Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  After I left Eric, Will and I went out together. He was so easy to be with—there was no unpleasantness, no pressure, no black moods, just fun, and I felt safe with him—cherished for the first time in years. He helped me find a way out of the horrible murky world in which I’d been living, and encouraged me to see a therapist, which I might never have done without him.

  My sister Jenny had been in therapy for years and had tried to persuade me to see her therapist. She had had her own share of problems. The failure of her two marriages to Mick Fleetwood had been very painful. During that period she had been dependent on drink and cocaine and eventually she had hit rock bottom. Therapy had helped, so when she and the girls had been living at Willow Cottage and she had seen what was happening to me, she had decided I needed the same sort of help. I knew I did too, but I was too frightened to do anything about it—I was afraid that if I saw this psychotherapist I would be opening up Pandora’s box: the sadness might come out in such a torrent that I wouldn’t be able to stem the flow. I saw myself in that Edvard Munch painting The Scream.

  By the time I left Eric, Jenny had given up drink and cocaine for good and had met Ian Wallace, a drummer who had played with King Crimson, Snake, and Bob Dylan. They went to live in Los Angeles and were married in 1984.

  I took Will’s advice and went to see Karen, who was a dream analyst and astrologer as well as a psychotherapist. Lying on a sofa in her basement consulting room in Shepherd’s Bush was everything I had feared it would be. All I wanted to do when I got into that room was lie on the floor and scream, “Help me!” So I tried not to go. After one or two sessions I’d had enough, but she would always say firmly, “See you next week.” And over many years she did help me, but the other person who helped me was Will. He was so sweet and so amusing, but he knew how unhappy I was and didn’t force anything. He was a strong, protective shoulder to cry on, and I fell in love with him.

  Eric knew I was seeing Will and bombarded me with letters and phone calls, pleading with me to go back. His letters were always poetic and passionate, and had I been on my own, without Will and Karen, my resolve might have collapsed, but I stuck to my guns. In December he came back from a tour of Australia and Hong Kong with the most beautiful present for me: a little ruby heart framed with diamonds on a chain. I remembered how much I loved him, but I didn’t crack. I had to salvage some part of myself, and going back to Eric and the life we had shared was not the way to do it.

  Immediately after Christmas I went on holiday to Sri Lanka, with a girl I scarcely knew called Sara Levinson. I had met her once or twice, then bumped into her again in a coffee bar. She was a university lecturer, so had long holidays, and couldn’t decide whether to go to South America or Sri Lanka. I thought Sri Lanka sounded nice and she said, “Come with me!” So I did.

  Sri Lanka is the most beautiful island with fabulous beaches and mountains and huge statues of Buddha everywhere. I fell in love with it. The one person we both knew on the island was the publisher Anthony Blond, who had a house in Galle, the capital of the southern province, and he invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with him. We stayed in a Dutch colonial hotel called the New Oriental. One evening we were sitting in the bar, which was pretty deserted, wondering how we’d find Anthony’s house, when a jolly-looking group of people walked in and started talking about Anthony Blond. How extraordinary. We pointed out the coincidence and started to chat.

  Among the group there was a property developer called Rod Weston, who had bought some land in Sri Lanka and knew the island well, his girlfriend Francesca Findlater, a dentist called Roman Franks (who became my dentist), and Eric Fellner, a filmmaker who went on to produce Notting Hill and both Bridget Jones movies. They had been in Galle for Christmas and were also going to Anthony and Laura’s for New Year’s. The next day we met up again at lunch, then again at the Blonds’ for the party. Afterward Sara and I went off to explore.

  We had a guide to show us the island and one of the places he said we had to see was Sigaria. It’s a plateau more than two thousand meters high, with the ruins of a fortress on the top. Twelve hundred steps lead to the summit, which I climbed. I have never been so frightened in all my life. He said we had to set off at 5:30 a.m., and after about an hour we reached a little platform where you can look at the wonderful views and buy Coca-Cola. We stopped for a drink and then the guide said it was time to get going again. Sara said she didn’t want to go any further, but I thought we shouldn’t let the guide down so I followed him up alone.

  From this point the steps were hewn out of the rock and were very shallow. I take a size six shoe and only half of my foot could fit onto each step, and the only thing to stop me from falling thousands of feet to my death was a thin rope loosely strung between metal stays drilled into the rock. At one point I made the mistake of looking down and Sara was a tiny speck miles below. We were still only halfway up and I thought, I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t go up, I can’t go down, I want a helicopter to get me out of here.

  I burst into tears and called up to the guide, “I can’t move!”

  “Yes, you can. You can do it slowly.”

  “No, I can’t!” I felt paralyzed. Then I remembered that there were no rescue helicopters: this was Sri Lanka. I had to get my head around it.

  With tears rolling down my cheeks, I went on up and, about fifteen minutes later, reached the top. It was the most incredible relief—and also the most incredible sight. How on earth had men carried the materials to build an entire fortress up that mountain? But you could see why they had and why it was considered so holy. We were almost in the sky, and could see for miles. Fortunately there was another route down, which was much easier, or I might still be there today.

