’d moved in we converted the garage at Kinfauns into a big sitting room with a little one off it as a projection room so that we could show films. I was the chief projectionist but I think the only movie we ever saw was The Producers. We watched it all the time—George could recite nearly every line. On television, we loved Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Eric Idle was one of George’s heroes and often came to the house. We liked Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In too, the American comedy series that made Goldie Hawn famous. And we listened to Motown and other new artists from America—Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Ronettes, the Byrds, and Dylan.

  The focal point of our new sitting room was a huge circular brick fireplace inspired by Salvador Dalí, whose work we liked, and we asked a Dutch couple, Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, known as the Fool, to paint it for us. They were talented, creative people, who wore outfits they had designed and made in velvet, richly decorated with beads and sequins. We must have got to know them through Robert Fraser, who owned an art gallery in Duke Street, or John Dunbar, Marianne Faithfull’s ex-husband who ran the Indica Gallery in Masons Court, St. James’s. They made amazing clothes for us all, and later for the Apple shop in Baker Street, which they also designed. On the night before the opening they took a bunch of art students to paint psychedelic murals on the outside of the building.

  The painting they did for us at Kinfauns was stunning. It took months to complete and they stayed with us while they were working on it. I so wish we could have taken it with us when we moved but of course we couldn’t.

  We had also covered the outside of the house with graffiti. The walls had been plain white when we moved in, so we bought some cans of spray paint and spent many happy hours cheering them up. When friends came we would give them a can and they added a bit here and there. There were flowers and psychedelic patterns in every color of the rainbow. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull came to see us one day when we were out and wrote “Mick and Marianne were here” in large letters on one of the walls. Sadly, when we left Kinfauns the new occupants painted over it.

  In Esher we had a wonderful cleaner called Margaret. Whenever we had to go to Liverpool to visit George’s mother she would have macaroni cheese ready when we got back. She used to love John Lennon visiting and would say to him, “Have you got any of those lovely pills?” and John would give her an upper. Afterward she would vacuum like a maniac—very different from her normal self. She was adorable. She believed that there was nothing beyond the sky and the clouds, and that the world was encased in a bubble. When she saw the moon landing and men walking on it, she refused to believe it was happening.

  When George and I first got together I wasn’t a good cook but always quite enthusiastic—I knew there was something better than school food and even Lilie’s fare. I tried to make the sorts of things I imagined boys from the north would like—shepherd’s pie, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding—and then George and I became vegetarian, which gave me a whole new interest. Someone gave us a book that talked about veal farming and how cruelly the calves were treated. They were kept in tiny cases in the dark, unable to turn around, and photographs showed them licking the metal bars. It was then that we decided we would eat no more meat.

  Being vegetarian at that time was quite a challenge. There was so little to choose from, nothing ready-made and no meat-free equivalent of steak or sausages that you could cook with minimal preparation. I had to create things myself and discovered I loved doing it; I cooked for our friends, George’s family and mine, and anyone who came to see or stay with us. We gave lunch and supper parties and I enjoyed buying the food. I would go into the health-food shop in Esher for beans and grains, vegetables, and fruit. I had hundreds of cookbooks—for a while I read nothing else. I was vegetarian for about seven years but George remained so until the day he died and would not allow meat or fish to be cooked or eaten in his house.

  We spent a lot of time in the kitchen—it was the heart of the house. I remember George sitting at the table with his guitar, writing the song that became “My Sweet Lord.” When it came out as a single and went to number one, he was taken to court because an American group called the Chiffons recorded a song called “He’s So Fine,” and the song’s music publisher claimed that George had stolen it. It was tricky for him. I knew he had written it—I was there when he was working on it—but he had to take his guitar to court and play in front of the judge to prove that the melody was original and not based on their song. The judge found him guilty of “subconscious plagiarism.” After that we never had a radio playing in the house in case he was unconsciously influenced by a song he had heard.

  His guitars were always left around the house and in any spare moment he would pick one up and play. When John, Paul, Ringo, or any other musician appeared—as they often did—they all played. But George would never play a complete song. He played what was in his head, or he would be working on new chords or a new song, I never knew which, and weeks later you would hear a song on tape. I loved listening to him, loved the sound of the guitar in the house. Sometimes I would start to talk and he’d be so deep in thought about the lyrics or the melody he was writing that he wouldn’t answer. We’d be in the same room but he wasn’t really with me: he was in his head. Most of the time I didn’t mind. I’d think, Oh, good, he’s writing a new song—he was always happiest when he was being creative.

  Sometimes songs would come to him in the middle of the night and he would wake up in the morning and immediately start to play so he didn’t forget it; he would change chords, then stop because something didn’t sound right. John and Paul wrote most of their songs together—they sparked off each other—but George wrote on his own. He composed the melody first, but as he was not formally trained he couldn’t write the music down; he would play it and play it so it was fixed in his mind, then record it. The words came later. Sometimes I tried to help if he couldn’t find a word to rhyme with another, but most of the time he did it alone, writing on the backs of envelopes, anything that came to hand.

  He composed all over the world, wherever he happened to be, and he would play me a tape recording of the things he had written—he didn’t sing them to me with the guitar—and I always thought how much better it sounded like that than the finished product.

  A lot of fan mail came to the house, and when George’s mother was down from Liverpool she would take it away and answer it. In the meantime it would stack up, mountains of envelopes, in cardboard boxes. I’ll never forget coming home one day and finding the boxes all over the floor, the letters scattered far and wide. It looked as though we had been burgled. As I put it back I noticed that one envelope had been opened. It was addressed to Korky, our adorable white Persian cat—named after the character in the Dandy comic—and contained a ball of catnip, the herb cats go mad about. Clever thing, he’d found and opened his own fan mail.

  Irritatingly, Korky se
emed to prefer life in the girls’ school next door, but perhaps that was because I was away so much—I was working regularly in Paris. I did a lot for Elle, and a few pages for American Vogue, where I met Diana Vreeland, its longtime editor in chief. Before that she had been fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar for twenty-five years and was a formidable woman. I was fascinated by her eyes: she put Vaseline on the bones above them. She wore her black hair scraped back and was very tall, thin, and grand. I was working for Bailey and not eating much and I passed out on some steps outside the studio and missed my flight home. When I finally got back to Esher I found George’s brother Pete and his wife Pauline installed in the house. They had come to have their holidays at Kinfauns. I was so annoyed; I made dinner for them and they wouldn’t eat it because they said they only ate at six o’clock.

  I became very fond of George’s parents. They were quite short and very Liverpudlian. Harold drove buses and Louise worked part-time at a greengrocer’s. She had always been supportive of George—she had bought him his first guitar when he was fourteen. She didn’t object to the long hair, the boots, or the jeans he made tighter with her sewing machine. George was their youngest child. His sister, also Louise, had immigrated to America but wrote often, telling him to get a proper job; his eldest brother, Harry, was a fitter; and Peter a mechanic. Harold had not wanted George to leave school so young: he thought education was the way to success. He had wanted him to take an apprenticeship like his brothers, and was afraid that he would never make a living as a musician. But his mother was all for it, and was one of the Beatles’ staunchest supporters. All she wanted for her children was that they should be happy, and she recognized that nothing made George quite as happy as making music.