Какова судьба Патти Бойд?

... до Патти:
with Alice Ormsby-Gore (17)

2Серёжа:

>2Sweet Little Queen XIII:
>>1973 Friar Park
>Не знал, что Эрик и Патти встречались так близко
>в 73-м

Посмотрите первые сообщения на этой странице топика. Там очень ясно понятно, какие были отношения у Эрика и Патти в 1973 году

"Before You Accuse" Me by Eric Clapton
Journeyman (1989)


Eric did a video of this and several other songs in a romantic comedy where he played the leading man opposite his long time lover Debra Hunter. It was never released but present was Mary Hart of ET who ask Debra what the name of the movie will be and she said she didn't know yet. Debra also was in videos of Hounddog, Lead Me On, & Someone Like You in the movie, and Eric did Breaking Point and Cocaine, and they quoted songs all thru the movie. It was made in Arlington, Tarrant Co. Texas at Players singles bar in Jul 1984 as a birthday gift to Debra from Eric who was hanging out in Texas for a few years after she left some other state. Eric and Debra named thier first daughter Layla.

иллюстрации к инфе, которую представил Primal Scream:
Pattie Boyd: 'My hellish love triangle with George and Eric' - Part One
Last updated at 08:58am on 6th August 2007


High minds: George and Pattie pictured shortly before they broke up

... упс, было уже, сорри

на свадьбе 1979 г.

2Holy Roller:
>Здесь весь список Эрика

Если это "весь", то я Папа Римский! ;)

2SergeK:

А, что, Бог:

https://www.beatles.ru/postman/forum_messages.asp...sg_id=14611&cpage=3&forum_id=1&cmode=1


и Папа Римский - ровненько идем!

The life and times of Layla

— 1944: Patricia Anne “Pattie” Boyd born in Somerset, the eldest of six children.

— Starts modelling in her late teens; models for Mary Quant and works with top photographers, including David Bailey and Terence Donovan.

— At 19, meets George Harrison after being cast in a bit part in A Hard Day’s Night.

— Is commissioned to write “Pattie’s Letter from London” column for 16 magazine.

— 1965: Boyd moves in with Harrison.

— 1966: Boyd and Harrison are married.

— After marrying, Boyd gives up her career. Her last photo shoot is with her sister, Jenny, for Vogue.

— 1968: Harrison writes the Boyd-inspired Something. It becomes a classic Beatles love song.

— 1970: Eric Clapton expresses his unrequited love for Boyd in Layla.

— 1973: after a series of infidelities by Harrison, Boyd has a brief affair with Ronnie Wood (before he joins the Rolling Stones).

— 1974: leaves Harrison for Clapton (“the last straw” was Harrison’s affair with Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen Starkey).

— 1977: Harrison and Boyd are divorced.

— 1977: Clapton releases Wonderful Tonight, which he’d written for Boyd.

— 1979: Boyd and Clapton are married.

— 1985: after being humiliated by two very public affairs that produced children, Boyd is separated from Clapton.

— 1989: Boyd and Clapton are divorced.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2293831.ece

Rock’s Stepford wife

She married two Sixties legends and inspired three of the era’s greatest love songs. But Pattie Boyd’s life in the most famous love triangle in rock was far from glamorous

