Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  Eric visiting George and me at Friar Park in 1973. I was feeling very awkward because I knew exactly why Eric was there.

  EIGHT

  Friar Park

  George and I had been together for five years, married for three, and although we still loved each other dearly, life was not idyllic. Emotionally, 1969 was an up-and-down year, and one of the activities that kept me busy was house-hunting. George had decided he wanted to move. I was always very happy at Kinfauns—and certainly our happiest years together were in Esher—but he had had a bad experience with the school next door and wanted to get away.

  The school had wonderful parkland, which we were allowed to use, with beautiful old trees, lakes, and rhododendrons. George had gone there once on acid and sat under the trees with the sun shining. An old watchman had come up to him about ten minutes before closing time and said, “Get out and go away.” George said, “All I want to do is look at the trees,” but the man threw him out. George was upset, his feelings probably heightened by the drug, but his reaction was, “Okay, I’ll buy my own park.” He wanted a large garden and a house big enough for him to convert part of it into a recording studio.

  I had no budget: we never discussed or thought about money. If we needed something we’d ask Brian Epstein, then Peter Brown and, latterly, Allen Klein. I just had instructions to find the right house. And it took a long time. For about a year I drove around the countryside, looking at one grand house after another. Sometimes George came with me, but most of the time it was Terry Doran, his assistant and general factotum.

  Terry had been around as long as I had known the Beatles. He had been Brian’s friend originally, but had known the whole gang since Liverpool days. He had started off in the motor trade—immortalized in the song “She’s Leaving Home”—and came to join the rest of them in the early sixties. With his broad Scouse accent, he had phoned Bradshaw Webb, an upmarket car dealer in Cheyne Walk, and said, “If you treat your customers anything like you treat me, you’re fucked—you’ll never sell another car. I want to speak to the chairman.”

  The chairman sent him a first-class rail ticket and asked him to work for the company, so he did. He sold Brian a Maserati—Brian was color-blind and driving with him was terrifying because he used to stop at green traffic lights and go on red.

  Brian soon saw how lucrative the motor trade was and set Terry up in business with a showroom in an old cinema at Hounslow. It made good money: he sold everyone their Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Aston Martins and Minis—not only Brian and the Beatles but the Stones and just about every other musician you care to name. Brian liked it when he did cash deals. Afterward they would go off to the White Elephant with the money to gamble, and as they walked in, the manager would say, “Good evening, Mr. Epstein. How much would you like tonight? Forty thousand?” But Brian never put anything back into the business and eventually it went under.

  Then Terry went to work for John Lennon, who said he’d keep him as long as he made him laugh—but when John married Yoko and they moved into Ringo’s flat in Montague Square, the job came to a natural end and George asked Terry to work for us in Esher. I adored him. I called him Teddy, which had been his childhood nickname. He was a real hippie with hair like Bob Dylan’s, and he was so kind and funny, someone I could always talk to when George was being difficult or withdrawn. He was there all the time, and always good-natured with David and Boo when they came to stay. I remember racing out of the house screaming one day when they were in the swimming pool because I thought they were about to kill Terry, who couldn’t swim.

  We searched and searched, and finally we found the perfect house. It was called Plumpton Place, near Lewes, in East Sussex, and had been designed by Edwin Lutyens, with a garden by Gertrude Jekyll. You went in through a big gate with little gatehouses and crossed a bridge over a moat, which spilled into a lake, which spilled into another. A woman showed us around and in every room the wallpaper was decorated with birds. In the garden she had an aviary with about two hundred budgerigars, plus the odd robin and sparrow that had found its way in. She said she had started with just a few but they had bred over the years. We fell in love with the house and put in an offer—but she turned it down. She said she didn’t want rock ’n’ roll musicians buying her lovely house and sold it to the local doctor instead. He realized what a treasure he had bought and sold it to Michael Caine (who had once lived with my friend Edina Ronay), who sold it on to Jimmy Page, the heavy-metal guitarist who founded Led Zeppelin.

