Pattie Boyd — Legendary Muse for George Harrison and Eric Clapton — Reframes Her Life in Rock and Roll

It's the most notorious love triangle in music history. On one side, Eric Clapton: guitar god. On the other, George Harrison: Beatle. Between them is Pattie Boyd, the iconic fashion model whose style and beauty helped define an era. Her name is forever linked with the songs she stirred her famous former husbands to write: Harrison's "Something," and Clapton's "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight." Now she's sharing her own timeless art.

Her new book Pattie Boyd: My Life in Pictures showcases both her formidable talent as a photographer and her unique perspective at the intersection of music, fashion, and spirituality in Swinging London. Due out Dec 20, the visual treasure trove draws on 300 images from her personal archive, offering an intimate portrait of rock legends — or, as she calls them, "old friends."

Boyd's camera skills were honed through years spent on the other side of the lens. She was working as a shampoo girl at a London beauty salon in 1962 when an agent approached her about a modeling job. Before long she was posing for legendary photographers like David Bailey and Terence Donovan while decked out in the latest haute couture designs by Ossie Clark or Mary Quant, famed mother of the miniskirt. For Boyd, the innovative styles were early signs of the budding youth movement that would blossom as the decade progressed. "Fashion really seemed indicative of a bigger change in how people were thinking," she says. "When I first started modeling, everybody was still a little old-fashioned and dressing like their mothers. And then, gradually, I noticed skirts were getting shorter. It all started changing rapidly after that."

With her career on the ascent, she was offered roles in television ads, including a spot for Smith's potato chips directed by a young filmmaker named Richard Lester. Then, in early 1964, Boyd got a call about another of Lester's upcoming projects. At first, she assumed it was just another commercial, but then she learned it was for a very different kind of gig. She was being offered a small part in her first feature film, A Hard Day's Night. Though she only had a single line ("Prisoners!?") she had to deliver it to the four most famous men on the planet — the Beatles.

The prospect left her terrified. "Initially I thought, 'I can't do this. I'm not an actress. There's no way I can do this!'" she remembers. "But my agent said, 'Don't worry, you've only got one word to say. Easy peasy.'" In spite of her nerves, and the less-than-stylish schoolgirl costume, she decided to take the leap.

When the band arrived on the set, their humor instantly put her at ease. "The Beatles said hello to us girls, and they were adorable. They were so charming and fun straight away. They bowled everyone over. I just fell for them."

The feeling was mutual for George Harrison, who proposed marriage to her mere moments after they met. When a stunned Boyd failed to reply, the 21-year-old guitarist dialed it back. "If you won't marry me, will you at least have dinner with me?" Unfortunately she had a boyfriend, thus putting her on a short list of women who have turned down a date with a Beatle. "He looked crestfallen," she recalls. "I thought, 'Awww, poor guy!'" To soften the blow, she invited Harrison to join her and her boyfriend for dinner. "This was not what he had in mind," she laughs.

Though she played it cool and coy in front of the Fabs, her diary tells a different story. The page for March 6, 1964 — included in My Life in Pictures — includes the phrase "George Harrison asked me out" followed by no less than five exclamation points.

Boyd assumed that she'd blown her one-and-only shot with him. "When we finished filming that day I thought I'd never see George again," she says. "Remember, this was before cellphones." But she got a second chance a few weeks later when the director called her back into the studio to take some press photos with the band. "By this time, of course, I had told my boyfriend that it was the end of our relationship," says Boyd. "When I saw George, the first thing he said was, 'How's your boyfriend?' And I said, 'Well, I don't have a boyfriend…'"

So began a relationship that would last a decade. Their first date was chaperoned by the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein. His watchful presence foreshadowed the intense scrutiny they would endure throughout their years together. Their wedding at a London Registry office on Jan. 21, 1966 was a top-secret affair. Boyd had strict orders to keep it under wraps due to fears of a fan invasion. There was to be no shopping for wedding gowns with a gleeful bridal party. "I would love to have told all my friends," she says, "But I just told my mother. That's not really that much fun, is it?"