The strongest feeling I had on completing Pattie Boyd’s autobiography was relief: “Thank God, I was never a super Sixties model who married two of the biggest rock heroes of the era and inspired three of the most enduring love songs of all time,” was my thought.
Boyd’s story is fascinating because it reveals the realities of rock-chick Stepford wifedom behind all those photos which made such an impression on me as a kid living off the Kings Road in the days when it swung: Pattie gorgeously gap-toothed and stylishly draped in her antique velvet coats and floppy hat, on the arm of George Harrison, then Eric Clapton who famously supplanted him.
In the flesh – she is still pretty fab at sixty-something – Boyd reminds me, with her wholesome poshness, occasional flashes of theatrical whimsy and sense of humour, of Joanna Lumley. From time to time, apart from her obvious attributes, one catches a glimpse of what it was that turned so many men’s heads. When you say something that amuses her, for instance, she throws back her chin and laughs so uproariously that you can’t help but feel flattered. Put almost any point to her and she endeavours to answer it as directly and thoughtfully as she can.
Despite her pukka but dysfunctional background, Boyd left school at 17 – before taking her A levels – and became a model at 18. She met George Harrison on the set of Richard Lester’s Hard Day’s Night, when she played one of a trio of the Beatles’ smitten schoolgirl fans. George and Pattie fell in love and married. Fast forward and – according to her book – Pattie got the Eastern mysticism bug first which resulted in all the Beatles, and their various spouses and girlfriends, taking off to meditate and get in touch with their inner selves in a spartan Indian retreat with the Maharishi. By the time George and Pattie returned to England Harrison had become somewhat “obsessive” about his spiritual practices.
Ensconced in the grand eccentricity of their old palatial pile of Friar Park, near Henley-on-Thames, put-upon Pattie has to deal with her husband’s periods of withdrawal – either to meditate for hours, sometimes months, on end or planning the restoration of their folly-filled grounds (her opinion is never sought) – and bursts of counteractive drug and booze-fuelled entertaining.
The latter, at least, gave her some sense of value since Boyd had – in her increasing isolation (Harrison saw no reason for his wife to continue modelling) – become a keen cook and a dinner party gave her an opportunity to show off her culinary skills. But even this pleasure is taken away from her when George decides that he would prefer to have Ravi Shankar’s nephew, a long-term guest along with an assortment of Hari Krishna families, to prepare his meals.
Eric Clapton, in the meantime, has been waiting in the wings – bombarding his friend’s wife with Baudelarian billets-doux and penning what was to become an anthem of unrequited love: “Layla. . . you’ve got me on my knees”. But Pattie does not prove so easy to conquer even when – how ridiculously this reads – he says that he will turn to heroin, showing her a plastic bag, if she continues to spurn his overtures. She resists him, he becomes a world-class junkie, and some years later – by which time Clapton has switched his addictions from heroin to alcohol – Pattie finally takes the plunge and replaces one form of glamorous-seeming imprisonment with another.
Before we talk about her years with Clapton, what interests me is the way that Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono both seemed to “manage” their husbands – and had, apparently, the most successful Beatles marriages as a result. Both of them come across as strong characters with careers of their own – Yoko as an avant-garde artist, Linda as a photographer. Those amazing songs – Something in the Way She Moves, Layla and Wonderful Tonight – were prompted by Pattie being the Object of Desire but the tributes have proved more durable than the intense feelings which inspired them.
She says that when so much is made of your looks: “It’s fantastic but it’s a double-edged sword . . . it made me really nervous because if the praise is purely about good looks, obviously there are other girls who are better-looking than me and, you know, could I be replaced?” The key thing about Linda and Yoko, Boyd says, is that they were American (Ono’s Japanese family moved to New York after the war) – and “whenever I went to America, I was amazed at how strong the American girls were with the guys. English girls were woosies in comparison.

