Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  Then I heard of a brilliant nutritionist on the Isle of Wight. She agreed to meet me at Gatwick and suggested I take Osteocare, which is an alternative calcium and multivitamin supplement, and do weight-bearing exercise. I went to tai chi classes and Pilates, which I love and still do twice a week, and after two years—my doctor couldn’t believe it—there was no sign of osteoporosis.

  Another year Rod and I went back to Kenya for a friend’s fiftieth birthday party on Lamu, an island off the northern coast that had originally been an Arab trading post. Lots of friends came from England and more from Kenya. After four days of partying we went to stay at the Muthuga Club in Nairobi, then to Donna Hurt’s.

  Another time we went to stay with Ringo and Barbara, who were living in Monaco, and later to the house they had in Cap d’Antibes. We visited Ronnie Wood and Jo, his second wife, who took a house near Aix-en-Provence, and at Christmas one year we went to my brother’s in Salt Lake City. We drove there from Los Angeles via Las Vegas, and came back through Monument Valley, Sedona, and the Grand Canyon to stay with Chris O’Dell in Arizona.

  I spent my own fiftieth birthday skiing in Courchevel with friends including Christian and Christine Roberts. Rod and I had met them with Amanda Wakeley, the fashion designer, who invited us to spend a weekend on her fabulous yacht. It was then that Christian and I discovered we had been born on the same day of the same year at the same time. He was an actor and had inherited a lot of money and used it to fulfill his dream of living in Barbados. He and Christine had built the most beautiful house, then bought the next-door property, which had been a famous garage called the Lone Star, and turned it into a boutique hotel, bar, and restaurant, still called the Lone Star. Rod and I went to stay with them several times and Christian and I celebrated many happy birthdays together. On our fiftieth we woke up everyone in the chalet at 4:00 a.m.—the time at which we were born—opened a bottle of champagne, and stood on the balcony in the freezing cold in our dressing gowns wishing each other a happy birthday.

  Rod’s fiftieth birthday came several years later. He is nine years younger than I am but I told him that once he had reached fifty he would no longer be a toyboy. He wasn’t very pleased to hear this, but I sent him into the adult world in an excellent way. I gave him three parties: a cocktail party in the flat in Kensington for about a hundred and fifty people, mostly London friends, and two lunch parties in the country for local friends and family. We had a Raj tent and caterers, and I found some Indian musicians to sit on the lawn and play tablas. The cake was decorated with sugar wine bottles.

  George and I didn’t speak on the phone much, but we saw each other from time to time at parties. He had become almost an older brother to me, someone with whom I felt entirely comfortable and to whom I could say anything. Every now and again he would send a little present—a tree for the garden or an ornament—and he invited Rod and me to Dhani’s eighteenth birthday dinner, saying we had to be there: we were family. I hadn’t seen much of Dhani while he was growing up but he was uncannily like George when I’d first known him.

  One Christmas, we were all together at a big lunch party given by Ringo and Barbara at their country house. Everyone was there, including George and Olivia, and Eric with a new girlfriend, Melia McEnery, a young, pretty American he’d met in Los Angeles. Eric was being unfriendly but I don’t think he ever liked Rod—and Rod found him unapproachable and boring. We were at a table with Roger Taylor of Queen, and the Rutherfords.

  At one point I went and sat next to George and said, “God, George, Eric’s being so weird, he can hardly say hello to me.” We had a good laugh, and when Eric and Melia were leaving, George said, “Eric, bye, man. Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Pattie?”

  It was really awkward. It was as if in giving up drugs and alcohol, Eric had become a different person. Maybe he had always been shy and quiet, the alcohol a prop. He wasn’t the vivacious man I’d known.

  After they had gone George told me about a nightmare he was having with a business partner in whom he had lost faith. George thought he was failing to manage the finances. He was so stressed about it and so angry—it was all he could talk about. A few months later I heard he had cancer of the throat. I can’t help thinking the two things were connected.

