Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton Escaped an Awkward Meet Up With Elvis
Pattie Boyd met Elvis for the first time with George Harrison, but she had an awkward encounter with him with her second husband, Eric Clapton. Elvis invited the couple to the movies with him, but it wasn’t what Boyd expected. She explained that she was excited to see Elvis again but found the meeting off-putting. Not only were they not allowed to sit near him, but they worried that the night would go on forever if they didn’t leave early.
Pattie Boyd married Eric Clapton after having an affair with him
When Boyd was married to George Harrison, there was infidelity on both sides. Clapton pursued Boyd even though he was close friends with Harrison. He wrote the song “Layla” about her and tried to speak to her one-on-one as much as possible. Once, at a party, Harrison caught them talking privately in the garden.
“George came over and demanded, ‘What’s going on?'” Boyd explained, per The New York Post. “To my horror, Eric said, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.'”
In 1977, Harrison and Boyd divorced. She married Clapton in 1979.
They had an uncomfortable movie date with Elvis
While they were together, Boyd accompanied Clapton on tour, something she hadn’t done with Harrison. On a stop in Memphis, both Stevie Wonder and Elvis reached out to them.
“Wow, I thought. What’s happening?” she wrote in the book Wonderful Tonight. “First Stevie and now the King!”
They had drinks with Wonder and, the following night they went to the movies with Elvis. The experience wasn’t exactly what Boyd had expected.
“I had met Elvis once before, with George, and he had looked a lot better than he did at this time,” she wrote. “He was now well on the way to being bloated and was surrounded by henchmen, who stopped us as we made for the row Elvis was sitting in and told us to sit five rows back. Not so good.”
Surprised, Boyd and Clapton did as they were instructed and settled in to watch the film.
“We found ourselves watching some boring old 1950s movie,” she wrote. “At the end, Elvis said, ‘Do you want to see another? We’re going to the theater next door.'”
Boyd said she wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
“It was a five-screen complex,” she explained. “We had visions of going from one to the next, watching more boring fifties movies, so we made our excuses and left.”
Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton divorced in 1989
In 1989, Boyd and Clapton divorced. He conducted numerous affairs during their marriage, but the final straw came when he impregnated the Italian TV personality Lory Del Santo. Boyd and Harrison had struggled to have a child, and she had undergone IVF treatment.
“I felt sick. I couldn’t breathe properly and my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t think,” she wrote. “I heard myself saying it would be all right, we would still be together. I was in shock. I was 42 and had been trying to have a baby for 21 years and this woman had slept with my husband once or twice and was carrying his child.”
In 2015, Boyd remarried for a third time to her partner Rod Weston.
