Pattie Boyd Calls the Songs George Harrison and Eric Clapton Wrote About Her ‘Haunting’
Former actor and model Pattie Boyd was married to two of the biggest rock stars, George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Boyd met George on the set of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. They married in 1966. However, Boyd fell in love with Clapton in the early 1970s.
Both rock stars could not communicate their feelings to Boyd and, instead, chose to write some of rock’s best love songs about her. Boyd thinks those songs are “haunting.”
Boyd said George Harrison and Eric Clapton had an ‘inability to communicate their feelings through normal conversation’
Unintentionally and simultaneously, Boyd became George and Clapton’s muse in the late 1960s. In an interview for Harper’s Bazaar, Taylor Swift asked Boyd, “What do you feel might be a factor that artists want to communicate with you through song?”
Boyd replied, “I think in my case both George and Eric had an inability to communicate their feelings through normal conversation. I became a reflection for them.”
George wrote numerous songs for Boyd, including “If I Needed Someone” and one of his best love songs ever, “Something.” Clapton showed Boyd his love by playing her his song, “Layla.” Later, when they got together, Clapton wrote “Wonderful Tonight” about how lovely Boyd looked before going out one night.
Instead of talking about the drama between them (i.e., Clapton and Boyd being in love), George and Clapton engaged in a guitar battle to win Boyd. Even during a critical time in their lives, they couldn’t express their feelings except through music. Clapton won.
“I just hid in my shell, pretending it wasn’t happening,” Boyd told The Age. “It’s the way musicians behave. On reflection, I think it was really beautiful.”
George and Boyd officially divorced in 1977, and Boyd married Clapton in 1979.
Boyd said the songs George and Clapton wrote about her were ‘haunting’
The actor and model told The Age she was flattered when her husband wrote “Something” for her.
“‘Oh my God, that’s really exciting,'” she told George. “I felt totally flattered and thrilled when he said it was about me. But I didn’t realise it was going to be such a fabulous song. The Beatles went back into the studio and added more instruments. But the version I like best is the one George played me in my kitchen, in its raw state.”
As for “Layla,” Boyd’s reaction to the song was a combination of “horror and jubilation,” The Age wrote. “She felt the song was so explicit that everyone in their circle would know she was the seductive Layla, and that by writing it, Clapton was forcing her into a doorway of no return. On the other hand, it was a priceless gift.
“The song got the better of me,” Boyd wrote in her book, Wonderful Today. “With the realisation that I had inspired such passion and such creativity, I could resist no longer.”
Which of the three songs penned about her does Boyd love most? “That’s a difficult question to answer,” Boyd said. “I find them all so haunting. They’re incomparable.”
Boyd said the former Beatle was her soulmate
Reflecting on her marriages to two of the biggest rock stars of the 1960s, Boyd said George and Clapton were utterly different.
Boyd said, “George was a soulmate, Eric was a playmate.” She added that George was the love of her life. However, she loved them both in her way.
