Pattie Boyd.Photo: © Nancy Sandys Walker
It’s the most notorious love triangle in music history. On one side,Eric Clapton: guitar god. On the other,George Harrison: Beatle. Between them isPattie Boyd, the iconic fashion model whose style and beauty helped define an era. Her name is forever linked with the songs she stirred her famous former husbands to write: Harrison’s “Something,” and Clapton’s “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight.” Now she’s sharing her own timeless art.
Her new bookPattie Boyd: My Life in Picturesshowcases both her formidable talent as a photographer and her unique perspective at the intersection of music, fashion, and spirituality in Swinging London. Due out Dec 20, the visual treasure trove draws on 300 images from her personal archive, offering an intimate portrait of rock legends — or, as she calls them, “old friends.”
Pattie Boyd.Pattie Boyd Archive
The prospect left her terrified. “Initially I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not an actress. There’s no way I can do this!'” she remembers. “But my agent said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve only got one word to say. Easy peasy.'” In spite of her nerves, and the less-than-stylish schoolgirl costume, she decided to take the leap.
When the band arrived on the set, their humor instantly put her at ease. “The Beatles said hello to us girls, and they were adorable. They were so charming and fun straight away. They bowled everyone over. I just fell for them.”
The feeling was mutual for George Harrison, who proposed marriage to her mere moments after they met. When a stunned Boyd failed to reply, the 21-year-old guitarist dialed it back. “If you won’t marry me, will you at least have dinner with me?” Unfortunately she had a boyfriend, thus putting her on a short list of women who have turned down a date with a Beatle. “He looked crestfallen,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Awww, poor guy!'” To soften the blow, she invited Harrison to join herandher boyfriend for dinner. “This was not what he had in mind,” she laughs.
Boyd assumed that she’d blown her one-and-only shot with him. “When we finished filming that day I thought I’d never see George again,” she says. “Remember, this was before cellphones.” But she got a second chance a few weeks later when the director called her back into the studio to take somepress photos with the band. “By this time, of course, I had told my boyfriend that it was the end of our relationship,” says Boyd. “When I saw George, the first thing he said was, ‘How’s your boyfriend?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a boyfriend…'”
The need for secrecy was very necessary. Boyd learned this the hard way while attending her very first Beatles concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The evening had started off auspiciously as she watched her man morph into Super Beatle before her very eyes. “God, the band was absolutely amazing. So exciting,” she remembers. “In order to be on stage as they did, I think you have to have a certain inner strength that deals with all the adulation and the praise. It fired them up and gave them another kind of energy, and that’s what I saw onstage; these guys who are so energized because of the love that was being sent to them. This was a different character than I saw at home.”
It was hard to share her husband with the world, but privately they were like any young couple building a life together. Harrison loved to make his new wife laugh with a frequent gag whenever heopened the refrigerator. As the light inside flashed on, he would pretend it was a stage spotlight and adopt a rock ‘n’ roll pose — mocking the chaos of Beatlemania that too often intruded into their lives.
They were among the friends present at EMI Studios on June 25, 1967, the day the Beatles recorded their new song “All You Need Is Love” live as part of a worldwide television special. The first broadcast to use satellites to link global networks, the event was less of a technical milestone than a cultural one. British music luminaries like Jagger, Faithfull, Keith Richards, Keith Moon and Eric Clapton gathered to help the Beatles share their message of peace to an audience of over 400 million across 25 countries.
For Boyd, resplendent in beads and flower-power regalia as she sat alongside her husband, this was the moment the youth movement came into full bloom. It was then that she had her first inkling that the Beatles were not just a pop group but a part of history. “I felt there was a big change happening,” she says. “Particularly in the creative, artistic world: music, fashion designers, painters, filmmakers, photographers. All the creative people were taking a leap forward.”
“It was just wonderful. Every day was glorious,” remembers Boyd. “The air was so clean and pure because the snow was melting on in the Himalayas and coming down the Ganges [River]. All the other people that were there at the ashram were very sweet and respectful to the Beatles. Everybody was very happy.” Between lectures, Boyd heard the band sketching out early versions of future Beatles classics. “John or Paul would play guitar and say he’s got an idea for a song and they would just play it in front of anybody. Much of the music that they created there was later put on The White Album. There was such incredible harmony between all of them.”
But the harmony wouldn’t last. Soon after they returned from India, relations within the band grew fractious as business headaches and interpersonal resentment started to supersede the music. Problems in the studio inevitably bled into the Harrisons’ private life. “[George] would get so angry, but he tended to bottle it up,” Boyd says. “So he would be angry at home about anything at all. I would say, ‘What is the matter?’ And he would start shouting about the band and various members and how everything was dreadful and ghastly. He wasn’t specific about it, but I knew there was something serious going on that was very troubling for him.”
