All the details I was too cowardly to put in my book! Pictures, stories, and comments about my life with George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Ask me anything! The ask box is always open. (This is a role playing/fanfiction blog. Any similarities with...
George had been in the studio all day. Terry Doran had been in and out and then, after it got dark, Ringo and Maureen stopped by. He could tell they’d been fighting, but George didn’t want to get involved so he said nothing. Maureen wandered around the studio, picking things up, putting them back down. Ringo slumped in the chair in the corner. Then just as suddenly as they’d appeared, Mo and Ringo were gone. Just as well. George was in a funk himself. Pattie had been gone for two weeks and even though he had nothing to say to her, he liked her being there. He knew Pattie wanted him to say things, to reassure her of his love, but he couldn’t. He didn’t really know why he couldn’t or wouldn’t, but he wished she would just understand that he loved her, needed her, without there having to be a discussion.
He heard the studio door open and he turned to see Maureen standing there. “Where’s Ringo?” George asked and Maureen just shrugged her shoulders and walked over to him and took his guitar out of his hands and carefully put it in its stand.
She moved back towards him and her dress swirled around her legs. It was then he realized she had on Pattie’s dress. It was one Pattie had recently bought, a long, floral silk that buttoned down the front. He could tell Maureen had nothing on underneath. She bit her bottom lip as she stared intently at him. Now was his chance to stop things, to laugh and ask her what the fuck she was up to, but he didn’t. He just stood there passively waiting to see what would happen, what Maureen wanted to happen.
As gracefully as a dancer, Maureen knelt before him and unzipped his jeans, took out his cock, and put it in her mouth. The one thing different from it being Pattie was the long curly hair was dark. That she had on Pattie’s dress was somehow sexier than George knew it should feel. He tried to move, but it seemed as if his body was rooted to the floor, and he felt himself growing big and hard inside her mouth.
George saw her thick, black eyelashes and long curls moving. Her bracelets jangled against each other. Her tongue was soft and long seemed to wind itself around him. George instinctively trust his hips and was about to come when Maureen suddenly moved away and began slowly to undress him. She unbuttoned his shirt and threw it across the studio. She pulled his tee shirt over his head and then took off his jeans and underwear. She made him lie down on the oriental carpet. She kept Pattie’s dress on, though. She sat beside him on the floor, took his hand, and brought it under the dress. George’s hand felt her warmth. It was deep, warm, and very wet. As if it were all beyond his control, his fingers were soon deep inside her.
Then Maureen straddled George and used her hand to reach down between them and slip him inside her. Once she had him deep inside, she began to slowly rotate her hips, and as she moved, the pools of floral silk caressed his stomach and thighs. With the skirt of the dress spread out around her, Maureen, astride George, looked like the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Maureen was warm and at the same time cold. Her presence enveloped him, drew him into her, and at the same time he felt as if she wanted to push him away. As he grew larger and harder, George felt he might explode. It was the strangest feeling, something that went beyond simple sexual pleasure. It felt as if something inside her, something special he had not before experienced with another woman was making its way into his soul. That it wasn’t Pattie, but his best friend’s wife, filled him with equal measures of guilt and wonder. When he finally kissed her mouth it was if he’d arrived home after a long journey. He didn’t feel remorse. It was meant to be and he couldn’t argue with the universe.
The videos from A Day In The Life orchestral session look like a a great time. What was going on besides the music?
In February, 1967, we all went to the studio for an overdub session for A Day In the Life. John and Cynthia picked us up in their Rolls. They had a driver and whenever we knew we were going to get loaded, we would all go together in one car so that none of us had to drive. Ringo and Maureen were already with a John and Cyn when George and I climbed in.
As soon as we were off, John pulled out some little, tiny squares of paper from his jacket pocket. “Here,” John said. “Everyone take one.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Acid,” he told us. “It’s on these little pieces of blotter paper. Just put it in your mouth. You can swallow it. It’s only a little bit of paper.” He immediately popped his in and stuck out his tongue for us to see. He grinned and pulled a face.
