Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  George was generous to his family—he loved them. He bought his parents a bungalow, which they were thrilled with. He took me to see the house they had had before, the one in which he had grown up, and it was in a very poor part of town. The bungalow always had that distinctive new-house smell, and had a nice little garden. We would go and see them for tea, but it wasn’t tea as I knew it—not tea and biscuits or cake.

  It was only when I went to his parents’ house that I realized George had been brought up very differently from me. Because he and I always had a cup of tea in the afternoon and dinner at eight or nine in the evening, I had assumed that this was the way he had always lived, but, of course, he had not. His family held their knives like pens and “tea” consisted of cold ham or pork pie, tomatoes cut in half, pickled beetroot, and salad cream, with sliced white bread. They had it at six o’clock and later in the evening there was tea and biscuits. They drank little alcohol—his father had an occasional beer. I remember taking them with me on a trip to Paris, just the three of us, and giving them dinner on a boat on the Seine. They loved it.

  Drink hadn’t been a big part of my life before I met George. I might have had wine with Eric Swayne—there was a lovely restaurant called Bistro Vino just across the road from my flat and we ate there quite often—but I drank little. George wasn’t a wine drinker until he arrived in London, where Brian Epstein introduced him to it. When we went to places like Annabel’s I would write down the names of some of the wines Brian ordered, which we had enjoyed, like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Clos de Vougeot, and Nuits-St.-Georges.

  Brian changed things for all of the Beatles, taught them more sophisticated ways. He came from Liverpool too, but a smart area—his parents owned a well-established furniture shop in which he had opened a music department, called NEMS, North End Music Store—and had been privately educated. He was also older than they were—twenty-seven when he started managing them—and more experienced in the ways of the world.

  Unlike me, George was never hungry so we didn’t eat much. We would have a cup of tea for breakfast, maybe fried eggs, then nothing for lunch. In the evening I was always ravenous. We were in the E-type one day, driving through Liphook or Hindhead, and stopped at a little tearoom because I was starving. As we walked in an elderly lady said, “It’s three and six each, you know,” and we laughed because we must have looked as though we couldn’t afford it.

  George loved cars—all of the Beatles did. After the E-type he bought a silver Aston Martin DB5 and a Mini Moke, a little jeep-like car with no doors and no roof that was really fun in the summer; people would cruise up and down the King’s Road in them, and George would often collect David and Boo from the station in it when they came to stay. He also bought a 1928 Rolls-Royce. My brother David remembers sitting in the bucket seat in the back of the DB5, asking me where Eric Swayne was and getting the most thunderous look from me. David worshipped George, he was his only male role model, and they would talk for hours. George would give him things to take to school, which would impress his friends, and if David liked a particular pair of trousers George wore, a shirt or a silk jacket, George gave it to him.

  The combination of drinking a lot of alcohol and not eating enough took its toll on my body, and after a while I developed a kidney problem. It may have been something to do with the slimming pills, too, or the diet biscuits. Whatever the cause, it was very painful. My doctor, Tony Greenburgh, repeatedly gave me pills that would gradually improve things, but the condition kept recurring. One day I heard about a weekend workshop being held in Wiltshire, somewhere near the Welsh border. I don’t remember who was running it but there was some connection with Lord Harlech and, as George was away, I booked myself on to it.

  I had met David Harlech many times; I knew his children—Jane, Victoria, Alice, and Julian Ormsby-Gore were friends, part of the King’s Road set, and Jane married Michael Rainey, who ran Hung On You, the boutique. I had been to the family house, Glyn, at Gwynedd in Wales, with them. There were always crowds of people there and David Harlech was a wonderful man. He had been British ambassador in Washington and a friend of the Kennedys. His wife had been killed in a car crash shortly before I met him and he was left to look after their five children on his own. He married again in 1969 and we were at the wedding, looking very hippieish. I was thrilled to meet the former Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan.