Harrison’s nights with Boyd began to mirror his troubled days with the Beatles. The situation reached its nadir in early January 1969, as Harrison got close with a recent ex of his good friend Eric Clapton. “Uncomfortably close,” as Boyd would put it in her 2007 memoir, leading her to temporarily leave the home they shared. This personal crisis exacerbated Harrison’s increasing frustrations with the Beatles, and days later he walked out of a session, vowing to quit the band for good. In the immediate aftermath, John Lennon proposed they hire Clapton as a replacement guitarist — a suggestion that was likely facetious, though strangely fitting.
Harrison would reconcile with both Boyd and the Beatles in the following week, but the damage to both relationships was severe. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that shortly after returning to the band, he began to work earnestly on what many believe to be his single greatest musical achievement: the transcendent love song “Something.” Though he’d written songs to Boyd before (notably 1965’s “I Need You”) rarely had Harrison been so eloquent when articulating his deepest feelings for his wife. “George said, ‘Here’s a song I’ve written for you, but we haven’t quite finished it.’ So I heard it in its raw state,” she says. “It was just stunning. I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is really, totally overwhelming.'”
But as the decade came to a close, ties between both the Beatles and the Harrisons continued to unravel. The band split in 1970 and the marriage reached a turning point that same year. “George was starting to distance himself from me,” Boyd says.
Pattie Boyd and George Harrison.Pattie Boyd/courtesy of Morrison Hotel Gallery
The feeling was mutual. Clapton’s growing obsession with Boyd was the chief reason his prior relationship had failed. For a time he even dated Boyd’s younger sister, Paula. He finally confessed his feelings for Boyd herself in a letter, mailed to the Harrison home in an envelope labeled “Express” and “Urgent.”
The letter was signed “e.” At first, Boyd assumed the letter was simply from an overeager fan and laughed about it with Harrison. Then, later that night, the phone rang. It was Clapton. He wanted to know if she got his note.
Pattie Boyd/courtesy of Morrison Hotel Gallery
Soon Boyd was inundated with his love letters. “I ignored them at first,” she says. “But things were going wrong with George and me. We were going in different directions. So it was difficult to try and maintain this loving, harmonious relationship with George while Eric was also writing to me, declaring love and all this sort of stuff. I was married to George, but he was really distancing himself. So I was in a very difficult position.”
Matters came to a head that same night at a house party the threesome attended. Harrison’s suspicions were raised when he found Clapton and Boyd having an emotional conversation in the garden. Pressed for an explanation, Clapton came clean to his friend. “I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.” Boyd, for her part, wanted to evaporate. An irate Harrison gave her an ultimatum: “Are you going with him or coming with me?” She chose her husband — for a time.
Boyd left Harrison for his best friend Clapton in 1974. Some would view this as the ultimate marital betrayal, but Harrison’s response was surprisingly good-natured. “He said, ‘Well, I’m glad you’re going off with Eric instead of some idiot,” Pattie remembers. “So he appreciated my choice!” George would jokingly refer to himself ever after as Clapton’s “husband-in-law.” The threesome even celebrated Christmas together that same year. The only hiccup occurred when Harrison, a strict vegetarian, learned that Boyd was now eating turkey. When she tied the knot with Clapton in 1979, Harrison was there at the reception, serenading the newlyweds with an impromptu jam alongside his old bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
She would remain close with Harrison for the rest of his life.My Life in Picturescontains the last photo of them together, taken in the early ’90s in the garden of Friar Park, the sprawling estate they’d shared during their final days as a couple. “Just because things didn’t work out as we planned, it didn’t diminish our love for each other,” Boyd says.
Pattie Boyd
Though Boyd and Clapton divorced in 1988, their relationship remains equally warm. They crossed paths again earlier this year. “He was just so joyful when he last saw each other,” she says. “He gave me the biggest hug and he was so happy to see me.” And the song he wrote in her honor still fills her with pride whenever she hears it. “It’s exciting. It’s thrilling. It’smysong.”
In recent years, Boyd has made a name for herself as a photographer, boasting numerous exhibits across the globe. “I’d come out of my relationship with Eric and I was sort of floundering,” she explains. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do and I completely forgot about my love and passion for photography. Somebody suggested that maybe I would like to have a photographic exhibition. At first, I thought this was a ludicrous idea because I had forgotten I had more than three photos!” This discovery ultimately led to her new book. For her, it’s akin to a family album. For the rest of us, it’s a snapshot of history.
© Chris Floyd
Now 78, Boyd is happily married to property developer Rod Weston. They met on a vacation in Sri Lanka in the late ’80s. After more than a decade together, they made things official in 2015. “I take it slowly now, you see,” she laughs. “No rushing!”
source: people.com
