George Harrison and Pattie Boyd Laughed at How ‘Weird’ Eric Clapton Was Acting at a Party
After George Harrison and Pattie Boyd divorced, they maintained a more friendly relationship than the one they had while married. The same could not always be said about Boyd’s relationship with her second husband, Eric Clapton. Boyd, Harrison, and Clapton were all at the same party, and Clapton behaved coldly toward her. She explained that she and Harrison laughed at his behavior.
Pattie Boyd married Eric Clapton after her divorce from George Harrison
Harrison and Boyd married in 1966. Their marriage was happy at first, but when he began dedicating himself to spiritualism, she felt alienated from him. They grew further and further apart, something that wasn’t helped by infidelity on both sides. On New Year’s Eve in 1973, Harrison told Boyd he wanted a divorce at a party.
“When I finally arrived George said, ‘Let’s have a divorce this year,'” she wrote in the book Wonderful Tonight. “On our wedding anniversary, January 21, 1974, I wrote in my diary: ‘Wedding anniversary. Joke!'”
As Boyd and Harrison’s relationship was crumbling, Clapton made it clear that he was interested in her. He even went so far as to tell Harrison, his friend, that he was in love with Boyd. They married in 1979, two years after Boyd and Harrison divorced.
They laughed about how strangely Eric Clapton was behaving
In 1989, Boyd and Clapton divorced due to his infidelity. Still, they shared many friends and attended the same events. One Christmas, Boyd, Harrison, and Clapton were all at the same party.
“One Christmas, we were all together at a big lunch party given by Ringo [Starr] and Barbara [Bach] at their country house,” she wrote. “Everyone was there, including George and Olivia, and Eric with a new girlfriend, Melia McEnery, a young, pretty American he’d met in Los Angeles. Eric was being unfriendly but I don’t think he ever liked Rod [Weston, Boyd’s partner] — and Rod found him unapproachable and boring. We were at a table with Roger Taylor of Queen, and the Rutherfords.”
Clapton’s cold demeanor may have been uncomfortable for Boyd, but she was able to laugh about it with Harrison.
“At one point I went and sat next to George and said, ‘God, George, Eric’s being so weird, he can hardly say hello to me,'” she explained. “We had a good laugh, and when Eric and Melia were leaving, George said, ‘Eric, bye, man. Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Pattie?'”
Boyd said that the moment was “really awkward” and seemed to show that Clapton was no longer the man she had known.
Pattie Boyd and George Harrison were friendly after their divorce
Though their split wasn’t exactly amicable, Harrison and Boyd got along well in the years after their divorce.
“George and I didn’t speak on the phone much, but we saw each other from time to time at parties,” she wrote. “He had become almost an older brother to me, someone with whom I felt entirely comfortable and to whom I could say anything.”
She explained that Harrison told her she could always come to him for help.
“When I left him for Eric, he had said that if things didn’t work out, ever, I could always come to him and he would look after me,” she wrote. “It was such a selfless, loving, generous thing to say and it had always been tucked away at the back of my mind.”
