Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

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)

Photo by Chaloner Woods/Getty Images

I have no memory of this photograph being taken but I was given the print about five years ago by a friend who bought it at a Getty exhibition.

Copyright © 2007 by Pattie Boyd

All rights reserved.

Published in 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.

Ebook ISBN: 9780307450227

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CONTENTS

COVER

PRAISE FOR THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

Preface

ONE: Childhood in Kenya

TWO: A New Father

THREE: Modeling

FOUR: George

FIVE: Mrs. Harrison

SIX: A New Direction

SEVEN: The Tears Begin

EIGHT: Friar Park

NINE: Leaving George

PHOTO INSERT

TEN: Eric

ELEVEN: Mrs. Clapton

TWELVE: Spiraling Out of Control

THIRTEEN: Things Fall Apart

FOURTEEN: Fighting Back

FIFTEEN: A New Life

Epilogue

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Whittaker/Camera Press

Preface

People have been trying to persuade me to write a book for years. And for years I have resisted. I have had the most extraordinary life, and ultimately the most rewarding and enriching life, and I wouldn’t change a day of it. I was part of the sixties revolution, I have known the most beautiful, talented people, and I have been married to two exceptionally creative musicians. My resistance has not been for want of something to say. It was partly because I have always been an intensely private person and have never spoken easily about my feelings, and partly because I have lived through a lot of pain and didn’t want to write my story until I felt strong enough to talk about it from a healthy perspective.

Now I feel that time has come. And for the sake of everyone who has shared similar experiences in their lives but not yet come through to that position of strength, I feel it is important to have my say. My experiences of childhood, of divorced parents and a stepfather, of marriages that went wrong, of unfaithful husbands, addictive personalities, and childlessness are not unique. All that is unique is that it happened to me in a very high-profile, crazy, rock ’n’ roll world. And as I discovered at Al-Anon, realizing that other people are going through exactly what you are is incredibly comforting and therapeutic. Secrets are not healthy.

So I am finally letting go of mine.

But it is important to say that this is the story as I remember it. I behaved throughout my life and reacted to situations as I did because of the way I had been brought up. We all do; it’s human nature. So I attach no blame to any of the characters in my story. They did the best they could with the tools they had. We are all the products of our upbringing. I hope and pray that none of the people I love so dearly will feel I am letting them down in any way.

Pattie Boyd, 1997

This is my truth, which may not necessarily be as others remember it. But if my story is to have any validity, I have to tell the truth as I see it.

From the collection of Pattie Boyd

My parents’ wedding at Taunton in September 1942, six months after the accident that left Jock’s hands badly burned. Both now say they were too young.

ONE

Childhood in Kenya

My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach—strange for someone who turned into such a passionate foodie. In my late teens I became determined to improve the experience, even enjoy it, and today spinach is one of my favorite vegetables—but it has to be right: steamed, chopped, and mixed with double cream, white pepper, and nutmeg. Delicious. Raw in a salad, it’s even better. But at the age of two I couldn’t get the repellent dark green mess out of my mouth fast enough.

I was living in Scotland, at a house in West Lothian my grandparents had bought when I was a year old in 1945. We lived with them at that time, and my mother remembers the move from Somerset: taking me on a train—in an ordinary carriage, as she puts it—with all our belongings, and the embarrassment of having to feed me during the journey amid a group of soldiers. I was her first child, of six, and she was a young, nervous mother. Shortly after we arrived in Scotland my brother Colin was born. He is almost exactly two years younger than I am and I remember examining him when he was a baby and noticing that there was a small difference between us. He was a huge baby, and as soon as he could walk he followed me everywhere.

Another early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed. I am told I also tried to feed him with a petrol capsule—the sort used to fill lighters. It looked like a miniature baby’s bottle, so I pushed it into his mouth and the poor little thing had burns all over his lips. I don’t remember that episode but I do remember trying to kill him by burying him in the sandpit in the garden. Luckily my mother noticed in the nick of time and rescued him.

My parents were living at Howleigh House, near Taunton in Somerset, when I was born. My mother and her twin brother, John, had spent most of their childhood there. They had been born in India but sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, and in the holidays they stayed with an aunt at Howleigh House. Their father, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander E. Drysdale, DSO, MC, was in the Indian army, and Vivian, his wife, a rather exotic figure with a penchant for pink gin, visited England and the twins about twice a year. So sad, but Vivian had also been born in India and shipped home to be educated in England, so history was repeating itself.

