Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

Her husband told us that because the Venusians hadn’t come, they wouldn’t charge us, and we said goodbye. Outside, we howled with laughter.

  When Brian’s death cut short our time in Bangor, Maharishi had invited us to stay with him at his ashram in India. Every year he held a course for Westerners who wanted to become TM instructors. None of us did, but we wanted to study it some more, and I think the Beatles thought their fans might copy them, which meant they would be using their influence on young people in a good way.

  In February 1968, with half the world’s press, we set off for Rishikesh, a small town in the north of India in the foothills of the Himalayas. Short though it had been, the experience in Wales had filled us with excitement about where Maharishi and Indian spirituality might lead. George and I, my sister Jenny, John and Cynthia flew out to Delhi together, and Paul, Jane, Ringo, and Maureen arrived a few days later.

  When we had been there for four weeks, Magic Alex arrived. He was a young Greek who had attached himself to the Beatles, and Jenny was renting a room in his house. His name was Alex Mardas and his father was one of the Greek colonels who had overthrown King Constantine in the 1967 coup d’état. He had invented some weird electrical gadgets that appealed to the Beatles, John in particular, and made things for the Apple boutique, which had opened just before we left for India. At one time he was keen that the Beatles should buy a Greek island, so we went to Greece and stayed on a boat, hopping from island to island—all I remember about the holiday is that some of us took acid, and we didn’t have to go through Passport Control because Alex’s father was so important.

  Jenny was coming to Rishikesh with us partly because she and I loved doing things together and partly because, coincidentally, while George and I had been discovering Indian philosophy with Ravi Shankar, Jenny had been going through a similar process at home. She had just broken up with Mick Fleetwood, and was missing him and us when she decided that the beliefs with which she had grown up made no sense anymore. One day she had come across a shop off the Charing Cross Road that was full of books on Eastern philosophy. When she had seen what they were saying about life, death, and reincarnation, she had suddenly recognized that God was everywhere, inside each one of us, and that everything was a circle. When we got back from India she told us what had happened to her. We, of course, had had exactly the same experience.

  At that time Jenny and I seemed to know exactly what the other was thinking. We often dreamed about each other, and eight out of ten times we would phone and discover that what had gone on in the dream had happened in real life. It was quite uncanny—a time of psychic closeness between us. Our simultaneous move toward Eastern philosophy was an extension of this.

  Our lives were also running in parallel. Jenny had left school and become a model, as I had. Occasionally we worked together, which was fun, but where I was almost exclusively a photographic model, she worked in-house for a designer, so the opportunities for us to do so were rare. She, too, had fallen in love with a musician. Mick Fleetwood was the drummer in Fleetwood Mac, so Jenny was part of the rock ’n’ roll scene, as I was. Their recent split was not permanent: her relationship with Mick was always on and off. He had first seen her when she was fifteen—at the Coffee Mill, in Notting Hill, where she and her friends used to go to after school—and had decided then that he would marry her. She was seventeen when they started going out together, and they married in 1970 when Jenny was twenty-three.

  The plan was that we would stay at the Academy of Meditation in Rishikesh for two or three months. It was a long time for me to be out of circulation as a model, but George had never liked me working and I was making an effort to cut down on the jobs I took. I never knew quite what it was about it that he disliked. I suspect he was simply a product of his upbringing and wanted his wife to be at home with the kids, waiting for him with a meal on the table when he came in from work. My career took me away from home and out of his bed at an ungodly hour; it made other men look at me, which he might not have liked—he was quite chauvinistic—and perhaps he worried that if I became more famous, it would fuel the public interest in us that he was always trying to escape. But when I gave up modeling I lost an important part of my identity, my feeling of self-worth, my independence, and my self-confidence.

  From Delhi, we took taxis for the six-hour journey to Rishikesh. The road was full of bicycles and oxcarts, donkeys and sacred cows. It was a hotchpotch of noise, and the smell of dung and spices hung in the air. As we left the city the dust rose, and through it we saw women working in the fields in bright saris, red and yellow, purple and green. We passed fields of wheat, mountains and rivers—it was an amazing drive.

