Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  If I phoned him in the afternoon I could tell from his first word whether he’d had lunch—there were certain friends with whom he would share four bottles of wine, two each. I would ask the friends not to drink so much with him, and they would laugh. It was the Eric syndrome all over again, and I couldn’t bear it. I thought maybe Rod had some problem I didn’t know about, something that was making him unhappy and, if so, it was silly not to acknowledge it and do something about it. Also, I was sure the drinking was affecting his work.

  I wondered whether I was holding him back in some way. I had so many invitations—some from friends inviting us to dinner parties, but also to numerous events to which Rod always wanted to go and I didn’t.

  I had grown up at last. That was not the quality of life I wanted anymore. It was a vacuous existence, and I wanted more. One minute Rod seemed to understand what I was saying, the next he didn’t. We argued for weeks until finally I said, “That’s it. I don’t want you to come to the cottage anymore. We’re no longer going out together.” I was upset—and his friends told me that he was too—but I felt good because I had done something. I had made a decision and carried it out. I had been unhappy for the last two years and I’m sure he must have been feeling the same, or he wouldn’t have become such a grumpy drunk.

  I didn’t want to cut him out of my life, just change the nature of our relationship. And it worked. We’re still the best of friends. My cottage is still full of his jeans and cowboy boots; his flat is still full of my furniture and various other bits and pieces.

  I’ve made it sound as though it was easy. It wasn’t. I found it unsettling and frightening to be on my own for the first time in my life. I sought out Karen again and saw her once a week. I wasn’t convinced I could be alone: the thought that every time I went out for a day, a weekend, or a holiday I would go home to no one but my cats, Polo and Molly, was scary. It was fine for today and tomorrow, but the possibility that it might be for the rest of my life was terrifying.

  However, I was suddenly free to go on girly expeditions, and soon after Rod and I broke up I went with Pat Booth and Cilla Black to spend a weekend in America with Lynda La Plante, to celebrate the Fourth of July. Lynda, who wrote Prime Suspect and several other very successful TV series, is a friend of Pat. We flew to New York, rented a car, and drove to her fabulous house in East Hampton, where we spent a lot of time lying around the pool, gossiping, and telling funny stories. One morning Paul O’Grady, the comedian, turned up and we lost track of time. We were due at Peter Brown’s for lunch the day before the big party. Suddenly a limo pulled up, which Lynda had ordered to take us there, so we changed, climbed into the back, and set off. We drove through the countryside, still chattering, all dressed up in our dark glasses, frocks, high heels, and lip gloss. The journey seemed to be taking forever, so I asked the driver, “Are we nearly there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “What? We don’t know where we’re going either!”

  We all looked at Lynda, who said, “Well, he’s your friend!”

  Peter has a little cottage in the sand dunes at East Hampton with a very big deck facing the ocean, and every year on the Fourth of July he throws a party for about two hundred people to watch the fireworks display that the village stages on the beach. He had invited us to join him. As usual, I was up for a party, but Lynda didn’t want to go and Pat was dying to get into her pajamas, so she wouldn’t budge. It was only when Cilla and I were in the car that she told me Jude Law and Nicole Kidman might be there. They were making Cold Mountain and Peter had told Cilla not to tell the rest of us in case they didn’t turn up. Well, Jude Law! I couldn’t wait to get there. And the best bit was going home and telling Lynda and Pat that we’d been lying on the beach next to him.

  One of the friends to whom Rod introduced me was a photographic agent, Raj Prem, who saw my work and wanted to take me on. I hadn’t known, until his interest prompted me to look through my old boxes, quite how many photographs I had going back to the sixties. There were hundreds that, by some miracle, I had hung on to over the years and through all the moves. It was exciting to find them but also emotional.

  There was the most beautiful photograph of George, for instance, lying on a bed in southern India, and it told such a story. We had just done our two months’ meditation in Rishikesh and come south because George hadn’t wanted to go straight back to England and the business the Beatles were starting up. It was almost as if he had known that this would be the last peaceful time in his life for years to come. And it was. Life had changed dramatically for him after that week in southern India—it had changed for both of us. Seeing the photograph took me right back—and so did several others. There were pictures of Mick and Marianne, Ronnie and Krissie, my chocolate-point Siamese Joss Stick, lots of the Beatles at Rishikesh, Eric, Jeff Beck…and everyone looked so young.

  Raj thought the collection was big enough and important enough to mount a solo exhibition. I gave him about eighty photographs and they went on show in America at Theron Kabrich’s San Francisco Art Exchange. Shared Memories opened on February 14, 2005. I hadn’t been in San Francisco for nearly thirty years. I was there with Eric when he performed with Dylan and the Band, plus others, for The Last Waltz movie, released in 1978, and before that George and I had had our scary experience with the hippies at Haight-Ashbury.