  It was back to the drawing board. Then one Sunday Perry Press, our estate agent, spotted a tiny ad in the Sunday Times, placed by some nuns, for a house called Friar Park, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. They wanted £125,000. I went to see it with Perry one day toward the end of 1969, when the clouds were low. As we went up the drive a magnificent Victorian Gothic pile appeared before us like something out of a fairy tale. Built of red brick and stone, it stood proudly on a hill and was the most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life.

  I raced back to Esher, told George and Terry about it, and we all went to see it the next day. When he saw it George flipped, and we put in an offer straightaway for £120,000. Eventually we bought it for £140,000—but this for a house on three floors with twenty-five bedrooms, a ballroom, a drawing room, a dining room, a library, a huge kitchen and hall, intricate carvings, formal gardens of ten or twelve acres, and a further twenty acres of land. There were two lodges and a gatehouse. It was certainly big enough for George to have his recording studio—and to lie under the trees in the sunshine without being moved on.

  The house had been built in 1898 on the site of an old monastery by Sir Frank Crisp, a wealthy London solicitor, microscopist, and horticulturalist. He must have been an amazing man—deeply eccentric with a strong sense of humor. There were towers, turrets, and pinnacles, large traceried windows, and gargoyles. The light switches were friars’ faces and you turned them on and off with the noses. All over the house puns about friars and little sayings, some in Latin, some in English, had been carved into the walls. Just outside the dining room there was a carving of a little boy eating, and above him the legend, “Eton boys a Harrowing sight.” Another, over the entrance to the walled garden, cautioned, “Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass; you know his faults so let his foibles pass.” How wise.

  When we bought it, Friar Park was owned by the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco, a Catholic teaching order that had run a school there for twenty-odd years—Jane Birkin had been a pupil. The school had closed and six nuns and a monk were living alone in the huge house. If they hadn’t sold it, the sisters said, they were planning to demolish it, which would have been a tragedy. It was very run-down but in its heyday it must have been spectacular—also the gardens, which Sir Frank had opened to the public. People used to come from far and wide to visit the Elizabethan garden, the Japanese garden, the vegetable garden, the lakes, the topiary, the maze, and the massive greenhouses where he grew peaches, nectarines, and apricots. It had taken him twenty years to create it and he delighted in showing it off. George was particularly tickled to discover that he’d had signs up saying, “Don’t keep off the grass.”

  We became passionate about restoring the house and garden to their former glory. We found lots of maps of the estate and booklets, printed in the 1920s and 1930s, describing how it had been, and we discovered there had been lakes in the garden. Recently they had been used as a dump for Henley’s rubbish. I suspect the nuns saw that as a way of making a bit of income. The wonderful gardens were overgrown and full of rusting iron and old bedsteads.

  Sir Frank had traveled extensively and brought back to his garden ideas from all over the world. He had built an Alpine garden with a miniature Matterhorn made from twenty thousand tons of granite he had brought from Yorkshire. He had made a network of underground caves leading from the house and in each one he had hung distorting mirrors, like the ones you see in fairgrounds, and as you walked on you came across another filled with litt
le red gnomes and fairies, and another with glass vines and bunches of grapes. It took months to excavate the lakes and patch them up, but when we filled them with water we discovered that stepping stones led from one to the other, and beneath the top lake there were more caves, which were only accessible by boat. You had to row along a very dark passage that led to an enormous replica of the Blue Grotto at Capri, blue from the blue glass he had laid in the garden above the top of the cave. If you rowed on you came to another cave full of stalagmites and stalactites, then on to a third where the walls were covered with glistening mica.

