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.

WONDERFUL TONIGHT
George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me
By Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor
Illustrated. 321 pages. Harmony Books. $25.95

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

There is much more in this story from the New York Times. Use this link.

Pics of Pattie Boyd with her two husbands also from the New York Times.