The only picture I’ve ever seen with Eric, Pattie, and George…
Ringo Starr with his wife Maureen Cox and George Harrison with his wife Pattie Boyd at Heathrow Airport, London, 26th June 1968. With the group is guitarist Eric Clapton (fourth from left, behind Ringo).
(Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Found this on Facebook
Why do you think George let you go so easily to Eric?
One night after my divorce from Eric, I was alone in my cottage in Sussex and George unexpectedly popped in. As always, he didn’t come empty handed and before long we were drinking wine and had a toke or two from some fabulous marijuana he’d rolled into fat joints.
Paul McCartney said that anyone who slept with George woke up with him wrapped around them. Was this right? Did George like to snuggle and cuddle?
Paul was right! George loved to snuggle and cuddle!
Sometimes it would be impossible to untangle myself from him. When I’d try to get up, he’d just tighten his hold, his arms and legs hugging me tight. Even if we went to bed angry, I always woke up in his arms, and soon the cuddles and kisses would turn to into something more! I found it hard to ever stay too angry with him if we were in the same bed.
The night I told George I was leaving him was no different. He came to bed long after I’d lain awake crying wondering if I could really leave him. He took me in his arms and asked me to stay, swearing things would work out.
When I woke up his arms were tight around me and his legs were hooked over mine as if he wasn’t going to let me go. I must have looked as shattered as I felt, because he kissed me tenderly and whispered in my ear that he would always love me and to take my time, he be right here waiting no matter how long it took.
Sometimes, for a few years after George died, in that moment before I’d wake up fully, I’d dream I was in his arms again. I’d snuggle in and think, oh, just a moment more, then the alarm would ring and I’d realize I was alone, I’d cry into my pillow wishing I could feel his arms and legs around me one more time.
Did you and George and Eric ever have a threesome?
George’s affair with Charlotte hurt me deeply, yet I felt sorry for him! He’d walked out on the Beatles, and after a few days with Charlotte he missed me terribly, or so he said. I dropped by Abbey Road, and he looked so depressed and sad, I told him I’d come home.
When I arrived at Kinfauns, I was greeted by George and Eric Clapton. I was surprised as Charlotte had been Eric’s girlfriend, but there seemed to be no animosity between the two. In fact, they were deep into the alcohol and both seemed quite happy to see me. George made me a drink, they called it a French 69, a mix of champagne and brandy. They would laugh like crazy every time they said French 69. Charlotte was French and I could only assume what the 69 was about.
Henri de By
January 20 2018, 12:01am,
The Times
Pattie Boyd was married to the Beatle but obsessively pursued by Clapton. Both would write songs about her; both would cheat on her. In a new documentary, she reveals what it was like to be at the heart of music’s most toxic love triangle. Nina Myskow meets her
Pattie Boyd and George Harrison, 1966Getty Images
When Pattie Boyd was 21 she married a Beatle. Wearing a Mary Quant dress and fox fur coat, the archetypal dolly bird model – all long legs and big eyes – married George Harrison, making her the most envied girl in Britain. It was the swinging Sixties and she was the epitome of glamour, inspiring Harrison to write Something, one of the best love songs ever written.
Pattie Boyd with Eric Clapton in 1978Rex Shutterstock
That was only the beginning of her story. Fellow guitarist and rock star Eric Clapton was so consumed with unrequited love for the wife of his friend that he wrote Layla, declaring his anguish and passion for her.
In a story woven through with obsession, drug addiction and alcoholism, and tortuous heartbreak for both of them, when he eventually wooed her away, he wrote another love song. “I remember it so clearly,” Pattie Boyd says now. “We were going out to a party, and Eric was just playing his guitar as he always did, and I thought, ‘Oh God, what should I wear?’ and I was trying on all sorts of things.
Eric said to George, ‘I have to tell you, man, I’m in love with your wife ’
“I took so long that when I came downstairs I thought, ‘He’s going to get really angry with me.’ But he didn’t. He said, ‘Listen to what I’ve just written.’ And he played Wonderful Tonight. They didn’t play it in the film last night,” she says. “I don’t know why. It’s a great song.”