  Then he was stabbed at his home by an intruder. I heard it on the news and immediately rang Harry, George’s older brother, who lived three or four miles from Friar Park. George had been with Harry and his wife Irene at their house that evening, and had said how happy he was at Friar Park and how safe he felt there. When he got home and pressed the clicker to open the electric gates, some madman who was hiding in the bushes must have slipped in behind him.

  George and Olivia had gone to bed and in the middle of the night George had heard glass breaking. He woke Olivia and told her he was going to investigate. She tried to stop him but he insisted. The man had smashed a window and come up the stairs with a knife in his hand. George met him in the minstrel’s gallery and there was a fight. Then Olivia appeared, picked up a lamp, and hit the man over the head. George had been stabbed in the chest. Eventually the police arrived and grabbed the intruder. He was a schizophrenic in his thirties with a thing about the Beatles. It was horribly reminiscent of what had happened to John Lennon.

  I had heard about John’s death from Eric. He and I had been arguing and had spent the night in separate rooms. The next morning—December 8, 1980—he came to wake me with the news that John had been shot dead in New York. I was appalled. I left Eric in Ewhurst and went to London, to the Beatles’ office, and hung out with everybody there. I had no idea how to get in touch with Yoko, or where she was, but the offices in Savile Row were the heart and soul of what had been the Beatles’ kingdom. That day it was where I wanted to be.

  George’s wounds were not life-threatening. His lung was punctured but he was only in hospital for a few days. He wasn’t noticeably changed, but I think the trauma had a much more lasting effect and weakened his body’s ability to fight the cancer. Having had it in his throat, he went on to develop it in his lungs. He died on November 30, 2001, a little less than two years after the attack.

  I heard about his death from Alan Rogan, who rang me early in the morning at Rod’s flat. I burst into tears, I felt completely bereft. I couldn’t bear the thought of a world without George. When I left him for Eric, he had said that if things didn’t work out, ever, I could always come to him and he would look after me. It was such a selfless, loving, generous thing to say and it had always been tucked away at the back of my mind. Now that sense of security had gone. I was devastated. I’d known that his death was inevitable, but I’d kept hoping that, with all his money, they would find a cure for him. At the end I hadn’t grasped how ill he was as I hadn’t seen him for a few months. The last time had been at my cottage: he had phoned to say he was coming to Sussex to visit Ringo and Barbara and wanted to see me—I think he was curious to know where I was living. I was so glad we’d had that last meeting.

  Danae Brook, a Daily Mail journalist whom I had known slightly, on and off, for some years, was due to come to the flat at ten o’clock on the morning George died. She wanted a photograph I had of somebody she was writing about. I was walking about like a zombie when, suddenly, she was there and wanting to interview me. I didn’t say anything to her but when her piece appeared it was all about how we had modeled together and been chums, and she had been with me soon after I received the news that George had died. I felt exploited.

  His funeral was in Los Angeles. I didn’t go, but I was invited to the memorial concert, which took place a year later in the Royal Albert Hall, organized by Eric. I couldn’t go: I had booked a spiritual holiday in Peru. Instead, I watched it on video. On the day, I took myself away from the rest of the group and spent the day high in the mountains, thinking of George, the tears trickling down my face. I was happy to mourn him alone and in my own way.

  You never know with grief how long it will last, but I think I’ll miss him for the re
st of my life. We shared so much and grew up spiritually together and there are so many things that no one else knows about that we did together; and for many years there were so many questions I wanted to ask him and so many things I needed to speak to him about. And then there were the dreams. I would dream he was alive and I would say to him, “Oh George, it’s so wonderful that you are alive after all, this is so fabulous; I knew they had all made a mistake.” Some dreams can be incredibly vivid and so very real and then I would wake up and within the first couple of seconds I would think he was alive, and then that wave of reality would wash over me as I became more conscious.

  I’d gone to Peru with a collection of friends, including Pat Booth. She had been living in Miami since our modeling days. She’d married, had two children, and become a massively successful writer with fifteen novels to her credit. Our spiritual holiday was led by a healer who lives near me. In preparation for an ayahuasca (jungle vine) experience, a traditional religious and magical ritual still practiced in the jungle, we were told to eat no dairy products and drink no alcohol for a week before our departure.