  It was exciting to walk into a gallery and know every photograph. It blew me away. But it was also nerve-racking to put myself on the line like that, offering my work for public scrutiny and judgment. I was also nervous about the publicity I had to do—I had never been able to shake off Brian Epstein’s injunction about not talking to the press—but I got through it. The gallery sold thirty or forty of my photographs, which I’m told was unprecedented.

  It was a fantastic boost to my confidence, both as a photographer and as a person. And subsequent exhibitions—last year’s was called Through the Eyes of a Muse, at the SFAE again, and in London—have reinforced my newfound belief in myself. For years I had been the wife of the famous man: it hadn’t been me for whom doors were opened and the red carpet laid down. I was the one who walked two paces behind, while everyone bowed and scraped to George and Eric. No one was interested in talking to me except as a means of getting closer to my husbands. It was an amazingly good feeling to be valued for myself as a professional and to have my work taken so seriously.

  Epilogue

  In October 2006 Bill Wyman was seventy. He was quite a bit older than most of us, but we’re all heading there—even if we’re fighting it every inch of the way. He had a huge party at Ronnie Scott’s with fabulous music, dancing, champagne, and canapés. He had taken over the entire club and it was full of faces from the sixties. All were friends, all looked as fabulous as they had fifty years ago.

  Our generation really did lead a revolution: as teenagers we refused to conform and we’re still refusing to do what’s expected of us, still breaking the mold, still enjoying everything that life has to offer and doing everything it takes to keep age at bay. One day we might have to give in to sensible shoes—but don’t hold your breath.

  Sadly, several friends didn’t make it. Nicole Winwood is no longer alive, and neither is Jim Capaldi, nor Elvis. Alfie O’Leary died of cancer; Julian Ormsby-Gore shot himself; Alice died of an overdose; David Harlech was killed in a car crash; Mal Evans was shot dead by police in America; Ossie Clark was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack by a gay lover; Derek Taylor and Ian Wallace died of cancer. Drink, drugs, and depression claimed many others, who died too young; victims, you might say, of the excesses of our time.

  I was lucky. I survived. I didn’t have the addictive gene or I might have gone down with Eric. We might have drunk ourselves to death. But given my life over again, I wouldn’t change anything. I love music. I loved everything that went with rock ’n’ roll. I loved being at the heart of such creativity and being young in such a stimulating and exciting era. I hav
e known some amazing people and had some unforgettable experiences.

  I regret allowing myself to be seduced by Eric and wish I had been stronger. I believed that marriage is forever, and when things were going wrong between George and me I should have gritted my teeth and resolved that we could come out smiling in the end. And I wish I’d known I didn’t have to be a doormat and allow both husbands to be so flagrantly faithless.

  But if I had resisted Eric, I would never have known that incredible passion—and such intensity is rare. I would never have been the inspiration for those beautiful songs. I accept that I paid a high price, but it was in proportion to the depth of the love he and I shared. I loved George very deeply, too, but we were younger and it was a softer, gentler love.

  And I don’t regret leaving Eric. All I regret is that I had to. It was painful beyond belief, but I am certain that if I had stayed, Eric might indeed have drunk himself to death. And I would probably never have discovered who I am.

  I now know that I don’t fall over if there is no one there to lean on. If the perfect man came along I would snap him up tomorrow, but I can live alone, and in many ways I am happier with my life today than I have ever been. I have lots of very good friends—both men and women, some new, some who go back to the sixties—whom I speak to on the phone and see regularly. We have lunches and dinners together, go to the cinema and the theater, to galleries, concerts, and parties, and we have weekends away and holidays, and they’re all people I love to be with. I speak to Jenny frequently, and to Boo, who now lives in England, Mummy, and other members of my family. There are no emotional strings, no expectations, some disappointments. And if I feel like spending the day potting tomato seedlings in the greenhouse or a nostalgic evening in front of the fire, with a cat on my lap, listening to Ravi Shankar, George, or Eric, I can do that and feel comfortable about it. Through self-knowledge I have learned self-acceptance.

  Being the muse of two such extraordinarily creative musicians and having beautiful, powerful love songs written about me was enormously flattering but it put the most tremendous pressure on me to be the amazing person they must have thought I was—and secretly I knew I wasn’t. I felt I had to be flawless, serene, someone who understood every situation, who made no demands but was there to fulfill every fantasy; and that’s someone with not much of a voice. It’s not realistic: no one can live up to that kind of perfection. Now I feel I can be myself—but it took me quite a while to discover that and even longer to work out who I was exactly because the “me” in me had been hidden for so long. For most of my life I’d been what others expected me to be—the eight-year-old who could cope with boarding school, the protective, all-knowing older sister whom all her siblings looked up to, the sixties icon, the glamorous model.