“The English public as a whole didn’t like Yoko or Linda because they didn’t get them . . . they were looking at them physically and thinking, ‘I’m sure I look better than those two.’ But they stood up to their men, which is what was needed because they’d been fêted and courted from a very, very young age.
“Whereas I would be: ‘If the man says that he wants this, that or the other then that’s what we’re going with’ because that’s what I learnt from my mother, you see – whatever the man says is right.” While to the outside world she was a modern goddess, behind the doors of her rock-star palaces whatever power Boyd had wielded through her beauty and glow had shrunk with her diminished self-confidence. Had she become a doormat? “I think I did slide into the doormat syndrome, most definitely, and what happened one day is I thought, ‘My God, this doormat’s getting thinner and thinner and thinner and unless I do something about it soon, I’m not going to have the strength to get up and . . .’ I knew that unless I moved when I moved, I wouldn’t be able to.” Reading Boyd’s book with its swift descent into the misery of living with an extreme alcoholic, and looking at the photographs of Clapton then – with his perpetually pickled glaze – it is hard to remember what a cool figure he was.
Still, I wonder whether there wasn’t something of a guy-thing about the adoration even at the time; his virtuoso guitar-playing spawning legions of adolescent Clapton wannabes. George and Eric’s allnight guitar duel to claim “rights” to a bemused Pattie in the kitchen of Friar Park sounds more like the antics of Rock School Frat Club brinkmanship than anything truly romantic.
Boyd says: “He was like a modern-day Pete Doherty to me. Well . . . I don’t know, actually, Pete’s a bit beyond . . . But he looked sort of rascally and naughty.” Of course, one of the reasons that she’s written the book is money. Boyd is admirably up-front about this: “Well, I always need money. As I told you earlier, I love to travel and I’m not the sort of person that can back-pack, quite frankly.” There is also no sense whatsoever that Boyd was exactly an innocent when all the partying was going on. The book is filled with references to her drinking and not all of it is blamed on her attempts to keep up with her spouses. There is one reference to her being offered “uppers, downers or sideways” by Andrew Loog Oldham’s (manager of the Rolling Stones) wife, Sheila, while her hostess’s children are playing in the garden.
Mrs Loog Oldham narrowly escapes burning the house down and George is not impressed by his wife returning in such a drug-addled state. She tries the really hard stuff in the loos of the airport en route to some fabulous location where she intends to get her younger sister, Paula, off junk for the umpteenth time. And, somehow, even this is relayed in such a breezily jaunty way that it sounds like “Bunty tries Heroin!” Clapton has been more outspoken about the worst depths of his behaviour with Boyd than she has – although she does write about her feelings of dread, lying in bed at night, hearing his sozzled footfall on the stairs and not knowing how he will behave.
When I ask Boyd why she chose not to include those incidents, she says: “You know, I don’t want to twist the knife.
“Eric knows how he was when he was married to me and it’s probably not happy for him to think of me and him because he must remember how he was and his alcoholic ways and nobody wants to remember the worst time in their life. I think it’s important for people who are in a position that I was in when we were married to see what the life is really like – how one has to hang on to secrets, and it’s a very sick relationship and a very sick disease. One wants to be loyal and within that loyalty, you don’t really tell anybody else about the extent of the pain and anguish that’s involved . . . the way you fool yourself that one day the person you love will get better.” There is a sense in the book that Clapton’s desire for Boyd was always at its most intense when she was absent and beyond his control. But I wonder whether, at some level, he never quite felt that he had the upper hand.
Do you think that Clapton ever felt that he quite “owned” you? “I don’t think so. He wanted to – he did his utmost to. We’re talking on a very deep level here.” Do you think it was almost as though he wanted to break your spirit? “Yes, he did. And he said that once. There must have come a time when he realised that he couldn’t and that was when he started to back off.
“But I think people do punish each other in relationships, don’t you? Sometimes it’s very obvious and other times it’s more like a little sting every so often – a reminder, and it’s a punishment, actually – part of a punishing process.”
Her last partner, Rod Weston, a property developer, was the first man who allowed Boyd to be herself: “He was very supportive and I realised that I could actually stand up to a man and he wasn’t going to desert me – so I thank him for that.”

We talk briefly about the painful area of children – her inability to have a child, despite undergoing IVF treatment when she was married to Clapton, and his joy when his mistress bore him a son, Conor, who he then lost in tragic circumstances. In the photographs of Clapton holding his son, he looked so happy, as though some deep shadow in him had lifted. “It was the boy in him that had lifted, I think,” Boyd says. “Because he now had his own boy, he didn’t need to play that role any longer.” It’s not as though there aren’t children in her life – Boyd has 13 nephews and nieces – but she still thinks she would have been “the best” mother herself and would have liked to have had four of her own.
She doesn’t like ageing at all: “It’s to do with looks – what else could it be to do with? I just think, ‘Oh my God, are my arms good enough for this T-shirt?’ [An off-the-shoulder number, revealing cleavage and a glimpse of black lacy bra.] See, I do love clothes – and clothes look good if you don’t look too old.” I ask her whether she’s had any work done. A dentist persuaded her to fill the gap in her teeth, which was part of her charm: “Years later, I thought ‘Oh what a mistake, I rather liked my gap’ and under my eyes,” she says. “I always describe them as ‘tear bags’. After my second marriage went so wrong and I was so terribly sad, I thought I’ll have my tear bags removed.”
We are sitting in a boudoir-ish room of a mad hotel off the Portobello Road. It’s eccentrically stuffed with antiques and knick-nacks. Boyd is something of a one-off too but I don’t have the sense at all that she is a tragic Sunset Boulevard figure trapped in her past glories, partly because of her insistence that the reality behind the façade was often far from glorious.
She has her photography and travel and in November a chocolatier course: “I want to make chocolate and learn about it right from the start.” She is attractively unbitter about life even though she does point out that one of her Burne-Jones paintings is still hanging in Friar Park “but, anyway, we won’t talk about that . . .” and that her divorce settlement from Clapton was hardly in the same league of today’s goldmines: “Amazing, isn’t it? Eric did say to me that I divorced him at the wrong time, and then had a bit of a chuckle after he had taken me out to lunch and I said: ‘Thank you for bringing me back to my two-bed-room flat’.”
The big reconciliation that she has had in recent years is with her mother. “I like her a lot now,” she says. “She’s my good friend. She phoned me the other day after she’d read some of the book and she said: ‘Poor darling, you had such a miserable childhood. I’m so sorry. It made me weep a bit – I was such a dreadful mummy.’ And I said, ‘So? Maybe I needed that sort of thing to battle against, you know. I’m hardly damaged now, am I?’
“And she laughed and said: ‘No, Pattie, you’re not damaged at all’.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2293812.ece

