So off she went, only to find that life at Mr. But he basically shares her idea of their grand passion.
#Wonderful tonight pattie boyd full#
Clapton, whose own autobiography, “Clapton,” is imminent in an autumn that will be full of rock ’n’ roll memoirs, sees the heroin issue a little differently: He says he was already fully addicted. Harrison for him, and that he made good on that threat.
Clapton told her he would begin using heroin if she wouldn’t leave Mr. One letter reads, “for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move.”
Boyd, taken from the Persian writer Nizami) was no fluke. “Wonderful Tonight” repeats enough of these letters to show that the plaintive beauty of “Layla” (Mr. The two men were friends who collaborated on records. Pattie Boyd with her husbands: George Harrison, above, and Eric Clapton. 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.” But 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. Boyd doesn’t remember much about her Beatle years that has not already been described by pop historians. 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.
Harrison married, but not before he asked permission of Brian Epstein, the group’s manager. She quickly became part of the Fab Eight, since each Beatle traveled with a wife or girlfriend. Boyd appeared in a television commercial for potato chips, which led to the “Hard Day’s Night” casting call, which led to a place in history. This book has a running food motif, which allows it to ask a priceless question: “Who would have guessed that the humble potato would play such an important part in my life?” Translation: Ms. As long as you were young, beautiful and creative, the world was your oyster.” Boyd would have been one tin-eared muse if she herself wrote passages like: “And, to use the old cliché, make love not war. Junor has probably put it, “the capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy.” Ms.
This made her exactly the kind of female accessory that rock stars favored in the days when, as Ms. Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humor. 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. And it meets them at the point where most of the world met Ms. Clapton’s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years (“My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach” “My only comfort was Teddy, my beloved bear”) and cuts quickly to the chase. “Wonderful Tonight,” which takes its title from another of Mr. Boyd’s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Ms. 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.