Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  The only time I ever did catwalk modeling was for Ossie Clark. We all modeled for him because we adored him and he made the most beautiful clothes. He was a thin, effete, stylish man, not very tall but with fine bones—and big workman’s hands. He could sew magnificently and he was the finest fabric cutter in London. He cut on the bias beautifully. It was a real treat to watch. I remember being in the shop one day and at the back there was a long table where his cutters worked. He and I were going out when someone said something to him and he said, “No, that’s not the way to do it.” He took the scissors and, in a flash, had cut perfectly across the material.

  He designed with his wife Celia Birtwell, who made all the prints and was also incredibly talented. She was a great friend of David Hockney. Hockney had a coterie of creative friends who hung out at his flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill. Ossie used to tell a wonderful story about when he and Hockney were on holiday together. Early one evening they caught the Trans-Siberian Express, had a bit of supper, and went to bed. Next morning they were hungry and looking forward to breakfast. Unable to speak Russian, David used a paper napkin to explain what he wanted. He drew a boiled egg and gave it to the waiter, who came back with a ball of ice cream. Little did the bemused Russian know that he had an original Hockney in his hand.

  Ossie was magical. When he was up, he was the best person in the world to be with, but when he was down—and he really plumbed the depths—he could be vicious. He didn’t like mixing with other designers and you were wise not to mention their names; he preferred to socialize with rock stars, painters, and models. He felt, and it was true, that he had introduced the trouser suit way before Yves Saint Laurent, yet the latter always got the credit. With Celia, he also did printed chiffons long before anyone else. He was a real innovator.

  I loved going out with Ossie. Usually I met him at Hockney’s flat—I remember going there once, after a show or something, and he said, “Come on, we’re going out tonight.” I said I couldn’t, I had nothing to wear, so he took me to his own flat in Linden Gardens, where there were lots of dresses. He threw one at me and said, “Try this on.” As I was changing I saw Celia and their two babies—typical mother at home, nappies everywhere—and said, “What about Celia?” And he said, “No, no, no, she can’t come out,” and off we went. I felt a bit guilty to leave her behind but that was how it was. He would go out all the time and her role was to stay at home.

  Nothing was ever planned when we went out. He would say, “Let’s go to a recording studio,” or a show or someone’s house. We would jump into his huge American car and he would drive down one-way streets the wrong way and into roads with no-entry signs. He was great fun to be with—unless it was after a collection. While he was working he would be up, up, up, and when it was over, he would go into a terrible depression and want to go on holiday when he should have been following up on orders and selling the clothes. His shows were spectacular with fabulous music that made you want to dance. They were real events, and he would sit up all night beforehand putting the finishing touches to the clothes—those great hands doing the most delicate sewing—and getting the sound just right. He didn’t pay us any money, but the clothes were so amazing that most of us would have paid him to model them—and he always let us keep one outfit.

  I can’t remember how I met Ossie. It might have been at a party or perhaps one day I wandered into Quorum. It was in Radnor Walk off King’s Road. Alice Pollock, another designer, shared it. All sorts of people used to hang out there—the building was a mecca for the young and beautiful—and if he liked the look of you he would give you things. I don’t know how he ever made any money. He was enormously talented but a hopeless businessman. David Gilmour, the great guitarist and songwriter with Pink Floyd, was a friend and worked for Ossie as a driver; when he wasn’t driving, he would be sitting in the cutting room putting buttons on leather jackets. Brian Jones, who played with the Rolling Stones, lived in a flat above the shop, and above that was a model agency called English Boy, run by Jose Fonseca and owned by Mark Palmer. When he eventually sold it, Jose started her own agency, Models One. English Boy had many famous names on its books, not just boys, including a number of my friends.

