“Wonderful Tonight” repeats enough of these letters to show that the plaintive beauty of “Layla” (Clapton”s name for Boyd, taken from the Persian writer Nizami) was no fluke. Meanwhile, mash notes from Clapton began to arrive.
He turned meditative and moody, “so if you talked to him you didn”t know whether you would get an answer in the middle of his chanting or whether he would bite your head off.” He also began to drink, sleep with his friends” wives (most notably Ringo Starr”s) and become increasingly hard to find in their 25-bedroom house.
Harrison returned from India a changed man, Boyd says. To its credit, the book answers that question plausibly and fully. There is exactly one big question for Boyd to answer here: What made her leave Harrison for Clapton, her husband”s close friend? And this book includes perhaps the least useful account of the much-described 1968 all-star idyll in India: “If it was anyone”s birthday, and there was a surprising number while we were there, including George”s 25th and my 24th, there would be cake and a party.”īut that”s not what you”re reading “Wonderful Tonight” for, is it? “George”s moods, I think, had much to do with what was going on between the Beatles,” she says vapidly. Harrison would repeatedly learn, “all of those musicians were like little boys in long trousers.” They never navigated the world for themselves, so neither did she.īoyd doesn”t remember much about her Beatle years that has not already been described by pop historians. And in January 1966 she and Harrison married, but not before he asked permission of Brian Epstein, the group”s manager. This made her exactly the kind of female accessory that rock stars favored in the days when, as Junor has probably put it, “the capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy.” Boyd quickly became part of the Fab Eight - each Beatle traveled with a wife or girlfriend. She appeared on the cover of a book called “Birds of Britain,” prompting the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, in the introduction, to rhapsodize about “a swirl of miniskirt, beneath which limbs flicker like jackknives and glimmer like trout.” Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humor.īoyd had been a successful London model in her dollybird days. And she meets them at the point where most of the world met Boyd: when she appeared briefly in the film “A Hard Day”s Night,” riding on a train and looking fetching in a schoolgirl”s uniform. “Wonderful Tonight,” which takes its title from another of Clapton”s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years and cuts quickly to the chase.īoyd meets the Beatles. Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Boyd”s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. But in Boyd”s case, being a muse also means never having paid a light bill until she was 45, jobless and suddenly unplugged from the world of rock ”n” roll royalty. Pattie Boyd calls herself a muse, and she has the ravishing love songs (George Harrison”s “Something,” Eric Clapton”s “Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) to prove it.
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