George Harrison - she had him on his knees. Eric Clapton - she had him begging, "Darlin', please."
George Harrison proposed to her the first day he met her.
After they were married, he wrote "Something" for her.
Though she was married to his best friend, Eric Clapton fell in love with her -- a love-triangle drama that inspired "Layla" and led him to become a junkie.
Later, after the two were married, she was the woman in Clapton's "Wonderful, Tonight."
Who is this modern musical Mata Hari?
She's Pattie Boyd and she's releasing a tell-all autobiography, Wonderful Today, on August 23.
As part of the promotion England's Daily Mail has run a two-part excerpt from the book.
Among the book's many strange revelations:
1) Apparently Harrison returned from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India in 1968 he was obsessed with becoming a Krishna figure, "a spiritual beings with lots of concubines." After telling his wife this he began bedding just about anything that would wriggle, including one of Clapton's ex-girlfriends and Ringo's wife.
2) Clapton was living with Boyd's younger sister when he first professed his love for her in an anonymous letter.
3) Clatpon was apparently quite the ladies man, but couldn't get Boyd out of her knickers until he played a pre-release version of "Layla" for her. Even then, she slept with him but wouldn't leave her husband. He threatened to become a junkie if she wouldn't be his -- when she said no, that's just what he did.
4) Clapton was fond of writing her love letters on the pages of books, including John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and a book of Scottish ballads.
5) Harrison was often busy shagging his friends' ex-girlfriends and wives, but he didn't take his best friend's advances toward his wife lying down. This is how Boyd describes a bizarre confrontation between the two which eerily presaged the alleged "dance off" between an estranged Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears years later:
"One evening the actor John Hurt was with us. Eric was due to come over too and George decided to have it out with him. John wanted to make himself scarce but George insisted he stay.
John remembers George coming downstairs with two guitars and two small amplifiers, laying them down in the hall, then pacing restlessly until Eric arrived – full of brandy, as usual.
As Eric walked through the door George handed him a guitar and amp – as an 18th Century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword – and for two hours, without a word, they duelled. The air was electric and the music exciting.
At the end, nothing was said but the general feeling was that Eric had won. He hadn't allowed himself to get riled or to go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar-playing was unbeatable.
That whole period was insane."
Clearly.
Boyd doesn't leave anyone looking like an angel -- including herself. She confesses to drug and alcohol abuse, adultery and (maybe, it's hard to tell) a brief affair with Ron Wood of the Faces and later the Rolling Stones.
The descriptions of people with way too much money, way too many drugs and way too few inhibitions are a little jarring, even to those of us sort of dulled to that sort of thing by modern celebrity gossip. There's a different sort of edge to it because we're not talking about people who we aren't sure whether we'll care about in five years -- we're talking about rock legends, here.
Comments (3)
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That duel is amazing and surreal.
I wish they had recorded it.
Posted on August 9, 2007 4:21 PM
My thing is this: Even if you dismiss the incredible strangeness of the duel itself, how doped up do you have to be to challenge ERIC CLAPTON to a battle of guitar supremacy?
Posted on August 9, 2007 4:36 PM
Doped up enough to want to be a incarnation of Krishna. That's a start.
Posted on August 10, 2007 10:40 AM