It’s one of rock’s most famous love stories, or at least its most painful.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, three icons of British music found themselves entangled in a knot of love, loyalty, and longing.
We’re talking, of course, about George Harrison, the ‘quiet Beatle ‘; Eric Clapton, the tortured guitar genius; and Pattie Boyd, the model and muse who inspired some of the greatest love songs ever written.
Before all this played out, Boyd was the face of Swinging London and one of the first true IT girls.
She was aVogue model who moved through the same electric world as Twiggy and Marianne Faithfull, capturing the restless glamour of a decade remaking itself in Technicolor.
How did George Harrison meet Pattie Boyd?
Harrison met her in 1964 on the set of A Hard Day’s Night when he was 21 and she was 19. It was love at first sight for Harrison, who famously proposed marriage the moment he saw her.
When Boyd was left speechless, he said: ‘If you won’t marry me, will you at least have dinner with me?’ She had a boyfriend at the time, so turned him down.
But when the pair saw eachother again a few weeks later to take press photos, she recalled to People: ‘By this time, of course, I had told my boyfriend that it was the end of our relationship. When I saw George, the first thing he said was, “How’s your boyfriend?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have a boyfriend…”‘
Thus began a whirlwind romance, and in 1966, they were married in a ceremony that had to be top-secret, for fear of fans or the press getting hold of the news.
Boyd recalled: ‘I would love to have told all my friends. But I just told my mother. That’s not really that much fun, is it?’
Their marriage began in a very particular cultural moment, meaning they were surrounded by sitars, incense, and spiritual searching.
At the time, Harrison was famously discovering Hinduism and experimenting with LSD while Boyd was navigating the heady world of rock celebrity and the isolating domesticity that often accompanied it.
But while Harrison was meditating with the Maharishi and retreating into his own inward universe, another man was watching.
When did Eric Clapton meet Pattie Boyd?
Eric Clapton, a close friend of Harrison’s, fell in love with Boyd almost from the moment he met her, to hear him tell it.
In fact, many around at the time would later claim he was obsessed, so much so, that he dated her sister Paula briefly, hoping to assuage his longing.
The result of this yearning was Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970), an anguished masterpiece recorded with Derek and the Dominos.
As many would later spot, the title track, inspired by the Persian tale of star-crossed lovers, was a barely veiled declaration of love for Boyd – who, at the time, was still very much married to his friend.
‘Please don’t say we’ll never find a way,’ Clapton sings in Layla. When Boyd finally heard it, she later said, she ‘snew instantly it was about me.’
The intensity of Clapton’s longing coincided with a growing coldness in Harrison and Boyd’s marriage, partly influenced by the couple’s inability to have a child and Harrison’s refusal to consider adoption.
Harrison was having affairs, including with Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen.
Boyd, for her part, had an affair with Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood (who would later join the Rolling Stones) in 1973.
When did Pattie Boyd leave George Harrison?
Boyd eventually left Harrison in 1974.
In a 2022 interview with The Telegraph, she recalled: ‘It was an extremely difficult decision of mine to make. I felt that I had to leave George because things were getting really out of hand.’
‘George was just being a different George. We had gone in different directions, basically. But we still loved each other. It’s just that I think he wanted to spread his wings and take advantage of being the handsome, famous, rich guy that he was, and see how the girls feel about him. A hot-blooded boy – why not, I suppose.’
During this period of acrimony, Boyd was beginning to feel differently towards Clapton.
When did Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd get together?
The details of this blooming romance have now been made clearer in letters between the two that were sold in an auction at Christie’s last year.
In 1970, he sent a letter which asked her: ‘What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband? All these questions are very impertinent, I know, but if there is still a feeling in your heart for me… you must let me know!
‘Don’t telephone! Send a letter… That is much safer.’
Months later, Clapton sent another letter which was written on a page he had torn from a copy of John Steinbeck’s book Of Mice and Men.
‘Why do you hesitate, am I a poor lover, am I ugly, am I too weak, too strong, do you know why?
‘If you want me, take me, I am yours… if you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me. To cage a wild animal is a sin, to tame him is divine. My love is yours.’
Although Boyd originally turned down his advances, after leaving Harrison in 1974, she began to entertain more of his advances.
Actor John Hurt later recalled that Harrison and Clapton staged a guitar ‘duel’ over Boyd at Friar Park. Hurt added that it was ‘extraordinary … The air was electric. Nobody dare say a word.’
She clearly had her head turned, as she went on tour with Clapton soon after.
When did Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd get married?
The pair married in 1979 -a union that, despite its fairy-tale beginnings, soon deteriorated under the weight of Clapton’s heroin and alcohol addictions, and his own serial infidelities.
Additionally, Clapton later admitted to abusing her while they were married and in the grip of alcoholism.
Clapton and Boyd tried unsuccessfully to have children, trying in vitro fertilisation unsucessfully in 1984 and 1987.
Which songs did Eric Clapton and George Harrison write about Pattie Boyd?
Both men wrote their longing and heartbreak into songs that became cultural touchstones: Harrison’s tender Something (which Frank Sinatra once called the greatest love song ever written) and Clapton’s desperate Layla.
Boyd provided inspiration for several more of Harrison’s Beatles compositions, including I Need You, If I Needed Someone, Love You To, and For You Blue.
Boyd was their shared muse, but her own experience – of being adored, pursued, and ultimately disappointed by both -tells a quieter, more human story about what it meant to be the woman behind the music.
By the 1980s, all three had reached a kind of uneasy peace. Harrison and Clapton famously reconciled, even performing together in later years, trading jokes about their shared romantic history.
Boyd, for her part, went on to write two memoirs that reframed her story on her own terms.
Looking back now, the Harrison, Clapton, Boyd triangle feels like a relic of a certain kind of rock-era masculinity, where women were both worshipped and confined by the art they inspired.
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