Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  I was happy in my flat on the river, but after a while I yearned for the countryside. I rang Eric and asked if I could come to see him. He still had Hurtwood Edge but he had also bought a beautiful house in Chelsea, and that was where I went. I was nervous about going to him cap in hand, but over tea I asked if he would consider buying me a cottage in the country. He said no. It would cost a million pounds and another million to furnish. I said, “Nonsense”—and thought, That’s what he spent on his house in London! All I wanted was a humble weekend cottage, I said it wouldn’t cost anything like that, so he agreed to talk to Roger.

  A few days later, Roger rang to tell me I could buy something up to the value of £300,000, so I started looking. When Tony Smith, who manages Genesis, discovered what I was up to, he suggested I rent a cottage on his beautiful estate at Chiddingfold. It was in a glorious setting, overlooking a lake with huge rhododendron bushes to either side. His wife hated being on her own in the country, he said, so I’d be doing him a favor in keeping her company. I was there for a year and he must have grasped that I didn’t have much money because he seldom cashed my rent checks.

  After about a year I found a little place in West Sussex. The estate agent sent me the details and urged me to look at it. I said no, I didn’t want a house on a road, which this one was, but she insisted it was only a lane and I really should see it, so I did. She was right: the position and the views were perfect, and although the outside didn’t strike me as particularly special, the cottage had a nice feel. Rod was very enthusiastic—we could make it fabulous, he said, and he’s good at that sort of thing. But it was £345,000, so I had to persuade Roger to let me have it even though it was over budget. Eventually he agreed. The house was bought in Eric’s name for me to live in rent-free. I moved in on April 1, 1995, and the only furniture I had was a pretty little rattan sofa, painted yellow, which I took out of the flat, and a rug. Thanks to Dick Kries and his advice all those years ago, lack of furniture didn’t stop me inviting people for lunch. We had picnics on the lawn, and inside, we took it in turns to sit on the sofa.

  Eventually I realized that the only way I could furnish the cottage without eating into my investments, which I needed for the income, was to sell my flat on the river. It was Rod’s idea: he said I should move into his flat in Kensington, then use some of the money I made from selling my flat in decorating and furnishing the cottage, then redesigning the garden. I could put the rest of the money into a couple of flats Rod would buy to do up. So I put my flat on the market and sold it quite well. I also sold a 1960 Les Paul Standard guitar that I had bought as an investment from Alan Rogan. Within three years it was worth 50 percent more than I had paid for it. I should have hung on—according to Alan, it’s now worth ten times the original sum.

  I’d had two amazing gardens—at Friar Park and Hurtwood Edge—and now I was desperate to do interesting things at the cottage, but before I set to work I decided I should learn a bit about how to do it. My friend Jill Wetton, another keen gardener, and I enrolled in an eighteen-month horticultural course at Brinsbury Agricultural College in Billingshurst. We thought we would learn about planting in a rather ladylike fashion, but it was infinitely more comprehensive. It was all about why and where you grow things, the importance of soil type, and that sort of thing. On day one we had to dig beds in the freezing cold, which came as quite a shock but we loved it.

  Because we were both mad about cooking we spurned the canteen and took it in turns to make lunch. We would vie with each other to cook ever more wonderful soups, and in summer we had lovely salads on the lawn. Two years later Jill and John divorced. She had also been unable to have children and, strangely, he had a child by another woman he’d been seeing.

  Rod and I spent week days in London and weekends at the cottage. He designed the interior and came up with some very clever plans, and I did the garden, which was two or three acres with a swimming pool and a triangular piece of lawn at the front. I turned that into a rectangle, then built a barn beside the pool, where I set up a darkroom, and made a wall to enclose the pool area. I dug a large pond with an island and planted yellow iris around the edge with black bamboo. Then I put in a pergola with a dining table beneath it. One day my father came to lunch. Paula was with us too, Rod and maybe Jenny. Paula was supposedly dry, but throughout lunch she kept leaping to her feet and saying, “Would you like some more?” then grabbing our plates while our knives and forks were in midair and whizzing back to the kitchen to replenish them. This happened so many times that I became suspicious, as did Rod. Eventually I followed her and heard the freezer door close. “Paula, what’s going on?” I challenged.