The film is Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, a documentary about his life, and we are meeting in Boyd’s flat in Kensington the day after she has seen a screening in London. “We were together 13 years, and it doesn’t really mention that, or that we got married.”
However, Clapton’s obsession with her is a major part of the film, a portrait of a deeply troubled man. “It’s a brutally honest film,” says Boyd, now 73, in her rather well brought up tones. “A very honest portrayal of someone in pain. I think he’s brave to have done it. It showed me that so many of Eric’s problems stemmed from his childhood and how unbearably cruel his mother was.”
He grew up not knowing that the woman he thought was his mother was his grandmother and that his real mother was actually the person he thought of as his sister. She fell pregnant at 16 to a Canadian soldier during the Second World War, and had moved to Canada. By the time she came back to visit with another son in tow when he was nine, he knew the truth and reached out to her, only to be rejected.
“It broke my heart watching it and I think it affected him throughout his life,” she says. “He didn’t really trust women.” She watched the film with some sadness, “Because our relationship didn’t work out ultimately. Part of me thought that we got together a bit too late.
“Eric was pursuing me and I was so indecisive about leaving George. Then Eric sank into this mess of taking heroin – he vowed he would if I rejected him. It was only after that that we got together and maybe it was four years too late. Who knows? Maybe he wanted to go the heroin route anyway.”
Boyd and the Beatles during the shoot for A Hard Day’s Night at Marylebone station, 1964Getty Images
It was a scene much less innocent than the one the teenaged Boyd encountered when, as a model who’d been on the cover of Vogue, she landed a role in the Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. “My agent said, ‘You just need to dress in a school uniform and only say one word.’ I thought, ‘It can’t be that difficult.’
“So that’s how I met the Beatles. George and I had this wonderful, instant attraction. I just thought he was the most gorgeous man.
“Both of us being shy it was, on reflection, quite sweet.” She laughs. “I found him charming and very funny. I’d never heard a Liverpool accent before. At the end of the day he said, ‘Would you like to come out with me tonight?’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m seeing my boyfriend.’
“A week later I was asked back to Twickenham Studios for a press shot and George, said, ‘So how is the boyfriend?’ I said, ‘He’s not in my life any longer.’ He said, ‘That’s wonderful! Let’s go out tonight then.’ And that was it.” She laughs.
Boyd was catapulted into the Beatles’ world. “It was enormous fun. If one of them wanted to go out for dinner, or to a club, we’d all go in a big group. Paul was just cute and adorable, and Ringo even more adorable.
“John was great fun, if a little scary because you would never know what he was going to say, but he was fascinating, riveting, clearly the leader. He was very attractive, very sexy, and I loved that he thought that I looked like Brigitte Bardot. He was very cool.” Did she have a fling with him? “No way! Cynthia [Lennon’s first wife] was a very sweet girl. I think when they moved from Liverpool she felt out of her depth. I tried to encourage her to come to London from their home in Surrey but she never really wanted to.
Eric slunk into a black hole of heroin for four years
“I was very lucky to be hanging out with the guys. We’d stay out all night and leave at dawn when the birds were waking up.” Booze and drugs? “Not so many drugs. We smoked dope, that was our big thing when they came back from a tour of America – Bob Dylan had turned them on to it.
“It was natural cannabis and made us giggly. Whereas today people use skunk and it’s a downer. Very antisocial. We were the opposite. It’s very different nowadays.”
They hung out with the Rolling Stones, all going to the same clubs: “Mick was very attractive but I would never have been a girlfriend of his. He’s not my type. Marianne [Faithfull] was absolutely gorgeous. A bit of an outrageous girl, but great fun.”
Faithfull, although later rehabilitated, became a casualty, and lived on the street in Soho for two years, an anorexic junkie. How did Boyd manage to float through relatively unscathed? “Choice of drugs, when it comes down to it,” she says. “The Beatles weren’t as hardcore as the Stones. I know John started taking heroin when he moved to New York, but basically they were a cleaner version of a band. They were the nice boys.”
