Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  I saw a lot of Rod and Francesca, and often she and I had lunch together. Fran and Rod had been together for ten years and were going to get married in the south of France but their plans went awry. They had so many arguments about where they would hold the ceremony that eventually their relationship petered out. Curiously, Rod had bought her an engagement ring in Sri Lanka on the holiday when they’d met me, and had intended to give it to her as a surprise at Christmas. He had wrapped it up and put it under the tree in their flat. On Christmas Eve, they were burgled and all the presents, including the ring, were stolen.

  After they broke up Rod had a series of disastrous affairs, and would chat through each one with me. When Phil Collins invited me to the premiere of Buster, his first big movie, I didn’t want to go on my own so I invited Rod. I enjoyed his company—he was entertaining and comfortable to be with—and he was very good-looking. I thought he would be a perfect walker, and he was. He came with me to many other parties, and afterward I would go back to my flat. Occasionally he came too, and I’d go to bed and he’d be asleep on the sofa in the morning. Then one night, after about a year of this, when we got back to my flat I said, “Come on, come to bed.” Almost the next day he started to move his clothes in; first his jeans, then the jackets and cowboy boots. I should have said something—I wasn’t expecting him to move in at quite the speed he did—but I didn’t because it was nice to have him around. And it was healing. With Rod in my life I felt better about myself. He’s younger than I am, and when he was growing up, Julie Christie and I had been his idols. He was so loving, supportive, and encouraging. I felt as though I was slowly crawling out of a dark hole where I had been for a very long time, and although it took time for my eyes to adjust to the light, it was wonderful to feel the warming rays of the sun on my back.

  Rod was quite different from either George or Eric. His background and education were much closer to mine. His father was a lawyer, he had been born in Wimbledon and had gone to King’s College, Wimbledon, then to art school in Kingston, where he had studied graphics—the same course Eric had taken some years before. Because of that I thought he and Eric might have something in common, but they couldn’t stand each other. Then Rod had fallen into modeling in much the same way as I had. He had been going out with a photographer’s assistant who had suggested he should see an agent. Modeling had taken him all over the world—he became the Brutus boy and the Wrangler boy—and he had made a lot of money. Then he had bought and sold property.

  What I loved most about him was his innate sense of fun. He wasn’t obsessive about chanting, fishing, or anything else—in fact, he didn’t seem to take anything very seriously. He loved life, parties, and people as much as I did. Socially engaged with all sorts of people he was charming to everyone. He made me happy, and he encouraged me to keep up with friends and family—unlike Eric. Rod was good for me: he helped me rediscover my self-esteem.

  But curiously, for about three or four years after he and I started seeing each other, I dreamed about going back to Eric. The main problem was always how I would tell Rod. It was bizarre to have the same dream in such detail like that over so many years—I would have loved to know what it meant, but I wasn’t seeing Karen anymore. She had helped me over the worst and I was on an even keel now that Rod and I were together.

  For the first couple of months that we were together we kept quiet about it, and then we went to Kenya for Christmas, ostensibly as just good friends. I had been back just once since my childhood, with Jenny in the early seventies. We had stayed in the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, where we had met up with Ronnie Wood and gone down to Mombasa, where I had swum in the sea for the first time—my grandmother had taken me there on holiday. The sand was so soft it made the same crunchy noise that virgin snow makes when you walk in it, a kind of silky squeak. On that first trip, the plan had been to find the places where we’d lived as children, but we had such a wonderful time on the beach and driving through game reserves that we never did.

  On this trip Rod and I stayed with John Hurt’s first wife, Donna, who has a lovely ranch near Nanyuki that she and John built in the foothills of Mount Kenya. John had gone to Kenya to make the movie White Mischief. He had fallen in love with the country and bought a piece of land. It has the most stunning views of the mountain, which is almost always snowcapped. Donna is a bit of a wild girl and there’s nothing quite like going on safari with her: she always seems to know exactly where the animals are and has no fear. I was driving with her once when she said, quietly but firmly, “Don’t get out just yet. Look to your left.” Above me, camouflaged by leaves, a leopard was snoozing on a branch. If he’d felt peckish, it would have been the end of me.

  One day we went to Ol Jogi estate to visit a friend of Donna’s who trained animals for their owners. Everyone was sitting on the veranda drinking beer and I was standing in the garden by the steps that led up to the house when the swing door flew open and out came a cheetah, which padded down the steps on her way to the garden. Someone said I could touch her but must on no account run. I stroked her, and her purr was a hundred times louder than Polo’s.

  Francesca was fine about Rod and me being together, and she and I continue to be the best of friends. The only difference was that before when we’d had lunch together she had moaned about Rod’s shortcomings; now I did the moaning. One year she and I went off to South Africa for a week. We wanted to see Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated for so many years. He’s one of my heroes. At home I have a copy of his inaugural speech as the first black president of South Africa. We were taken around the prison by an ex-con who had been locked up with him and vividly described their life there. In the dining room there was an old board with three columns: blacks, coloreds, whites. Each column specified the amount of rice a category of prisoner would have each day. The whites got most, and the blacks least. The coloreds, I discovered, included anyone with Indian or mixed blood. It was a bleak island, with strong, bad vibrations and an odor I can only describe as being one of suffering. I found it depressing. Just twelve kilometers across the water, which was a dense, dark emerald green, Cape Town twinkled in the sunshine, guarded by Table Mountain, its flat top swathed in cloud.