The need for secrecy was very necessary. Boyd learned this the hard way while attending her very first Beatles concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon. The evening had started off auspiciously as she watched her man morph into Super Beatle before her very eyes. "God, the band was absolutely amazing. So exciting," she remembers. "In order to be on stage as they did, I think you have to have a certain inner strength that deals with all the adulation and the praise. It fired them up and gave them another kind of energy, and that's what I saw onstage; these guys who are so energized because of the love that was being sent to them. This was a different character than I saw at home."

But as she made her exit from the theater, she found herself mobbed by a hoard of jealous fans. "These girls chased me into an alley, kicking me and pulling my hair," she says. "It was quite frightening! I began to realize, 'Oh my God, he's not just my George.' I hadn't completely taken into account that he had so many thousands — or millions — of fans. I had thought that they would greet me respectfully, which most of them did. But a few were very upset because they thought George was for them."

It was hard to share her husband with the world, but privately they were like any young couple building a life together. Harrison loved to make his new wife laugh with a frequent gag whenever he opened the refrigerator. As the light inside flashed on, he would pretend it was a stage spotlight and adopt a rock 'n' roll pose — mocking the chaos of Beatlemania that too often intruded into their lives.

They settled into a modest home in the staid London suburb of Esher, where they quickly began to liven up the drab grey exterior with hand-painted Day-Glo psychedelic swirls. "It was the most dull bungalow you can imagine — so, so ghastly. We had to do something to it. So we bought lots of tins of paint and spray paint and we painted it. Whoever came over helped us paint the outside of the entire place. There was lots of smoking dope and drinking wine. It was just a really fabulous, happy place." One day they arrived home to discover that their friends Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful had dropped by while they were out. The pair had left a note, playfully painted alongside the wall of the house: "Mick and Marianne were here."

They were among the friends present at EMI Studios on June 25, 1967, the day the Beatles recorded their new song "All You Need Is Love" live as part of a worldwide television special. The first broadcast to use satellites to link global networks, the event was less of a technical milestone than a cultural one. British music luminaries like Jagger, Faithfull, Keith Richards, Keith Moon and Eric Clapton gathered to help the Beatles share their message of peace to an audience of over 400 million across 25 countries.

For Boyd, resplendent in beads and flower-power regalia as she sat alongside her husband, this was the moment the youth movement came into full bloom. It was then that she had her first inkling that the Beatles were not just a pop group but a part of history. "I felt there was a big change happening," she says. "Particularly in the creative, artistic world: music, fashion designers, painters, filmmakers, photographers. All the creative people were taking a leap forward."

The iconic session was the high watermark for band unity. Now in their mid-20s, the Beatles' energies became focused less on their gang of four and more on their families and individual pursuits. To help them through the growing pains and general stress of their high-pressure existence, Boyd recommended lessons in Transcendental Meditation by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a world-renowned guru. "I was always quite interested in some form of meditation," Boyd says. "I saw a little advertisement in the newspaper for lessons in TM. So I went along with a girlfriend and we learned. It's calming and strengthening. I told George all about it. And then, as luck would have it, McCartney phoned about a week later saying, 'Hey, there's this guy, the Maharishi. He's going to do a talk at the Hilton. Why don't we all go check him out?' So that's what we did."

The suggestion was embraced by the Beatles, who almost singled-handedly introduced TM to the cultural mainstream. They were so impressed with the Maharishi's teachings that the Beatles and their entourage embarked on a trip to India in early 1968 for an intensive multi-month Transcendental Meditation course at his private retreat.

"It was just wonderful. Every day was glorious," remembers Boyd. "The air was so clean and pure because the snow was melting on in the Himalayas and coming down the Ganges [River]. All the other people that were there at the ashram were very sweet and respectful to the Beatles. Everybody was very happy." Between lectures, Boyd heard the band sketching out early versions of future Beatles classics. "John or Paul would play guitar and say he's got an idea for a song and they would just play it in front of anybody. Much of the music that they created there was later put on The White Album. There was such incredible harmony between all of them."

