Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  Ringo realized that things were bad between George and me and offered me a job, which helped take my mind off my problems. He was playing Merlin the Magician in a musical comedy he made with Harry Nilsson called Son of Dracula. He asked me to take the stills shots. The film was produced by Apple Films and was so bad that it was hardly ever shown.

  At home the madness continued. Until one day George, Chris O’Dell, and I went to Ringo’s house, where George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo that he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself up into a terrible state and went about saying, “Nothing is real, nothing is real.” I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair red.

  On June 22 that year, my little brother Boo was married to Monique in Devon, and I went down for the wedding. We had both been invited but George didn’t come. Boo and I had been shopping in the King’s Road the previous week and I had bought him a lovely suit to wear on the big day and a shirt; the suit had to be altered so I said I’d bring everything with me. Boo was worried I’d forget the shirt and as soon as I arrived he asked if I’d remembered it. “Don’t worry, Boo,” I said, “it’s in the car.” Then he asked how the suit looked. I’d left it at Friar Park.

  It was about ten o’clock at night, in Bampton, Devon, and the wedding was at ten in the morning. Boo freaked. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get George to send it down in a helicopter.” We went into a public telephone box and rang George, who was furious. Alfie, his driver, brought it down overnight. To complete the fiasco, Paula and Andy were so drunk that they missed the ceremony.

  “Return to find lunacy inspired by Eric with Pete Townshend and Graham Bell [another musician],” is what I wrote in my diary about the following day. I arrived home in the evening to find them all locked in conversation. I made some soup, which we ate amid forced jollity, then Eric took me aside and pleaded with me once more to leave George. We were alone together for what felt like hours, and he was so passionate, desperate, and compelling that I felt swamped, lost, and confused. But now I had to make a choice. Would I go to Eric, who had written the most beautiful song for me, who had been to hell and back in the last three years because of me, and who had worn me down with his protestations of love? Or would I choose George, my husband, whom I had loved but who had been cold and indifferent toward me for so long that I could barely remember the last time he’d shown me any affection or told me he loved me?

  That night Eric left and went off almost immediately to America on tour with the band who had made 461 Ocean Boulevard. On July 3, I told George I was leaving him: It was late at night and I went into the studio and told him we were leading a ludicrous and hateful life, and I was going to Los Angeles to stay with Jenny and Mick. When he came to bed, I could feel his sadness as he lay beside me. “Don’t go,” he said.

  Half of me wanted to stay, and to believe him when he said he would make it better, but I was at the end of my tether. I must have weighed about eight stone—I was really, really thin. I said, “I’m going.”

  The next day, with a great sadness in my heart, I packed some things, said a tearful goodbye to Friar Park and our two Siamese cats, then flew to America.

  A week later Eric phoned and asked me to join him on tour. Eight days later I met him in Boston and he played the Boston Garden that night. By the end of the week I was writing, “At last I can feel the lost woman in me.”

  If only that could have remained true.

  Eric in the garden at Friar Park having a laugh with Terry Doran. I was taking lots of photos at that time because I had just made myself a darkroom in the house.

  TEN

  Eric

  What I had felt for George was a great, deep love. What Eric and I had was an intoxicating, overpowering passion. It was so intense, so urgent, so heady, I felt almost out of control. Having made the decision to leave my marriage, I knew I had to be with him, go everywhere with him, do everything he did, keep up with him in every way. Which, on that tour of America in 1974, meant drinking.

  I had never been allowed to go on tour with George so I had no idea what to expect, but standing at the side of the stage night after night, amplifiers booming, lights up, music exploding in my head and vibrating through every part of me, was an incredible sensation—deeply sexy. For the first time I understood what a high musicians get when they’re in front of a stadium full of fans, adrenaline pumping. And looking out at the thousands of screaming, waving, swooning people who had come to see Eric, my Eric, and seeing their reaction every time he played the opening chords of the song he had written for me was mind-blowing. They went mad. At the end when the band left the stage and everyone was calling for an encore, the audience would hold up candles or lighters, and watching twenty thousand flames sent shivers down my spine.

