Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  Meanwhile Paul and Jane’s relationship, which everyone had thought would end in marriage, had also spectacularly hit the buffers. Jane came home unexpectedly from New York and found another woman in the house, an American girl—and did what I should probably have done with George. She went and got her mother, and between them they moved her stuff out of the house in St. John’s Wood. Not long afterward, Paul met Linda Eastman, an American photographer, in the Bag o’ Nails, a club behind Liberty’s department store that stayed open late, and the boys often went there when they had been recording late.

  Linda was in London photographing rock groups for a book called Rock and Other Four Letter Words. She came from a wealthy family—her father, Lee Eastman, was a New York lawyer, and her mother was independently wealthy through Linder’s department stores. She had a daughter, Heather, from a previous marriage and was reluctant to commit again, but eventually Paul persuaded her.

  George’s moods, I think, had much to do with what was going on between the Beatles. After Brian Epstein’s death they were like orphans, so underlying tensions and resentments began to surface. George felt excluded: John and Paul had always been the songwriters and he had had to fight to get any of his songs onto an album. As he became older and more confident about his talent, he recognized how unfair this was, but they were powerful characters. I don’t think I knew half of what was going on—George would start to say something about Paul, then stop. He appeared unable or unwilling to share his thoughts with me; he wouldn’t tell me he felt left out—although I am sure he did. He kept his hurt, frustration, anger, or whatever it was, to himself. We had once been so close, so honest and open with each other. Now a distance had developed between us. At times I couldn’t reach him.

  Apple was another bone of contention; they were musicians, not businessmen, but for tax reasons they had been persuaded to start a company. The name Apple Corps was Paul’s idea. He had just bought a Magritte from Robert Fraser, which was simply a big green apple with “Au revoir” written across it (Paul was disappointed that no one got the pun—corps, core.) Apple was essentially a record-production company, with other divisions to handle the Beatles’ other activities, like music publishing, books, films, television, and the shop; most were run by old friends. The accountant had been urging Brian, long before his death, to do something to minimize the taxes the Beatles were paying—85 percent at that time—and because of an issue over renegotiating their contract with EMI, they suddenly had a mountain of money. If they didn’t invest it, it would go to the tax man. Apple was launched in New York a couple of months after we came back from India.

  Simultaneously, the Beatles announced the formation of the Apple Foundation for the Arts, inviting anyone who thought they had talent in any artistic field to apply for funding. They put an ad in a newspaper saying, “Send us your tapes and they will not be thrown straight into the wastepaper basket. We will answer.”

  The offices were bombarded with every manner of artistic endeavor—not just tapes, but clothing, paintings, drawings, novels, plays, poems, sculpture, designs—everything you could think of—and most of it was rubbish. Much was delivered in person by a variety of extraordinary characters who believed that the Beatles would help them make their fortune. Once they even had a bunch of Hells Angels on the doorstep, complete with motorcycles, who had flown in from America. And there was a nerve-racking moment at the Christmas party when an Angel became obnoxious and Peter Brown had to reason with him. “Well, that was strange,” said Ringo, with his gift for understatement.

  Originally the Apple offices were above the shop in Baker Street, but so many people and packages kept arriving that they soon needed more space. Eventually, in July 1968, they settled permanently into a five-story Georgian building at 3 Savile Row, in the heart of London’s bespoke-tailoring district. Magic Alex set about building what he promised would be a state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement. Sadly, it didn’t turn out quite like that, and they had to go back to using the EMI studios in Abbey Road. That was just one of many ways in which they were pouring money down the drain.

  No one would ever be able to step into Brian Epstein’s shoes. Robert Stigwood, whom Brian had brought into NEMS as a partner to look after some of the other musicians on his books, had assumed he would take over as the Beatles’ manager, but they quickly put a stop to that. Another contender was Allen Klein, who managed the Rolling Stones. To begin with, the Beatles weren’t convinced that they needed a manager. Brian’s genius, apart from managing their private lives, had been for organizing tours and live performances, but those days were over. For the future they needed someone to take care of business and run the office. That job fell to Peter Brown, who became Apple’s business administrator and personal fixer, and Neil Aspinall, who had started out as the Beatles’ roadie, became managing director in charge of Apple’s artistic and creative side.

  Peter Brown was another Liverpudlian; he and Brian had met in the late fifties and become friends. They had both been in retail, working in neighboring shops. Peter had been doing management training in a department store across the road from where Brian managed NEMS, his father’s shop; when he went to open a second branch, he asked Peter to take his place in the first. Soon after, Brian left the family business to manage the Beatles, and in 1963 they moved to London, leaving Peter in Liverpool. It was not long before he realized how much fun he was missing, and at the end of 1964, he arrived in London to join Brian as his executive assistant.

  Peter was great and, a little older than the rest of us, became another father figure. He was always very kind to me. Whenever George was busy or away—which he was on most of my birthdays—Peter would take me to lunch at San Lorenzo or Inigo Jones, or we’d go to the theater, Covent Garden, or Glyndebourne. I once went to Jamaica with him and his boyfriend Gary. He always says he remembers the holiday because of the size of suitcase I took with me. It was tiny, and he was astonished that, night after night, I appeared dressed to the nines in a different outfit. The secret was that I had lots of silk, which packs down to nothing.