  One day we took a tourist bus to a black township where the poverty was staggering, but I took some great photographs. Our guide told us we were invited for a beer in one of the houses. We followed him into a dark room where, in the far right-hand corner, a woman was stirring a huge pot of something that was bubbling and foaming. Men sat around the edges in a neat line. We were told to sit too. Then she poured some of the noxious-looking liquid into a metal bucket about ten inches in diameter. It was passed from man to man and each took a sip. I thought Fran and I were going to be ill but we couldn’t refuse because we were guests. I have seldom put anything more disgusting into my mouth. We said thank you and fled before the bucket came around again. From there, we went into a one-bedroom hut in which four people lived; they had practically nothing, but what they did have was polished, loved, and looked after, and they showed us around with pride.

  Then we saw the other extreme of Africa. We had read about a wonderful-sounding hotel some way out of Cape Town and booked ourselves in for a night. We drove for three hours and the suburbs gave way to scrub and the Tarmac to gravel, dust, and wilderness. Suddenly, just as we were thinking we must have gone in the wrong direction, we came to some gates, drove through them, and found ourselves in another world: perfectly tarmacked drive, lush flowers, immaculate lawns, and a host of smartly dressed boys in khaki uniforms—shorts, jackets, and hats—who leaped forward to greet us. They told us to leave our bags and jump into the Land Rover they had waiting. They were going on safari and had thought we’d like to join them.

  In we climbed, and drove around looking for game. We saw Cape buffalo, zebras, bush pigs, guinea fowl, and several different types of antelope, then looked at some ancient cave paintings. After about an hour the Land Rover came to a halt, we
got out, and the driver produced a perfectly stocked cocktail cabinet. There we were, in the middle of the African bush, binoculars in one hand, vodka and tonic in the other, while the setting sun turned the skyline crimson. It felt surreal, colonial, almost as if we were in a movie.

  Eric and I had seen each other a few times since the divorce. He had stopped the emotional pressure, although he still wrote the odd letter. Once when he had tried to get in touch and failed, he said that hope was the only thing that kept him going “but sometimes it’s enough just to know that you are somewhere in the world, smiling.” And in a letter from New York, where he was working on an album with my “other ex-hubby,” as he called George, he said he had written another song about me. “I think it will be the best one on the album,” he said. “It’s called ‘Old Love,’ don’t be offended, it’s not about you being old, it’s about love getting old, and it’s great, well, you’ll see when you hear it.”

  I felt flattered, but every week the newspapers had published photographs of him with some beautiful young girl on his arm and I knew that even if I’d wanted him back it was probably too late.

  Sometimes he would come and collect me from the flat and take me out for lunch. I was amazed at the difference in him. He was sober and he would say, “I’ll pick you up at twelve-thirty,” and be there on the dot. In the old days, time had been of no consequence. Now, everything about him was precise and organized. He was a different person from the one I had lived with, and I felt great love for him but no desire. I think he felt the same about me. He enjoyed having lunch with me and he still loved me, but he wasn’t trying to pursue me. On the way back once I said, jokingly, how sad I was to be living in my little two-bedroom flat in Hammersmith, and he said, “It’s your fault for divorcing me at the wrong time.”

  Once I went to Hurtwood Edge. Eric had Conor staying and rang me to say he wanted me to meet his son. He was the most adorable little boy, and Eric was besotted, but it was difficult for me to see them playing so happily together in the house that, but for Conor, I might still have been calling my home. Eric didn’t have him to stay as much as he would have liked. Once he wrote to me saying that Conor appeared to be suffering from traumatic asthma and it was frightening when he had an attack. Apparently it was triggered by emotional stress or even a change of environment and Eric said that he would have to leave him in Italy for a while, maybe visit him there where he felt secure. “It’s so sad,” he said, “but I must go by what is best for him.”

  Two years later, in March 1991, I was about to go out to a dinner party at Mike and Angie Rutherford’s when Alan Rogan phoned with devastating news. There had been a terrible accident and Conor was dead. He didn’t have the details, but it transpired later that the little boy had been running along the floor in his mother’s fifty-third-floor apartment in New York and fallen to his death through a window that a cleaner had left open. The idea that an architect could design something like that defies belief.

  Eric was in New York at the time, as were Roger Forrester and Alan Rogan and the rest of the crew. They were in a hotel a few blocks away when it had happened. Eric had spent the previous evening with Conor at the circus and had been planning to take him and Lori to lunch that day, followed by a trip to the zoo. Instead he had a call from Lori, in hysterics, telling him his son was dead. He ran the ten blocks to find paramedics, ambulances, and police cars. Roger identified the body and asked the morgue to change the lightbulbs so the room was less brightly lit before he let Eric see the little boy. I couldn’t begin to imagine the pain Eric would be going through. This was the worst thing that could possibly have happened to him.