  When Eric was playing in Memphis and staying for a couple of days, Roger Forrester, who was looking after him, came into our hotel room and said, “Stevie Wonder wants to meet you.” Next we had a phone call. “Elvis wants you to go to the cinema with him.” Wow, I thought. What’s happening? First Stevie and now the King! Then there was a knock at the door. “Oh, hi, Stevie, come in.” We chatted to him, had a few drinks, and the next night we had a few drinks with Elvis, then went to see a film.

  I had met Elvis once before, with George, and he had looked a lot better then than he did this time. He was now well on the way to being bloated and was surrounded by henchmen, who stopped us as we made for the row Elvis was sitting in and told us to sit five rows back. Not so good. We found ourselves watching some boring old 1950s movie. At the end Elvis said, “Do you want to see another? We’re going to the theater next door.” It was a five-screen complex. We had visions of going from one to the next watching more boring fifties movies, so we made our excuses and left.

  In Los Angeles one night, standing with Jenny at the side of the stage, I spotted Peter Brown in the wings on the other side. It was wonderful to see him after so long, and at the party afterward we sat on a swing on the beach and talked all night. To me, Peter was a father figure—the only one I had left. It was such a relief to be able to speak freely to someone who knew George about what I had done. Peter understood the situation, and it wasn’t the sort of conversation I could have had with my mother. Peter knew about George’s infidelity, the chanting and everything else. He thought I was right to have left him. He said I had been too loyal and that George hadn’t deserved it. It was comforting to hear that, particularly from someone whose views I respected.

  The tour was grueling: twenty-six shows, from coast to coast, playing to huge audiences; some of the venues seated seventy thousand and they were all packed. We were living out of suitcases, checking in and out of hotels and airports, getting on and off buses, in and out of limos, and partying until well into the night after each gig. I found it exhausting. For Eric, after three years of addiction, it was shattering.

  He coped by drinking himself close to oblivion. He began in the morning and drank all day until four o’clock, when Roger made him stop temporarily. At that time Roger was working for Robert Stigwood, but eventually he became Eric’s manager. He reckoned that if he could stop Eric drinking at four, he had enough time to sober him up with showers and coffee before the show. After that he made sure Eric had only cold tea and 7UP to drink. Eric’s normal poison was Courvoisier and 7UP, which looked much the same as cold tea, and by that stage in the day he couldn’t tell the difference.

  The plan didn’t always work. There were times on that tour when Eric was so drunk onstage that he played lying flat on his back or staggering around wearing the weirdest combination of clothes that somehow looked stylish.

  One night, on a later tour in Australia, Roger got cross with Eric. I had found them with a couple of strippers in our hotel suite in Adelaide. A man on the street opposite had been touting for trade and Eric had shouted from the balcony, “Send two up here, will you?” I walked in to find Roger and him lying on the bed watching the strippers and went berserk: how could they ex
ploit women in that way? Eric said he couldn’t agree more, that it had been Roger’s idea, and Roger took the flak.

  At the next gig Roger exacted his revenge. Instead of mixing the 7UP with cold tea, he mixed it with Sarson’s malt vinegar. He could barely contain his delight as Eric took the first gulp onstage, uttered a strangled scream, and spat it over Alfie O’Leary, the roadie, who was standing in the wings with a bucket.

  Alfie was a great character. He came from the East End of London and his family were friends of the Kray twins. He was the size of a small mountain and his main job was to protect Eric on the road—he would flatten anyone who stood in Eric’s way—but he was sweet-natured and would have done anything for Eric. He looked after Hurtwood Edge when we were away once, and I’ll never forget coming home and asking Alfie to go to Cranleigh for some wine. “Sure,” he said, “what sort do you want?”

  “Some St.-Emilion would be good.”

  He went into the shop and asked for something called “thanks a million.”