But the harmony wouldn't last. Soon after they returned from India, relations within the band grew fractious as business headaches and interpersonal resentment started to supersede the music. Problems in the studio inevitably bled into the Harrisons' private life. "[George] would get so angry, but he tended to bottle it up," Boyd says. "So he would be angry at home about anything at all. I would say, 'What is the matter?' And he would start shouting about the band and various members and how everything was dreadful and ghastly. He wasn't specific about it, but I knew there was something serious going on that was very troubling for him."

Harrison's nights with Boyd began to mirror his troubled days with the Beatles. The situation reached its nadir in early January 1969, as Harrison got close with a recent ex of his good friend Eric Clapton. "Uncomfortably close," as Boyd would put it in her 2007 memoir, leading her to temporarily leave the home they shared. This personal crisis exacerbated Harrison's increasing frustrations with the Beatles, and days later he walked out of a session, vowing to quit the band for good. In the immediate aftermath, John Lennon proposed they hire Clapton as a replacement guitarist — a suggestion that was likely facetious, though strangely fitting.

Harrison would reconcile with both Boyd and the Beatles in the following week, but the damage to both relationships was severe. It's perhaps not a coincidence that shortly after returning to the band, he began to work earnestly on what many believe to be his single greatest musical achievement: the transcendent love song "Something." Though he'd written songs to Boyd before (notably 1965's "I Need You") rarely had Harrison been so eloquent when articulating his deepest feelings for his wife. "George said, 'Here's a song I've written for you, but we haven't quite finished it.' So I heard it in its raw state," she says. "It was just stunning. I thought, 'Oh gosh, this is really, totally overwhelming.'"

But as the decade came to a close, ties between both the Beatles and the Harrisons continued to unravel. The band split in 1970 and the marriage reached a turning point that same year. "George was starting to distance himself from me," Boyd says.

That's when she became drawn to Clapton. She first noticed him onstage during a concert for his band Cream a few years earlier. "They were playing with Jimi Hendrix in a theater that was owned by Brian Epstein. Brian said, 'Let's go and see these guys' So we all went to watch them and I thought, 'My God, Eric's rather tasty…'"

The feeling was mutual. Clapton's growing obsession with Boyd was the chief reason his prior relationship had failed. For a time he even dated Boyd's younger sister, Paula. He finally confessed his feelings for Boyd herself in a letter, mailed to the Harrison home in an envelope labeled "Express" and "Urgent."

The words inside were just as frantic. "I am writing to you with the main purpose of ascertaining your feelings towards a subject well known to both of us," the letter (included in My Life in Pictures) begins. "As you have probably gathered, my own home affairs are a galloping farce, which is rapidly degenerating day by intolerable day…What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband or if you have another lover? All these questions are very impertinent, I know, but if there is a feeling in your heart for me…you must let me know!"

The letter was signed "e." At first, Boyd assumed the letter was simply from an overeager fan and laughed about it with Harrison. Then, later that night, the phone rang. It was Clapton. He wanted to know if she got his note.

Soon Boyd was inundated with his love letters. "I ignored them at first," she says. "But things were going wrong with George and me. We were going in different directions. So it was difficult to try and maintain this loving, harmonious relationship with George while Eric was also writing to me, declaring love and all this sort of stuff. I was married to George, but he was really distancing himself. So I was in a very difficult position."

When his letters failed to have the desired effect, Clapton invited Boyd over to play a new song he'd written for her. He called it "Layla," borrowing the name from Layla and Majnun, a 12-century Persian poem about a pair of star-crossed lovers. Clapton's lyrics echoed the tale of a man who falls hopelessly in love with an unavailable woman. Boyd listened as he played the track for her several times, studying her face intently. As far as she was concerned, the meaning of the song was not subtle. Though profoundly moved by this epic ode to unrequited love, she was "rather nervous" about her husband hearing it. "I knew it was about me. And I was rather nervous because I thought, 'If George hears this, I'm sure he'll guess it's for me, as well.' George and I hadn't split up and I was trying to hang onto him, but Eric was trying to steer me away. I was torn."