Boyd and Harrison married in 1966. “I was happy apart from the realisation that I was married to one of the most famous men on the planet and that there were all these girls who hated me. They would write letters, ‘That horrible bitch has married my George.’
“I thought, ‘I’d love to have a baby,’ but nothing seemed to be happening. I put it off because we were young and exciting things were going on. For example, Brian Epstein said, ‘I’ve booked you a holiday in Tahiti.’
Pattie Boyd, 1964Getty Images
“So John and Cynthia and George and I went. It was so exotic. Everything was organised; I don’t ever remember holding a passport but there must have been one somewhere. It was an extraordinary life. Taxis were paid; the car was filled; I didn’t see any bills at all. I lived this amazing life, nothing practical.”
One day Harrison played a recording of a song he’d written for her. It was Something. “Oh my God,” she says. “I was bowled over. Frank Sinatra said it was one of the most beautiful love songs he’d ever heard.”
The oldest of a family of six growing up in Kenya, Boyd was packed off to boarding school at the age of eight. “So I grew up without good support – I didn’t have that grounding that should have been instilled by parents.
“I was sort of airy-fairy, and I would go along with anything. ‘Come play with me?’ ‘Oh, all right.’ ‘Come take drugs!’ ‘Yes, OK.’ Maybe that’s attractive to a creative man. Now I would have a louder voice, a stronger voice.”
She and Harrison bought a huge estate, Friar Park in Henley, so that Harrison could have his own recording studio. But it was not idyllic. George became withdrawn and depressed. And then there were the drugs. Into this scenario came Clapton, who fell obsessively in love with her and pursued her.
The film details how the toxic triangle took hold. Boyd resisted until the day Clapton invited her to his London flat in South Kensington and played her Layla for the first time: “The song got the better of me.” She slept with him for the first time. That night, they went to his manager Robert Stigwood’s party, which George had not wanted to attend. However, he turned up later, and it was at dawn that he came upon the pair of them in the garden.
To Boyd’s horror, Clapton said, “I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.” She shakes her head. “George said, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Are you going home with him or me?’ And I said, ‘Oh George, I’m coming home with you.’ Eric was distraught. He slunk into a black hole of heroin for four years.”
Harrison must have been deeply hurt? “No, George couldn’t give a damn,” she says, surprisingly. She adds, “I didn’t realise until I saw the film last night that Eric knew that George was messing around all the time.” Had she known? “Not until the film’s director, Lili Fini Zanuck, came here. She told me. I didn’t know when we were married. I knew he was at the end, because I knew who she was and it was right in front of me.” The other woman, Boyd’s 2007 autobiography revealed, was Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen.
Boyd left Harrison and Clapton tracked her down to where she was staying with her sister in Los Angeles. “Come and join me on tour in America,” he said to her. “Seeing him on stage was amazing. My heart just burst with joy.”
The end came one morning after Clapton had been up all night drinking. ‘He was uncontrollable. Hysterical. “That’s it,” I said. “I can’t stand it.” It was my birthday’
She and Clapton married in 1979 in Tucson, Arizona. But he too was incapable of fidelity. She says ruefully, “I tried to right everything in my mind by thinking, ‘Maybe all men are shits. This is what happens to everybody.’ He behaved badly on tour. None of the other guys in the band were married, so they would have all these girls in their rooms after the shows.”
And he had replaced drugs with alcohol. This was the period of Clapton’s life when, as he himself once put it, he was a “basket case”.
“He wasn’t always a basket case. There were times when he wasn’t drinking so much and we could have conversations. But I’d have to get him at the right time of day,” she admits.
“I was so in love with him, in love with the man I knew he really was behind the alcohol façade, that I kept thinking, ‘That man might come back.’ ” At one point Boyd tried to keep up with him. “God, I looked such a wreck.”
