Pattie Boyd

[Josephine]

^i love the last one

 

[Little Tiny]

Thank You for sharing all of the pictures,she's got such pretty legs in those miniskirts!

 

[lusia]

finally:

yahoo groups

 

[Josephine]

Pattie's book is out:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/in-the-eye-of-rock-n-rolls-hurricane/2007/08/23/1187462441562.html

I might try and buy it this weekend

 

[60swildchild]

I'm really looking forward to this book. On a side note: I didn't know her sister Jenny was married to Mick Fleetwood.

 

[IcePrincess]

I'm really looking forward to this book. On a side note: I didn't know her sister Jenny was married to Mick Fleetwood.

I ordered my book some time ago but it doesn't look like it was shipped out yet

I knew Jenny was married to Mick Fleetwood, they have a couple of daughters...I don't know if they are still married though.

 

[SomethingElse]

The Muse Who Made the Guitars Gently Weep

Pattie Boyd calls herself a muse, and she has the ravishing love songs (George Harrison’s “Something,” Eric Clapton’s “Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) to prove it. But in Ms. Boyd’s case, being a muse also means never having paid a light bill until she was 45, jobless and suddenly unplugged from the world of rock ’n’ roll royalty.

Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Ms. Boyd’s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. “Wonderful Tonight,” which takes its title from another of Mr. Clapton’s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years (“My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach”; “My only comfort was Teddy, my beloved bear”) and cuts quickly to the chase.

It meets the Beatles. And it meets them at the point where most of the world met Ms. Boyd: when she appeared briefly in the film “A Hard Day’s Night,” riding on a train and looking fetching in a schoolgirl’s uniform. Mr. Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humor.

Ms. Boyd had been a successful London model in her dollybird days. She appeared on the cover of a book called “Birds of Britain,” prompting the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, in the introduction, to rhapsodize about “a swirl of miniskirt, beneath which limbs flicker like jackknives and glimmer like trout.”

This made her exactly the kind of female accessory that rock stars favored in the days when, as Ms. Junor has probably put it, “the capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy.” Ms. Boyd would have been one tin-eared muse if she herself wrote passages like: “And, to use the old cliché, make love not war. As long as you were young, beautiful and creative, the world was your oyster.”

This book has a running food motif, which allows it to ask a priceless question: “Who would have guessed that the humble potato would play such an important part in my life?” Translation: Ms. Boyd appeared in a television commercial for potato chips, which led to the “Hard Day’s Night” casting call, which led to a place in history.

She quickly became part of the Fab Eight, since each Beatle traveled with a wife or girlfriend. And in January 1966 she and Mr. Harrison married, but not before he asked permission of Brian Epstein, the group’s manager. As the new Mrs. Harrison would repeatedly learn, “all of those musicians were like little boys in long trousers.” They never navigated the world for themselves, so neither did she.

Ms. Boyd doesn’t remember much about her Beatle years that has not already been described by pop historians. “George’s moods, I think, had much to do with what was going on between the Beatles,” she says vapidly. And this book includes perhaps the least useful account of the much-described 1968 all-star idyll in India: “If it was anyone’s birthday, and there was a surprising number while we were there, including George’s 25th and my 24th, there would be cake and a party.” But that’s not what you’re reading “Wonderful Tonight” for, is it?

There is exactly one big question for Ms. Boyd to answer here: What made her leave Mr. Harrison for Mr. Clapton, her husband’s close friend?

To its credit the book answers that question plausibly and fully. Mr. Harrison returned from India a changed man, Ms. Boyd says. He turned meditative and moody, “so if you talked to him you didn’t know whether you would get an answer in the middle of his chanting or whether he would bite your head off.” He also began to drink, sleep with his friends’ wives (most notably Ringo Starr’s) and become increasingly hard to find in their 25-bedroom house. Meanwhile mash notes from Mr. Clapton began to arrive.

“Wonderful Tonight” repeats enough of these letters to show that the plaintive beauty of “Layla” (Mr. Clapton’s name for Ms. Boyd, taken from the Persian writer Nizami) was no fluke. One letter reads, “for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move.”

Ms. Boyd also says that Mr. Clapton told her he would begin using heroin if she wouldn’t leave Mr. Harrison for him, and that he made good on that threat. Mr. Clapton, whose own autobiography, “Clapton,” is imminent in an autumn that will be full of rock ’n’ roll memoirs, sees the heroin issue a little differently: He says he was already fully addicted. But he basically shares her idea of their grand passion.

So off she went, only to find that life at Mr. Clapton’s place, fittingly called Hurtwood Edge, was hardly an improvement. “It was as though the excitement had been in the chase,” she realizes amid many tales of drunken excesses, after Mr. Clapton had successfully traded drug addiction for alcoholism. “On reflection I see that being in love with him was like a kind of addiction,” Ms. Boyd says in one of many indications that she has logged long hours of therapy in dissecting her past.

“When the first thing you have in the morning is a packet of cigarettes with a large brandy and lemonade, you have a problem,” she recalls a friend’s having told Mr. Clapton. “Have you never heard of Shredded Wheat?”

Mr. Clapton eventually heeded this advice. And after all their tumultuous times together Ms. Boyd felt that he was no longer the live wire she had married. They eventually divorced, and this led her to the sadder, wiser post-muse period that the last part of her book describes.

“Our generation really did lead a revolution,” it concludes feebly. And: “I have known some amazing people and had some unforgettable experiences.” Her husbands’ music is what made them unforgettable. But her side of the story, for all its slick packaging and hopeless platitudes, is worth hearing too.

