Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  After a couple of years, I reshaped the kitchen, and put in all new kitchen appliances, but I had to get permission from Roger Forrester before I could spend any more money on the house. And he blocked my plans for the beautiful, romantic garden, decked out immaculately with rhododendrons, redwood trees, and rare plant species. There was a fantastic wisteria walk supported by round brick pillars, the color ranging from deep purple at one end through paler shades to white at the other. Another walk was lined with azaleas that came into bloom in stages so that throughout the spring the whole garden smelled heavenly. I wanted to bring in a designer and a few extra gardeners to change it a bit because it hadn’t been very well looked after, but Roger said no.

  There was just one gardener, Arthur, whose wife worked in the house. They were from the Isle of Wight, lived in a flat above the garage at the top of the drive, and adored Eric. When I arrived I said, “Arthur, these are the vegetables I would like to grow.” He smiled and said, “Yes,” then went on growing what he’d always grown. I bought some chickens, and one day I noticed a broken egg outside the hen run. “Arthur, how could that have happened?”

  “Rats. They work in pairs,” he said. “They go underneath the wire netting, into the compound, into the henhouse, and take an egg. Then one rat lies on his back with the egg between his paws and the other pulls him under the netting by his tail. They tuck in when they get to the other side.”

  Eric loved animals, and when he was away, Arthur was always there to look after them. When I first arrived Eric had a huge ginger cat called Fast Eddy and a Weimaraner called Willow. For one birthday he bought me an Airedale puppy, which I called Trouper because she was one; she had the most hilarious sense of humor and always looked as though she was laughing. She would race about the garden, then suddenly put out her front paws and raise on her haunches on straight woolly legs. She was gorgeous, like a teddy bear. One Christmas I bought Eric a donkey called Matthew, who lived in the field.

  Eric wouldn’t move unless Roger approved—theirs was another father-son relationship, like the Beatles and Brian Epstein. All of those musicians were like little boys in long trousers. Eric was charming to everyone and agreed to everything. He never had to display negativity because if he didn’t like a situation he’d got himself into, Roger would deal with it. If someone asked him to play on their record, he would say, “Yes,” then ring Roger and say, “Get me out of it.”

  Eric never did anything for himself. He didn’t even take his own driving test: he got someone who looked vaguely like him to sit in for him. He never had to fill his cars with petrol, pay taxes on them, or insure them. Someone else did it. He never paid any bills: they all went into a drawer and someone from the office would collect them. One day I found a check for five thousand pounds in a drawer and said, “I’m going up to London. Shall I take the check up to the office so they can bank it for you?”

  “No! Don’t touch it,” Eric said. I asked why not, and he told me, “I’ve got the check. That’s good enough.”

  On another occasion someone sent Roger a large check, and when it didn’t arrive, he discovered it had been dispatched to Hurtwood Edge. He asked Eric if he had seen it. “I’ve had it for ages,” he said. “I put it in the drawer.”

  “Why?” asked Roger.

  “I’m not giving it to the bloody bank,” said Eric indignantly. He had no idea about money or banking or anything—not even royalties. He just wasn’t interested.

  Every week Roger’s bookkeeper, Gladys, would give Eric his allowance of two hundred pounds. Eric called it his “wages,” pocket money for cigarettes and drinks. Restaurant bills went straight to the office and we had accounts at various shops, like the wine merchant’s and the butcher’s. Eric also had a checkbook but Roger wouldn’t allow him a joint account. If he wanted to buy anything like cars or jewelry, he had to ask Roger and Roger would fix it. His job was to keep Eric happy, but that didn’t extend to me. His loyalty was to Eric.

  I had little money of my own. I didn’t feel I had the right to ask George for any, and Eric was adamant that I shouldn’t take it even if it was offered. He wanted to provide for me and keep me in the manner to which I had become accustomed, but that didn’t translate to my bank account. With George I had always had a Harrods account. The first Christmas after I left him I went to Harrods, as usual, picked out lots of presents for my family and friends, then went to pay and discovered that the account had been closed. And I didn’t have enough money in my bank to pay for it all. I rang George, told him what had happened and how embarrassed I had been, and he sent me a check for five thousand pounds.