2Holy Roller:
>А, что, Бог:

Ошибаешься, он уже есть - https://www.beatles.ru/postman/member_properties.asp?user_id=11350

In the eye of rock 'n' roll's hurricane

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

The Muse Who Made the Guitars Gently Weep
By JANET MASLIN
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.

It's easy to fall when seduced by god.

His heart was on his sleeve, and on his record jackets: Pattie Boyd was the love of Eric Clapton's life, writes Steve Meacham.
IN THE spring and summer of 1970, Pattie Boyd - the wife of Beatle George Harrison - began to have a series of clandestine meetings with her husband's best friend, the guitar "god" Eric Clapton. They went to the movies, met in the woods, but never consummated their affair.
One afternoon they met in a flat in South Kensington because Clapton wanted her to listen to a song he had written. It was based on The Story of Layla and Majnum by the Persian writer Nizami, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him too but is unavailable.
Clapton's song, of course, was Layla - a hymn to his own thwarted passion. He repeatedly played the recording, which he had just made in Miami with his band, Derek and the Dominos. Boyd's reaction was a combination of horror and jubilation. She felt the song was so explicit that everyone in their circle would know she was the seductive Layla, and that by writing it Clapton was forcing her into a doorway of no return. On the other hand, it was a priceless gift.
"The song got the better of me," Boyd writes in Wonderful Today, her autobiography released yesterday. "With the realisation that I had inspired such passion and such creativity, I could resist no longer."
That evening Clapton and a guilty Boyd went to a party hosted by the Australian impresario Robert Stigwood. It was almost getting light when Harrison walked in and asked, "Where's Pattie?" He found them alone in the garden and angrily asked, "What's going on?"

To Boyd's shock, Clapton replied: "I have to tell you, man, that I'm in love with your wife."
Speaking on the phone from London, Boyd still feels guilty as she recalls the moment. "I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. I hadn't actually made up my mind whether I wanted to leave George or not." Harrison "behaved in a characteristic way. He looked furious and said to me, 'Well, are you going with him, or me?' And I said, 'Of course I'm going with you.' But he was clearly very angry."
Later Clapton told Boyd he believed Harrison had never been prepared to fight to keep her. Certainly Clapton was more extreme. A few days later he arrived unexpectedly at Friar Park, the Harrisons' stately home near Henley-on-Thames. Clapton again said he was hopelessly in love with her and begged her to leave the Beatle.
When she told him "I can't possibly. I'm married to George," he produced a small packet of heroin from his pocket and threatened her: "If you're not going to come with me, I'm going to take this. That's it. I'm off."
And that's what he did, retreating into a continuous heroin fix with his girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore - the daughter of Lord Harlech - at his own stately home, Hurtwood Edge.
Boyd and Clapton didn't see each other for another three years, although they did exchange four letters.
Poignantly, it was Harrison who induced Clapton out of his self-imposed heroin exile, persuading him to perform in the Concert for Bangladesh in New York in 1971 - the world's first charity super concert.
Boyd was appalled at Clapton's appearance: his life revolved around the pure heroin he snorted from a gold spoon he wore around his neck. "It was a shock to think that he had done this to himself because of me," she says now. But once the concert was over, Clapton and Alice again retreated to their heroin prison at Hurtwood Edge.
Eventually it was Pete Townshend, leader of the Who, who persuaded Clapton to stop using heroin. The problem was he immediately began drinking heavily. As Boyd says today: "Eric went straight from being a heroin addict to an alcoholic."
When he returned to Hurtwood Edge he began bombarding Boyd with letters, imploring her to leave George. On July 3, 1974, after months of indecision, she made her choice, opting for the man "who had been to hell and back and who had worn me down with his protestations of love" over a husband "who had been so cold and indifferent for so long that I could barely remember the last time he'd told me he loved me".