I never knew my great-grandfather but he sounds splendid. His name was Alexander Stuart-Martin and he was also born near Lucknow, in India—in 1870. He fought in the Indian Mutiny and the British government rewarded him for his bravery with indigo and sugar plantations, which made him wealthy. He, too, was educated in England, as most colonials were, then became an engineer and built many of the bridges and railways in India. It was on a trip to England that he met and married the beautiful Elizabeth Sabin, who, unusually for those times, was a divorcée, having managed to escape from a terrifyingly brutal husband. They returned to India together, where she had two daughters, Vivian, my grandmother, and Frances, but there were complications with the second delivery and Elizabeth died soon after she had given birth. Alexander lived on—in some style. He drove around in a magnificent Bentley that he had had shipped out from England. For years it behaved beautifully in the heat and dust, but finally gave up the ghost. Undaunted, my great-grandfather hitched it up to a couple of oxen and continued to travel in the style to which he was accustomed.

The two daughters, Vivian and Frances, were sent to school in England, where they were looked after by relatives, returning to India once a year to visit their father. You could only travel by sea in those days and the journey took two weeks. On one of the voyages the young Vivian met Alexander Drysdale, my grandfather, on his way to join his regiment. Many years later they met again, at a tennis party in Lucknow, fell in love, married, and Vivian gave birth to twins: Diana Frances, my mother, and John, my uncle, who never married and has spent most of his life abroad.

The twins were well looked after at Howleigh, and there was no shortage of money. A cook, a scullery maid, and a pantry maid ran the domestic side of life, but the aunt was Scottish born and bred, so life was simple. She didn’t entertain much or lay on anything for the children, so Diana and John seldom saw other children during their stays. I can’t imagine how bereft they must have felt with their parents thousands of miles away, or how a mother could bear to see her children no more than two or three times a year, but I suppose in those days she would have had no choice. And, having suffered the same fate as a child, she probably thought there was nothing unusual about it.

I was born, weighing seven pounds, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1944; hence my name. My mother had been convinced she was having a boy and had thought of me as Michael for nine months, so as she had put no thought into girls’ names, I was called Patricia Anne. I don’t know whether it was the shock of discovering that I was not a Michael, or the inordinate length of time I took to be born, but she had a sort of breakdown afterward—I suppose you would call it postpartum depression today—and to begin with I was looked after by the now aged aunt, May, who had cared for Mummy, and by my grandmother, who was back from India. My grandfather had retired from the army, leaving India for good, and they planned to settle in Britain. They stayed initially in Somerset with Aunt May, but when she sold Howleigh House, they bought a house in Scotland and the whole family moved there.

Brigg House was beautiful, with extensive grounds and a walled vegetable garden, but the cold, damp West Lothian winters proved detrimental to my grandfather’s health, so in 1947 he sold it and moved to Kenya with my grandmother, leaving my parents, Colin, and me to fend for ourselves. We moved south and rented a house near Guildford, in Surrey, where my sister Jenny was born in November 1947, when I was three and a half. She wasn’t actually christened Jenny: my mother named her Helen Mary, to please a couple of aunts, but I had a favorite teddy at the time called Jenny and I insisted my new sister be called by the same name.

My parents married when they were young and inexperienced, and, like hundreds of other couples who married during the war, they knew next to nothing about each other when they walked up the aisle. My mother was seventeen when she met Jock Boyd at a dance in Somerset. He was twenty-three and, of course, dashing in his RAF uniform, with smart brass buttons and gold wings on the left shoulder. Also, he danced like a dream. He was tall and handsome with blond curly hair and cornflower-blue eyes; she was petite and beautiful, with luxuriant chestnut hair. They danced all night, and after just two more brief meetings Jock wrote to Diana and asked her to marry him. Her mother, my grandmother, who was a controlling sort of woman, encouraged her to say yes. I think she wanted to get my mother off her hands, and Jock, she had established, came from a good family. He had money, too, or so she had been told by his mother. All in all, he was the perfect catch. But once they were married it turned out that he had no money, and my mother, having been used to quite a grand lifestyle, found it difficult to manage.