  After three glorious weeks I came back to London to find a letter from Eric. This one wasn’t passionate but it was just as potent as any of the poetic letters of the past. He had been snowed in at Hurtwood Edge and talked about the birds he found frozen to death each morning in the garden, even though he was putting out an extra bird tray. I immediately saw in my mind’s eye the glorious terraced garden with the huge views. Not much fun for Zulu the cat, he said. And he told me how much Trouper, whom I missed, loved catching snowballs that exploded on her nose—“and then she wonders where they’ve gone…silly dog.” There was news of Rose and Pat, and then he finished with the clincher:

  I miss you and need you so much, my love, and I ask you, please, please don’t take up with Will again the moment you get back, I think it would be the end of me…Please come home, where you belong. I promise I won’t let you down again.—I love you—

  El xxx

  Despite my holiday I was still feeling wobbly and confused about what I wanted and where I was going. There had been so many letters, phone calls, and red roses that I couldn’t just turn my back on him when he clearly loved and needed me so much. I was so mixed up and tearful that I didn’t know what to think.

  Then he rang and asked me to go to Israel with him. I agreed, and we flew to Eilat. The next day we took the car and drove for miles along the coast, with the beautiful pink hills of Jordan just visible across the Dead Sea. Eric stopped the car at one point and explained that he had been given a couple of tablets he wanted us to take. They were called Ecstasy and had been created, he said, for therapists to give to couples who needed help in resurrecting their lost intimacy. I found it difficult to believe that a pill could turn my head and heart around, but he was convinced they would help us—and me in particular. So we each swallowed our pill and Eric carried on driving until the Ecstasy kicked in and he couldn’t so any further. He asked if I could take over.

  A feeling of deliciousness came over me. I could do anything! After a while we stopped and went into the Dead Sea. It was so weird. The water was body temperature and deliciously viscous, the mineral content so high that it lifted our legs and spirits. We lay in the water and talked.

  Telling Will was almost the hardest bit. I know I hurt him very badly and I felt ver
y torn about doing what I did. He had been a true friend and helped me through some nightmarish times and I will never forget how kind and gentle he was to me during those months. I don’t know how, or if, I would have survived without him. But my bond with Eric was too strong for me to resist.

  Eric was so sick of airports and hotels that one year Roger tried to make a European tour more interesting for him by hiring the Orient Express.

  THIRTEEN

  Things Fall Apart

  Arriving back at Hurtwood Edge was emotional. Trouper was so thrilled to see me, bounding about and wagging her tail so much that her whole woolly body did a little dance. It was wonderful to see the animals again, the house and the garden, Arthur and his wife Iris. Eric showered me with presents and lots of Giorgio Armani clothes, but I didn’t know whether I had made the right decision: the drive for reconciliation was coming from him, but I had made the decision and had to live with it. I prayed that he wouldn’t go back to drinking too much and that our lives could be relatively normal. But that is what every wife, husband, child, or parent who lives with an alcoholic tells themselves. They are all living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and so was I. I went back to living with and for Eric.

  Still, too, I had no one to talk to apart from Karen, my therapist. I longed for an older woman, whose judgment I respected, to confide in. I needed her to let me talk through what was happening to me and how I was feeling, not to tell me I had to do this or that. I needed to be able to work it out for myself. But my mother wasn’t that person. To her, everything was black or white: I had to leave him immediately or stay and get on with it. No discussion, no weighing up the pros and cons. In my experience, life wasn’t like that.

  The honeymoon period was soon over. Two weeks after our return from Israel Eric went off on a UK and European tour, and I was alone again. The loneliness always set in several days before he left the house, when he would start to detach himself from me emotionally. It was a kind of subconscious letting go, essential for him, I am sure, but quite difficult for me—and difficult again when he returned. It always took him at least ten days to readjust to the normal routine. On tour he was used to having everything done for him: if he took a cigarette, someone was there to light it; if his glass was nearly empty, someone would fill it. I wasn’t prepared to do that. I was the harridan telling him to light his own cigarette, so he would be moody for a while, frustrated and at a loss to know what to do. On tour he had lots of mates around him. If he wanted to be on his own, he would say so or he would retreat to his hotel room, but if he wanted to play, he had his playmates. At home in the country there was just me and I was a poor substitute. Curiously, he would never pick up the phone and invite friends to come over. If someone phoned him or turned up at the house, that was fine, but he would never do the asking.

  While he was in Europe I had organized a party for his fortieth birthday in March. We hadn’t had many parties, mostly because Eric was so antisocial, but that night, surrounded by his friends and family—about seventy in all—he seemed happy. And the house came alive again. I found a marvelous magician and illusionist, called Simon Drake, who dressed as a guest and surprised everyone by suddenly going into his act.

  At about two in the morning the phone rang and it was Ringo and Barbara, his second wife, whom he had married after he and Maureen were divorced in 1981. They had crashed their car on the Robin Hood roundabout and been taken to hospital.