  Rishikesh nestles beside the Ganges at the point where the river cascades out of the Himalayas into the plains. The ashram was at the top of a hill overlooking the town and the river; the air was clear and clean and filled with the scent of flowers. It was about eight or ten acres, surrounded by a high perimeter fence and padlocked gates. Inside we were shown Maharishi’s little bungalow, the post office, a communal dining area, a lecture theater, and a series of stone cha-lets, where we stayed; they had flat roofs on which we sunbathed.

  Maharishi and the elders greeted us and we were shown to our rooms. Initially George and I shared one. It was sparsely furnished, with two skimpy beds, but we kept disturbing each other in our meditation so we ended up with a room each; John and Cynthia were next door to us to begin with but they were not getting on well—John had met Yoko Ono—and after a week or two he moved into a room on his own. I felt so sorry for Cynthia: he received notes from Yoko in the post almost every day saying things like, “If you look up at the sky and see a cloud, it’s me sending you love.”

  Every day was much the same. We would wake in the morning, to the piercing sound of peacocks calling, and go to breakfast in an open dining area, covered with canvas held aloft on bamboo sticks. The cooks were a couple of twenty-one-year-old Australian boys, who were on their way around the world and had heard the academy needed help. Everything they cooked was vegetarian and delicious. It reminded me of the chapatis and beans the Kikuyu had made in Kenya. They produced porridge and toast for breakfast, which we would eat watched by hundreds of big black crows in the trees—they were waiting for us to leave so that they could swoop down and peck at our leftovers. Sometimes monkeys jumped onto the tables, grabbed a handful of food, and bounded off. Ringo had spent years in hospital as a child: he couldn’t eat onions, garlic, or anything spicy so had brought with him a suitcase of Heinz baked beans.

  After breakfast we were given our itinerary for the day, which mostly amounted to meditating and attending lectures given by Maharishi. These were held in a large covered area with a platform that was always covered with flowers when he spoke. For me one of the greatest revelations was the concept of reincarnation, which he espoused. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a continuation of life in a different sphere. I had thought that when we died, that was it. Over the years, as friends have died, this belief has been a great consolation to me.

  There were probably about sixty of us at the ashram, an interesting collection of people from across the world—Sweden, Britain, America, Germany, Denmark—and everyone was so nice. Despite that, we felt cut off from the rest of the world so it was always exciting when letters came in the post—my mother wrote regularly with news of home—or when others joined us. One of the newcomers was Donovan, with his manager, “Gipsy Dave.” We had known Donovan for some years. He and the Beatles had recorded together, and he’d contributed to the Yellow Submarine album. He had fallen in love with Jenny—for whom he wrote “Jennifer Juniper.” Mike Love, lead singer of the Beach Boys, also turned up, as did the actress Mia Farrow, with her brother Johnny and sister Prudence.

  Maharishi’s lectures were fascinating. He talked about the ideas behind meditation and what we should be trying to achieve, about life and astral traveling, how this can happen when you’re meditating. It’s like an out-of-body experience, and it ha
ppened to me once at Rishikesh. I felt as if I was in one of the other rooms, then realized I was in my own. It happened to George too, and we compared notes. Sometimes Maharishi gave our group private lessons, just him and us, including Donovan, sitting out of doors. Afterward we would go to our rooms to meditate, at first for a limited time. Gradually we were allowed to spend as long as we wanted meditating, and if we were going to do so during mealtimes we had to let someone know so that food could be left outside the room. The longest I managed was seven hours, from five in the afternoon to midnight.

  Every so often a tailor would appear and we would get him to make clothes for us. We all wore pajama trousers and big baggy shirts, and the boys grew beards. It was baking hot during the day so you had to wear loose, flowing Indian clothes. After four in the afternoon it could get quite cold, and when it rained there was no hot water. One evening Maharishi organized boats to take everyone on a trip down the river while two holy men chanted. Then George and Donovan started to sing, and we all joined in with a mixture of English and German songs. It was so beautiful, with mountains on three sides of us. In the setting sun the one to the west turned a deep, deep pink.