Below: Pattie Boyd with her husbands: George Harrison, above, and Eric Clapton. The two men were friends who collaborated on records.

nytimes.com published 27 August 2007

 

[angelanna]

^ I've started to read her autobiography....i can't seem to put it down! The pictures in the book are gorgeous too!

 

[lusia]

^ youre so lucky!!

btw her new site full of amazng pics:
www.pattieboyd.co.uk

 

[lusia]

and a great interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFKh4rdg1fQ

 

[angelanna]

^ thanks lusia!

 

[Platinum Blonde]

I never heard of Pattie Boyd I think until yesterday when I found this thread. I think her style in clothes,hair and makeup was fantastic! A true inspiration. I think she is very beautiful I mean still is. Thanks for this thread,all the pictures and the article about her beauty product favourties and beauty care.
I really want that book to. I find out on a internet book shop near me that it is avaliable.
This question may sound stupid but why is the Eric Clapton song about her called Layla if her name is Pattie?

 

[IcePrincess]

I never heard of Pattie Boyd I think until yesterday when I found this thread. I think her style in clothes,hair and makeup was fantastic! A true inspiration. I think she is very beautiful I mean still is. Thanks for this thread,all the pictures and the article about her beauty product favourties and beauty care.
I really want that book to. I find out on a internet book shop near me that it is avaliable.
This question may sound stupid but why is the Eric Clapton song about her called Layla if her name is Pattie?

According to Wikipedia

The title, "Layla", was inspired by a love story, The Story of Layla / Layla and Majnun (ليلى ومجنون), by the Persian classical poet Nezami. When he wrote "Layla", Clapton had recently been given a copy of the story by a friend (reportedly Ian Dallas)[5] who was in the process of converting to Islam. Nezami's tale, about a moon-princess who was married off by her father to someone other than the man who was desperately in love with her, resulting in his madness (in Arabic and Persian, Majnun, مجنون, means "madman"), struck a deep chord with Clapton.[4]


My book came in the mail today, I haven't got around to reading it yet.

Thanks for the links Lusia Nice photos they have at her site!

 

[Platinum Blonde]

Iceprincess: Thank you so much for explaining that! I though it was extra interesting to know since my name is almost the same (Laila).

 

[SomethingElse]

Sarah Mower applauds designer Celia Birtwell for surviving the Sixties and beyond while fashion muse Pattie Boyd became a victim, shares the trauma of shopping for shoes with teenage girls, and zooms in on Hillary Clinton's cleavage

Who'd be a rock chick?

Anyone who thinks they might fancy it ought to read Wonderful Tonight, the autobiography of that most envied, most beautiful flower-child of the 1960s, Pattie Boyd, one-time wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton.

Not only did she inspire Harrison's Something and Clapton's Layla and Wonderful Tonight but she was a fashion muse, too, the drifty, fragile long, blonde wraith of a model who was the personification of designer Ossie Clark's ideal. More than anyone else, she was associated with the dresses he made with his wife, the print designer Celia Birtwell.

Boyd was a star of Ossie Clark's first show at Chelsea Town Hall in 1971, when the girls - including Marianne Faithfull and Amanda Lear - danced on the catwalk (in Manolo Blahnik's first-ever shoes) with the Beatles in the audience.

"One of my outfits," she remembers, "was a long, strapless chiffon gown that barely covered my nipples - I was terrified they might pop out and cause a row with George." It's a moment that has gone down in fashion history as one of the most important shows ever.

Boyd's look is an indelible fashion reference point - and it's with us right now, from the kind of doll-like, retro make-up she used to wear to the floaty, flowery-print maxi-dresses, all the way down to the platforms.

On Sunday, a new generation of girls will storm Topshop for the latest "drop" of Celia Birtwell's limited-edition print dresses, unknowingly chasing the Pattie vibe.

They are beautiful. Birtwell comes the closest yet to reproducing the magic of her late ex-husband's dresses - managing to knock spots off the offerings of Kate Moss, that other rock-chick wannabe, in the process.

Birtwell's time has come again but, back in the 1970s, it was Boyd fans envied, not Birtwell. Legions of girls would have killed to swap places with her, an elegantly starved size eight who had two monumental rock stars fighting to be with her. But her life turned into a tragic descent into a vortex of * and pointlessness.

Clark was murdered by a gay lover and Boyd, meanly paid off by Clapton, ended up middle-aged and living in a tiny flat without even a clue how to take the Tube on her own.

The moral is a classic for girls: throw away your talent and education on possessive rock-star egos and no good will come of it. The most telling passage in Wonderful Tonight is Boyd's description of changing into an Ossie dress at his flat and glimpsing Celia Birtwell changing nappies.

Clark cries: "She can't come out!" and whisks Pattie off to some party while Celia, as usual, stays home and works on the collection.

Celia Birtwell is far too nice to savour the irony, but she should. At 66, she is now far more successful than she was back then. If I had to choose between being her and Pattie Boyd? No contest.

telegraph.co.uk/ . published 5 September 2007

 

[omgspicegirls]

I just bought her autobiography called Wonderful Today.
is it the same as Wonderful Tonight?

 

[lusia]

^ she has only one book so ...i guess so. though its weird

 

[omgspicegirls]

Very weird indeed.

the cover looks like this :

 

[omgspicegirls]

She looks so different in that video.
Has she had some plastic surgery?

 

[lusia]

^ i donr think so. she's just got older...