  On the way to the workshop I stopped at a chemist and filled yet another prescription for my kidney disorder. I arrived, not knowing a soul and thinking I’d made a big mistake. As we sat down for dinner the man next to me started to analyze my gesticulations. He said he hadn’t been able to talk until the age of seven and had learned to study people. Then someone else spoke and I realized my companions were healers. Another man asked how I was. I confessed that I wasn’t feeling very well and he stopped me from saying any more. He took out a crystal on a length of string, held it over me, and, after a few minutes, said quietly, “Yes, it’s your kidneys.” I was amazed. I told him about the pills the doctor had prescribed, and he said, “You can take them or not, as you like, but do please take these.” And he gave me a homeopathic remedy. I still don’t know what caused the problem but I certainly know what fixed it. I took the remedy and have never had kidney trouble since.

  In the summer of 1965 George was away on another long tour of America and I had my sister Jenny to stay at Kinfauns. I still had the flat in South Audley Street—but I spent little time there. The only problem was that George always seemed to be going away. Eventually he told Brian he’d had enough of touring. He hated it; they all hated it. They were sick of singing the same songs, which no one could hear because of the screaming; they were sick of the motorcades, the security, and the fans’ insanity.

  They were also sick of being away from home, particularly George. He became more and more lonely and phoned me every day, or if the time difference made it impossible he wrote. I couldn’t have gone on tour with him because of my work, but Brian wouldn’t have let me anyway because wives and girlfriends would have been too much for the security men. But Kenny Everett, the Radio 1 disc jockey, was in America with them, and every afternoon when we were sitting by the pool at Kinfauns we would turn on the radio and listen to the Beatles chatting to him.

  At other times when he was touring I went away. In the summer of 1966 I asked Mary Bee and Belinda to come to the south of France with me. The Beatles’ office arranged a flat for us in Monte Carlo, which, by a strange coincidence, belonged to Rudolf Nureyev—all the towels were monogrammed RN. The new sixties fashions we were wearing in London hadn’t yet traveled further afield and everyone stared at us in our short skirts; we seemed to be the only people wearing them.

  We felt awkward and uncomfortable so we hired a car and drove down the coast to St. Tropez, where no one turned a hair. It was much more fun than Monte Carlo, and we kept bumping into people we vaguely knew. One of them was Alexander Weymouth, then heir to the Marquess of Bath, who invited us to stay at his house in the hills for a few days. The rest of the time we stayed with my French friend ZouZou—I’d met her modeling a couple of years before—who took us to all the cool clubs, where I gave the DJs the first pressing of “Good Day Sunshine.” It was a lovely holiday—every morning the first one up would roll a joint and put on the Byrds, whose music filled the flat. The sun shone; we hadn’t a care in the world.

  George didn’t want to meet new people or go to new places. He was happy to visit my old friends and our families, but he was wary of newcomers—unless they were musicians. One evening some months before we had been invited to dinner by a Mr. Angardi, who ran the Asian Music Circle in London, and his English wife, who painted a large portrait of the two of us, for which we sat on several occasions. Mr. Angardi wanted George to meet a sitar player called Ravi Shankar. Ravi was well known in classical-music circles and a hero in his own country, India. They talked music all evening and George was awestruck.

  Soon afterward Ravi came to Kinfauns to g
ive George a sitar lesson. At one point the phone rang and George put down the sitar, stood up, and went to answer it, stepping over the sitar as he did so. Ravi whacked him sharply on the leg and said, “You must have more respect for the instrument.”

  The technique involved in playing the sitar is quite different from anything George had known before: he had to sit on the floor for hours, cross-legged, with the bowl of the gourd resting on the ball of his left foot. In no time at all his legs were in agony. However, he and Ravi became friends and a couple of months later Ravi invited George and me to India, where he would be our guide for spiritual, musical, and cultural lessons.

  We flew to Bombay and I was overwhelmed by the noise, the heat, and the mass of humanity. The road between the airport and the center of the city was a seething tangle of cars, bicycles, carts, cows, dogs, tuk-tuks, and people all going somewhere; the noise of car horns and bicycle bells was relentless. We stayed in the Taj Hotel, a grand Victorian building opposite the Gateway of India, and from our window, safely away from the mêlée, watched men and women going about their business. Ravi arranged yoga classes every morning, to teach George how to sit and hold the sitar, followed by several hours of lessons and practice with him and his other students.

