Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  When Paul realized that David and Boo were bored, he took them outside in search of fun. In a disused loo, with hundreds of fan letters waiting for Mrs. Harrison’s attention, they found George’s bow and arrows. Paul showed the boys how to use it. David pulled back the string, and Paul watched the arrow score a direct hit on the bonnet of his gleaming Rolls-Royce.

  After our wedding we had to endure a press conference that Brian had set up. It was so terrifying that I have almost blanked it from my memory. Lots of reporters asked questions about when George had asked me to marry him and our plans for the future. George said he had proposed on the day we met, on the train filming A Hard Day’s Night, and I said I hadn’t thought he was serious. He then said he’d asked me out and I’d turned him down. And I blurted out that we’d like three children but not immediately: there was plenty of time.

  We spent our honeymoon in Barbados in a fabulous rented villa called Benclare at Gibbs Beach, on what is now the Sandy Lane Estate. It was perched on a hill with a sweeping lawn to the main road, views of the sea, and a full staff. One day we were out in the garden and the maid said, “Oh, look, there’s the Queen of England!” Sure enough, there she was, driving past in an open-topped car waving to everyone, with Prince Philip sitting beside her, head buried in a newspaper. We spent beautiful sunny days exploring the island, playing in the sea, and having romantic dinners at home to the sound of the ever-present tree frogs. We lounged on the beach, went to the famous Sandy Lane Hotel, swam, talked, and walked, and I was so happy I thought I might burst. It was bliss to have George to myself, no work pulling either of us and no fans making life a misery.

  We didn’t know anyone on the island and there were few tourists at that time, but gradually word got out that we were there so we posed a couple of times for the local press, and then the local dignitaries wanted to be photographed with us. We made a few friends including the eccentric George Drummond, of the banking family, who lived there. He showed us around the island and gave parties for us to meet other locals. A lot of people still lived in the old wooden chattel houses, built on blocks so they could be lifted up and moved, with shutters on every window, and painted blue, pink, or yellow. The island was full of life and color, cascading bougainvillea in every shade, flame-red trees, smartly dressed schoolchildren in uniform, pretty brown, black, and white goats.

  After a week some friends who were in New York came to join us—Terry Howard was the creative director of an advertising agency, and his girlfriend, Venetia Cuninghame, was a model—another face in the Birds of Britain book. One day we took them up to an old hotel on the northern tip of the island, where it was very wild and windy, and in those days undeveloped. It is the point at which the Caribbean meets the Atlantic, so there are big seas and strong currents. The owner had invited us to a picnic lunch. There was a huge swimming pool, overlooking the sea and, as everywhere in Barbados, a beautiful sandy beach. We said we’d like to be on the beach rather than by the pool, so we went down some stone steps that led to it from the hotel garden and found a perfect spot on which to lie and sunbathe.

  The sand was silky soft but so hot in the midday sun that we couldn’t sit on it for long. Soon we raced into the sea to cool down. George and I swam a little further out than the others, but as we headed back toward the shore we suddenly discovered we were making no progress. We were about sixty yards from the beach, swimming and swimming but moving nowhere. George and I looked at each other, and he said, very calmly, “Just keep swimming. Don’t panic.” We could see Terry and Venetia at the water’s edge but they were blissfully unaware of our predicament and probably wouldn’t have heard our shouts over the noise of the waves. Every time a wave came we tried to use it to inch a little further, but then the fierce undertow took us out to sea again. Eventually, after about half an hour, we made it and collapsed, exhausted, onto the sand.

  We were desperate for something to drink and ravenously hungry—as if by a miracle, a waiter appeared at that precise moment with a huge jug of lemonade, tinkling with ice, and a silver platter laden with delicious things to eat. Horror of horrors, no sooner had he put them down on the sand beside us than a huge wave whooshed up the beach and swallowed our lunch, tray and all. The sea was ferocious in that northern part, which, I now know, was why the hotel had such a glorious swimming pool.

  Recently I was in Barbados and went back to see the beach. Forty years on, the hotel is in ruins, the swimming pool too, but I found the stone steps to the beach, overgrown and unused, and felt a shiver run down my spine.

  Paul and John in Rishikesh, India, 1968. I didn’t take many photos while we were there but I treasure the ones I did. It was the most enlightening time of my life.

  SIX

  A New Direction

  George was away on tour yet again and I was sitting with my friend Marie-Lise at the kitchen table in Kinfauns. It was February 1967, and we had the Sunday papers spread out in front of us. I had a yearning to take up chanting, meditation, or something spiritual—I suppose after the experience of India—and she felt much the same. Something was missing from our lives, we decided. So there we were, combing through the papers, when we came upon an advert for transcendental-meditation classes in London. Perfect. Off we went to Caxton Hall and enrolled in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. In the course of a long weekend we were initiated and given our mantras.