  Eric told me to tear it up—an instruction I ignored. It was a matter of pride to him—and I guess he must have felt a bit guilty for having taken me from George, who had always been such a good friend. He always said that George put up no fight, and he was right. With hindsight I think George might have behaved as he did because it was his friend, someone he respected and loved, who was in love with his wife. He was such a selfless, generous person that he let it happen. In the end, when the divorce was negotiated in 1977 on the grounds that we had lived apart for more than two years, my lawyers insisted I must have some sort of settlement and I was persuaded to take £120,000. Apart from that I kept the red Mercedes George had given me, but Eric hated me having it so I sold it and he bought me a black AMG Mercedes, which I had for years.

  Alcohol was an everyday feature of our lives. When Eric had been drinking so much on tour, I had put it down to the pressure. When he was passing out every night at Goldeneye, I put it down to the bad influence of the gardener. At home I ran out of excuses. The Ewhurst village pub, the Windmill, was at the end of the drive, about three minutes’ walk away, and they were brilliant about protecting Eric. If anyone asked where he lived, they would direct them miles away.

  Eric loved the pub. When he was at home we would go there most lunchtimes. I had never gone to pubs or drunk beer until I met Eric, but I went to keep him company and then he would invite all these people who happened to be there back to the house afterward and carry on drinking all afternoon. At first I thought it was quite fun—but after a while, the novelty wore off.

  In April 1975 Eric was advised to leave the country for a year for tax reasons, so we went to the house of my friend Sam Clapp, on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. It was where I had taken Paula to wean her off heroin, but this time we stayed in the big house, which overlooked the beach, where the sand was as soft as snow. It was everything the island’s name implied. We took with us a nineteen-year-old called Simon Holland, whose parents ran the Windmill, to act as a kind of gofer. He would drive the boat to the mainland, Nassau, to collect visitors, help me with the shopping, and do odd jobs.

  We had a lot of visitors, including Ronnie and Krissie Wood, and Mick Jagger. Krissie was pregnant, and one day Eric and Ronnie went to Miami to record, leaving the three of us at the house. When I came down in the morning to make tea, Krissie said “Shh.” I crept into the kitchen and there was Mick, up to his elbows in soap suds, washing the dishes from the night before. He was incredibly fit and said we must go for a jog along the beach. So we set off, and as we ran, we heard a chorus of “Oh, look, that’s Mick Jagger!” as we sped past the sunbathers, trying to catch up with him.

  One morning I woke with a searing pain in my tummy. I could barely stand up so Simon took me across to Nassau in the boat, dropped me off, and arranged to meet me later. As it was Saturday, most doctors’ offices were closed and I was shunted around for hours before I finally saw someone at St. Margaret’s Hospital. By that time I was doubled up in agony but I had also been ravenously hungry and bought myself a slice of pizza. The doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis. He wanted to operate immediately because he was afraid my appendix might burst: Had I had anything to eat? I had to own up to the pizza so the procedure had to wait, but eventually I had it done, and all was well. The next day Eric came to see me with Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish author of The Painted Bird and Being There�
��he was also one of the many locals with whom we had become friends.

  Another local and neighbor was the Irish screenwriter Kevin McClory. He invited Eric to appear in a show he was producing in County Kildare about a circus, starring John Huston and Shirley MacLaine. Eric played the part of a clown and John Huston the ring master. We were put up in Baberstown Castle Hotel, where we slept in a room in the tower that was supposedly haunted. In the middle of the night I awoke to the sound of water running of its own accord in the basin—and the same night Roger Forrester’s battery-operated watch inexplicably stopped.

  A few years later Eric and Roger bought the hotel and we often visited with friends, and inevitably settled down to some serious drinking. During evenings in the bar, silence would be called and whoever could sing or play an instrument would be invited to perform. It was quite wonderful to be in a silent bar crowded with drinkers listening to a farmer’s wife singing “Danny Boy” or “If I Were a Blackbird.” Marianne Faithfull sang one night when she popped in for the evening.

