An iconic figure of the 1960s and ’70s, Pattie Boyd breaks a forty-year silence in Wonderful Tonight , and tells the story of how she found herself bound to two of the most addictive, promiscuous musical geniuses of the twentieth century and became the most famous muse in the history of rock and roll.
She met the Beatles in 1964 when she was cast as a schoolgirl in A Hard Day’s Night . Ten days later a smitten George Harrison proposed. For twenty-year-old Pattie Boyd, it was the beginning of an unimaginably rich and complex life as she was welcomed into the Beatles inner circle—a circle that included Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, and a veritable who’s who of rock musicians. She describes the dynamics of the group, the friendships, the tensions, the musicmaking, and the weird and wonderful memories she has of Paul and Linda, Cynthia and John, Ringo and Maureen, and especially the years with her husband, George.
It was a sweet, turbulent life, but one that would take an unexpected turn, starting with a simple note that began “dearest l.”
I read it quickly and assumed that it was from some weirdo; I did get fan mail from time to time.... I thought no more about it until that evening when the phone rang. It was Eric [Clapton]. “Did you get my letter?”... And then the penny dropped. “Was that from you?” I said....It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written me.
For the first time Pattie Boyd, former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, a high-profile model whose face epitomized the swinging London scene of the 1960s, a woman who inspired Harrison’s song “Something” and Clapton’s anthem “Layla,” has decided to write a book that is rich and raw, funny and heartbreaking—and totally honest and open and breathtaking. Here is the truth, here is what happened, here is the story you’ve been waiting for.
Wonderful Tonight, Pattie Boyd
If you had asked me what I was expecting before I picked up this auto-biography, I doubt I could have told you. Maybe a bit about what it was like, really like, to be within the inner circle of the Beatles. A feeling for the how it was in the beautiful, swinging, mad, crazy 60s "it" crowds. Perhaps some sex, drugs and rock and roll, maybe even a little gossip. Written by the muse of two of the most famous musicians around I was hoping to see what it was about this woman that influenced / engendered that reaction in men who - well let's be frank - could probably have had any woman they wanted.
Pattie Boyd spent part of her childhood in Kenya, but even for the child of divorced parents, the raising of Pattie and her siblings seems to have been a slightly erratic undertaking, although she does seem to be close to her mother in later life. She left home, fell into modelling, met George Harrison during the filming of "A Hard Day's Night" and life from there took off as she and George found an instant attraction. Later, as married life with George turned sour, Eric Clapton told George one night "I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife". Later, married to Clapton, things again turned sour as he struggled with a drinking problem and became more and more distant.
At points in this book you can see glimpses of what it must have been like to live a life so publicly scrutinised and followed. You can get some sense of the way it must have been to go from a life of nothing to the privilege of money. You can see some of the dissatisfaction that can arise from fame, notoriety, pressure and the sheer excess of money. But to me, a lot of this seemed to be just that - glimpses. As a result of that, I was a little disappointed. This is a woman who was as close to that particular, exciting, period of music and social history and change as anybody could have been (without being one of the musicians herself), yet the story that she wrote seemed a little flat, disconnected and jumbled. Maybe Penny Junor, dual writing credit on the book, should have had a firmer hand in directing the narrative, but Boyd's own voice is a little muddy, toneless, perhaps extremely cautious? There is a lot of name dropping however, and I'd imagine that anybody who is a passionate fan of the Beatles will appreciate whatever glimpses they can get into the inner-world of the band. At the end of the book could I see why Pattie Boyd became that famous muse? I'm not sure.