Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  Much later in the evening, George appeared. He was morose, and his mood was not improved by walking into a party that had been going on for several hours, and most of the people there were out of it. He didn’t want to speak to anyone, just find me. He kept asking, “Where’s Pattie?” but no one seemed to know. He was about to leave when he spotted me in the garden with Eric. It was early morning, just getting light, and very misty. He came over to us and said, “What’s going on?”

  To my complete horror, Eric said, “I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.”

  I wanted to die.

  George was furious. He turned to me and said, “Well, are you going with him or coming with me?”

  And I said, “George, I’m coming home.”

  I followed him to his car, we got into it, and he sped off. When we got home I went to bed and he disappeared into his recording studio.

  The next time I saw Eric, he turned up unexpectedly at Friar Park. George was away—I don’t know whether Eric knew that in advance—and I was on my own. He came in and we had a glass of wine together. Then he said he wanted me to go away with him: he was desperately in love with me and couldn’t live without me. I had to leave George right now and be with him.

  “Eric, are you mad?” I asked. “I can’t possibly. I’m married to George.”

  And he said, “No, no, no. I love you. I have to have you in my life.”

  “No,” I said.

  At this point he produced a small packet from his pocket and held it out toward me. “Well, if you’re not going to come away with me, I’m going to take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Heroin.”

  “Don’t be so stupid.” I tried to grab it from him but he clenched his fist and hid it in his pocket.

  “If you’re not going to come with me,” he said, “that’s it. I’m off.” And he went. I hardly saw him for three years.

  He did as he had threatened. He took the heroin and quickly became addicted. And he took Alice Ormsby-Gore with him. He already did a lot of drugs, but they were the ones we all used—marijuana, uppers, downers, and cocaine—and he drank quite heavily too. His dealer had been insisting recently he buy heroin when he supplied him with cocaine and he had been using it infrequently for about a year, but not often enough to make much of a dent in his hoard. He had amassed a big pile and now set about using it. He and Alice retreated into Hurtwood Edge and pulled up the drawbridge. He didn’t leave the house, he didn’t see friends, he didn’t answer the door or the telephone, and the two of them sank into virtual oblivion.

  By this time Paula had gone. She had been with Eric in Miami when he was recording Layla and Other Love Songs, and he had invited her into the studio to hear him sing “Layla,” the last track to be laid down. The minute she heard it she realized it was about me. She had always had a nagging suspicion that he was only with her because she was the next best thing to me and I was unobtainable. Hearing “Layla” confirmed it. She packed her bags and took her broken heart home. She had been seriously in love with Eric, but he destroyed her pride, her self-esteem, and her confidence—which were already fragile. On top of that her big sister, traditionally the nurturer in the Boyd family, was the last person to whom she could turn for comfort.

  She went off to stay, first, with Bobby Whitlock, who played with Delaney & Bonnie and the Dominos, then bounced from one relationship to the next, one marriage to the next. Her first husband, Andy Johns, was a sound engineer who worked with the Rolling Stones (as did his brother Glyn); he and Paula had a son called William. Then she married David Philpot, a rug dealer, and had two daughters, Emma and Cassie, but that relationship didn’t last either. She embarked on a life of drink and drugs, which has been a constant source of worry for us all, but my mother in particular. Sadly, it destroyed not just her youth but her potential to develop her talent into a career.

  Eric disappeared into Hurtwood Edge. I tried to telephone but Alice always answered so I hung up. Instead I turned my attention to Friar Park and my husband. For a brief period the project united us, but the house was so enormous, and there were always so many people living in it, that we never had the intimacy we had enjoyed at Kinfauns. Most of the time, even when he was in the house, I didn’t know where he was. At meals, if he was there, too many other people were at the table for us to have any real conversation; and even though we shared a bed, he was often in his recording studio or meditating half the night.

  The house took about four and a half years to restore. It was a lot of work and George put a huge amount of money into it. He poured more into the garden. Friar Park lifted his spirits. He and Terry spent a lot of time in the garden, discussing what needed to be done and how they were going to do it. George’s attention to detail was second to none. At Kinfauns I had felt that, although it was George’s house, I had a say in it. I felt we had had an equal partnership. At Friar Park I didn’t. I felt it was George’s house and he would make the decisions. I did a lot of the furnishing but I never felt the house was truly “ours.”

  David Mlinaric helped with the interior decorating. I had met him with David Harlech and the Ormsby-Gores at their house in Wales. He had also done Eric’s house in Ewhurst. George and I knew and liked his work but we did quite a lot of the inside ourselves. I commissioned Kaffe Fassett, a friend of mine, to make a big tapestry of ancient musical instruments to hang in George’s recording studio; a young artist called Larry Smart did a trompe l’oeil at the end of an upstairs corridor. I bought lots of fabulous Tiffany lamps—there was one with dragonflies around the edge and another with tulips—and went to the Furniture Cave in Lots Road, Chelsea, to buy cheap sofas, then had them resprung and reupholstered. Terry bought a billiard table for forty pounds from a workingmen’s club in Chipping Norton that was closing down. But the real pleasure was going out to find serious pieces of art nouveau. We had lots of big rooms to furnish and I had a wonderful time hunting out the perfect pieces for each one.