  We flew to Lima, then took another plane and a boat, and finally arrived at a jungle lodge. That evening, after dinner and a talk from the shaman, we were taken into a room with twelve mattresses on the floor, one for each of us in the group. Incense was burning on a table in the center. First we were given a small cup of the jungle juice, then told to lie down. I shut my eyes and waited for “the great medicine, the visionary vine” to take effect while the shaman and his aide chanted. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogen, but not in the same way as the manufactured LSD. It had the most extraordinary effect on everyone. My visions were constantly moving geometrical patterns of great clarity and color. I could hear the jungle breathing as the people at either side of me were being sick. It was all part of the cleansing detox process, which lasted for about six hours.

  We went on to walk the Inca trail, then took a boat on Lake Titicaca, the highest commercially navigable lake in the world, as high and as cold as Mont Blanc in Switzerland. We stopped at the Uros, a group of forty-three artificial islands made entirely of reeds. Amazingly a whole community lives on them.

  Peru was fabulous, but of all the places I have traveled to, Bhutan was the most beautiful and spiritual. It is tragic that this little kingdom in the Himalayas, which borders India and Tibet, has fallen prey to the influences of the Western world: television had arrived three years before I did. The Bhutanese are Tibetan Buddhists, and foreign influences have always been tightly controlled to protect their culture, which had scarcely changed since the Middle Ages. We went trekking with Mike and Angie Rutherford, Penny Smith, the TV presenter, and her actor boyfriend Vince Leigh. We booked through a normal travel agent and then I ran into Lenny, an old friend from the sixties and the King of Bhutan’s nephew. He was always terribly exotic, dressed in the finest Bhutanese leather riding boots, beautifully cut jodhpurs, and jackets with Nehru collars and brocade. He said, “Don’t bother with travel agents. My daughter will arrange everything for you in Bhutan and take you to special temples and places where tourists don’t go.”

  So we were taken around by Lenny’s daughter, who introduced us to her husband and some princes and princesses. They had a dinner party for us at one of their houses, which was very casual and relaxed. They told us that the King was considering relinquishing the job and giving the kingdom back to the people: the country was self-sufficient, in good working order, and he felt the Royal Family had done as much as they could. At one point I noticed that Angie was very pale and Mike was guiding her to the loo. Someone said, “She’s had one of those betel nuts.”

  They aren’t actually nuts: they are the seed of the betel plant, wrapped with a piece of lime in a lime leaf. When you chew them, they turn your mouth, lips, and teeth red. The man next to me, whose head was shaved and who was wearing Bhutanese clothes but spoke as though he was straight out of Yale University, told me that Bhutan betel nuts were special. I decided that if I was going to have a betel-nut experience, this was the place to have it. I took one and started to chew, and after a while I asked, “How long does one have to chew for?”

  “Enjoy, enjoy.”

  A little later I realized I couldn’t move. I could just about speak but that was it, and I thought what an odd addiction it was—in the East millions of people chew betel and all that happens is that they can’t move.

  Our trekking guide, Karma, always carried an ice-blue umbrella and, since it wasn’t raining, I couldn’t work out why. He told me it was to protect him from the snow, wind, and sun. Whenever I thought I’d lost him, I looked for the blue umbrella.

  I had brought with me some homeopathic pills to help prevent altitude sickness, and fed them to everyone each morning. We carried plenty of water in our rucksacks as we had been told it was essential to keep drinking—we should sip three pints a day or the altitude might affect our brains. As a start we did a day’s trek to acclimatize, and then it was the real thing with Sherpas and ponies packed with sleeping bags, tents, saucepans, and everything you can imagine. The lead pony had a bell around his neck, which we could hear tinkling as we climbed higher. When we stopped for lunch, we would find it laid out by the Sherpas, who had gone ahead. We would sit by a stream in the mountains, eating sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, then off we’d go again. About three hours later, we’d arrive in a clearing and there would be our tents, all set up for the night. There was a dining tent, sleeping tents, and a tent for the loo, which was a hole dug in the ground. We’d have supper when the sun went down, then play dice and card games. It was hot during the day, but the temperature dropped steeply at night, and if it snowed, it was cold in daylight too. We wore layers of clothing, and I had trousers that I could unzip above the knee to turn into shorts.