Jock’s real name was Colin Ian Langdon Boyd. His parents had a farm in the Fowey Valley in Cornwall. His mother was a strange woman. By the time I knew her she and Jock’s father had separated and she was living with lots of dachshunds. According to my mother, she had never really liked children, so Jock and his younger brother and sister were brought up by aunts living in Bideford. Poor Jock had a miserable childhood but he spent a lot of it hunting and shooting, and horses were his passion. He was sent to Kelly College, a small public school in Tavistock, then went on to Sandhurst and into the Cheshire Regiment. But he never fought as a soldier. A car crash prevented him going out to the front with his regiment and he was seconded to the RAF, first flying Lysanders and later, when he joined Bomber Command, Wellingtons. When he met my mother his squadron was stationed at Weston Zoyland in Somerset and he and his friends went regularly to the Castle in Taunton for a drink or two in the evenings.

Soon after they were engaged, just weeks after that first meeting in early 1942, Jock was sent to Malta, where he had the most terrible accident. There was a strip of runway, with bombers taking off and landing from opposite directions, controlled by traffic lights. He was taking off in a plane fully laden with bombs and fuel with the green light in his favor, but there was a fault: the light at the other end of the runway was also green and the two planes collided head-on and burst into flames. My father jumped clear before the plane exploded but his face and right hand were very badly burned. He was lucky to be alive. Several of his crew and men from the other aircraft were killed—including two who got out of one plane but lost their bearings in the smoke and were decapitated by the propeller.

Jock was flown home and taken straight to East Grinstead, in Sussex, to the burn unit at Queen Victoria Hospital run by the famous pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, where he became one of McIndoe’s Guinea Pigs—so called because of the experimental reconstructive work McIndoe was doing on burn victims. Before him, people with burns as severe as my father’s would probably not have survived. My mother went to see him in hospital, fearing that she wouldn’t recognize him—the ward was full of heavily bandaged men with missing noses and ears. Jock’s head was covered with bandages but she could see two very blue eyes and knew at once it was him. I have the same color eyes and so does Colin—and it was the Boyd eyes, years later, that made me certain that someone who thought she might be my half sister, in America, really was.

As soon as my mother sat down beside Jock’s hospital bed he said, I’ve got something for you. He opened a drawer and out came a matchbox with lots of cotton wool inside which was a ruby and diamond engagement ring. It had belonged to his mother, but because she was such a horrible woman, my mother disliked the ring from the start.

It was not a good omen. Apart from the ring, though, Mummy was uncertain about the marriage. The accident seemed to have changed Jock. She went to see him in hospital several times and they would sit together not saying a word. She was very shy and didn’t know what to talk about, and he would sit staring vacantly ahead.

Physically, they patched him up as well as they could. He was left with a badly burned forehead and the tendons in his right hand had been irreparably damaged, so he never flew again. Emotionally, I don’t think he ever recovered. From that day on he was locked into himself. He would never talk about the accident; in fact, he would scarcely talk about anything. My mother had fallen in love with this handsome, spirited, brave young pilot, who had swept her off her feet on the dance floor, and he had gone, the spark had died. But having said she would marry Jock, and with the terrible thing that had happened to him, she didn’t have the heart or the courage to call it off.

Six months after the accident, on September 14, 1942, they married. It was a big wedding for the time, with two hundred guests and a reception at Howleigh House, but my mother says that even as she was walking out of the church she knew she’d made a big mistake. She didn’t feel comfortable with Jock: there seemed to be a barrier between them. They went on honeymoon to Scotland and, as my mother puts it, muddled along. Jock now says he felt the same way and that, anyway, they were far too young when they married.

My father went back repeatedly to East Grinstead for treatment over the following months and spent time in various other rehabilitation places to try to get his fingers moving, but without success. His right hand remained claw-like and both were discolored; as children, we found his injuries fascinating. Unable to fly, he ended up in the War Office, which was enough, according to him, to drive anyone mad, so when my grandparents suggested that he and Mummy join them in Kenya, he leaped at the idea.

When I was four, we moved to Africa, to the large, sprawling house that my grandfather had built in Langata, near Karen, about half an hour from Nairobi. I remember that flight—it took hours: there were no direct flights from England to Africa in those days because the planes needed to refuel at regular intervals. Flying BOAC from London, we stopped at Cairo, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, and finally Nairobi. I was horribly sick throughout the trip, into the sturdy brown bags that were routinely tucked into the back pockets of the seats in front.