  Jeff Beck left the party for his house in Kent at about 3:00 a.m. Half an hour later there was a phone call from someone in Rowhook: “We’ve got one of your guests in our garden!” Jeff had missed a sharp bend in one of his hot rods. I said I’d go and pick him up, and arrived to find an old lady and her husband, both in dressing gowns and slippers, and Jeff, looking so rock ’n’ roll in his leather jacket with blood pouring from his face. “Thank you for coming to save me. Celia [Hammond, his girlfriend] is going to be so cross with me for crashing the car.” He was much more worried about her wrath than the gash on his nose and the gushing blood that the elderly couple were trying in vain to stanch. His nose bears the scar to this day.

  Almost immediately afterward Eric started a fifteen-week tour of America and Canada. He broke off in July, in the middle of it, to play in the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, organized by Bob Geldof in aid of the starving in Africa. I flew over and joined him, and I can’t remember a more electrifying day. There were ninety thousand people in the stadium and the energy levels, both on-and offstage, were beyond belief. The show ran simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and absolutely everyone was playing at one or the other location. We sat in the hotel in Philadelphia, with Mick Jagger and others popping in and out, and watched the Wembley concert on television. We saw Phil Collins play in London, then left for the show. By the time we arrived backstage, Phil was in Philadelphia ready to drum for Eric: he had taken the Concorde so he could play in both concerts. Eric played three songs—“White Room,” “She’s Waiting,” and “Layla.” He had been nervous but I’d never seen him play so brilliantly and never felt so proud to be his wife. It was the world’s biggest-ever rock festival. More than a billion and a half people watched it on TV and it raised £30 million—three times what Bob had expected.

  After our reconciliation Eric had lifted his ban on wives and girlfriends, but life on the road was pretty hard-core and my memories of touring before I walked out on him were not good. He would shout at me in restaurants and across hotel lobbies. Perhaps he thought he was being funny but no one else did: the roadies and the rest of the band would think, Poor Pattie. I never shouted back, which chipped another notch in my self-esteem. If a tour was particularly long, Eric would get bored and ask me to join him. He would be all over me when I arrived but gradually he would want to hang out with the band, see what girls were around, and tell me to go home so he could slide back into his old habits. I went to the odd concert—and wouldn’t have missed Live Aid for the world—but I didn’t want to trail around, watching women throw themselves at him.

  So in October I didn’t go with him to Milan, where he met an actress called Lori del Santo. Her name was unknown to me until one evening Eric suggested we go out for dinner. I thought, How romantic, and phoned the Italian restaurant in Cranleigh to make a reservation. We almost never went out to eat, so this was a real treat. Our first course had just arrived when Eric said he had something to tell me. I froze. I knew instinctively, in the way one does, that what he had to say was not good.

  He’d met a girl called Lori when he was in Italy. They had slept together a couple of times. He still loved me but he thought he was in love with her too.

  I don’t know how I got through the rest of dinner. This was what I had dreaded. I could put up with infidelity if it was purely physical. Girls like Conchita were no threat—they were not predatory—and girls plucked out of an audience after a gig were out of the door by morning. Sex was no threat to our marriage. Emotion was a different matter.

  But, as usual, I put it out of my mind, pretended it wasn’t happening. I didn’t know what else to do. How could I have allowed Eric to destroy the shred of self-esteem I was still clinging to?

  Life went on. Christmas approached, and I began my usual preparations. One day I was in the kitchen putting flowers into a vase when he came in and told me that he had had a phone call from Lori. She was pregnant. I felt panic, fear, uncertainty, terror of what might happen next. What would I do? How would I cope? “Can’t she get rid of it?” I asked.

  “No, she’s Catholic. And she doesn’t want to.”

  I felt sick. I couldn’t breathe properly and my heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t think. The stalks of the flowers I was arranging got shorter and shorter as I kept to my task. I heard myself, as if disembodied, saying it would be all right, we would still be together, but my brain was shutting down. I was in shock. I needed space to digest what I had heard. I had been trying to have a baby for twenty-one years, and this woman had slept with my husba
nd once or twice and was carrying his child. I thought my heart was about to disintegrate.

  Eric was clearly infatuated with Lori. He told me how beautiful she was and what wonderful photographs she took—another stab to the heart—and now she was expecting a baby too. I really think, in a funny way, he expected me to be pleased. When they met, he told me, she had professed not to know who he was. He was impressed by that—the oldest trick in the book, and he had fallen for it. They were introduced by his Italian promoter in a Milan nightclub, and Roger Forrester, who was there at the time, thought it was a setup. She was a friend of Adnan Khashoggi, the powerful, Saudi-born arms dealer and businessman. It was the final nail in the coffin of my marriage.

  Christmas was full of false jollity for family and friends, anger between us, and far too much alcohol. I told Eric I didn’t want to share a bed with him anymore—I didn’t sleep with him again—so he moved into the bedroom above the kitchen, which he didn’t like. He was angry that I wouldn’t sleep with him, but I think that that was mostly to do with fear. He was afraid he was going to lose me. I continued to see Karen—she and our sessions were all I had to hold on to.