  People say I was Ossie’s muse. He liked to make clothes for women who looked like women, with busts and waists, narrow hips and long legs—and I had all of those. He used to say I had “glass ankles” and some of the designs were called “Pattie.” When I was modeling I was very thin and I worked at keeping myself that way. I would hardly eat, and then I discovered these diet biscuits that you could buy from the chemist. They were so filling I hardly had to eat anything else. I was a size eight—34B/24/34. I have a narrow back and at that time I had a tiny rib cage. Recently I found some of my clothes from the sixties and I can’t begin to get into them. They look as though they were made for a child.

  In March 1963, I moved from the chaos of Stanhope Gardens to a flat in Hereford Square, where there were even more girls and even greater chaos. After three months, I was short of money and went to live at home for six months. With Bobbie gone, my mother had had to give up Hurlingham Court and move into the house that Bobbie and Ingrid had lived in, in Strathmore Road. I thought it very shabby and I was angry on her behalf. I couldn’t understand why she had not stood up for herself and insisted on staying in Putney, instead of moving to his poky love nest in Wimbledon. Also, she should have ensured that she got a decent amount of maintenance. After his invitation to Jenny the year before, I had heard nothing from Bobbie. Since then, the only times I have seen him were David’s and Boo’s weddings and occasional family parties, and when I was writing this book!

  The silence from my real father was equally deafening. After we left Kenya at the end of 1953, apart from the occasional Christmas card and gift, we heard nothing.

  I was so happy on our honeymoon in Barbados I thought I might burst.

  FOUR

  George

  Who would have guessed that the humble potato would play such an important part in my life? In November 1963 I was in a rather charming television commercial for Smith’s crisps. The director was Dick Lester, a good-looking, soft-spoken American who, at the age of twenty-six, had already made a name for himself with a short comedy classic called The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. In this film, I had to pick crisps out of a packet and put them into my mouth, lisping about how much I loved Smith’s crisps. It was the first television I had ever done and the first time I had had a speaking part. For someone who was as cripplingly shy as I, it was quite an ordeal, and in the end they used someone else’s voice—which I felt decidedly miffed about—but the commercial was a great success and projected me to a new level of recognition.

  A few weeks later I heard that a girl called Mary Bee was looking for someone to share a flat. She was originally a friend of Belinda Watson—who had ensnared the lovely Jean-Claude—but when Belinda introduced us we realized we had already met. She had been at the Convent of the Sacred Heart while I was at St. Martha’s and we had played in school tennis matches and guzzled orange quarters together. And there were other connections. I had been at school with someone called Paula Derham, whose brother John I was very keen on, would take us to parties in his Jag. Mary Bee knew Paula because John Derham had been at school with Mary’s brother John. Jean-Claude had also been there—it was a Roman Catholic school—and the three were friends. So in December Mary and I moved into a gorgeous but tiny flat in Oakley Street, Chelsea, with one little bedroom that we shared.

  I was working flat out, not getting back until late and needing an alarm call to get me out of bed in the mornings—the phone number was Flaxman 4088. Mary was working for Mary Quant, one of the first designers to have a boutique in the King’s Road. It was called Bazaar and, with her husband Alexander Plunkett Greene, she went on to build up a chain, then brought out a range of makeup and was very influential in the way people looked and dressed.

  For me, as a mode
l, no two days were the same and my eating pattern went haywire. Some days I would eat, other days not, and I never had more than a cup of tea for breakfast. I was still preoccupied with keeping my weight down and I had found a doctor in Harley Street who gave me some pills that speeded up my metabolism so I was thirsty but not hungry. I’m sure it was very bad for me but that didn’t cross my mind because we all did it. I wasn’t much of a cook then either—sometimes Mary and I would give dinner parties, and had to ring our mothers for instructions. My mother was good for the basic things; Mary’s was the one to ring when we attempted more exotic dishes.

  I was still going out with Eric Swayne and doing a lot of work for him, but I wasn’t in love. He could be very severe, and the longer I was with him the more domineering he became. He was a bit like my stepfather, I suppose, and he didn’t bring out the best in me. He was almost obsessive about me and all that he would do for my career, and most of my friends found him a bit creepy.

