Paul McCartney Accidentally Taught Pattie Boyd’s Brothers How to Shoot His Car With an Arrow
At Pattie Boyd and George Harrison’s wedding, Paul McCartney worked hard to be a good best man. He sat with Harrison’s parents at dinner, posed for pictures with the couple, and took Boyd’s younger brothers under his wing. Boyd’s brothers were significantly younger than most of the wedding guests, so McCartney took them in search of a bit of fun. While he had the best intentions, his actions resulted in an arrow landing directly in the hood of his car.
One of Pattie Boyd’s boyfriends worried she would fall in love with Paul McCartney
Boyd met her future husband on the set of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. She hadn’t initially wanted the role — she was a model, not an actor — but she eventually agreed to it.
When she told the photographer David Bailey that she’d accepted a part in a Beatle movie, he predicted that her relationship would end. He was right: Harrison asked her on a date on the first day of filming. While she turned him down at first, she later realized that she wanted to go on the date with Harrison, leading her to break up with her boyfriend. Boyd thinks he might have seen it coming, but he thought she’d fall for McCartney, not Harrison.
“He might have sensed what was coming,” Boyd wrote in her book Wonderful Tonight. “When I’d told David Bailey about the film job, he had predicted I would fall in love with Paul McCartney and had told [her boyfriend] Eric he’d be left on his own.”
Paul McCartney accidentally helped Pattie Boyd’s brothers to shoot his car
After two years of dating, Boyd and Harrison married in a small ceremony at the Surrey register office. Her younger brothers, David and Boo, took off school for the wedding and soon grew bored with the event. When McCartney realized this, he aimed to provide the two boys with a bit of entertainment.
“When Paul realized that David and Boo were bored, he took them outside in search of fun,” Boyd wrote. “In a disused loo, with hundreds of fan letters waiting for Mrs. Harrison’s attention, they found George’s bow and arrows. Paul showed the boys how to use it.”
While it was a good way to distract Boyd’s brothers, McCartney likely didn’t count on his car getting damaged during the activity.
“David pulled back the string, and Paul watched the arrow score a direct hit in the bonnet of his gleaming Rolls-Royce.”
The wedding wasn’t exactly what she had dreamed of
The quiet wedding hadn’t exactly been what Boyd had wanted. Due to Harrison’s level of fame, though, The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein felt that it would be best.
“It was not the wedding I had dreamed of — I would have loved to be married in church, but Brian didn’t want a big fuss,” she wrote. “They all trusted him so implicitly that when he said it should be a quiet register-office wedding George agreed. He also said it had to be secret — if the press found out, it would be chaotic.”
While Boyd had imagined a “big white wedding” for herself, she was a fan of her outfit: a red, knee-length dress with a matching fur coat.