  Life on the island was idyllic—every day was another perfect day in paradise, and at night we would walk on the beach, our feet kicking up tiny phosphorescent fish that sparkled in the moonlight. I could have stayed forever, but Eric hadn’t wanted to go in the first place and, with his creative personality, developed island fever. He was drinking heavily and wrote a song during that time called “Black Summer Rain.” I couldn’t understand how he had come up with such a dark title in such an idyllic place.

  A tour of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan came as a welcome diversion for him. While he flew to New York to pick up the band, then on to New Zealand, via Anchorage, I flew to London, Anchorage, New Zealand. By coincidence both flights landed in Anchorage at the same time. I spotted Eric in the transit lounge, crept up behind him, put my hands over his eyes, and said, “Guess who?” We wanted to fly the rest of the way together, but the airlines wouldn’t let us. However, worse was to come. When my plane touched down in New Zealand, the air stewardess told me I wouldn’t be allowed to get off it: the cannabis conviction had followed me to the other end of the earth. Eric was furious when he discovered they weren’t letting me into the country; he ranted and raved at the authorities, but there was nothing anyone could do. I had no choice but to fly on to Australia, where I didn’t know a soul, and wait for him and the band to arrive three days later.

  Roger took care of everything, as managers do so brilliantly. He knew some disc jockeys at a radio station in Sydney with whom Eric was to do an interview and rang to ask them to meet me at the airport and look after me. They took me to the Sebel House Hotel on the waterfront—deeply luxurious—and we went to a wonderful Japanese restaurant. They were such fun and brought lots of friends with them. The next day they invited me to join them on their weekly Saturday pub crawl, but I declined and instead spent the day at the zoo, with koala bears and wallabies.

  I loved Sydney. It seemed ahead of the game. Eric and I met a group of arty people there who were doing wonderful things photographically, film-wise and with cloth. There were dozens of designers I had never heard of who were big in Australia, producing all sorts of exciting things that weren’t available in England or America. But the other Australian cities seemed still to be set in another era and none awoke in me any affection.

  In Japan we were taken care of by a promoter called Mr. Udo. He took us to wonderful Japanese restaurants, where the food was amazing. To me, Japan smelled of soy sauce, and I loved sashimi and sushi, and seeing the doll-like girls and women who came into the hotel for tea. They were beautifully made up, with white-powdered faces, immaculate hair, and kimonos, as if they were in the Kabuki theater, and they walked with little shuffling footsteps. In those days you saw few women in jeans, and they were treated as second-class citizens: they would follow their men, faces expressionless, several paces behind.

  Back at Hurtwood Edge, with the tour over and the tax year complete, we settled down to normal life—although it was far from normal. Eric only came alive when he was in front of an audience, feeding off the energy and excitement of the crowd. That was where and how he communicated. He once said to me that he saved all his emotion for the stage. When he was at home he was restless and uneasy.

  In some respects he was like George. The guitar was never far from his side and he would pick it up to play chords and riffs, which I loved hearing while I was cooking or reading, often in front of the television, which was constantly turned on. He had none of George’s anxiety about the radio and other people’s music, so the house was full of it; we even had a jukebox.

  The house seemed made for parties—it had been the setting for great ones in the 1930s—and when there were just the two of us I always felt it had a melancholy air. In the early days Eric and I threw some fantastic parties at Hurtwood Edge, but he wasn’t good with people in the way that George had been. He was only comfortable with friends at the pub, and musicians, who mostly ended up in the pub, and Ripleyites, the boys he had grown up with, people like Guy Pullen, Sid, Scratcher, Pat, and Frank. We didn’t go out much further than the Windmill, or the pub in Ripley, and I had to think twice before I invited my family to visit.

  My mother didn’t like Eric. She hadn’t approved of him when he was going out with Paula and wasn’t much happier when I was with him. I think she found him too raw. He didn’t have George’s charm and was lacking in social graces. He didn’t do polite small talk. She had adored George because he had adored her and been so sweet with my brothers and sisters. I usually waited until Eric was away before I saw them. He didn’t even like me talking to them or to friends on the telephone. He wanted me to himself.