  Back in England after the American tour, I rang George to say I was coming to Friar Park to collect my clothes, photographs, and various other things I had not taken with me when I had left three or four months before. George was there, and he was very sweet but looked so sad. I felt so guilty and wondered whether I had done the right thing. In that beautiful house, with the furniture, and the gardens, and the lakes, everything we had spent so much time making right, the memories flooded back of laughter, lovely parties, and the good times we’d had.

  As I walked in through the kitchen doors, which led out onto the lawns, my lilac-point Siamese appeared with a deep, guttural meow. “Hello, Rupert!” I said as he wound his sleek body around my legs.

  George couldn’t believe it: Rupert had disappeared the day I left and he hadn’t seen him since. As I picked him up and he lay in my arms, purring like a steam engine, I remembered that before I had gone I had cuddled Rupert, then taken him for a walk in the gardens and told him everything. I had explained how unhappy I was and that the time would come when I had to leave, but I promised I’d see him again. It was hard to say goodbye a second time.

  After the twenty-six-gig American marathon Eric needed a holiday so we went to Montego Bay in Jamaica to stay in a house called Goldeneye, which had belonged to Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond novels. It had just been bought by Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records. Subsequently he turned it into a luxury resort, but when we were there the house was full of original 1940s furniture in mint condition, and had its own beach. We had the most glorious time except…every morning the gardener would arrive with the biggest, fattest joint for Eric, then take him to the “tea shop.” In fact, it sold rum, and they would spend the day smoking dope and drinking. Eric would come back in the evening and pass out. Then the maid would ask, “Is it dinner for one again, madam?”

  Eric was clearly an addictive personality: he had moved from heroin to alcohol without blinking, as Meg Patterson had warned. I think he was basically shy and he used drink to enable him to be the personality, the life and soul of the party, that everyone had come to expect. And I tried to keep up, to be what he wanted me to be.

  I had never drunk so much in my life, but I assumed that that was what happened on the road and, always up for a party, I drank when the boys did. It seemed like jolly good fun, and in those first heady months I was so happy, carried away with the thrill, the excitement, the passion. But, ultimately, it wasn’t satisfying. I wasn’t a musician, so I didn’t feel I was contributing anything, and consequently I didn’t feel good about being out of it so much. I didn’t feel I had the right to be wrecked each day.

  Eric was a working-class boy, like George, but in other respects their backgrounds were different. George came from a stable, loving family and had no insecurities on that account—he loved his family, and couldn’t have been more welcoming or generous to my own. Eric’s mother, Pat, had given birth to him when she was sixteen after a wartime affair with a Canadian wing commander called Edward Fryer. He was stationed with the Canadian air force at Ripley in Surrey, which was where Pat lived, but he had a wife at home to whom he returned, leaving Pat to bring up their baby alone. Her mother and stepfather, Rose and Jack Clapp, supported her, but an illegitimate child was socially unacceptable in the 1940s, so when she met Frank McDonald, who became her husband and the father of three more children, she had to choose between marriage and her baby son. It was an impossible decision for any woman to make, but she married, then went to live in Germany and, later, Canada. Eric was left with his doting grandparents in the village of Ripley, where, to avoid stigma, he was brought up as their own child, believing that his mother was his elder sister. “Clapton” had been the name of Rose’s first husband, who had died.

  It was not until Eric was nine and Pat reappeared in his life that he learned who his real mother was. He was angry—and I think that anger was always inside him, coloring his relationships with women. He never trusted them and he couldn’t understand the concept of having a platonic friendship with a woman; if no sex was involved, he didn’t see the point. It made him intolerant of any friendships I had. He was insanely jealous of anyone who diverted my attention from him—which included my family. He also became obsessed by the need to find his father. Eventually a journalist in Toronto traced him, but by the time Eric had tracked him down, Edward Fryer was dead. However, the search had not been in vain because Eric discovered where his musical talent had come from: his father had played piano and saxophone.

  When Eric was a boy Rose and Jack lived in a two-bedroom house on the village green, and although they didn’t have much money, they showered him with expensive toys, which made the other local boys envious. It was their way of compensating him for having no mother. He had lots of friends—many of whom were still close when we were together—but as a child he was solitary. It was not until he was given a guitar at the age of thirteen that he discovered the perfect way to express himself.