  “Oh, I’m so happy to see Daddy! Can you believe it? Isn’t it wonderful? Look at him out there,” she said. “It just makes me want to cry.”

  “Pull yourself together! We didn’t see him for all of our childhood. How can you be so emotional now? This is ludicrous.”

  And, of course, she was drunk. Every time she’d taken a plate into the kitchen she had had a slug out of the vodka bottle in the freezer.

  Paula had been a real worry. Since our Bahamas trip I had tried several times to clean her up. Once, when she was married to David Philpot, her second husband, I had kidnapped her from her flat in South Kensington, with the help of Alfie O’Leary and Roger, and taken her to Brighton. They knew the problem only too well. She had been drinking heavily while she was living in Los Angeles with Andy, and every time Eric had been in town, she had phoned Roger to ask if she could borrow money. She’d asked me, too, and everyone I knew, and could never pay it back. Every time I saw her she’d say, “You couldn’t lend me a tenner, could you?” which, over the years, mounted up to an awful lot of money. Finally, I said, “Paula, no more. The money I give you is going on drink and drugs and I’m not going to finance it any longer.” After that I gave her clothes, because she never had money to buy them, but I expect she sold what I gave her to service her habits.

  I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do with her in Brighton, or even why we chose Brighton, but David was a heroin addict too, and they were in such a mess that I just had to get her away from him. But he found out where we were and telephoned: “Pattie, you can’t do this. Unless you bring her back right now I’m going to tell the newspapers that you take drugs and you’ve kidnapped my wife.”

  “I haven’t kidnapped her, David. She’s here for a little holiday.”

  “I’ve got friends in that area. Paula is coming back to me. She’s my wife.” He sounded so menacing I took her straight back. I didn’t like him, but I suppose you can’t really kidnap someone, however much you want to help them—and you can’t help someone unless they’re willing to be helped. And Paula wasn’t.

  At the time she only had her son William—this was before Emma and Cassie were born—and he came to stay with Eric and me at Hurtwood Edge almost every weekend. I remember sitting in the garden at the Windmill one day and asking him what he wanted to drink. “I’d like a hair of the dog, please,” he said. He had his own room in the house with a big box of toys at the end of the bed. It was his second home and he adored Uncle Eric—they went fishing together and Eric helped him play the guitar. We loved him, and he could never understand why he had to go back to Paula on Sunday night. I considered fostering him—and I helped pay his school fees—but even as a little boy he was protective of his mother and I don’t think he would truly have wanted to leave her.

  And Paula wouldn’t have wanted me to have him permanently. Like every child of an alcoholic, no matter what age, Will had become the parent. I remember Paula coming to stay with us once, when he was about seven, and I couldn’t find her so I went upstairs. Her bedroom door was ajar. She had collapsed on the floor and Will was shaking her, trying desperately to wake her up, saying, “Mummy, Mummy, please get up, please get up.” But when he saw me he quickly stood back from her and said, “I think Mummy’s fallen asleep.” If I had taken him away from Paula, he would have worried about her.
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br />   One of the greatest sadnesses about my divorce from Eric was that Will suffered. He had assumed, not unreasonably, that Uncle Eric would always be there for him, and when Eric wouldn’t return his calls or lend him money for another guitar or any of the things Will had taken for granted as a child, he was hurt. Through no fault of his own he had lost someone he loved.

  We all tried to help Paula. Mummy took her to Scotland to try to clean her up, which worked for a while, but nothing lasted. She couldn’t come to any family get-togethers because they triggered the desire to drink, as did giving birth. She cured postnatal depression with smack, and when she managed to kick that she was back to alcohol.

  When Emma was two Paula realized they would all die if they stayed in London—she was drinking alcohol and cough mixture—so they went to live in Cork, in Ireland, for a while, where she went to AA meetings and was dry for months. Then she went to a fair with some Irish girls, had a beer, and couldn’t remember anything until she woke up in a psychiatric institution. That terrified her: she was lining up with all these madwomen for her food, ranting and raving, and no one knew what to do with her. When she and David split up, she came back to England with three children and had nowhere to live so the council put her into bed-and-breakfast accommodation until they found her a house in Haslemere.