Stigwood eventually got Clapton into a treatment centre in America. He came back sober but he had changed his addiction. Boyd rolls her eyes. “Because he’s an obsessive person, he started fishing every single day. He’d come back with a basket of trout. Every day, 20 trout.”
She laughs uproariously. “I bought a big freezer and learnt how to gut these bloody things, wrap them in tinfoil.”
Months later, he fell off the wagon on tour, emptying his hotel mini bar. “He’d become unbearable. He was slowly killing himself.”
Equally damaging was the infidelity. “He had that affair on tour with the Italian woman [Lory Del Santo], and he had the baby [Conor]. It was a stab in the heart. I wanted to have children and I’d tried everything: IVF, Chinese medicine. Nothing. A doctor examined me and said one tube was out of action, but that shouldn’t have stopped me getting pregnant.”
The end came one morning after Clapton had been up all night drinking. “He was uncontrollable,” she says. “Hysterical. He was screaming so loudly that I thought the veins in his neck were going to burst. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand it.’ It was my birthday. I left.”
They divorced in 1989. Two years later, Conor died falling from a 53rd-floor window in a Manhattan apartment building. She attended the funeral at Clapton’s request.
Boyd with her third husband, Rod Weston, in 2015Getty Images
The birth and death of Conor became the catalyst in Clapton’s rehabilitation. Today, he is decades sober, married to Melia McEnery with three daughters (and another, Ruth, from a previous relationship). In 1997 he founded Crossroads Centre, a luxury rehab centre in Antigua.
In the meantime, on her own after the divorce, Boyd had to learn to make her own way with little support and no practical skills. “I hadn’t been on public transport for 30 years,” she says. “I had no money. I didn’t have a bean.” She turned her hand to photography and has held several exhibitions. “I’m over 70 now and I’m still having to work,” she says.
She and Rod Weston, a property developer, married in 2015 after 20 years together. They first met 30 years ago and Weston has brought some peace to her life. “With Eric I was living on a rollercoaster. When I started seeing Rod I was going to see a psychotherapist and I said, ‘The weird thing about him is that he’s sort of like the same, all the time.’ The psychotherapist said, ‘Pattie, that’s normal.’ I’d never realised that before.”
In the past, there have been a lot of tears. “I cried so much I ran out of them. When George became a nightmare, and Eric became a nightmare, there were tears all the time. I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to cry again in my life,’ and I don’t think I have.
“The good thing about ageing is that you don’t care so much,” she says. “There is that disappointment of the disintegration, but you have to have a sense of humour.
“It would be nice to have a waist,” she goes on, laughing and clutching at her midriff. “When did I get this tummy? And these bat-wing things ... I didn’t order that!”
Who was the love of her life? ‘I think it was George. George was always very loving’
She walks Freddie, her Irish terrier, does Pilates, swears off wine two nights a week and makes her own almond milk to have with her daily porridge.
She is still in touch with Clapton. “We text each other when we have news about friends. And he was very happy to see me last night. Big hug and kiss, and he said to me, ‘Oh, I didn’t know if you were coming. I have to warn you, it’s a bumpy ride.’
“It was weird watching our relationship on screen, knowing he was watching it, too. Because when I see him, there’s still that little connection that was always there. And I don’t want it to be there ... But I was once so mad about him.”
What did she think of her younger self on screen? “I wanted to shake her! I thought, ‘Why is she just standing there looking pretty.’ How lucky, to be pretty, because I was in those days. But really …”
Clapton’s story is one of redemption and the film’s ending is uplifting. Boyd’s, too. “It’s a good life. I have a lovely husband, a beautiful dog, the best of friends and I’m happy. I’ve survived George, and I’ve survived Eric. So I’m very lucky.”
Can she decide between the two men these days? Who was the love of her life? “I think it was George. George was always very loving. Even after we split he was always my friend, we’d still speak on the phone. And he came to see me before he died [of cancer in 2001]. If you love somebody, you do that.
“And I think he always did love me.” And Eric not? “Eric loves himself. I don’t think there’s much room for me.”
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