As rock wives go, Pattie Boyd has performed a tremendous service for the music-loving public. She inspired George Harrison to write Something, the Beatles’ most widely covered song, after their marriage in 1966. Three years on, Mrs Harrison was so staunch in rejecting the advances of George’s best mate Eric Clapton that he slunk away and recorded Layla, the most potent expression of unrequited love in the rock canon. Later, after a change of heart, divorced and remarried to her second superstellar lead guitarist, she prompted Wonderful Tonight. The fact that at the time he composed this mellow ode to his wife’s fabled beauty, Clapton was in his alcoholic phase, downing a couple of bottles of brandy a day, is just one of the reasons why a book in which Boyd finally spills the beans has been so eagerly anticipated.

Inevitably perhaps, it’s a bit of a disappointment. Nobody lived closer to the eye of the hurricane that blew through London in the 1960s than she did, first as a top model for two of the photographic gurus of the day, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, then as a member of the Beatles’ inner circle. It must have been a blast, but that’s not quite how it comes across here. Before her first meeting with the Beatles in 1964, as an extra on the film of A Hard Day’s Night, Boyd recalls that “the idea of meeting such famous people was [so] exciting” that she rang up her friend Bailey for advice.

As a start, he suggested that she should listen to a Beatles LP, so she did: “And I really enjoyed it.” Upon encountering the fabulous foursome she “couldn’t understand .. . the thick Liverpudlian accent. I’d never heard anything like it”. And how was it for a 20-year-old, home-counties, convent-educated gel to go out with this working-class Scouser pop icon? “It felt as though we did nothing but laugh.” By the time she falls for Clapton, the revelation “Eric, I discovered, was not a naturally tidy man” is the sort of humdrum disclosure you’ve come to expect from an autobiography that feels ghosted in more than the usual sense.

Then again, this low wattage is probably what has kept Boyd sane. While George was carrying on with Ringo’s wife Maureen (locking himself and Mrs Starr into the master bedroom at Friar Park, yet furiously denying they were having an affair), Boyd admits she remained bizarrely calm. “I didn’t say, as I should have done. . . ‘Get that woman out of my house’.” Nor did she restrain her husband from the drug bingeing that led to his brutal infidelities, observing mildly that “George used coke excessively, and I think it changed him”. The realisation dawns on the reader that allowing philandering alpha-male partners to do as they please stores up more problems than it solves.

When in 1985, after years of trying to have a child with his wife, Clapton found that he was about to become a father thanks to a fling with an actress he bedded one night in Milan, he took Boyd out for a meal in a local restaurant. “I really think, in a funny way, he expected me to be pleased,” Boyd muses. By this point, the awful truth is that you can see why Clapton might have expected she would be. It was two months before she finally stopped sharing his bed. After divorcing two of the wealthiest rock stars on the planet, she somehow ended up broke, living in a small flat in Hammersmith.

Boyd shows some insight into her good-natured passivity. The most touching part of the book describes her disrupted childhood – the war-wounded father who never spoke, then disappeared, ceasing all contact with his eldest daughter; the cruel stepfather who ran off with the German wife of his best friend; the long-suffering mother who endured every kind of genteel privation in bringing up six children, mostly on her own. Boyd rightly sees a lot of her mum in the way she has handled her own affairs.

But she remains a party girl at heart, and all the womanly talk at the end about discovering “self-worth” and “spirituality” with her new best friend, the PR Lynne Franks, only strengthens that impression. After she’s sacked her third and last man, Rod, a male model turned property developer, Boyd announces she has “grown up at last”. All that hanging out at dinner parties and dressing up for events she denounces as “a vacuous existence”. She now realises “what’s inside is much more important”. Yeah, right. A page later Boyd is with Cilla Black heading for a party in the Hamptons, breathless with excitement at the thought of bumping into some famous film stars. “Well, Jude Law! I couldn’t wait to get there. And the best bit was going home and telling [everybody] that we’d been lying on the beach next to him.”

Wonderful Today by Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor
Headline Review £20 pp310
Buy the book here at the offer price of £18 (inc p&p)

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