  Do you have any idea what having your face on the front cover of Vogue does for the ego? It seriously undermines it. I knew—as all models know—that I didn’t really look like the image on the magazine cover because, like all good models, I knew how to manipulate my body to its best advantage. It’s an illusion—the public never see the real person. They see the fantasy, and it’s the fantasy they admire and fall in love with: the photograph, the image someone has spent hours getting together. You know that in the flesh you can never live up to it. You play the game and do the things, but when you walk out of that studio you’ve left the image behind. Then you have to do the hair and put on the full makeup every day so that people don’t see behind the illusion. The more successful you are as a model, the more insecure you may become, preoccupied with your imperfections. When you look at other models all you see is their perfection, so you are constantly with people who you think are far more attractive than you.

  But I have stopped thinking like that and I have stopped worrying. I still have a weakness for shoes and I will always love buying clothes, and if I’m going out I still take a great deal of trouble about how I look, but I have come to realize that what’s inside is much more important. Nowadays I’m perfectly happy to go to the local shops in a tracksuit without a trace of makeup and if, as occasionally happens, someone stops me and says, “Aren’t you Pattie Boyd?” I give them a big smile and say, “Yes! I’m Pattie Boyd!”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to say a very big thank-you to all those loyal and lovely people who have been there for me over the years, to those who encouraged me to write this book, and to all the friends and members of my family who subsequently helped jog my memory. Among them are Mummy, Colin, Jenny, Paula, David, Boo, and Jock Boyd; Lesley Aggar, Mary Bee, Bobby and Aline Bell, Pat Booth, Jill Briggs, Cilla Black, Peter Brown, Terry Doran, Francesca Findlater, Jose Fonseca, Roger Forrester, Bobbie Gaymer-Jones, Adi Hunter, Lulu Hutley, Chris O’Dell, Dick Polak, Guy Pullen, Melanie Rendall, Alan Rogan, Edina Ronay, Angie Rutherford, Linda Spinetti, Ringo Starr, Giles and Vanessa Swarbreck, Belinda Volpeliere-Pierrot, and Rod Weston.

  A special thank-you also to Eric Clapton for so generously giving me permission to reproduce the first verse of “Wonderful Tonight,” from the 1977 Slowhand album, and to quote from some of the beautiful letters he has written to me over the years. And to all the photographers, many of them friends, who have allowed me to reproduce their work. Very warm thanks to Christopher Simon Sykes.

  I would also like to thank my publisher Val Hudson and the fabulous team at Headline who have been so supportive, creative, and such fun to work with. Also Shaye Areheart and everyone at Harmony Books.

  My thanks too to Caroline Michel, my agent, and all at William Morris UK, and Dorian Karchmar and all at William Morris U.S.

  Also a big thank-you to Ginny Manning for all her help and brilliance in sourcing and sorting the photographs.

  And to Penny Junor for coaxing my life story out of me—no mean feat!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PATTIE BOYD is an acclaimed photographer whose exhibition Through the Eyes of a Muse recently toured two continents. She lives in West Sussex, England.

  PRAISE FOR THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

  Wonderful Tonight

  “The appeal of Wonderful Tonight is as self-evident as the seemingly simple but brash opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’…A charming, lively and seductive book…this isn’t a bitter tell-all. There’s an aura of sweetness around Boyd’s approach.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Boyd finally answers some of those questions [about George Harrison and Eric Clapton]—but on her own terms.”

  —USA Today

  “Sixties model Pattie Boyd opens up about her rocky relationships with two of music’s most famed performers.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “[Wonderful Tonight] will thrill classic-rock buffs with a taste for scandal.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A backstage pass into a life with icons and iconic songs. As open and honest as an acoustic performance, Boyd shares the tumult and happiness of her life.”

  —On-the-Town magazine

  “They say if you can remember the ’60 s, you weren’t really there. Well, Pattie Boyd was there, and she remembers it all. Wonderful Tonight is a unique gospel of a turbulent time by someone who was in the very eye of the rock ’n’ roll hurricane.”

  —Sydney Morning Herald

  “Pattie Boyd married two sixties legends and inspired three of the era’s greatest love songs, but life was far from glamorous. The ex-wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton speaks out in this compelling autobiography.”

  —Sunday Times (London)

  “There are so many wonderful stories in Pattie Boyd’s life: Falling in love with a Beatle. Falling in love with another famous rock star, Eric Clapton, and being serenaded with ‘Wonderful Tonight.’…There is much that is excruciating in her life story…but here she is: not dead, not on drugs, not an alcoholic, but a survivor.”

  —Daily Mail (London)

  Copyright © 2007 by Pattie Boyd

  All rights reserved.

  Published i
n the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as Wonderful Today: The Autobiography of Pattie Boyd by Headline Review, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group, London, and in hardcover in the United States as Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2007.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45022-7

  v3.0