  Then she met Graham, an ex-roadie, and the drinking continued. Emma had terrible rows with her mother and moved out when she was seventeen. She found a room in a pub where she worked at night, having attended college during the day. Cassie didn’t speak until she was twelve—at least, not to me. I think she held too many secrets, that I knew what was going on at home. Just before Cassie’s seventeenth birthday, Paula went to live with Graham in a narrow boat on the Worcestershire canals, leaving Cassie alone. I took her some food and presents on her birthday so she could have a party, but I was a poor substitute for her mother.

  About five years ago, as a last resort, we tried intervention—the polite way of saying we captured Paula and took her into treatment against her will. Jenny was working for a well-respected addiction clinic in Arizona, called Cottonwood, and managed to get Paula a place. The whole family was in on it but I was elected to tell her. I arrived at her house—she was still in Haslemere—and said, “Paula, it’s booked. You’re going to Arizona.” She burst into tears. “I’m staying the night with you and we’re leaving tomorrow to go and talk to the others in London.”

  She was terribly upset, but after a while she said, “Thank you. I do need to go.”

  I felt awful controlling her in this way, but she was slowly killing herself and we couldn’t bear to stand back and watch it happen without trying everything. Eric had given her a car when she had been sober—she had rung him and asked for one—but she’d fallen off the wagon and sold it to buy drink. He vowed that was the last time he helped. My mother then bought her a car and again she sold it and drank the proceeds.

  Part of the treatment at Cottonwood involves the alcoholic in confronting family members about issues they feel may have contributed to their addiction; in return, the family confronts the alcoholic about their destructive behavior. This is vital because often the alcoholic is so drunk they don’t know what they’ve done. The clinic insisted that Mummy be there. During those sessions Paula talked about her childhood, claiming that she had suffered abuse at the hands of our stepfather—my mother accused her of telling lies. She came away saying it was a dreadful place that had twisted Paula’s mind and made her say the most horrible things. And when I asked her whether she had described what Paula did when she was drunk, she said she hadn’t wanted to talk about it in front of other people. She was being loyal—and doing what she had done all her life. She failed to grasp that Paula couldn’t be helped unless she was faced with the truth, but she couldn’t do it.

  Meanwhile I had quite a lot of work on. Ronnie Wood was commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber to paint a triptych to hang at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was an epic piece of art. He wanted to capture a crowd of celebrities dining at the Ivy restaurant, which he saw as a seminal element of London life. He asked me to help. Andrew selected about sixty celebrities—including Lulu, Cilla Black, Joan Collins, A. A. Gill, Melvyn Bragg, Naomi Campbell, Salman Rushdie, Kate Moss, Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger, and Tom Stoppard—and each one came to Ronnie’s studio in Richmond for a sitting. He would sketch them while I took the photographs he wanted as a guide when it came to putting the paintings together. They were big canvases—each one five feet by six.

  Ronnie’s favorite wine at that time was Lynch-Bages and Andrew gave him several cases. I’d arrive at lunchtime, we’d open a bottle, and whoever came that afternoon joined in. It was very jolly, but it ended when Mick said that unless Ronnie stopped drinking he couldn’t tour with the Stones. The paintings were finally hung in 2004, with some of my photographs alongside them.

  Living with Rod was like living in a cocktail party. With most people, socializing is the icing on the cake. With Rod, it was icing all the way. I had more than met my match. He liked to drink, which rang alarm bells, but his capacity didn’t come anywhere near Eric’s. It was social drinking—and Rod was social every day of the week, usually at lunchtime and in the evenings. He had a huge number of friends and between us we had more invitations than we could possibly accept, but Rod wanted to go to everything. At first it was fun. I loved dressing up, going out, meeting people, drinking champagne, and eating wonderful food, but when we had done that every night of the week in London, I began to feel I’d like a rest at weekends when we were at the cottage. Not Rod. He wanted big lunch and supper parties. I’ve never bought convenience food or anything ready-made and never will, so it meant shopping expeditions and menu planning. Much as I adore cooking and entertaining, by the time we went back to London I was worn out.

