THE GUITARS GENTLY WEEP FOR HER

George Harrison loved her, so did Eric Clapton. What was it like being married to both?

Pattie Boyd calls herself a muse, and she has ravishing love songs George Harrison8217;s Something, Eric Clapton8217;s Layla and Bell Bottom Blues to prove it. But in Boyd8217;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 8216;n8217; roll royalty.

Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Ms. Boyd8217;s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. Wonderful Tonight, which takes its title from another of Clapton8217;s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years and cuts quickly to the chase. It meets the Beatles. And it meets them at the point where most of the world met Boyd in the film A Hard Day8217;s Night, where she rides on a train. Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humour. Boyd quickly became part of the Fab Eight, since each Beatle travelled with a wife or girlfriend. As the new Mrs. Harrison would repeatedly learn, 8220;all of those musicians were like little boys in long trousers.8221; They never navigated the world for themselves, so neither did she.

There is exactly one big question for Boyd to answer: what made her leave Harrison for Clapton, her husband8217;s close friend? To its credit the book answers that question plausibly and fully. Harrison returned from India a changed man, Boyd says. He turned meditative and moody, 8220;so if you talked to him you didn8217;t know whether you would get an answer in the middle of his chanting or whether he would bite your head off8221;. He also began to drink, sleep with his friends8217; wives most notably Ringo Starr8217;s and become increasingly hard to find in their 25-bedroom house.

Meanwhile, mash notes from Clapton began to arrive. One letter reads, 8220;for nothing more than the pleasures past I would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move.8221;

Boyd also says that Clapton told her he would begin using heroin if she wouldn8217;t leave Harrison for him. So off she went, only to find that life at Clapton8217;s place, fittingly called Hurtwood Edge, was hardly an improvement. 8220;It was as though the excitement had been in the chase,8221; she realises amid many tales of drunken excesses, after Clapton had successfully traded drug addiction for alcoholism. 8220;On reflection I see that being in love with him was like a kind of addiction,8221; Boyd says in one of many indications that she has logged long hours of therapy in dissecting her past.

8220;When the first thing you have in the morning is a packet of cigarettes with a large brandy and lemonade, you have a problem,8221; she recalls a friend8217;s having told Clapton.

And after all their tumultuous times together 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. 8220;I have known some amazing people and had some unforgettable experiences.8221; Her husbands8217; music is what made them unforgettable. But her side of the story is worth telling.
-JANET MASLIN

NYT