  After about a month we traveled together around India. Among many others, we met Ravi’s spiritual guru, Tat Baba, who explained the law of karma to us both—the law of action and reaction, or cause and effect. Ravi was respected all over India: his students would bow down at his feet. He gave concerts across the country and people would sit, sometimes until four o’clock in the morning, to listen to him play, accompanied by Alla Raka on tablar and harmonium, while his students kept time. They counted the beat, which confused me: it was unlike Western classical or even rock beat. I found it intensely moving: these were not just concerts—there was something profoundly spiritual about the experience. Ravi told us that sometimes he would go into a meditative state and not know consciously what he was playing.

  We visited many jewels of India with him—the Taj Mahal, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Agra, Delhi, temples with ancient carvings of gods and goddesses in love, fighting, and sometimes disguised as demons. We met some holy men who were more than a hundred years old, and sadhus who live in abject poverty. We visited the sacred ghats of Benares, where people are cremated and have their ashes scattered in the Ganges. It was an astonishing sight to see bodies burning on the banks as we stepped out of the boat to walk up to a ghat. I was unable to look away, although I wanted to. We went to a festival of Kumbh Mela, the most sacred of all Hindu pilgrimages which attracts millions of people from all over India. We found ourselves in a crowd of about three thousand, most of whom had come on foot. We watched as the compound filled, pink dust rising, and in the distance I saw the maharajah riding an elephant, followed by a prince on a smaller one. They dismounted and sat on a dais where two wallahs kept them cool by wafting peacock-feather fans.

  Meanwhile a man sat at our feet with a length of bamboo. Every now and than he would lean forward and stick his tongue into the hollow stick. Ravi told us there was a poisonous snake inside it: each time the man extended his tongue the snake struck, which gave him a high.

  When everyone was assembled, we watched a religious play with wooden characters twenty feet high mounted on wheeled trolleys that moved back and forth across the arena. I felt as if I had been transported back two thousand years to biblical times.

  We ended the trip in Kashmir, where we stayed on a houseboat, George and I, Ravi and his girlfriend Kamala. It was moored near a floating garden on Lake Dah and one night the man who owned the boat invited us to dinner at his house. As a Muslim, he didn’t allow the women of the house to meet George or Ravi. When we arrived we were given tea, then Kamala and I were taken to meet the women. Communication was a bit limited as even Kamala didn’t speak their language.

  When we rejoined the men, we all sat down to dinner. Later the cook appeared and we heard his story. He had been bought as a child and castrated so that he could work with women in the kitchen.

  The Beatles lived an unreal life and other musicians were the only people who shared it. They had found fame when they were so young—George was just seventeen when they were playing in Hamburg, Paul and John a couple of years older—and they had done nothing but work ever since. They hadn’t had a chance to grow up in the way most people do, and from the moment fame hit, they had been so bombarded by fans and hangers-on, so cocooned by Brian Epstein, that they never knew whom they could trust.

  In many respects they were still children. They had few real friends apart from each other, and when they were asked questions they could answer as one—they were so much on each other’s wavelength. If one went to a gallery opening, they all went; if one bought a new car or a new house, they all did. If one seemed in danger of taking himself too seriously, the others knocked it out of him. They knew little about life and, with Brian looking after their every need, they had no reason to learn. Money was never a motivating force. They enjoyed the toys it bought them but they never had any idea how much they had. If they wanted something they asked Brian.

  One December evening we were in London and George stopped the car and said, “Let’s get married. I’ll speak to Brian.” He stopped in Chapel Street, outside Brian’s house, rushed in, leaving me in the car, came back fifteen minutes later, and said, “Brian says it’s okay. Will you marry me? We can get married in January.”

  “Oh, yes!” I said. “That would be fabulous!” I was thrilled—but George had had to ask Brian’s permission in case another tour was planned.