My grandparents’ house stood at the bottom of a long, winding gravel drive—on which, some years later, I learned to ride a bicycle—with glorious views in every direction across the game reserve that surrounded it. It was a single-story house with a veranda that ran almost all the way around it. My grandparents had brought paintings, china, and cutlery from the house in Scotland but they had had the furniture made in Nairobi of mooli, the most beautiful honey-colored local wood. There was a huge garden, with lawns, standard roses, peach trees, and nasturtiums, that ran straight into the wilderness. It was quite common for giraffes, lions, or other wild animals to wander in and, because of the bushes, it wasn’t always easy to see them. The dogs, though, would bark incessantly until the interlopers left.

One night my grandfather was sleeping in a small bedroom leading onto the veranda. It was a hot, still night, the doors ajar, and in slunk a leopard, which leaped onto sleeping Grandpa. He woke immediately, but as he reached for the pistol under his pillow the big cat jumped onto the floor. It had smelled dog, and took the Alsatian, which was asleep under the bed. Grandpa shot wildly as the protesting dog was dragged out onto the veranda. Next morning there was no sign of either animal. My grandfather was distressed at having lost his favorite Alsatian, but it could so easily have been him.

He was quite a dashing, conservative character, my grandfather, very much the retired army colonel home from India, who seemed to spend all his time playing golf. He and my father, who did nothing on arrival in Kenya but sit and stare, didn’t see eye to eye. As a military man he couldn’t understand Jock’s condition and had no patience with his inactivity. My grandmother felt much the same, and she was furious that she had been misled into thinking he had money.

Although Granny was quite fierce, I found her loving and easy to be with. I remember making fudge with her—she dyed it green—and standing on a wooden chair to reach the stove. She wore colored stockings long before anyone else. She wasn’t very tall and probably fatter than she should have been, but she loved life, glamorous clothes, and laughed a lot. I am probably much more like her than my mother. My grandparents spent a lot of time on Cunard liners, sailing to South Africa, East Africa, and India, and had wonderful trunks with drawers and space inside to hang their clothes.

I had a bedroom to myself at Granny’s house and I remember her coming in to kiss me good night and smelling sweetly of juniper from the pink gin she always drank. She took me on holiday to the coast at Mombasa once, where she had rented a house for the week. There were vast white sandy beaches and I couldn’t believe how delicious the sea was. I pretended I had already learned to swim, knowing she wouldn’t let me into the water otherwise. I remember her giving me a teddy bear, which went everywhere with me—I still have it—and becoming hysterical when she hid it once because I had been naughty. She was much more accessible to me than my mother was; she had more time for me and a far greater influence over me.

I have practically no memory of my mother during my childhood, apart from the smell of her Dior perfume and her singing voice, which was beautiful. In retrospect, I think life must have been difficult for her, suddenly transported to Africa with three young children, a man she didn’t love and with whom she couldn’t communicate, no friends, and no money. She must have been deeply unhappy, but I was too young to appreciate that.

My grandparents were wealthy so there were several servants and nannies to look after us. And although I saw a lot of Granny, it was the nannies who brought us up. At night they bathed us and put us to bed while the grown-ups went off to their favorite watering holes—the Karen Club nearby (named after Karen Blixen, or Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa—we arrived in Kenya just after that era) or the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. At about this time I started having flying dreams, and when the grown-ups were out of the house, I would make Colin and Jenny stand on a table and try to teach them to fly.

The servants were Kikuyu, the most common tribe in Kenya, and they and their families lived in rondavels, traditional circular mud huts with thatched roofs, in a little community at the top of the drive. They adored my grandparents, and when, some years later, during the Mau Mau uprising, which began in 1952, they were threatened with death if they carried on working for white people, they came to my grandparents and said how sorry they were that they had to leave. It was a scary time in Kenya and a lot of white people slept with guns under their pillows for fear that their servants would try to murder them during the night. Many white farmers were killed.

One would call the Mau Mau freedom fighters today, I suppose, but I saw them as terrorists who were trying to incite and enrage the Africans I knew and loved. They wanted to overthrow British rule and evict the white settlers who had taken their land. Their tactics worked: there was an exodus of Europeans during the fifties. However, when my grandparents came back to England it was not because of the Mau Mau: it was my grandfather’s health.