  George, John, and Paul wrote several songs while we were there—several went into the White Album—and Donovan taught them his finger-picking technique on the guitar. Someone was always playing a guitar and there would be discussions and singing, a nice little hubbub of social activity. And if it was anyone’s birthday, and there was a surprising number while we were there, including George’s twenty-fifth and my twenty-fourth, there would be cake and a party. At George’s everyone put red and yellow paint on their faces and wore garlands of flowers, and an Indian musician came to play for him. The same musician played on my birthday, and gave me a beautiful dilruba—an Indian string instrument—with a bird’s head engraved at the neck. John drew me a picture of us all meditating and wrote “Happy Birthday Pattie love from John and Cyn” on it, and Cynthia, who was an accomplished artist, made me a lovely painting.

  While the Beatles were recording the White Album, George wrote a song called “Something,” which he released as his first A-side single with the Beatles. He told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful—and it turned out to be the most successful song he ever wrote, with more than a hundred and fifty cover versions. His favorite was the one by James Brown. Frank Sinatra said he thought it was the best love song ever written. My favorite was the one by George Harrison, which he played to me in the kitchen at Kinfauns.

  Prudence Farrow didn’t have such a good time at the ashram. She overdid the meditating—we couldn’t get her to come out of her room. She stayed in it for something like two weeks, as if she was in a trance. We took it in turns to visit and talk to her, but to no avail. She was trying to reach God faster than anyone else. We were worried and so was Mia. Even Maharishi was concerned. When she finally came out, he told her she must meditate only in short bursts. John wrote a song for her, “Dear Prudence,” and the boys would stand outside her room and sing it to her.

  Ringo and Maureen only stayed two weeks. Maureen had a phobia about flies—which at the time I thought silly—and she couldn’t have come to a worse place: there were all sorts of flying insects. Ringo looked so sad when they left, but I think they also missed their children, who were very young—and he was probably tired of baked beans.

  Paul and Jane left after about a month. Paul was keen to get back to London and Apple, the business the Beatles were about to launch. The Apple shop had opened just before we left but there was an office to find and a new manager to replace Brian. He had always been more interested in business than the others and I guess a month of meditating was enough for him.

  The two who were most engrossed in Maharishi’s teachings were John and George. They would meditate for hours, and George was very focused. I loved meditating, but I can’t sustain that sort of intensity for long. Sometimes I would leave George meditating and make a foray to Mussoorie and Dheradun, Tibetan trading posts. At that time China was slowly taking over Tibet, whose people were being pushed out of their country as their culture was destroyed.

  I bought a few trinkets—a prayer wheel and lots of pretty Tibetan beads—and sometimes I would walk down to the Ganges with a couple of friends. There were lepers on the other side of the river, begging, and a man sat in the middle meditating on a pointed rock. If I had seen lepers in Oxford Street I’d have been upset, but in India they and the man on the rock were just part of the scenery.

  As the days got hotter the cool water in the river was delicious. It moved so fast that you could sit on it, quite literally, and it would take you along as if you were on a chute. George disapproved—he thought it far too frivolous. He never knew that one day when I was in the river I lost my wedding ring. I panicked; George would be furious. Johnny Farrow was with me and we looked and looked, I was convinced it was in vain, but miraculously, after about twenty minutes, he had it in his hand. Maybe it was a sign.

  And then everything went horribly wrong. Mia Farrow told John she thought Maharishi had been behaving inappropriately. I think he made a pass at her. John threw a hissy fit. “Come on, we’re leaving.” Then Magic Alex claimed that Maharishi had tried something with a girl he had befriended. I am not sure how true that was. I think Alex wanted to get John away from Rishikesh—he seemed convinced that Maharishi was evil. He kept saying, “It’s black magic.” And perhaps John had been waiting for an excuse to leave—he wanted to be with Yoko. Whatever the truth, they left.