It was late at night when she went into Harrison's recording studio at Friar Park and told him she was leaving. In the book she writes: "When he came to bed, I could feel his sadness as he lay beside me. 'Don't go,' he said."
The next week she joined Eric Clapton in America. On tour, Clapton "coped by drinking himself close to oblivion", beginning in the morning with Courvoisier and 7Up and having to be sobered up with showers and coffee before each show. Sometimes he was so drunk on stage he played lying down.
Their wedding was held on March 27, 1979, in Tuscon, at the Apostolic Assembly of Faith in Christ Jesus. The reception ended in a drunken cake fight. And there was no time for a honeymoon since Clapton was playing the next day, bringing his new wife on stage while he played Wonderful Tonight.
Clapton had written what many believe is the classic middle-aged love song the previous year while he was waiting for her to get ready for a party. The lyric begins: "It's late in the evening; she's wondering what clothes to wear. She puts on her make-up and brushes her long blonde hair. And then she asks me, 'Do I look all right?' And I say, 'Yes, you look wonderful tonight.' "

And that's exactly how it happened," Boyd says of the night they were going to Paul and Linda McCartney's annual Buddy Holly party in September 1976. "He was hanging around in the sitting room with his guitar, playing away as he did most of the time. As he says in the song, I was trying on different clothes. This didn't work, that didn't work. And finally - poor thing, he'd been waiting so long! - I came downstairs. And during the time I'd been getting ready, he had written the song.
"I knew at the time that I was taking far too long. I was being a nightmare, but he didn't seem to mind waiting. I suppose it gave him time to create."
Does she have a favourite from the three great songs written by her two former husbands - Harrison's Something and Clapton's Layla or Wonderful Tonight? "That's a difficult question to answer. I find them all so haunting. They're incomparable."
Still, the domestic balance which Clapton described in Wonderful Tonight was fleeting. Boyd's book catalogues Clapton's increasing drunkenness and infidelities.
Wasn't her 13 years with the guitarist one long ordeal? Boyd laughs. "I know it sounds like that, but it was huge fun. A life of extremes. Fun followed by trials. I think I became addicted to the extremes in my life with him. You'd don't realise that it's an addiction - to being loved, then being abused, then being loved again. It's a cycle you feed into the psyche. And it's not healthy."
They were divorced in 1989, three years after Clapton's son, Conor, was born - the result of his affair with Italian actress Lori del Santo. Conor's birth - and subsequent death in 1991, prompting Clapton's song Tears In Heaven - were harrowing times for Boyd, who had always wanted children of her own. Although Clapton believed Conor's birth need not affect their marriage, Boyd ultimately couldn't cope both with Clapton's alcoholism and infidelity.

All these years later, who does she regard as the one love of her life? There's a long pause on the phone line. "Probably George." Does she regret leaving the Beatle? "I don't know. Eric and I went to a party once. And George, bless him, was there with Olivia [Arias, his second wife]. I said to George, 'Darling, do you think I made a big mistake in leaving you?'
"And he said, 'No, no. I was a bit of shit.' I thought that was terribly sweet and generous of him to admit he had been behaving badly, and that he didn't hold it against me that I left him."
The difference between the two, she says, was that "George was a soul mate, Eric was a playmate". She remained friends - "Absolutely!" - with Harrison until his death in November 2001. "George and I kind of grew up spiritually together. Very important parts of our lives were shared. He was always fond of me. There was part of him that always loved me, and me him. That we weren't married or together didn't really matter."
But it wasn't the same with Clapton? "No, I don't know why. Eric wasn't well. Being an alcoholic meant he had a disease, an illness. He leads an incredibly different life now. His personality is that of an obsessive. He clings on to things ferociously, then lets go and moves on to the next obsession. He has hung on zealously with Alcoholics Anonymous now for many years. Not drinking, which is very good, is his lifelong obsession."
So does she speak to Clapton? "Only if I see him at a concert or a party, and he rarely goes to parties."
Today she lives in Sussex, in a cottage once rented to her by Clapton. Despite the huge fortunes amassed by her two former husbands, her means are modest. Ironically, since she found fame as a model, she makes her living as a professional photographer.
Since Clapton, there's been one serious relationship. But today, at 63, she's alone. "I think I'm better off on my own," she says. "Until I meet a real man instead of a little boy in long trousers."
And is there any possibility that the real man could be another rock musician? She laughs again. "Don't be naughty! All rock musicians are little boys with oversized egos."

Something in the way she writes
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/strongmusicstrong-muse-inspired-celebrated-love-...