I’m so delighted that Pattie Boyd has, at last, received fitting recompense for inspiring three of the 20th century’s greatest love songs: George Harrison’s Something and Eric Clapton’s Layla and Wonderful Tonight.
Pattie was married to the two guitar gods in that order, and last week put a trove of her intimate memorabilia from those years up for auction at Christie’s.
The collection included George’s handwritten lyrics for his song Mystical One a love letter from Eric (laboriously inscribed on a page torn from John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice And Men), and a photograph taken in India while she was with the Beatles studying transcendental meditation under their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The sale had been expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000, but so hot was the bidding that it reached almost £3 million.
I’ve written biographies of Pattie’s ex-husbands, Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton in 2018 and George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle in 2023. She gave me generous help with both books; in the process we became friends and now meet regularly for lunch at the Polish Hearth Club in South Kensington.
She is as beautiful as when she was among the Swinging Sixties’ top fashion models and wise and sympathetic, as well as enormous fun. Over her devilled chicken-livers and my Polish pierogies, she somehow manages to make me feel better about everything.
Uncoupling from two of rock’s wealthiest stars should have set her up for several lifetimes, as was generally presumed at the time. Yet on her divorce from George in 1976, she received a settlement of just £120,000, which, even back then, was derisory.
When she divorced Eric in 1988 after 14 years together, it was £300,000 – allowing for inflation, not so much more than she’d got from George.
Despite her immeasurable contribution to their reputations and bank balances as their muse, she refused to protest or haggle or subject them to lengthy, embarrassing court battles. Her lawyer said he’d never met someone so completely without greed or vengefulness.
There was a time when every young woman in the Western world envied her for bagging the Beatle known as ‘the Quiet One’, despite his being just as talkative as John, Paul or Ringo. If only they’d known the true story.
In 1964, already a familiar face in glossy fashion magazines, she joined the cast of the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night, playing a schoolgirl in a gym slip, whom they try to chat up on a train (a sequence unthinkable nowadays). During the lunch-break, she sat next to George and he proposed to her, playfully, as she thought.
Two years later, in 1966, they married in secret. Pop stars back then were believed to lose female fans if they had wives or even steady girlfriends, so in public Pattie had always to walk a few steps behind George and be on her guard not to show any sign of intimacy.
When George’s worshippers discovered the couple were staying at an hotel in Ireland and laid siege to the place, she was smuggled off the premises inside a wicker laundry hamper.
Even in spaces safe from shrieking fans, being a Beatle’s wife meant automatic inferiority:
‘People would open the door for George,’ she recalls, ‘and then let it shut in my face.’
She also had to give up her successful modelling career because the old-fashioned northern working man inside hippie George felt it a slur on his masculinity for his wife to have a job.
In 1970, the Liverpool bus-driver’s son, born in a tiny ‘two-up two-down’ without an inside toilet, purchased a gigantic faux-Tudor mansion named Friar Park in posh Henley-on-Thames and set about refurbishing it and its extensive grounds, with money no object.
However, Pattie played no real part in its restoration, beyond choosing a few lamps. ‘I always felt it was very much his house and he called the shots.’
She’d looked forward to brightening its Gothic interior with flowers from the vast beds outside, but George wouldn’t allow it. ‘He said it was “robbing the garden” and made me order what I wanted from the florist’s in Henley.’
Yet overall, she remembers him as ‘sweet and considerate’ - until he embraced Hinduism, swapped his guitar for a sitar and got heavily into meditation. His intense yearning to become ‘a spiritual being’ made him touchy and temperamental — the reverse of meditation’s usual effect.
Once, on a long-haul flight while he was murmuring a mantra and spinning his prayer-wheel, a cabin attendant innocently asked him if he was ready for lunch.
‘Fuck off,’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m meditating?’
George identified with Krishna, the Hindu god of love, although the women depicted around the deity in paint or stone were nothing compared with those available to a Beatle.