Matters came to a head that same night at a house party the threesome attended. Harrison's suspicions were raised when he found Clapton and Boyd having an emotional conversation in the garden. Pressed for an explanation, Clapton came clean to his friend. "I have to tell you, man, that I'm in love with your wife." Boyd, for her part, wanted to evaporate. An irate Harrison gave her an ultimatum: "Are you going with him or coming with me?" She chose her husband — for a time.

The couple continued to drift as the '70s progressed. Harrison's growing devotion to Eastern spirituality made him increasingly remote, and his enthusiastic cocaine use left his emotions frayed. Most painful for Boyd, his infidelities were becoming more frequent and less discreet. Following an affair with Maureen Starkey (a.k.a. Mrs. Ringo Starr), the marriage was all but over.

Boyd left Harrison for his best friend Clapton in 1974. Some would view this as the ultimate marital betrayal, but Harrison's response was surprisingly good-natured. "He said, 'Well, I'm glad you're going off with Eric instead of some idiot," Pattie remembers. "So he appreciated my choice!" George would jokingly refer to himself ever after as Clapton's "husband-in-law." The threesome even celebrated Christmas together that same year. The only hiccup occurred when Harrison, a strict vegetarian, learned that Boyd was now eating turkey. When she tied the knot with Clapton in 1979, Harrison was there at the reception, serenading the newlyweds with an impromptu jam alongside his old bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

She would remain close with Harrison for the rest of his life. My Life in Pictures contains the last photo of them together, taken in the early '90s in the garden of Friar Park, the sprawling estate they'd shared during their final days as a couple. "Just because things didn't work out as we planned, it didn't diminish our love for each other," Boyd says.

Harrison dropped in on her just a few months before his death in November 2001. Though he didn't say as much, it was obviously a goodbye. "He came with some little gifts and we played music and had some tea," she recalls. "It was lovely to see him, but I knew he wasn't well. I sensed that he wanted to see me rather than leave it too late." As they talked in her garden, Harrison noticed a few lone flowers poking through the dirt and shaking in the breeze. "The flowers are shivering," he said — an observation that always stuck with Boyd. "Only George would think flower shiver. It was so sweet." It was the last time they saw each other.

Though Boyd and Clapton divorced in 1988, their relationship remains equally warm. They crossed paths again earlier this year. "He was just so joyful when he last saw each other," she says. "He gave me the biggest hug and he was so happy to see me." And the song he wrote in her honor still fills her with pride whenever she hears it. "It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's my song."

In recent years, Boyd has made a name for herself as a photographer, boasting numerous exhibits across the globe. "I'd come out of my relationship with Eric and I was sort of floundering," she explains. "I didn't really know what I was going to do and I completely forgot about my love and passion for photography. Somebody suggested that maybe I would like to have a photographic exhibition. At first, I thought this was a ludicrous idea because I had forgotten I had more than three photos!" This discovery ultimately led to her new book. For her, it's akin to a family album. For the rest of us, it's a snapshot of history.

Now 78, Boyd is happily married to property developer Rod Weston. They met on a vacation in Sri Lanka in the late '80s. After more than a decade together, they made things official in 2015. "I take it slowly now, you see," she laughs. "No rushing!"

She's a believer in soulmates — not just one, but several (if you're lucky) that come through your life. "You can meet someone and just recognize the essence of their being," she explains. "And they're always a joy to be with. Even if a year goes by and you don't see them, when you will reunite, you're still on the same page."

The word most commonly associated with Boyd is "muse." It's a title she wears with good humor and a touch of bemusement. "I think it's actually a source of pride. As long as it doesn't kill me," she jokes. "When I think of a muse, I think of somebody being painted by an artist. Normally they were sort of used and abused and they died in poverty. All they were was a name, and then they were just never seen or heard of again. I'm a lucky muse because I've maintained. And I've endured."