When I'm 64

Wonderful Today: George

Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me

By Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor

Published by Headline Review, 2008

Available at Asia Books, Bt450

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The Nation

After 40 years, the ex-wife of two of music's most bent string-benders succumbs to the temptation to tell the "truth" about what went down. The word in quotes is fair enough, but Pattie Boyd's book is pretty much a script for a Hallmark biopic, though how it could ever be condensed into a film is beyond me.

A great deal of history happens, of course, between the time Pattie is plucked by George Harrison in the first full bloom of Beatlemania, from the set of "A Hard Day's Night", and the day she pries herself loose from the wreck that Eric Clapton documented in his own autobiography last

year.

And she is, after all, the woman for whom Clapton wrote "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight".

There are a few choice jigsaw-puzzle anecdotes that fans can use to build up the big picture, but nothing that jolts.

I was surprised, for example, that George was so crushed by the "My Sweet Lord" vs "I Feel Fine" legal fiasco that he banned radios from his home lest he inadvertently plagiarise another melody.

He didn't want television around either, so it was nothing but his guitar and chanting you heard around the vast estate called Friar Park - or the oppressive silence of his sullenness.

I didn't know either that, in those pictures and film footage of him and Pattie frollicking with the hippies in Haight-Ashbury, they were both flying on LSD, but coming down hastily, terrified of a trampling as the crowd swelled.

And that's pretty much the lynchpin in what boils down to a template book on the flower-power grooviness of the 1960s morphing into the drug-and-drink grotesques of the '70s.

Harrison lurches from blissed-out Krishna incarnate into wasteful, womanising, spiteful boor. Clapton goes from pleading for Pattie's love via corny letters to ignoring her, once captured, in his seamless transition from junkie to boozehound.

All the rock stars are screwing each other's wives - though Mick Jagger, amazingly, is only glimpsed washing dishes!

Wotta mess. "At home the madness continued," says Pattie, as channelled by ghostwriter Penny Junor (the royal-watcher and an even slacker version of Clapton's scribe Christopher Simon Sykes).

We "went to Ringo and Maureen's house where George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo that he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself into a terrible state and went about saying, 'Nothing is real, nothing is real'. I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair red."

There is a happyish ending, naturally, even after Partner No 3 (not a rock star) turns out to be another dud. Yes, it's one of those "stories of survival". Boyd, now 64, gives the fans some good reading, but not great.

Pattie's got a pretty good website, with lots of pictures at www.PattieBoyd.co.uk.