  By the time I knew Eric his grandfather was dead, and Rose was living in a house that Eric had bought for her in Shamley Green, not far from Ripley and Hurtwood Edge. He was very close to her, which Pat had found difficult to come to terms with when she had returned to Ripley; there was some jealousy between the two women. I tried to encourage Eric to make friends with his mother. She was riddled with guilt at having abandoned him as a baby, and she was depressed: her son Brian, Eric’s half brother, was killed on a motorcycle in Toronto soon after Eric and I got together.

  I liked Pat but she couldn’t rewrite the past, and although Eric softened to some extent, I don’t think he ever entirely forgave her. Rose was the one he adored. He would visit her every week, sometimes twice, and she came to lunch with us most Sundays—also his aunt, uncle, and their children, and sometimes Pat too. As often as not, his old friends from Ripley were also there. He would meet them in the pub and they would come home for lunch. My role as cook had been reestablished and I was back to never knowing how many people I was catering for.

  Unlike George, Eric had no social graces when it came to mealtimes. He would only sit at the table until he had finished his food and then he would get up, regardless of whether others were still eating, and go to watch TV or play the guitar. For him eating was functional: it was not an opportunity to enjoy good food, wine, and conversation, not the high spot of the day as it was for me.

  With Eric I slid back into eating meat. When we were in America he and I went to Disneyland and I was so hungry I was driven to it. The Americans are such carnivores; there was nothing there for me to eat except iceberg lettuce. The only alternative was a hamburger the size of a plate. It was the first meat I had eaten in seven years, and after half of it I felt as though I’d eaten a brick.

  That Christmas we had turkey, and as we were sitting down to it at Hurtwood Edge, George burst in, uninvited. He was horrified to see me eating meat and berated me—but then we laughed and he had some Christmas pudding with us, and some wine, and it wa
sn’t awkward at all. I couldn’t believe how friendly he and Eric were toward each other.

  He had come over to see what we were up to. And the sad thing was, I realized later, he wasn’t doing anything on Christmas Day and must have been lonely. I know he was hurt and angry that I left him, but not long afterward he met Olivia Arias, and from then on things were easier all round.

  She worked for Dark Horse, his record label in Los Angeles, and I liked her, but I was hurt when they married in 1977 because George didn’t tell me. I said nothing to Eric but he knew instinctively that it had upset me and wrote a song about it—“Golden Ring,” on the Backless album. When I went back to Friar Park sometime later, when Dhani, their son, was about six, I was interested to see that the house was as I had left it. George asked how I felt, coming back to my old home. He hoped I wasn’t uncomfortable.

  Hurtwood Edge was in the most terrible state when I arrived, but it felt much more like real life than Friar Park had. It was beautiful: it had a square tower and a huge hall with a black-and-white marble floor, and big arched windows overlooking the terrace. It looked rather like an Italian villa, with a garden designed in the thirties by Gertrude Jekyll and views for forty miles. But everything was on a smaller scale than it was at Friar Park, and cozier: there were only six bedrooms, and some were dinky. For years the house had been a kind of commune—bats circled around our bedroom—but when I appeared, everyone, apart from the bats, was told to go. They left behind a complete mess but a lot of it was Eric’s: books, boxes, and records, all out of their covers, were strewn all over the place, with piles of paper, unopened letters, and unbanked checks. Eric, I discovered, was not a naturally tidy man and didn’t look after any of the lovely things he had. He had a large collection of leather shoes and a wardrobe of expensive clothes. The shoes were scuffed and dirty and the suits no better. The bedroom carpet was lamb’s wool, and filthy, and the bath was full of his sweaters and shirts—that was where he stored them. The kitchen was a health hazard: it was very 1950s with lino on the floor, lots of Formica, an old gas cooker, and a mouse that scuttled about whenever I came in. There was a lot of work to be done.