  We stayed on but the next night I had a horrid dream about Maharishi, and when George woke me the next morning, I said, “Come on, we’re leaving.”

  He, Jenny, and I went south to Madras: George didn’t want to go straight from two months of meditation into the chaos that was waiting for him in England—the new business, finding a new manager, the fans, and the press. Instead we went to see Ravi Shankar and lost ourselves in his music.

  Defiantly arriving at Kingston Magistrates’ Court after our drug bust in March 1969. We had harmlessly smoked dope but were treated as if we had been using hard drugs.

  SEVEN

  The Tears Begin

  We had learned to meditate at the feet of a master—despite the allegations, George and I still regarded Maharishi as a master—we had been shown the way to spiritual enlightenment, we had returned from Rishikesh renewed and refreshed, and yet from the time we left India our lives and our relationship seemed to fall apart.

  I was delighted to be home and eager to tell my friends all about our trip. George retreated into himself. He had become very intense in India: the experience seemed to have answered some of the nagging questions he had had about his life but it had taken some of the lightness out of his soul. He continued the meditation and the chanting, and his prayer wheel was never far from his hand. To begin with, so did I, but he became obsessive about it. Some days he would be all right, but on others he seemed withdrawn and depressed. This was new: he had never been depressed before, but there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t about me, but I found that my moods started to mirror his. Because I kept a diary, I discovered that we went into deep despair at the time of the full moon, and that it was particularly bad with every fourth—so bad, indeed, that at times I felt almost suicidal. I don’t think I was ever in any real danger of killing myself, but I got as far as working out how I would do it: I would put on a diaphanous Ossie Clark dress and jump off Beachy Head.

  And there were other women. That really hurt. In India George had become fascinated by the god Krishna, who was always surrounded by young maidens, and came back wanting to be some kind of Krishna figure, a spiritual being with lots of concubines. He actually said so. And no woman was out of bounds. I was friendly with a French girl who was going out with Eric Clapton. She was always flirtatious with George, but so were a lot of girls and he, of course, loved it. Then she and Eric broke up—Eric told her to leave—and she came to stay with us at Kinfauns
.

  It was January 1, 1969, and George and I had seen in the new year at Cilla Black’s house. She was an old friend of the Beatles, one of the originals from Liverpool, and gave fantastic parties. We arrived home in good spirits but then everything went swiftly downhill. The French girl didn’t seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to George. Something was going on between them, and I questioned George. He told me my imagination was running away with me, I was paranoid.

  Soon I couldn’t stand it so I went to London to stay with Belinda and Jean-Claude. Six days later George phoned me to say that the girl had gone and I went home.

  I was shocked that George could do such a thing to me. It might have been different if I had been a stronger, more confident person: I might have guessed that, with his infidelity, he was just being a boy and would get over it, that it didn’t mean he didn’t love me, but my ego was too fragile and I couldn’t see it as anything other than betrayal. I felt unloved and miserable.

  But ours wasn’t the only relationship in trouble. Shortly after we came back from India, Jenny, Donovan, and Gipsy, his manager, Magic Alex, and Cynthia went off for a fortnight’s holiday in Greece. John had urged Cynthia to go—so that he could move Yoko Ono into their house and his life.

  He had met Yoko, a Japanese artist, at the Indica Gallery in London. It was a way-out place and she had been holding an exhibition there, Unfinished Paintings and Objects, to which John had been invited. John Dunbar, the gallery’s owner, had told her to chat him up as a potential sponsor. I don’t think she knew who he was, but John was intrigued. She was everything that Cynthia—and probably every other woman he had ever met—was not. She was anarchic, original, afraid of nothing—and she didn’t fall into the stereotype of the subservient woman that John had been used to.

  John said he had never known love like it; and she seemed to take the place of everyone else in his life. It was as though he no longer needed the Beatles or any of his friends. She left her second husband, by whom she had a daughter, Kyoko; John walked out on Cynthia and their son, Julian; and after their respective divorces they married in Gibraltar in March 1969. They spent their honeymoon in a hotel bed in Amsterdam, protesting about the Vietnam War.