  George and I had a beautiful bedroom—and as soon as it was finished we moved back into the main house. It was above the kitchen and the library and had huge windows that looked out over the lawns toward the lake. We knocked three rooms into one so we had a bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom—with a deep Victorian bath—that ran into one another. That bathroom was mine—George had his own at the top of a spiral staircase—and we bought the most beautiful art nouveau doors and hung them between the bedroom and my bathroom.

  I remember flying to Hollywood in a hurry because MGM was holding an auction and I wanted some art nouveau chandeliers. Our bed was designed by Louis Majorelle. It was mahogany, beautifully carved, and came from Lillian Nassau, a shop in New York that specialized in art nouveau. We also bought a huge cabinet that we put in the hall, and a table for the kitchen. The table was slightly paler than mahogany, oblong with rounded corners, carved flowers, and leaves on the legs.

  The original kitchen had been a big, big room at one end of the house with stone floors, huge sinks, and a butler’s pantry. For a long time we cooked and ate there, but we made a new one between the dining room and the library. I spent months finding wonderful old tiles for the walls—I went all over the country to reclamation companies and building renovation sites looking for them, and Jenny helped. Sometimes we chiseled them off walls ourselves. The kitchen, dining room, and library were south-facing rooms, with enormous French windows opening onto the garden. A graveled walk ran along the front of the house with a stone lip, then lawns, with stone steps that led down at either end of the house to a lower level and a round pond, then further down to the lakes.

  The library was a sweet little room—the smallest in the house—with wood paneling, a fireplace, and a really good feel. Terry was convinced there was a ghost in the house but I never sensed one and neither did George. The library was where I would sit if I was on my own. I loved books; I bought a lot about art and cookery. George wasn’t a great reader, except of Indian spiritual writings. He re
ad the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda again and again and could quote them at length. “Create and preserve the image of your choice,” he would say.

  He became increasingly obsessive about meditating and chanting. He would do it for hours, usually in the temple he had made in an octagonal room at the very top of the house with Persian rugs on the floor. It became his sanctuary. The other was the recording studio, which he had designed on the first floor; he converted the wine cellars into an echo chamber.

  I had great plans for the house: I imagined we would host wonderful charity parties with music and ballet for hundreds of people on balmy summer evenings and our friends would visit, but gradually I realized that George didn’t think like me. He just wanted to be in his recording studio, surrounded by other musicians and a few old and close friends and family.

  When he had first seen the house, he’d thought we might turn it into a spiritual institution, which would be our life’s work and payment for the privilege of owning such a glorious place. Then he had doubts about whether we should buy it at all. I wrote in my diary, “G got up with naughty spoiled depression. Now he doesn’t want Friar Park. A bad air of destruction around.”

  I don’t know whether it was to fulfill his spiritual dream or as a means of providing cheap labor, or a combination of the two, but shortly after we moved into the house George decided to invite three Hare Krishna families to live with us. The idea was that the men would do gardening and the women would look after us and cook. I wasn’t sure of this arrangement but George thought it would be wonderful: we could chant together and there would be good vibes in the house.

  He had become quite involved with the Hare Krishnas. On our trip to India with Ravi, we had been to Brindaban, which is full of Krishna people—Krishna had lived there four thousand years ago—and George was blown away there chanting with them. But I think these families came through Apple. They had turned up at the offices with all the other lost souls and wannabes, and George had invited them to Friar Park.

  To begin with, it was fine. They were a mixture of English and Americans, they were young, they had children, and they all dressed in orange. They lived on the top floor of the house and every morning at seven they would start cooking pungent-smelling food. Then they would take over the dining room for their chanting; I joined them sometimes, but I began to feel that what I considered my home had been taken over. And while they may have been spiritual and belonged to a spiritual group, at the end of the day they were just people. And as they were big fans of the Beatles and George, they were quite nice to me, particularly Syamasundasa, the head of this Hare Krishna chapter.

  What finally got to me was that they didn’t look after their children. One had a toddler who was left to wander around on his own until one day he fell into the pond. Luckily someone saw him and pulled him out, but he was in a bad way and I called the doctor, who raced round to revive him. Then it happened again. Once again, I called the doctor: he came but this time he said he was not prepared to turn out a third time: they had to take responsibility for their children, because he wasn’t going to do it for them.

  When I relayed what he had said, they were angry, and I was too. “You’ve got to look after your children,” I said. Their response was, “Krishna looks after them.”

  Well, that was it. I spoke to George about it, but he liked having them there—and what he wanted counted more than what I wanted.

  I felt more and more alienated, and my only allies were Terry, Chris O’Dell, and Jenny, but then Chris went back to London and in June 1970 Jenny married Mick Fleetwood.