  March 12, 1969, is ingrained on my memory. It was the day Paul and Linda were married at Marylebone Registry Office. It was also the day on which our worst nightmares came true. We didn’t go to the wedding—Paul hadn’t invited any of the Beatles, perhaps because feeling among them was so bad at that point. It was quite late in the afternoon and I was on my own at home in Esher. We were going out to a Pisces party that evening, given by an artist friend, Rory McEwan. He was a marvelous painter and an old friend of Princess Margaret. George was at the Apple office in London and I was expecting him home so that we could drive to Rory’s house together.

  Suddenly I heard a lot of cars on the gravel in the drive—far too many for it to be just George. My first thought was that maybe Paul and Linda wanted to party after the wedding. Then the bell rang. I opened the door to find a crowd of uniformed policemen, one policewoman, and a dog standing outside. At that moment the back-door bell rang and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so scary! I’m surrounded by police.

  The man in charge introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Pilcher, from Scotland Yard, and handed me a piece of paper. I knew why he was there: he thought we had drugs, and he said he was going to search the house. In they came, about eight policemen through the front, another five or six through the back, and there were more in the greenhouse. The policewoman said she would follow me while the others searched and didn’t let me out of her sight. I said, “Why are you doing this? We don’t have any drugs. I’m going to phone my husband.”

  I rang George at Apple. “George, it’s your worst nightmare. Come home.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “The police are here. Come home.”

  He said he would sort something out—he was always very calm—and in the meantime he would send a friend round so I wasn’t on my own.

  After a while Pete Shotton, one of John Lennon’s best friends from school, arrived
. It was a great relief to see someone who wasn’t dressed in blue, so I said, “Let’s have a drink.” He and I started tucking into the vodka and tonic.

  Suddenly Sergeant Pilcher appeared. “Look what Yogi, our dog, has found!” He produced a block of hash.

  I said, “Are you mad? You brought that with you.”

  He denied it. “Yogi found it in one of your husband’s shoes,” he said triumphantly.

  “This is a joke,” I retorted. “If we had a lump of hash like that, we certainly wouldn’t keep it in George’s shoes. If you’d said at the start you were looking for cannabis, I would have told you it’s in the sitting room on the table in a pot. But you said you were looking for drugs. I thought you meant heroin or something dangerous. Why are you doing this? Don’t you realize the implications? George and the other Beatles have a lot of fans, and if they get to hear through the press, which they will, that George smokes dope, lots of kids will do the same.”

  Sergeant Pilcher replied, “I want to save you from the evils and peril of heroin.”

  I said, “I’d never touch heroin. Even if you put it in front of me, I’d never touch it. I don’t believe you. I know you’ve planted this on us.”

  So there we were, no George, just me and Pete Shotton with our vodka and tonic and all those policemen, one of whom clearly thought he was on a mission to save the world.

  “Now what are you all going to do?” I asked.

  And they said, “Any chance of a cup of tea?”

  “Well, I’m not going to make it.”

  So the policewoman made tea for them and then they were standing around with it, not knowing what to do. One asked if they could watch television. So some did that and one of the others said, “Have the Beatles been doing any new music?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but you’re not going to hear it.”

  Then Pete asked them about being in the drug squad. What drugs, he wanted to know, had they taken themselves so that they knew what they were looking for? One policeman said he’d been searching a house and had run his finger along someone’s mantel-piece, licked it—and found himself on an LSD trip.

  Eventually George arrived and found us in the middle of this policemen’s tea party. He was still calm but he wasn’t happy. The police were obviously excited to meet him. They stood to attention and were almost elbowing each other out of the way to get closer to him while Sergeant Pilcher went into his “I am arresting you…” bit. George had Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, with him and a lawyer called Martin Polden, who worked for Release, set up by Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris after Mick and Keith’s bust to give free legal advice to anyone in that situation. Busts were happening more and more frequently and people were being far too harshly treated by the police and the courts.

  The day after Jenny had left for India, Magic Alex’s house, where she had a room, was raided and the police found a pipe Colin had brought her from Morocco, which she had smoked once and decided she didn’t like. The lab found traces of cannabis in it and the day she got back from India they were on the doorstep to arrest her. They took her to the police station and were joking in the car about Rishikesh. “Why did you want to go to India?” they said. “Couldn’t you have just gone to see the local vicar?” She was taken to court and given a year’s conditional discharge—but since Alex owned the house and she was renting a room, he probably could have been charged. I think they left him alone because of who his father was.

  After Sergeant Pilcher had cautioned us, we were taken to Esher police station to be processed and fingerprinted. The local police were flabbergasted: they knew us and were appalled to see us being marched in by all those London policemen. I don’t think they’d used the fingerprinting machine before—it took them about twenty minutes to find it and even longer to work it. We were formally charged but released on bail. We got home feeling gloomy, so George said, “Come on, let’s go to the party.”

