How Pattie Boyd inspired some of the 20th century’s greatest love songs

In the autumn of 1970, Pattie Boyd found herself at the centre of a painful love triangle that would inspire some of the greatest love songs ever written.

The English photographer and model was the object of desire of a young Eric Clapton, who had found fame with The Yardbirds, Cream and Blind Faith. Having invited Boyd to his apartment in Kensington in London, he told her, ‘I’ve got something for you to hear.’

‘So I went up to the flat and he put on a cassette, and it was Layla,’ explains Boyd. ‘It was inspired by a 12th-century Persian tale called The Story of Layla and Majnun about a young poet whose unrequited love turns him mad, and it was so passionate and full of love and raw emotion. I was taken aback by its beauty — but at the same time I felt guilt.’

Boyd was already married to one of Clapton’s closest friends, George Harrison from The Beatles. Boyd knew that as soon as Harrison heard Layla, he would learn of Clapton’s obsession.

Pattie Boyd’s alluring, almond-shaped eyes, poker-straight blonde hair and scandalous hemlines defined the look and feel of Swinging London in the 1960s, and she became a spring of creativity for the likes of photographer David Bailey and fashion designer Ossie Clark.

Her journey to becoming one of the greatest muses in rock history began in 1964, when at the age of 19 she was cast as an extra in Richard Lester’s musical comedy A Hard Day’s Night, which starred The Beatles.

Despite having only a single word of dialogue, she caught the attention of Harrison, who at the end of the first day’s filming asked Boyd to marry him. Already in a relationship with the photographer Eric Swayne, she declined. But her friends soon persuaded her to break it off. ‘They all asked me if I was completely mad, saying, “Imagine George Harrison asking you out, you lucky thing!”’

The couple became officially engaged the following Christmas, then married on 21 January 1966.

Boyd served as the inspiration for many of Harrison’s songs, including I Need You, For You Blue and Something, which Frank Sinatra called one of the greatest love songs ever written. She also played an important role in The Beatles’ adoption of vegetarianism, meditation and psychedelics, which took the couple from bars in London to ashrams in the Himalayas.

Things began to unravel around the time the couple moved into Friar Park, a Neo-Gothic mansion in Oxfordshire, in the spring of 1970. A letter arrived, which, in tiny, neat rows of words mostly missing their capital letters, read: ‘Dearest L, i am writing this note to you, with the main purpose of ascertaining your feelings towards a subject well known to both of us…’ It was signed ‘all my love, E.’

‘I had no idea it was from Eric. I thought it was a letter from a weird fan,’ Boyd recalls. ‘I even showed it to George!’ The penny dropped that evening, when Clapton called to ask Boyd if she had received any mail from him. ‘I said, “Oh my god, I didn’t realise it was from you!”