  Eventually, in 1973, George bought the Krishnas a house in Hertfordshire. They renamed it Bhaktivedanta Manor, and it is still the UK headquarters for the International Society of Krishna Consciousness. They created a nice vegetable garden for us among other things, but I found them invasive, and I didn’t like their attitude to their children. But they left a lasting reminder. Syamasundara went to South India because he’d heard that a ruby mine was for sale and he was curious. And because the mine owner was so pleased with the sale, he sent Syamasundara back to England with a sack of ruby chips for George, with some larger bits and one or two nice pieces that George gave to me. One was an emerald surrounded by diamonds attached to an uncut ruby necklace. He also gave me a handful of rubies that I thought I would have made into necklaces to give to my nieces when they reached eighteen. He couldn’t think what to do with the rest, so he scattered them among the gravel on the path to the swimming pool.

  At one point we had eight gardeners working on the garden, not counting the Hare Krishnas; and Beth Chatto, the well-known garden designer, came in to advise us on planting and the oxygenating species we would need in the lakes. (I loved flowers and thought there was nothing nicer than filling the house with them, but George would never allow me to pick anything from the garden or the greenhouse: it had to stay as it was. He insisted I go into Henley to buy flowers from a florist.) Maurice, our gardener in Esher, became head gardener and lived in one of the lodges. George’s eldest brother Harry, his wife, and two children lived in the gatehouse, and the third was kept for guests if they preferred to sleep there rather than in the house. George respected Harry. He was a garage mechanic, but when George asked him to oversee the work being done in the grounds he was happy to come south. His brother’s fame didn’t faze him: he simply said, “He’s our George,” and ignored it.

  When the caves had been excavated we had a big party and my youngest brother, Boo, aged fourteen, was given the job of rolling the joints for everyone. Terry showed him how to do it and he sat there doling them out to our friends—people like Bobby Whitlock, Bobby Keys—a saxophonist who played with George and Eric—Harry Nilsson, Donovan, and the Stones. All sorts of people spent the evening cozying up to him and saying, “Hey, Boo, let’s have another.”

  Suddenly someone said they thought the police were coming up the drive. Boo, thinking he mustn’t let me get into any more trouble after the drugs bust in Esher, threw the entire huge bag of marijuana into the bushes. No police materialized, only our guests saying, “Hey, Boo, let’s have another.” To his acute embarrassment, he had to confess what he had done. Our friends spent the rest of the night scouring the bushes for marijuana.

  Boo loved George and he loved the kudos of having him as a brother-in-law. He also loved the crushed-velvet trousers that George gave him—David and Boo both seemed to fit into George’s trousers—which gave him an edge when it came to wooing the girls at the school across the road from my mother’s house. But he was not influenced by George as David was. David hero-worshiped George. One of his first memories is of listening to George and Mummy discussing religion, and when he was about thirteen he remembers George, some friends, and me coming to stay with my mother for the weekend at her house near Tiverton, and going on an outing across Bodmin Moor to climb Brown Willy, Cornwall’s highest hill. It was a long walk and everyone became rather bored, but while the rest of us went back to the car, George sat at the top of the hill, prayer wheel in hand, with David and told him about Babaji, a divine guru who was an incarnation of Krishna and had a perfect physical body that he could materialize and dematerialize at will.

  Not long afterward when David was visiting us in Henley, George gave him a copy of The Autobiography of a Yogi and urged him to read it. David devoured it. Next came a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. David was very affected by both books. He had been brought up a Christian, with weekly Sunday visits to church, but now he was drawn to Hinduism. George had a tough job: David had adopted him as spiritual mentor now, as well as male role model.

  By the age of seventeen David’s beliefs had changed again and he found comfort in the Chard Full Gospel Church. He went on to become a minister in the charismatic Bath City Church, then moved to a church in Hampstead. Finally, after decades of devoted service, he became a life coach.

  George bought my mother a house near Axminster in Devon. It was called Old Ruggs, and our friends went there al
most as much as we did. They went to see my mother and whoever else was at home. It was such a lovely house—gray stone with a thatched roof and big rooms with enormous flagstoned floors. But Mummy was convinced it was haunted and she only stayed for two or three years.

  We drove down to see her in a black Radford Mini that George had at that time, which my brothers were wild about—particularly after he had it sprayed in psychedelic colors. It came to a sorry end: George lent it to Eric, and Alice wrapped it around a lamppost.

  George in southern India in 1968 before going back to London to the launch of Apple and the stress of business. It was the last time I saw him looking so calm and relaxed.

  NINE

  Leaving George

  Cooking was my thing. Having given up modeling full-time, and with no children, I needed to find some role for myself, some raison d’être. Preparing wonderful meals for George and all the people who came to Friar Park became a passion. I was good at it and loved the whole process. I took cookbooks to bed with me and woke up in the morning knowing what new dish I wanted to create. Driving into Henley and buying all the ingredients was a pleasure. I loved finding new shops and buying the best of everything, finding new brands, new tastes, specialized cheeses, unusual vegetables, different-shaped pastas, exotic varieties of wild rice, fruit, nuts, beans, olive oils, vinegars, and spices. I loved bringing it all home and unpacking it, laying it out on the kitchen counter, and the business of washing and chopping. Then at last the cooking: I was insane about getting the sauces smooth, and I loved combining tastes and textures to see what worked, and creating delicious, nutritious, and exciting dishes. As we were vegetarian, it was a challenge to keep meals interesting, but I threw myself into it.