  Inside the house you went into a small vestibule with beautiful floor tiles, through two oak doors into a huge hall with a grand, sweeping staircase that had a lamp at the bottom in the shape of a magnificent copper eagle. Wooden pillars extended from the hall to a minstrels’ gallery above, and as you walked up the stairs you could see that the first pillar had, on three sides, carvings of a day in the life of a farmer. At 5:00 a.m., with a few rays of sunshine, he’s getting out of bed; at six, his wife’s stirring the porridge; at seven he’s off to work in the fields, and on, to the last scene of nighttime stars. The fireplace in the hall was twenty feet high with a painted panel on either side of it—one was the Tree of Life, the other the Tree of Destiny—and a beautiful stained-glass window reached to the second floor.

  In the dining room the walls were covered with embossed leather, depicting flowers, plants, and golden peacocks. At either end there was more stained glass, big windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones, and a huge fireplace between them. It was quite dark and I remember John and Yoko coming to see it. John said it was so dark he didn’t know how we could live in it. George suggested he take off the sunglasses he was wearing.

  The ballroom was pale blue, creamy white and gold, with cherubs on the ceilings. Somebody said that the nuns had plastered little skirts on the cherubs to make them decent.

  The whole house, though, was in a state of terrible disrepair. There was grass coming up through the dining room floor, the weather had damaged the wall coverings, and a lot of the lead had gone from the roofs. The wiring, plumbing, and central-heating systems needed to be replaced. In fact, the whole house had to be gutted from top to bottom, then have its beautiful, quirky features carefully restored.

  In March 1970 we moved in—George, Terry, and I—and immediately brought in an architect called David Platt, who oversaw the project, starting with the top floor. The house was basically un-inhabitable, but we stayed there for a few weeks while the Middle Lodge was done up, then moved into the lodge for a few months until the top floor of the main house was ready. Those first few weeks were so freezing—I don’t remember ever being so cold, not even with the aunts in Northamptonshire when I was a child. The only two rooms we could warm were the kitchen, a huge room with a lovely big scrubbed-pine table that seated twenty, and the hall, where there was a big fireplace. At night we used to pile up the fire in the hall with logs and sleep in front of it in sleeping bags, wrapped in hats, coats, scarves, gloves, anything we could find.

  One night as we were sitting in front of the fire we heard a noise upstairs. I had a torch so I strode up the stairs and, to my horror, saw a burglar climbing in through one of the first-floor windows. I was so indignant. I shouted, “Burglar!” and everybody scattered in different directions to look for him. Fortunately he ran away.

  It was in the big old kitchen one morning that I opened a letter addressed to Pattie Harrison, Friar Park. It had “express” and “urgent” written at top and bottom. Inside I found a small piece of paper. In small, immaculate writing, with no capital letters, I read: “as you have probably gathered, my own home affairs are a galloping farce, which is rapidly degenerating day by intolerable day…it seems like an eternity since i last saw or spoke to you!”

  It began, “dearest l.” He needed to ascertain my feelings: did I still love my husband or did I have another lover? More crucially, did I still have feeling in my heart for him? He had to know, and urged me to write—much safer—and tell him: “please do this, whatever it may say, my mind will be at rest…all my love e.”

  I read it quickly and assumed it was from some weirdo. I did get fan mail from time to time—when I wasn’t getting hate mail from George’s fans. When I showed it to George and others in the kitchen at the time, “Look at this really weird letter,” they laughed and dismissed it as I had.

  I thought no more about it until that evening the phone rang. It was Eric. “Did you get my letter?”

  “Letter?” I said. “I don’t think so. What letter are you talking about?” And then the penny dropped. “Was that from you?” I said. “I had no idea you felt that way.” It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written to me and it put our relationship on a different footing. It made the flirtation all the more exciting and dangerous. But as far as I was concerned it was just flirtation.

  Jenny had come to stay for a few days as soon as we moved into Friar Park—and suffered those freezing nights in the hall—also Chris O’Dell, a pretty blond American girl who had been working at Apple. She came home with George late one night. He had asked her to live with us for a bit to help with the house—and I confess I was miffed. I was convinced he was playing around big-time and that any girl who came into our lives was an immediate threat. Whatever nice noises they made to me, I knew that they wanted George. As a result, I had virtually no girlfriends. Jenny was the only one I knew I could trust. So when Chris walked in through the front door, looking like Goldie Hawn and chatting confidently with George and Kevin, the new roadie, I guessed he had brought her home because he intended to sleep with her.