  We also had some wonderful holidays and weekends with friends, including Lynne Franks, the PR guru, immortalized by Jennifer Saunders as Edina in the BBC’s Absolutely Fabulous. I had met her through the ladies’ committee of the Nordoff-Robbins music-therapy charity, which Jill Wetton had asked me to join. Lynne was another member and was often so busy at work that we had to go to her office for our meetings, and she was so funny; Jennifer Saunders had her to a T. She always had masses of food there and would bring in more for us.

  Lynne Franks became my new best friend, and she invited Rod and me to stay with her at her house in Majorca for a bank-holiday weekend. Dick Polak and Edina Ronay were also invited and I had discussed with Dick the sort of car we should rent. I’d said, “Let’s not get the cheapest.” Unfortunately he did. We arrived quite late at night, had a few drinks, and went to bed. The next morning Lynne suggested a long walk with a local friend to Michael Douglas’s beautiful house. Off we went but it started to pour with rain so we ran back to the cars. Dick and I got into the rented car, which Rod drove, and Lynne, her friend Juliet, and Edina climbed into Lynne’s. They followed us. It wasn’t far to the house so none of us had bothered with our seat belts. We were driving down a steep hill with a cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other and came around a corner quite fast, to meet a coach driving up the hill. This was the first rain for months so the roads were greasy. Rod braked, but there was nowhere to go, and the minute I saw the coach I thought, If this isn’t a dream, it’s going to hurt. I wasn’t wrong. My leg was injured, my ribs were bruised, and I had held on to the door handle so tightly when I realized what was about to happen that my wrist had snapped and a bone was protruding through the skin. Rod’s ribs were broken on one side and had punctured a lung. Dick, who had been in the back, walked away without a scratch.

  Dick was terrified that Lynne would come around the corner and plow straight into the back of us, so he helped me out and sat me down on the side of the road. Then he tried to get Rod out too, but he was trapped, slumped over the wheel.

  Then the others arrived—managing to stop in time. Lynne, who is a Buddhist, started to chant while Juliet phoned for help. After a very long
time, an ambulance arrived. Rod and I were dragged into it and taken off to intensive care in a private clinic in Palma.

  All I remember about the journey was Edina trying and failing to undo my Cartier watch—a fortieth birthday present from Eric—and a little love bracelet I was wearing. Eventually the doctor hacked them off with a knife as I shouted at him to stop. He didn’t: I got both pieces back in bits.

  After two days in the clinic, I asked if Rod could move into the spare bed in my room. A funny old man arrived in a wheelchair, and I wondered who on earth he was. When I realized it was Rod we both had hysterics, which, with our ribs, was torture.

  Back in London I went into the Wellington and it took four operations and a bone graft from my hip to sort out my wrist. Everyone was very kind and George and Olivia sent me a huge bunch of flowers.

  Rod and I went back to Sri Lanka several times. I bought a little beach there, and I pay a man to look after it for me, but since all the coconut trees growing on it are owned by different individuals, it’s a bit complicated to build a house. We also went to Barbados, St. Lucia, France, Spain, India, and Bali.

  Bali was interesting. We drove through the so beautiful countryside where people lived the simplest lives, and then we’d come to a village with one television set that everyone was glued to.

  We stayed with friends in Denpasar, the capital, had another car crash, and I broke my other wrist. Again, Rod was driving, and I was in the back when he hit a motorbike that had appeared from nowhere. My wrist was painful but I pretended it wasn’t broken because I had heard that the brother of a friend had died after an accident in Bali because medical equipment had been in short supply. I had it rebroken and set when I got back to England.

  At the same time the doctor carried out a bone-density test and discovered I had osteoporosis. He put me on Fosamax, which was very strong, and I wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, or walk for half an hour after each dose. Then, by coincidence, I heard a lecture by two American doctors and Leslie Kenton, the nutritionist, about what the drug companies are doing to women—with the pill, hormone medications, and diuretics—and how we get into a vicious circle and end up with osteoporosis, needing yet more pills. “Don’t take this stuff” was the message.