Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  After that experience, acid became part of the creative process for the Beatles. They had been taking other pills since Hamburg days—George used to tell me about how they had to play for hours on end and to stop them falling asleep the nightclub owner used to feed them pills. At the time we thought nothing of it. We didn’t consider that they might be harmful. They were just fun. They could be scary but most of the time they made us feel like a million dollars, see wonderful psychedelic images, and hear everything much more acutely. George used to say that when he took LSD he felt as though a lightbulb had gone on in his head. Every sensation was heightened.

  The police didn’t share our view. I think the Establishment felt they were losing control, that the young were being corrupted by their decadent long-haired hippie heroes. A lot of the Beatles’ songs were clearly drug-induced but the Beatles were clean-cut: everyone loved them—even our parents’ generation. The Rolling Stones were the bad boys, overtly sexy, dissolute, and dangerous. If only they had known….

  In the summer of 1967 George was working in Los Angeles for a couple of months. We rented a house on Blue Jay Way and met so many fantastic people. Joni Mitchell came over and invited me to hang out with her while George was busy. She was great fun and took me to a studio belonging to a friend of hers where she and some other musicians sat down and played together. One day David Crosby, of the Byrds, invited us to his place in the hills. We arrived to find a swimming pool full of naked people. Not knowing anyone—or, indeed, what to do—we went into the house until David arrived, naked, with a joint in his hand. He soon realized we were not going to join in so he put on his shorts. Next thing, the pool attendant arrived and didn’t bat an eyelid, got on with his job. L.A. is wild, I thought.

  Most exciting of all, one evening we were invited to meet the great Frank Sinatra. We turned up at the studio where he was recording and, through the glass wall of the control room, watched while he sang “My Way” accompanied by a full orchestra. At the end of the song he came out to hear it back and meet George. We were then ushered into limos and driven down Sunset Boulevard to a restaurant. We glided in, as smooth as silk, and sat at a table already prepared with a bottle of whiskey, or bourbon, in front of each of Frank’s crew—all short, wide men in large suits. I found the ones I sat next to very difficult to understand.

  We also went to see my sister Jenny, who was living with a friend in San Francisco. We flew there in a private Lear jet with Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall and were met by a limo, then picked up Jenny and went to have lunch. Afterward we thought it would be fun to go and have a look at Haight-Ashbury, the district that had been taken over by hippies. Musicians like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin lived there, and it was the LSD capital of America. On the way, Derek produced a tab. Would we like some? Since we were going to Haight-Ashbury, it seemed silly not to.

  The area is named after the intersection of two streets, Haight and Ashbury, and as we approached, the driver said he wouldn’t drive down the street itself, he’d park among the side streets. It seemed a little odd but we didn’t argue. We got out of the car, the acid kicked in, and everything was just whoah, psychedelic and very…I mean, it was just completely fine. We went into a shop and noticed that all these people were following us. They had recognized George as we walked past them in the street, then turned to follow us. One minute there were five, then ten, twenty, thirty, and forty people behind us. I could hear them saying, “The Beatles are here, the Beatles are in town!”

  We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible—full of ghastly dropouts, bums, and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned—even mothers and babies—and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled. Then somebody said, “Let’s go to Hippie Hill,” and we crossed the road, hoping the lights were red, and went into a park. Then somebody said, “Let’s sit down here,” and we all sat down on the grass, our retinue facing us, as if we six were onstage. They looked at us expectantly—as if George was some kind of Messiah.

  We were so high, and then the inevitable happened: a guitar emerged from the crowd and I could see it being passed to the front by outstretched arms. I thought, Oh, God, poor George, this is a nightmare. Finally the guitar was handed to him. I had the feeling that they’d listened to the Beatles’ records, analyzed them, learned what they’d thought they should learn, and taken every drug they’d thought the Beatles were singing about. Now they wanted to know where to go next. And George was there, obviously, to give them the answer. Pressure.

  George was so cool. He said, “This is G, this is E, this is D,” and showed them a few chords, then handed back the guitar and said, “Sorry, man, we’ve got to go now.” He didn’t sing—he couldn’t have: he was flying. We all were. I was surprised he could even do that.

  Anyway, we got up and walked back toward our limo, at which point I heard a little voice say, “Hey, George, do you want some STP?”

  George turned around and said, “No, thanks, I’m cool, man.”

  Then the bloke turned around and said to the others, “George Harrison turned me down.”

  And they went, “No!”

  And then the crowd became faintly hostile. We sensed it because when you’re that high you’re very aware of vibes, and we were walking faster and faster, and they were following.

  When we saw the limo, we ran across the road and jumped in, and they ran after us and started to rock the car, and the windows were full of these faces, flattened against the glass, looking at us.

  That was a turning point for George. We had always thought of drugs as fun, a means of expanding your mind and consciousness. What we saw at Haight-Ashbury was an eye-opener. Those people had dropped out, were sleeping rough and taking all kinds of drugs—some of which were ten times stronger than LSD. STP was one, as George later discovered from Mama Cass Elliot. There was nothing remotely artistic or creative about those people: they were like alcoholics or any other kind of addict, and it turned George right off the whole drug culture. He stopped taking LSD, and took up meditation.