I used to spend a lot of time with the Kikuyu who worked for my grandparents; they were my friends. They made the most delicious food, mostly Indian-based—lentils, spicy vegetables, curries—which they cooked outside on open fires and ate wrapped in chapatis. My father had a couple of horses and I remember riding bareback out into the bush one day with one of the Kikuyu stable boys. We came across a watering hole in a thicket, and as the horses were drinking I suddenly realized we were not alone. I turned and saw a group of tribe people with painted faces staring at me. It was the first time I’d seen anyone like them but the boy talked to them and told me not to be frightened. I wasn’t: I was used to so much being strange in Africa. I was fascinated by them and the jewelry they wore, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces.

I loved Kenya. I loved the huge skies, the vast landscapes, the incredible feeling of space, and the sky at night, full of bright, bright stars, so close you felt you could almost reach up and touch them. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the noises: the cicadas, tribe people chattering, the rhythmic beating of drums in the distance, the howl of hyenas and jackals, and the unmistakable roar of lions. But what encapsulates Africa for me is the smell: the smell of pepper trees and wild herbs combined with heat and dust. It’s an unforgettable mix, and every time I go back to Kenya, which I have done several times as an adult, that smell takes me straight back to my childhood.

It was quite a wild life, but wonderful for a child—there were few rules. I don’t remember any toys or presents—except the teddy bear my grandmother gave me. I don’t remember birthdays or Christmases either, although I do remember writing a letter to Father Christmas one year and the letter being gone the next day. We played outside: we rode bicycles or went into the woods to explore. I remember bouncing on my bed one night, watching a huge snake inch its way under the door and screaming for help. The houseboys rushed in, grabbed it, and killed it.

By that time my charmed existence was crumbling at the edges. After nearly a year, my grandparents had had enough of Jock doing nothing but ride his horses and told him he had to get a job to support his wife and family. He and my mother effectively split up for about six months, at the end of which he had started work with the Jockey Club in Nairobi and we had a series of far less opulent houses. Eventually we moved to one that you reached via a long dirt drive, a series of thatched rondavels linked by corridors. My mother hated it but I thought it was wonderful. She had been used to considerable comfort with her parents, and must have found it a shock to adapt to such straitened circumstances, particularly with the arrival of a fourth child. In March 1951, my sister Paula was born in Nakuru hospital. I remember someone, probably Granny, taking Colin, Jenny, and me to see her, and spotting her and Mummy through the window as we walked around the outside of the building.

I had now started school—the first of many. Loretta Convent was in Nairobi and smelled of powdered paint. My mother took me on my first day and I was excited—until I arrived. The school was enormous, or so it seemed to me, and I had never seen so many people. Suddenly all of the children were running around, which frightened me, and then my mother said she was going. I panicked and held on to her skirt, begging her not to leave me, but of course she did. A nun took me aside and introduced me to painting, which I enjoyed. And that’s all I remember doing at Loretta, lots of painting and playing with the other children.

A year later, at the age of eight, I was uprooted from everything I knew and sent to boarding school in Nakuru. I had never felt so miserable. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, why I was being punished. I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t want me at home with her. I felt completely and utterly bereft—unloved, un-wanted, unimportant. With hindsight, I think I sensed something bad was going on at home but I was too young to know what it was—and that made my insecurity even worse. Every time I had to go back to school I would cry and my mother would smile and say goodbye. I couldn’t work out what message she was delivering and it left me feeling confused. I had the same sensation when I saw my first Laurel and Hardy movie. The two characters were being chased by someone in a car up a hill and at the top there was a sheer cliff—it was clear to me that they were going to die. I was weeping, yet everyone else was laughing. I couldn’t understand why they thought it was so funny.

Despite the tears and the trauma of being ejected from the nest, my memories of Nakuru School are good. It was a big school, surrounded by acres of brown playing fields—the predominant color of Africa—and with a long flight of steps leading up to the main entrance. I was terribly nearsighted, although I didn’t know it until many years later, and at the end of one term my grandmother was coming to collect me. I didn’t want anyone to think she was my mother because she was much older and not nearly as beautiful as Mummy, so I kept an eye open for her car so I could leap into it before she had a chance to get out and everyone saw