  We were married on January 21, 1966. It was not the wedding I had dreamed of—I would have loved to be married in church, but Brian didn’t want a big fuss. They all trusted him so implicitly that when he said it should be a quiet register-office wedding George agreed. He also said it had to be secret—if the press found out, it would be chaotic. I had always thought I’d have a big white wedding, as all little girls do, then have children and live happily ever after—not be divorced like my mother. As a child I thought I’d do anything to avoid divorce—I even considered waiting until I was forty to marry because by that time I would have had my fun and there would be no chance of a marriage breaking up. But there I was, at twenty-one, marrying George, who was all of twenty-two. But I was so happy and so much in love, I didn’t care. Divorce didn’t enter my head: we would be together and happy forever.

  He didn’t give me an engagement ring, but we did go to Garrard, the royal jewelers in Regent Street, to choose my wedding ring. There was a lot of fuss when we arrived: all the assistants were excited and the top man was called out from the back to serve us. The ring I chose was a wide gold band that looked like a little brick wall made from yellow, pink, and white gold. It was so unusual, flexible, and felt lovely on my finger. I didn’t buy George a ring. He didn’t want to wear one—few men did in those days.

  I bought a Mary Quant pinky-red shot-silk dress, which came to just above the knee, and wore it with creamy stockings and pointy red shoes. On top, because it was January and cold, I wore a red fox-fur coat, also by Mary Quant, that George gave me. She made George a beautiful black Mongolian lamb coat.

  The ceremony took place early in the morning at Epsom Registry Office, in Surrey, not the most glamorous place, and the room was very hot and stuffy. Brian Epstein was there and Paul McCartney, who was George’s best man. Otherwise it was family—my mother, with her cousin Penny Evans, who had been around a lot while I was growing up, Colin, Jenny, Paula, David, and Boo, George’s parents and brothers. Uncle John, my mother’s twin brother, gave me away.

  He lived in Africa, and although we children didn’t see much of him as we were growing up, he was probably the main male influence in our lives. We adored him and Jenny and I both held him in higher regard than either our real father or our stepfather. He was a writer. He had been stationed in the desert in Africa during the Second World War and afterward worked for Reuters. Then he went to S
ingapore and wrote a book about it, and later returned to Africa, where he is still, aged eighty-three. He lives in Somalia, speaks the language fluently, and is helping the Somalis to map their land. He is hardly paid a penny but he cares deeply about the people and can’t bear the idea of coming back to Britain.

  My mother thought I should invite Jock Boyd, my father, to the wedding, so I wrote to him at an address in Devon. He had apparently been living there with a new wife for several years. I didn’t know how to address him—Daddy, Jock, Mr. Boyd? In the end I called him Daddy. I said, “I am going to marry George, he comes from Liverpool, I’m sure you’d like him, and if you’d like to come to our wedding, please do.” He wrote back saying he forbade me to marry someone so young whose family he hadn’t met. He didn’t come.

  Uncle John not only gave me away, he saved the day. After the ceremony we all went back to Kinfauns for lunch and the photographer Brian had booked had a problem with his camera—he couldn’t synchronize the flash. John came to the rescue with a little Instamatic he had just bought in Selfridges, and took the photos at the reception.

  There was no shortage of pictures of us leaving the register office. We came out into the street to find dozens of press photographers lined up outside. So much for keeping the whole thing secret. We traveled to and from Epsom in a Rolls-Royce Princess, and after the ceremony David, who was then about twelve, walked out beside George and me. Not knowing wedding protocol, he jumped into the back of the car ahead of us. “Wrong car,” said George, very quietly, so no one else could hear.

  At the reception David sat between George’s father and Paul McCartney, with (the other) Mrs. Harrison one place away. David and Boo should have been at school but came to the wedding instead. They went to the most horrible schools. Bobbie had little money but felt that the boys would be better off away from my mother—I now discover—and persuaded the council to foot the bill for two boarding schools. Even at that age David was very independent and a bit of a rebel—and, out of school, thought he could safely have a cigarette. What he hadn’t bargained on was George’s mother, who told him to put it out at once.