  TM is an ancient Indian practice that was brought to the West in the 1950s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a means of ultimately achieving enlightenment. It is a simple technique. You are given a mantra, a single word, which you keep secret, to say over and over again to yourself. The idea is that in repeating the mantra you clear your mind so you can give it and your body a brief rest from the stress of modern life. You sit with your eyes closed, completely relaxed for twenty minutes, repeating your mantra, to make yourself feel calmer, more creative, focused, and more successful. The benefits are cumulative. Day by day, life is supposed to get better and better. I loved meditating and I found the effects remarkable: I really did feel more alert and energetic. It did what it said on the bottle—it was life-changing. I couldn’t wait to tell George.

  As soon as he came home I bombarded him with what I had been doing and he was really interested. Then, joy of joys, I discovered that Maharishi was coming to London in August to give a lecture at the Hilton Hotel. I was desperate to go, and George said he would come too. Paul had already heard of him and was interested, and in the end we all went—George, John, Paul, Jane, Ringo, and I. Maharishi was every bit as impressive as I thought he would be, and we were spellbound.

  At the end we went to speak to him and he said we must go to Wales, where he was running a ten-day summer conference of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Bangor. It started in two days’ time. We leaped at it. I persuaded my sister Jenny to join us. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull came, also Cynthia Lennon. John had been doing an awful lot of drugs, which Cynthia didn’t like, and I think she was worried about the effect they were having on him, and about their marriage. When he came back from the Hilton lecture full of enthusiasm about Maharishi, who was against drugs, I think she hoped it might lead to something she could share. Maharishi said that through meditation you could attain a natural high more powerful than any a drug could give you. Maureen had just had a baby so she couldn’t come.

  We were traveling to Bangor in the same train as Maharishi and caught it by the skin of our teeth. We had traveled up from Surrey in John’s Rolls-Royce and arrived at Paddington to find pandemonium at the station, hundreds of people—passengers, press, police, photographers, and fans. And we were on our own. For the first time, Brian was not in charge, and although he had sent his assistant, Peter Brown, to see us off, we were like children allowed into the park with no nanny. John said it was “like going somewhere without your trousers on.”

  Brian had seemed interested in what Maharishi had to offer but it was a bank-holiday weekend and he was committed to spending it with friends at his hou
se in Sussex. He said he would join us later. Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, the two roadies who had looked after the Beatles since the Cavern Club days and went everywhere with them, were not there either so we had to carry our own baggage and fight our way through the crowds onto the platform.

  In the rush Cynthia was left behind—she was probably carrying the suitcases while John, empty-handed and thoughtless as ever, made a dash for it. And so the train pulled away and I shall never forget the sight of Cynthia running down the platform shrieking at John to wait. But Peter Brown arranged for Neil Aspinall to drive her to Bangor in his car and she arrived not long after the rest of us.

  On the way down, John, George, Paul, and Ringo signed autographs for fans and we went to see Maharishi in his first-class compartment. He was sitting cross-legged on the seat, which one of his followers had covered with a white sheet, and seemed to be doing an awful lot of giggling. He was a rather rotund little man in a white robe, with long hair and a big beard that was white at the tip. He had had no idea who the Beatles were, simply that they were very famous, but he promised that TM, in which he would initiate them at Bangor, was simply a method of reaching a spiritual state and that his meditation had to be practiced for just half an hour every morning. Then it was like a bank—no need to carry all your money around with you, you’d pop in now and then and take out what you wanted. “What if you’re greedy,” asked John, “and have another half hour’s meditation after lunch, then slip in another half hour after tea?” Everyone laughed.

  When the train pulled into the little seaside station at Bangor, hundreds of people were waiting, a combination of screaming fans and press. We wanted to go on to a stop further along the line and take a taxi back to avoid the inevitable scrum but Maharishi insisted we stay close to him. He marched up to the press and agreed to hold a conference that afternoon, little realizing, I think, who the press were actually interested in.

  When we were shown to our rooms in the teacher-training college where the conference was being held, I felt as though I was back at boarding school—spartan dormitories with the regulation chest of drawers and line on the floor. That night we went into Bangor in search of a restaurant and found the only one that was open late, the Chinese. Fine. In we went. A couple of hours and many bottles of wine later, we discovered that none of us had enough money to pay the bill. We weren’t used to paying restaurant bills. Or any others, for that matter.

  The next day, Maharishi gave an introductory seminar to his three hundred or so devotees, seated cross-legged on the floor, and afterward the impromptu press conference took place. Reporters were swarming all over the college and there was no one to keep them in check. I am sure they had little idea who Maharishi was and perhaps thought the Beatles were pulling a stunt. But the Beatles said that not only were they deadly serious, they were no longer going to take drugs, in accordance with Maharishi’s teaching. Just a month before, they had put their names to a petition in The Times calling for cannabis to be legalized. “It was an experience we went through,” said Paul. “Now it’s over. We don’t need it anymore. We think we’re finding new ways of getting there.”

  The petition had been in protest at Mick Jagger and Keith Richards receiving custodial sentences after the infamous drug raid on Redlands, Keith’s house in Sussex, in May. The previous Sunday, the News of the World had run a story that quoted Mick Jagger admitting he had frequently taken drugs. The paper had made an expensive mistake: it wasn’t Mick who’d been overheard talking in a nightclub, it was Brian Jones, and Mick sued for libel. The following week, acting on a tip-off, the police raided the house in the early hours of the morning, knowing that Mick Jagger was there and drugs were in the house. The tip-off, it transpired, had come from the News of the World. George and I had been at Redlands that evening. Marianne Faithfull was there and also Robert Fraser. There was an American drug dealer, too, known as the Acid King, and a few others. At about three o’clock in the morning George and I drove home. No sooner had we left than thirty policemen burst into the house with a warrant to search it for drugs.