  Mary had a more adventurous social life than I did and was seeing a well-known married man. She wore the prettiest black lacy underwear and Guerlain Shalimar perfume when she went out to dinner with him and seemed so sophisticated. Married men were out of bounds, as far as I was concerned; having seen what Ingrid’s affair with my stepfather had done to my mother, I had no desire to break up a marriage. Neither, I am sure, did Mary. Leaving the morality issue aside, though, I didn’t find older men attractive. I felt safer with people of my own age, boys who, like my brothers, would be friends and playmates—and photographers were usually pretty playful.

  I was busy working with a photographer called Dudley Harris one morning in January 1964 when Cherry Marshall rang to tell me she had made an appointment for me at a casting session. It would take place at one o’clock in the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, and the contact was Walter Shenson. I assumed it was an advertising agency job. I was used to those interviews. They were ghastly, like a cattle market.

  When I got there the usual models were clutching their portfolios, but when my turn came, I was surprised to see Dick Lester among the men in suits, automatically assumed it was another commercial, and asked him what product he was doing this time. He wouldn’t say, which surprised me, but all became clear when I arrived home.

  Cherry Marshall was soon on the phone to say that they wanted me. It was top secret and I wasn’t to tell a soul, but I had been offered a part in a Beatles film.

  I panicked. “No, I don’t want to do it! I can’t do it!” I wasn’t an actress and had no aspirations in that direction. The idea of having to act and speak in front of a camera terrified me.

  Cherry insisted I could do it; there was nothing to worry about. They knew I wasn’t an actress, they wouldn’t expect me to do anything I couldn’t do. I had to play a schoolgirl, dressed in uniform. There were no lines and it was only two days’ work. She wouldn’t let me turn it down.

  At that time Britain was in the early stages of Beatlemania. After years of hard slog in dingy Hamburg nightclubs, and at the Cavern in Liverpool, the Beatles had made it. In less than a year they had gone from being a talented group with a strong following in the north to major recording artists with millions of fans worldwide, fame, acclaim, and the stardom that every rock star dreams of. The four boys with their floppy haircuts—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—had conquered Sweden, France, Spain, and Italy; and before they started shooting this film, they took America by storm—a notoriously difficult task for British artists.

  It had been a slow start in America. Three records they had released there had done nothing until the American newsmagazines Time and Newsweek had published articles about Beatlemania in Europe. Suddenly America was interested. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went straight to number one, and in February 1964 they were invited to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York, the most prestigious chat show in America. That night seventy-three million people watched—and afterward George said proudly that he had been told no crime was reported while they were on.

  Britain was equally transfixed. In September 1963 the Beatles’ songs were number one in every bestseller chart there was. Please Please Me was the top-selling LP, “Twist and Shout” was the number one EP, and “She Loves You” had outsold every other single. Before “She Loves You” even had a title, thousands of copies had been ordered, and the day before it went on sale there were unprecedented advance orders of 500,000. They were all over the newspapers, even the serious broadsheets, they were mobbed everywhere they went, and at their concerts thousands of hysterical teenagers cried, swooned, charged the stage, and screamed so loudly that no one could hear the music.

  I was the exception. I didn’t have any of the Beatles’ records and hadn’t paid much attention to them or their music. But, of course, the idea of meeting such famous people was exciting. I broke my vow of silence and confided in David Bailey, who insisted that I buy a copy of their album before I did the filming. Mary and I played Please Please Me in the flat on our Dansette record player, and I really enjoyed it. My parents’ music had never inspired me but I do remember thinking how exciting when the first free copy of New Musical Express fell out of their Daily Express one morning: news about music—what a good idea.

  We had always had a radiogram at home, in a large mahogany cabinet in the drawing room. When you opened the doors a dim light fell on our record collection—about five LPs. Four were ghastly but the fifth was Glenn Miller and his orchestra, and in the absence of anything else, we played that as I grew up. As a teenager I liked Cliff Richard, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers.