  Chris and I got on well together; we cooked, went into Henley to do the shopping, and hung out together, and it was all good fun. I liked her, I wanted to be her friend, and she clearly wanted to be mine. That made me even more frightened: I knew that if George came on to her I would lose her. I decided to bite the bullet. “Chris,” I said, “I’d really like to be your friend, and—I’m sorry, I’ve never said this to anyone in my life before—you will only be my friend as long as you don’t let George have you.”

  “Okay,” she said, “that’s a deal. I’d rather be your friend.” And we still are friends. And, of course, George tried—she told me, so she was clearly someone I could trust.

  From time to time during the spring and summer of 1970 Eric and I saw each other. One day we went to see a film called Kes together, and afterward we were walking down Oxford Street when Eric said, “Do you like me, then, or are you seeing me because I’m famous?”

  “Oh, I thought you were seeing me because I’m famous,” I said. And we both laughed. He always found it difficult to talk about his feelings—instead he poured them into his music and writing.

  Once we met under the clock on the cobbled Guildford high street. He had just come back from Miami and had a pair of bell-bottom trousers for me—hence the track “Bell Bottom Blues.” He was tanned, gorgeous, and irresistible—but I resisted. On another occasion I drove to Ewhurst and we met in the Hurt Woods. He was wearing a wonderful wolf coat and looked very sexy, as he always did. We didn’t go to the house, probably because someone would have been there. A lot of people lived at Hurtwood Edge: the Dominos were there—they were Eric’s current band—also Paula, Alice Ormsby-Gore, and various musicians or friends who needed a roof.

  Eric had started going out with Alice, Lord Harlech’s youngest daughter, at about the same time as he’d started going out with Paula. The two girls were the same age and they were friends; how he juggled them I don’t know. Another girl, a model called Cathy, was around at the same time. He met Alice through David Mlinaric, the interior designer, and took her with him to Hurtwood Edge when he first went to view the place. She was only sixteen, which I think Eric thought a bit young, but he was seriously attracted and a year or so later she moved in with him. Like Paula, I think she was very much in love with him. The convent girl in me found the situation uncomfortable but at the
same time strangely exciting.

  Another of our secret meetings took place in London one afternoon. The Dominos had finally left Hurtwood Edge and moved into a flat in South Kensington, which that afternoon was empty. Eric took me there because he wanted me to listen to a song he had written. He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume, and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard.

  It was “Layla”—about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable. He had read the story in a book he had been given by a mutual friend, Ian Dallas. Ian had given me a copy too. It was called The Story of Layla and Majnun by the Persian writer Nizami. Eric had identified with Majnun, and was determined that I should know how he felt. He had written the song at home and recorded it in Miami with the Dominos.

  He played it to me two or three times, each time watching my face intently for my reaction. My first thought was, Oh, God, everyone’s going to know who this is. I felt uncomfortable that he was pushing me in a direction I wasn’t certain I wanted to go. But the song got the better of me, with the realization that I had inspired such passion and such creativity. I could resist no longer.

  That evening I was going to the theater with Peter Brown to see Oh! Calcutta!, the Kenneth Tynan revue that had caused such a stir. It was the first time full-frontal nudity had been seen on the British stage. By this time Peter had left Apple and was working for Robert Stigwood in America, so I hadn’t seen him for a while. Afterward we were going to a party that Robert was holding at his house in Stan-more, North London. George didn’t want to go to the theater and said he wasn’t interested in the party either, so Peter was my date.

  After the interval I came back to my seat to find Eric in the next seat. He had spotted me in the theater and persuaded a stranger to swap places with him. Afterward, he drove himself to the party and I went with Peter, but we were soon together. It was a great party, and I felt elated by what had happened earlier in the day, but also deeply guilty.