  I had no idea how to get in touch with Eric so I wrote to him at the house. When he came home he rang me. He was very fragile—not tearful, just so numb he could hardly speak. He asked me if I would come to the funeral in Ripley. Little Conor was to be buried alongside Rose, Eric’s grandmother, in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene. Roger had organized everything and done his best to keep the press at bay, but the road was jammed with photographers. We met at Eric’s mother Pat’s house, next door to the church. That day Eric reminded me of the figure who had stood on my mother’s doorstep when I’d left him in 1984: haunted. I was terrified he would start drinking again. Lori was there and I spoke to her but she didn’t want to talk; she was completely grief-stricken and just wanted to be close to Eric. I think she wondered why I was there—forgetting perhaps that I had been married to Eric when she had this baby.

  Lori and Eric sat at the front of the church. About a hundred people were there, including George—all the Ripleyites, all our friends. I sat between Nick and Adie Cook and was engulfed by sadness. Any child’s funeral is horrendous and Eric had been so happy to be a father. He had never known his own father, and fatherhood was so important to him. He was cool and contained, and didn’t give in to what must have been a strong temptation to douse the pain with alcohol. As ever, he turned to music to express his feelings and wrote beautiful songs about Conor. “Tears in Heaven” chokes me every time I hear it.

  Soon after Conor’s funeral, the phone rang in the flat and it was Eric. He wanted to come over and see me in half an hour. “I just wanted to warn you,” he said. “The press are on to me. They know about my daughter.”

  “Daughter?” I said. “What daughter? Christ, Eric, how many more children do you have?”

  It was another twist of the knife and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  The next morning the newspapers were full of the story in all its salacious detail. Luckily Rod was there to pick up my pieces. The daughter, Ruth, was the result of an affair Eric had had when he was recording Behind the Sun in Montserrat in 1984, and she had been born the following January. Her mother, Yvonne Kelly, lived on the island with her husband. She had worked as the studio manager. What cut deepest was that Eric had known about the child all along. While he had been declaring undying love to me and pleading with me to go back to him, he had been paying Yvonne maintenance for the last six years.

  This was taken at Ol Jogi estate when Rod and I went to stay with Donna Hurt at Nanyuki in Kenya. I was told I could stroke the cheetah but on no account to run.

  FIFTEEN

  A New Life

  When I was first with Eric he persuaded me to try to find my father. He was so obsessed by his own missing father that he felt it was important, and so I asked Mummy to get in touch with him for me and, my heart in my mouth, took the train to Exeter where he was living with his second wife, Angela. What would we talk about? I worried. I didn’t know what he liked or whether he would be interested in me. Then I remembered he had worked at the Jockey Club so I thought I could tell him that Eric had bought me a beautiful racehorse, but I was so nervous I couldn’t think of any of the race meetings where Bushbranch had run.

  He met me at the station. I hadn’t seen him since I was nine but I recognized his cornflower blue eyes. At first he seemed pleased to see me, but behind his smile he was awkward. He said we couldn’t walk in the main streets of Exeter in case one of his wife’s friends saw us. I was aware that she didn’t want anything to do with his first family, but not that no one in his new life knew of our existence. We had a cup of tea in some horrid backstreet café and that was it. I caught the train home. I had imagined my father as a sort of David Niven figure and hoped he would want to know all about what had happened in the last twenty-odd years, perhaps be a bit proud of me and tell me he’d missed me. But he asked me nothing and volunteered nothing. I got back on the train with an aching sense of loss.

  Much later I discovered that Colin had also been to see Jock. When he was seventeen he had phoned the house and Angela had answered. Colin had asked if he might speak to his father. “He’s not here,” said Angela, “and he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” retorted Colin, “but I want to talk to him.”

  Eventually she gave him the number where Jock was working in Exeter, and Colin arranged to see him. They met
in the street and my father, for some reason, had brought a friend who hovered on the other side of the road as if for protection. Goodness knows what he thought Colin, aged seventeen, was going to do to him. Having been beaten by his stepfather, Colin had a fanciful vision of his real father, and longed to hear him say, “You’re my son,” and all the other things that boys without daddies imagine.

  Colin shook Jock’s hand and said, “I just wanted to say hello,” and Jock said, “Have five shillings,” then tried to press money into his hand.

  Colin was mortified. He refused the money, said again that he had only wanted to make contact, shook hands again, and fled.

  Jenny was next to seek him out, and her meeting was every bit as awkward as mine, but she did say as they parted that it would be lovely for Colin, her and me to see him together. One day when I was living in the flat on the river she drove to Devon and brought him to London. We went to the Waldorf Hotel for tea. By this time he and Angela had parted so he felt less constrained about meeting us. What we didn’t know was that he had two daughters with her, our half sisters. It was only when Jenny published her book, Musicians in Tune, about the nature of creativity, for her psychology thesis, that one got in touch. She came to visit me in Hammersmith, and the moment I saw her blue eyes, I didn’t doubt she was my half sister. She said she and her sister had been brought up ignorant of their father’s previous family until one day when her mother was driving her to school. They had been listening to the radio when an item on the news reported that Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd had married. Her mother had lost control of the car and ended up on the pavement, sparking my half sister’s suspicion.