  Sometimes—at Christmas, for instance—he had no choice and my family came to see us. He liked Colin because he became a drinking partner. Colin had never found his niche in life—I think he rather envied the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle that Jenny and I were living, but Mummy had wanted him to get a proper job so he worked in publishing, at Hamish Hamilton, for a while, then as a photographer. He traveled around Europe for months on end, and ended up divorced, with a grown-up son and two young daughters, selling locally produced foods in Norfolk. Boo and Eric also got on reasonably well, but David had so loved George that I think he would have found it hard to warm to anyone who replaced him. Jenny was the one by whom Eric probably felt most threatened because I was closer to her than I was to the others. She was quite frightened of him, didn’t like the way he played mind games. He reminded her of our stepfather but, like me, she didn’t know how to handle situations in which she felt uncomfortable.

  One night, unusually, Eric and I were going out, but I couldn’t decide what to wear. I was taking a very long time to do my makeup and hair, putting on one dress, then another and another, throwing them all into a pile on the floor. Poor Eric had been ready for hours and was waiting patiently. He was so sweet—at least, in the early days. The worst he would say if I annoyed him was, “You’re a silly clown.”

  While he waited for me he was in the sitting room, fiddling with his guitar. He went through phases in listening to music and at that time he liked a country singer called Don Williams. We talked about how beautifully simple his lyrics were, each song telling a story about everyday happenings. Eric had been thinking of writing something similar and had already worked on some music for it. Suddenly, as I was flinging dresses on and off, inspiration struck. When I finally got downstairs and asked the inevitable question, “Do I look all right?” he played me what he’d written:

  It’s late in the evening; she’s wondering what clothes to wear.

  She puts on her makeup and brushes her long blonde hair.

  And then she asks me, “Do I look all right?”

  And I say, “Yes, you look wonderful tonight.”

  It was such a simple song but so beautiful and for years it tore at me. To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such music was so flattering. Yet I came to believe that although something about me might have made
them put pen to paper, it was really all about them. And I think the depressions they suffered were to do with the creative process—the need that all creative people have to delve deep inside themselves to bring to the surface whatever they are creating. “Wonderful Tonight” was the most poignant reminder of all that was good in our relationship, and when things went wrong it was torture to hear it.

  I had no idea until I met Eric that I was capable of experiencing such deep feelings for another human being; before, I had always held back. I was frightened of strong emotion and intensity, and in a way, I was right to be. There is always a price to be paid for excess—a yang to every yin, a negative to every positive. Jenny once asked me whether I would have swapped the passion of my relationship with Eric for a more gentle kind of love. The answer was no. It was like hitching a ride on a shooting star: a fantastic experience that caused immense pain, but I’m glad I had it. And I know I will never have those feelings again. That sort of experience doesn’t come twice. But because he inspired such passion in me I was willing to be with him and forgive his bad behavior, which I should not have done.

  As the drink took hold, Eric began to live his life in five-hour cycles: his body needed alcohol every five hours, so there was no set pattern to life, or his moods. He could be loving and caring or angry and withdrawn, and if I went out shopping in Cranleigh or to London perhaps, I was never away for more than five hours, and I would never know what mood I would find him in when I came back into the house. I might expect the worst and find him sweet and sober on my return, which would leave me racked with guilt for having had such nasty thoughts, or I would come home expecting sobriety and find him comatose on the sofa. He ate sporadically. I would make him something delicious, like the Indian food he loved, and take it to him where he was slouched in front of the TV and he would say he wasn’t hungry. He came to bed every night with a pint glass of brandy and lemonade, at whatever time he found his way upstairs—sometimes he would undress first, sometimes not. I used to dread the sound of his lurching footsteps on the wooden stairs, not knowing what to expect next. And when he woke in the morning he would finish what was left, then pour himself a fresh glass. He was drinking about two bottles of brandy a day, plus however many pints of beer he had in the pub.