  The instructions for my first day’s filming on A Hard Day’s Night were to go to Paddington station and meet three other models, who had also been cast as schoolgirls, under the clock at 8:00 a.m., then join a train halfway down platform one. About ten minutes out of London it ground to an unexpected halt at a tiny station, deserted but for four familiar figures, who leaped on board and bounced into our compartment to say hello. They introduced themselves fleetingly, one made a crack and we all laughed, then they bounced out. They were enchanting and we cursed our luck to be meeting them in school uniforms.

  The film crew had taken over the train and most of the action happened on the move. It was supposedly about two days in the life of the Beatles and the train scene began with the four racing into a station, chased by hundreds of screaming fans, then jumping into a train that pulled away, leaving the fans forlornly on the platform. They had done that bit at Marylebone station before they met up with us. We were involved in the action once they had supposedly jumped into the carriage.

  The train took us to Cornwall and back, not that I remember much of the scenery. I spent most of the day watching the action, chatting to everyone during the breaks, and waiting to do my bit. The Beatles were so funny together, so quick-witted, and their laughter was infectious. I couldn’t understand half of what they said because of the thick Liverpudlian accent—a revelation to me, I’d never heard anything like it. It was impossible to be in their company and not be helpless with laughter.

  On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute, and George, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I’d ever seen. At the break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him, whether by accident or design I have never been sure. We were both shy and spoke hardly a word to each other, but being close to him was electrifying.

  As the train neared London and the filming was winding down, I felt sad that such a magical day was ending. It had been pure joy and I wanted to capture it forever. As if George had known what I was thinking, he said, “Will you marry me?” I laughed, as I had at all the Beatles’ jokes. I scarcely allowed myself to wonder why he had said it or whether he might feel as I did. Then he said, “Well, if you won’t marry me, will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  I was thrown. Was he serious or just playing around? I felt
awkward and said I couldn’t, I had a boyfriend, but I was sure my boyfriend would love to meet him—maybe we could all go out. George didn’t think so, so we said our farewells at the station and disappeared into the night.

  I went home and told Mary Bee I thought I’d made a huge mistake. She thought I was insane—“And what’s more,” she said, concluding the tirade, “you don’t even like Eric!”

  The next day I was at a very unglamorous catalogue shoot with a model called Pat Booth in a dingy basement studio in Wardour Street. We’d been working together the day I heard I’d got the film job (and had indiscreetly told her, too), and she was dying to know how it had gone and what the Beatles were like. I told her that George Harrison had asked me out and I’d turned him down. We were sitting in a corner trying to put on our makeup. “Are you crazy?” she said. “You must be out of your mind.” I explained that the person I was going out with wouldn’t like it. “Of course he wouldn’t,” said Pat, “but he’ll get over it. And if he doesn’t, so what? You don’t turn down the chance of going out with George Harrison. It would be such an adventure. You’ve got to go.”

  Pat became a close friend, and if ever I don’t know what to do about a situation I ask her. She’s always so decisive and I’m the opposite. She’s convinced it’s because she’s a Taurus, the bull, and I’m a Pisces, the fish that swims in both directions.

  The second day’s filming was about ten days later. I wasn’t confident that George would ask me out again but I wanted him to, which made me realize I had to do something about Eric. We’d been going out together for about nine months and I didn’t love him. He was very kind and sweet and gave me a lot of work, but that wasn’t enough, and as long as he was my boyfriend I couldn’t go out with anyone else. Until now, that hadn’t been a problem: I hadn’t fancied anyone else. But George was different. I had to tell Eric it was over and I dreaded it. I thought I’d feel trapped if I told him in his flat, so I arranged to meet him in the West End and we went to a restaurant near Oxford Street. He might have sensed what was coming. When I’d told David Bailey about the film job, he had predicted I would fall in love with Paul McCartney and had told Eric he’d be left on his own. Eric was so upset: he cried and said he’d throw himself under a bus. I felt cruel, and I was worried about him but I couldn’t change the way I felt. In the end I had to get up and walk away.