  So Maharishi and his teachings had come into our lives at the right moment—or, at least, into George’s life—and not just by providing an alternative to drugs. George was unsure why he was so famous. He knew he was a talented musician but he also knew that there were dozens of talented musicians, some more talented than him, yet he was the one who was world famous, who couldn’t walk in the street without being mobbed or sit in a restaurant without someone pestering him for an autograph. He was looking for an explanation and Maharishi offered a practical way of accessing the spirituality and mysticism he had glimpsed on our trip to India with Ravi Shankar.

  By Sunday morning in Bangor, everyone had been initiated into transcendental meditation and believed we had found a new way of living. Then the telephone rang and the world turned upside-down.

  Brian Epstein was dead. It was the most shocking, dreadful moment. Paul took Peter Brown’s call. Brian had been found dead in his bed at his house in Chapel Street. He was thirty-two years old. At that point there was no explanation. We were stunned when Paul, ashen faced, repeated what he had been told. It had to be a mistake. Paul and George were in complete shock. I don’t think it could have been worse if they had heard that their own fathers had dropped dead. The unthinkable had happened. Brian had found them, believed in them, molded them, turned them into millionaires, and made them famous the world over. He had looked after them, pandered to their every whim, protected them, guided them, advised them. He was their friend, their enabler, their hero. He was irreplaceable. We knew, in the cold hard light of a Bangor morning, that life would never be the same again.

  We were outside, just after breakfast, when we heard the news. We had been on our way to Maharishi, who was going to talk to us privately—and suddenly that seemed the
right thing to do so we kept the appointment. We needed someone wise and spiritual to tell us what to think. We were lost. I even thought, idiotically, Maharishi is so amazing, maybe he can bring Brian back to life. He couldn’t, of course, but he was calm. He talked about reincarnation, but he said, too, that negative feelings would impede Brian’s journey. His spirit was with us, and to release it, we must be joyful for him, laugh and be happy. It was hard to feel any joy that day, but it was an enormous help to have someone to turn to, who knew with such certainty how we should cope. I can’t help thinking it was no coincidence that we were with Maharishi when Brian died. Someone up there was looking after us.

  Brian had died of an overdose of a bromide-based drug that he had been taking to help him sleep. The police inspector called to the house, after Brian’s secretary, housekeeper, and doctor had broken down the locked bedroom door and discovered the body, reported finding seventeen bottles of pills in his bathroom cabinet, his briefcase, and beside his bed. The question was whether he had died on purpose. We knew that Brian took sleeping pills. He took all sorts of drugs and drank far more than was good for him, but we all did. However, you shouldn’t drink alcohol on top of sleeping pills: it was suggested that Brian had taken some pills, woken up later and drunk something, then taken more pills, forgetting what he had already swallowed.

  I cannot believe he committed suicide. On the other hand, I don’t think he was happy, and, fundamentally, probably never had been. He was gay, and I think he found it difficult: he was attracted to the wrong sort of people, rough trade who would treat him badly, then leave him. Much of the time he was lonely and depressed. For all their closeness, he had never really socialized with the Beatles. He had held mad, wild, mind-blowing parties at his house in Belgravia and at Kingsley Hill, his country house near Heathfield in Sussex, to which we had all gone, but for most of the time he left us to do our own thing—and we left him to do his. We had noticed that he had become a little loose in his social life—I got the feeling he no longer cared about anything as much as he once had.

  The year before, George and I had been to the south of France with him again for a week, and that had been typical of the old perfectionist Brian. He had every little detail worked out, each meal, each restaurant, each place we would visit. He even laid on a plane to take us to a bullfight in Arles. But in the last year of his life, when our lives changed so dramatically, he had let things go. We knew he was taking far more drugs than were good for him, but we didn’t know that he was spending most days in bed, only emerging from his flat at night, or that he had scarcely been seen in the office for months. I suppose we were so absorbed in our own lives, as children are, that we didn’t stop to wonder how Daddy was.

  I don’t know whether any of us cried when we heard the news that Sunday morning, but I know I did during the memorial service at the New London Synagogue in St. John’s Wood a few weeks later. We didn’t go to the funeral, which was family only in Liverpool, but George sent a single sunflower, and Brian’s business partner, Nat Weiss, threw it into the open grave. At the memorial his mother, Queenie, looked frail and broken. Her husband, Brian’s father, had died a little over a month before.

  Already George was full of Maharishi’s teachings: “There is no such thing as death,” he said to reporters that Sunday morning in Bangor, “only in the physical sense. We know he’s okay now. He will return because he was striving for happiness and desired bliss so much.” And a little later, he said much the same thing: “There’s no such thing as death anyway. I mean, it’s death on a physical level, but life goes on everywhere.” George found it comforting to believe that Brian’s soul would be back one day—and I agreed with him.