  I took lots of photographs of particularly beautiful scenes or prayer flags. They are made of fabric with prayers written on them in Sanskrit. Buddhists stick them into the ground for the wind to carry their prayers across the world. There were so many in the mountains, some in such precipitous places that I wondered how someone had managed to put them there.

  One day we stopped for lunch in a little woodland clearing and suddenly the temperature dropped by about ten degrees. It was unbelievably cold and I had to find the bottom bits of my trousers and zip them onto the shorts. My hands were so cold that I couldn’t make the zip work, then I realized I was trying to attach the wrong leg so swapped them around. Meanwhile Angie was freezing so she, Mike, and Penny went on with our guide to find where the Sherpas would be setting up camp for the night, leaving Rod, Vince, and me with our other Sherpa.

  I was still struggling with the trouser legs, and by the time I had them sorted out it was snowing heavily and a thick fog had come down. We set off behind the Sherpa, walking, walking, walking. I kept wondering why we hadn’t met the others—and then the Sherpa turned around. He was lost.

  It was so cold: I only had a tiny sweater on and no hat. Rod had a whistle and started to blow it and Vince shouted, but there were waterfalls everywhere so no one would hear them. Oh, my God, I thought, we’re lost and we’re going to die. Then I luckily remembered that if a bear suddenly appears you have to run in a straight line because they can only run in zigzags.

  The Sherpa kept saying that Timpu, which is the capital of Bhutan, was about four hours’ walk. It was now two o’clock and the sun would go down in about three hours. Not a hope. Then he ran off.

  Rod was furious. “How dare he leave us alone?” Vince gave me a hug and then began to dance as theatrically as if he was in a musical. So we had Vince dancing around in the high Himalayas, a Sherpa running around in the fog, Rod angry, and me thinking I was about to meet a bear.

  Then the Sherpa came back, and after about twenty minutes the blue umbrella appeared and I thought, We’re saved. How marvelous. Karma took off his jacket and gave it to me, then held the blue umbrella over me. It was still snowing but we walked higher and higher. Just as I was on th
e verge of freaking out, we came to a clearing where there was a beautiful monastery with young monks. There were the tents, and the others were waiting for us beside a roaring fire.

  Just over a month after George had died, Eric married Melia at the church in Ripley. Their friends had thought they were going to the baby’s christening, but when that had taken place they found themselves witnessing a marriage ceremony. I was pleased for Eric, but became very aware of my vulnerability with the cottage, which he owned. If anything happened to him, his new wife would inherit his estate, and my home, on which I had already spent a great deal of money, would be in her hands.

  It coincided with my desire to build an extension. I had never liked the flat roof over the kitchen because of the potential for leaks, and Rod had a brilliant plan to build an extra bedroom and bathroom above it, which would give me three bedrooms and two bathrooms instead of two and one. He had drawn up the plans so I wrote to Eric enclosing them with my bank details, and asked whether he might see his way to lending me £40,000, which I would pay back at so much a year. He replied, saying he hadn’t realized he was my landlord and wouldn’t lend me any money, but he would put the cottage in my name. After that I slept a lot more easily, knowing the roof over my head belonged to me. Over time I scraped together the money for the alterations, which made a big difference.

  However, my relationship with Rod had run its course. He was getting angry with me over the slightest thing and was drinking far too much. I had been telling him for years that he should cut down—but in the past he had never been an angry drunk. Now he was. I once said to him, “I hate the way you get drunk. I hate to see you drunk. I have lived with a drunk. I have lived with an alcoholic. You’re just like Eric.” Rod just smiled. He thought I was complimenting him.