He was the only one of the four with (what wasn’t yet termed) a sex-addiction. And with a Beatle’s boundless sense of entitlement, he saw no reason to conceal it from Pattie.
Meanwhile, his best friend Eric Clapton was helplessly infatuated with her, racked with guilt and sending her anguished anonymous letters (some included in the Christie’s auction), which she, at first, mistook for George’s fan mail.
He finally went public from the concert stage with Layla, a coded lust-rather-than-love song, criticising George’s coldness towards Pattie and hinting what an infinitely better bet he himself would be:
‘I tried to give you consolation / When your old man let you down…’
So oblivious was George of the situation — or indifferent to it — that he offered Pattie to Eric as a bedfellow without her knowledge, as casually as if loaning a guitar, his object to get her out of the way while he seduced her teenage sister, Paula.
(In the end, Eric ended up sleeping with Paula, so briefly turning the sexual triangle into a quadrangle.)
Pattie herself had been unaware of any of these shenanigans. When I enlightened her at one of our lunches, she gave a tolerant smile. ‘That was minxy of George,’ she said. ‘He could be very minxy.’
Finally, George even broke Beatledom’s First Commandment (‘Thou shalt not have it off with another Beatle’s wife’) by starting an affair with Ringo’s wife, Maureen. It was often carried on at Friar Park, while Pattie was there, but the house had so many bedrooms, it took her some time to find them in flagrante.
A French or Italian wife might have reached for a 12-bore shotgun but Pattie, being Pattie, merely squirted them with a pair of water-pistols.
Something on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album (which Frank Sinatra called the century’s greatest love song), proved George was the songwriting equal of John and Paul, after years of being eclipsed by them in the recording studio.
Though it was shot through with adoration (‘Something in the way she moves…’), George told Pattie that the song was about her one day in the kitchen, as flatly as if saying, ‘We’re out of milk.’
After years of trying to make their marriage work, Pattie left George for Eric in 1974, exchanging the sex-addicted philanderer for an alcoholic who started on the ‘Courviosier Five Star’ at breakfast time and often could do nothing onstage but lie flat on his back.
As had so often happened with desirable guitars, Eric’s longing for Pattie began to wane the moment she came over to him.
Eric’s other Pattie-inspired classic, Wonderful Tonight is an idyll of rock-star domesticity; they’re due at a party and he watches as ‘she puts on her makeup and combs her long blonde hair’, with an adoration matching George’s in Something. Actually he wrote it in a grumpy mood because she was taking so long to get ready.
George not only accepted losing Pattie to Eric but the two men became even closer than before, leaving her feeling thoroughly excluded:
‘They were still so tight… I was just the one in the middle.’
George died of cancer in 2001, his suffering exacerbated by being attacked by a knife-wielding intruder to Friar Park, and almost becoming the second Beatle to be assassinated.
Not long before his death, he visited Pattie and, in a resurgence of his old sweetness, brought her flowers and a little statue of the god Hanuman.
Eric, long since sober, is remarried, with three grown daughters, and a devout Christian. He and Pattie text each other from time to time.
She is philosophical – compassionate even – about the unbelievable licence such rock deities enjoyed, before risk of exposure in the tabloids and the #MeToo movement brought them into line with the rest of the human race:
‘They were like children really, who’d had boring childhoods in the Fifties and could have a second one in the Sixties with all the money in the world, no need to deal with any of the unpleasant things in life and no one telling them what to do. I was lucky to survive loving two of them.’
More than just survive, it must be said. Pre-George, her days had been spent in front of the camera, post-Eric she got behind it, becoming an internationally renowned photographer with a client-roster naturally angled towards music.
And, although now happily remarried to someone in a totally different line of work, she hasn’t gone off guitar gods completely. At the recent launch of her new book Pattie Boyd: My Life In Pictures, an acquaintance and I were taking a selfie when another guest thrust his face into the shot.
It was Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.