  The first person we saw when we arrived at Rory McEwan’s house was Lord Snowdon. Thinking—in vain—that he might be able to pull a few strings, George rushed over to him. “Can you help us? The most awful thing’s just happened.” Meanwhile I went downstairs and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Princess Margaret was standing with my youngest sister Paula, who was in the process of handing the Queen’s sister a joint she had just lit. After everything we’d been through that evening, it was too much. I leaped at her and said, “Don’t!” When I told them what had happened, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon beat a hasty retreat.

  Sergeant Pilcher had been making a bit of a name for himself and, apart from wanting to rid the world of drugs, I think he quite enjoyed the celebrity. He had led the Redlands raid on Keith Richards and had also busted Donovan. He went on to arrest a whole range of musicians, including Brian Jones. A few months before he busted us, he raided John and Yoko’s flat. He turned up at midnight with five other policemen, one policewoman, two dog handlers, and two dogs—Yogi, once more, and Boo-Boo. The dogs arrived considerably later than the press, who had plainly been tipped off.

  John and Yoko were half naked in bed, and when they refused to open the door, Pilcher and his men tried to get in through the windows. John and Yoko were terrified, but John had been warned by a reporter on the Daily Mirror that Pilcher was planning to get him and had cleared everything out of the flat. He was confident there was nothing to find. But he had forgotten about a pile of his belongings that Anthony, his driver, had brought from Weybridge. Among them were a couple of things with some cannabis in them, which the sniffer dogs found. John and Yoko were charged with possession and willful obstruction of police officers, arrested, and taken to Marylebone police station.

  Three weeks after our bust we appeared in court and, as I recorded in my diary, “fined £500—the bastards.” The real problem about being convicted, for John, Yoko, and us, was that afterward it became difficult to get into America and New Zealand. The day after we were arrested, the U.S. embassy seized our passports and thereafter they had a code in them that told the immigration authorities we had a criminal record for drugs. The States took such offenses seriously and every time I wanted to go to America—and when Jenny moved to Los Angeles, it was quite often—I had to go through rigorous tests and examinations, explaining exactly why I wanted to go there and, most humiliating, I had to sit in the narcotics lounge with all the other drug offenders when I arrived in America.

  John’s conviction was equally damaging. A deportation order was served on him when he and Yoko were living in America, which took four years to resolve, and meant he couldn’t leave the country for fear of not being allowed back in; Yoko was convinced that that contributed to her losing custody of her daughter, Kyoko. But Sergeant Pilcher got his comeuppance. Not only did John immortalize him as “semolina pilchard” in “I Am the Walrus,” but years later, after he had retired to Australia, he was brought back and sentenced to four years in prison for corruption.

  One aspect of that whole episode still puzzles me. We were busted in the late afternoon—and discovered long afterward that Pilcher had chosen that day because he’d thought we would be at Paul and Linda’s wedding and the house would be empty. The home secretary, James Callaghan, had given him such a hard time for his handling of the John and Yoko bust that he had wanted to get us without attracting attention.

  Earlier that day I had been in London and something odd had happened. I was driving down Sydney Street on my way to Ossie’s shop, and at traffic lights a boy appeared at the side of the car and asked for a lift. I said, “No,” and drove off, parked my car, and went into Ossie’s. When I came back, someone had left a packet of cigarettes under my windscreen wiper with his name and number written on it. I took it off, threw it into the car, and drove home to Esher. When I got home I opened the cigarette packet and found a small lump of cannabis. I chucked it onto the bed and forgot about it. I suppose the police took it as evidence. I never knew whether the two incidents were connected, but it was weird.

&nb
sp; After a while, all of the Beatles had grasped that they were not businessmen. They had found some good artists—including James Taylor, Mary Hopkin, and Jackie Lomax—but Apple was hemorrhaging money and they needed someone to take charge before they went bankrupt. The office was like the best-stocked bar in town, and Scotch, VSOP brandy, vodka, wine, champagne, cigarettes, whatever anyone wanted was dispensed liberally to all, from the office juniors to friends, other musicians, and anyone who happened to drop in.

  Derek Taylor’s office was on the top floor and he always had interesting people with him—writers, artists, musicians—and they would entertain the Beatles like courtiers. Visitors didn’t stop at drinks: they walked out with typewriters, hi-fi speakers, television sets—anything that wasn’t screwed down. Security was nonexistent because it had never occurred to anyone that it might be necessary. As George said, “We’ve been giving away too much to the wrong people. This place has become a haven for dropouts. The trouble is, some of our best friends are dropouts.”

  Derek Taylor came from Manchester but, crucially, had been born in Liverpool. He had started as a journalist in the Manchester office of the Daily Express. In 1964 the paper had sent him to Paris to interview the Beatles and they all got on well. Brian had liked him too, and when George was briefly contracted to produce a weekly column for the Express, Derek did the writing and they became quite close. Brian then hired him as the Beatles’ press officer. Later he started his own PR company, went to Los Angeles for three years, and worked for the Beach Boys and Warner Bros., then came back to work for Apple in 1968. He, Joan, his wife, and six children moved to Ascot and they were great friends of ours. I remember being at their house watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, all of us doubled up with laughter. Derek knew the Monty Python team and I think it was he who first brought Eric Idle to our house.