  The real sadness for Brian, I think, was that when the Beatles stopped touring, they no longer needed him so much. And in August 1967, when he died, they hadn’t been touring or done a live performance for a year. For a long time they had hated playing to vast, screaming audiences, but the crunch had come in Manila, at the end of a tour of Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. Brian Epstein and Peter Brown had been having breakfast in the coffee shop of their hotel in Tokyo when someone came to tell them that Mrs. Marcos, the wife of the Philippines’ president, wanted to invite the Beatles to lunch during their visit to her country.

  Brian said, “We don’t do that. We don’t go to official functions.” This was because the last time they had gone to one—at the British embassy in Washington in 1964—it had been a fiasco. It was after a concert at the Coliseum, their first on American soil, and the embassy was swarming with reporters as well as guests. Everyone had had too much to drink and kept grabbing the Beatles to demand autographs. Someone cut off a chunk of Ringo’s hair, then John swore and walked out. Brian had decided that in future they would do nothing that he hadn’t arranged.

  When the Beatles flew into Manila, their bags were confiscated. They were terrified they would be busted for carrying drugs—their fears were unfounded. The day after the concert, someone arrived at their hotel and said he had come to take them to the palace for lunch. Brian explained that they had declined the invitation. “But you have to go,” said the emissary. Brian was adamant that they would not, whereupon he received a call from the British ambassador suggesting he reconsider. Brian dug in his heels and they didn’t leave the hotel. All the while the story on national television, which George and the others were watching in their suite, was that the Beatles were expected at the palace but had not yet shown up. Then, as time passed, the news became “Beatles Snub First Family.”

  The next morning they were due to leave and woke to find that all security had been removed, there was no room service, and every facility was unavailable. There was no car or taxi to take them to the airport. Eventually they found two vehicles: Neil, Mal, and Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer, went in one and the Beatles, Brian, and Peter in another. When they arrived at the airport no one would help with the bags and the crowd was booing. The young people were screaming and trying to grab them but the older ones were punching them, throwing bricks, and kicking them.

  When they found their way to the right gate, they were put into a glass room on display to people on the mezzanine floor. The security people who had confiscated their bags on the way into the country came in to shove them around. The thugs were wearing guns and the Beatles’ entourage were frightened. When Mal, a big bloke, was knocked over, it turned nasty. They were leaving on a KLM flight to India and were worried that it would take off before they could get aboard.

  On the plane, finally, a call went out for Mr. Epstein and Mr. Evans to get off. Brian sorted it out, but it cost him everything the group had earned in Manila. The stress brought him out in hives.

  That was when George said he never wanted to go on tour again. Being mobbed because people loved you was one thing; being mobbed because they hated you was another. The only good thing that came out of Manila was the beautiful emerald ring George brought home for me with some gorgeous black pearls.

  The last live performance they gave was at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in August 1966. From then on the Beatles wrote songs and recorded albums. And Brian’s role changed. He had never been needed in the recording studio—that was the domain of George Martin, the Beatles’ record producer. Although they still relied on him to fix and arrange everything in their personal lives, his day-today contact with them diminished. He had plenty of other people to look after, but the Beatles were becoming independent. Brian’s empire, NEMS Enterprises, was huge and he had signed up many other artists, including Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer, but the Beatles were special. For five years they had been his life and suddenly they were almost gone.

  Shortly after Brian’s death, a couple wrote to George and John saying that Brian was trying to make contact with us. The wife was a medium and could conduct a séance. But, they said, it was vitally important that we told no one about it because some Venusians would join us, and if anyone got wind of their visit, the
military would try to kill them. There had been a lot of sightings of Venusians recently, they said, and they would be traveling in their V6 spaceship. We thought this sounded exciting, so John, Cynthia, George, and I drove to East Grinstead, in West Sussex, where the couple had converted an enormous country house into a health spa.

  While we waited for the Venusians to arrive, the wife explained that she had previously lived in London. One day a little person had appeared in the window and said, “You have been sent here to help people whenever you can.” So she and her husband had bought the house and turned it into a health spa to fulfill her destiny.

  We waited and waited. There was no sign of the Venusians. Were we sure we hadn’t told anyone? Yes. Then the husband sat in front of a big old-fashioned radio, like something out of a 1940s movie, put on earphones, and fiddled with some knobs, saying things like “V6, V6, come in, V6…” The Venusians, he announced, had said they weren’t coming after all, but they would contact us at another time. He and his wife were so disappointed, but we dared not look at each other for fear of cracking up.

  We were ushered into a big dark room where we sat around a circular table. Suddenly the wife was talking in a weird voice as though she had been taken over by a spirit. She talked about people on the other side, people who were coming forward, who wanted to speak to us. She had Brian with her, she said. He was saying he was all right, we were not to worry about him—and he wanted us to know that he had not committed suicide. I so wanted to believe her, and so did George, I think, but she got a few things wrong for me; she was pretty accurate in the things she told Cynthia, but John pooh-poohed the whole thing. When it was over and the spirits had left her, she looked drained.