  Drugs were still new and the police were still quite naïve. Robert Fraser produced a bottle of pills from his coat pocket, which he said had been prescribed by his doctor for a stomach problem. An officer said he had better take a few to have them tested. He left Robert with about twenty-four. They were pure heroin. They also found amphetamines and cannabis. Keith, Mick, and Robert were arrested and spent a night in Lewes jail. That Sunday, the News of the World had the entire story—including the detail that “a famous couple had left earlier.” They had obviously been waiting for us to go, presumably so that a Beatle wouldn’t be implicated.

  Robert went to jail for six months for possessing heroin. Mick was sentenced to three months for possessing four pep pills, which he had bought legally in Italy, and Keith got nine months for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property. Mick did one night of his sentence before he was bailed; Keith spent three at Her Majesty’s pleasure and came out saying he intended to prosecute the queen for allowing cannabis to be smoked on her property—he had been offered half a dozen joints in prison and “they were fab.”

  When word got out that the tip-off had come from the News of the World, fans stormed the newspaper building and hurled Molotov cocktails. The Times, not noted as the most liberal of newspapers, attacked the judiciary in an editorial written by the editor, William Rees-Mogg, under the headline “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”

  Drugs were a part of our lives at that time and they were fun. We didn’t take anything hard—none of us used heroin, and we’d had no idea that Robert did—but we took acid regularly. Everyone did, and it was perfectly legal. We also took uppers and downers and smoked cannabis. Our dentist, John Riley, had turned us on to acid. He and his girlfriend invited John, Cynthia, George, and me to dinner at his house in Hyde Park Square one evening sometime in 1965. We knew him quite well and had been to a few clubs with him in the past. The four of us went to London in my little Mini Cooper S—George had bought me a fabulous orange one for my birthday.

  We had a lovely meal, plenty to drink, and at the end George said, “Let’s go.” We were planning to see some friends playing at the Pickwick Club.

  John Riley’s girlfriend jumped to her feet. “You can’t,” she said. “You haven’t had any coffee yet. It’s ready, I’ve made it—and it’s delicious.”

  We sat down again and drank the coffee she was insistent we should have. But then we were really keen to get away and John Lennon said, “We must go now. These friends of ours are going to be on soon. It’s their first night, we’ve got to go and see them.”

  And John Riley said, “You can’t leave.”

  “What are you talking about?” said John Lennon.

  “You’ve just had LSD.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “Yes, you have,” said our host. “It was in the coffee.”

  John Lennon was absolutely furious. “How dare you fucking do this to us?” he said.

  George and I said, “Do what?” We didn’t know what LSD was.

  John Lennon was the only one of us who knew because he had read about it in Playboy. He said, “It’s a drug,” and as it began to take effect we felt even more strongly that we didn’t want to be there. I wondered if the dentist, who hadn’t had any coffee, had given it to us hoping the evening might end in an orgy.

  We were desperate to escape. John Riley said he would drive us and we should leave our car with him. “No,” we said. We piled into my Mini, which seemed to be shrinking, and drove to the club where our friends were playing. All the way the car felt smaller and smaller, and by the time we arrived we were completely out of it. People kept recognizing George and coming up to him. They were moving in and out of focus, then looked like animals. We clung to each other, feeling surreal. Soon we moved on to the Ad Lib Club—we knew it and thought we might feel better if we were in familiar surroundings. It wasn’t far from the Pickwick so we walked and on th
e way I remember trying to break a shopwindow.

  The Ad Lib was on the top floor, above the Prince Charles Theatre in Leicester Place, and we thought the lift was on fire because there was a little red light inside. As the doors opened, we crawled out and bumped into Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Ringo. John told them we’d been spiked. The effect of the drug was getting stronger and stronger, and we were all in hysterics and crazy. When we sat down, the table elongated. Hours later we decided to go home. We climbed into the car again and this time George drove—at no more than ten miles an hour, concentrating hard, all the way to Esher. But it felt as though he was doing a thousand miles an hour and I saw some goalposts and said, “Let’s jump out and play football.”

  The journey took hours and it was daylight by the time we got home. We went into Kinfauns and locked the gate so that the cleaner wouldn’t come in and find us, put the cat into a room on her own, and sat down. The drug took about eight hours to wear off, but it was very frightening and we never spoke to the dentist again. George said, “It was as if I had never tasted, talked, seen, thought, or heard properly before. For the first time in my whole life I wasn’t conscious of ego.”

  I had always thought John Riley was rather odd. No matter what he was going to do in our mouths, he would give us intravenous Valium. All of the Beatles went to him and we took it for granted that this was what happened—no one questioned it. We would go into a deep sleep and wake up not knowing what he had done. I watched him trying to revive George once by slapping his face. It was sinister—he could have been doing anything to us while we were out.