The way she moves

PATTIE Boyd was the archetypal rock chick, the blonde model and muse of designers and rock stars alike, the 'It girl' of the 60s. Three of rock's most enduring songs were dedicated to her - The Beatles' Something, Derek & The Dominos' Layla and Wonderful Tonight, by Eric Clapton.

Dressed by designer Ossie Clark and photographed by David Bailey and Terence Donovan, she married George Harrison and was then wooed persistently by Eric Clapton in what became one of the most famous love triangles in rock history.

After years of resisting Clapton - who went on a three year descent into drugs as a result of her initial rejections - she ended up leaving Harrison, only to regret her decision.

Clapton's alcoholism, touring and womanising left her an emotional wreck. The final cruel blow came when he told her his lover, Lori del Santo, was pregnant, which resulted in the birth of his son, Conor. Boyd had been having IVF treatment for some time to try to conceive.

"I had been trying to have a baby for 21 years, and this woman had slept with my husband once or twice and was carrying his child. I thought my heart was about to disintegrate," she says.

The years of being on an emotional rollercoaster took their toll when she left Clapton, suffered a breakdown and ended up having years of therapy.

Today, Pattie, 62, is a successful photographer living a quieter, single life in West Sussex and has broken her 40-year silence to reveal the story of her loves and losses in her memoir, Wonderful Today.

"The time was right to write a book," she says. "My life has been quite extraordinary. Psychotherapy has helped me put order back and realise that I can be strong."

The book charts her relationships with both men, detailing the obsessive nature of Harrison, whom she met when she was cast as a schoolgirl in the film, A Hard Day's Night, just as The Beatles were on the rise.

"He was so utterly good-looking and so funny. At that point fame hadn't affected him. We lived in this fantastically protected, wonderful world which involved all sorts of famous people. We were taken to fabulous places on glorious holidays. We didn't have to think about any realities. We were like children with all the toys we could ever have wanted."

But as The Beatles became more famous, the couple's privacy diminished and female fans became more prominent.

George's input into the band was also hindered, as it was largely felt that Paul McCartney and John Lennon were the creative genius behind the band's success, even though Harrison wrote Something, which turned out to be one of their biggest hits, she says.

Harrison turned to spiritualism, meditating and chanting for hours, and became obsessed, she says. "He would chant Hare Krishna all day. It's quite intimidating to talk to somebody while they are chanting."

Drugs were always around - the people she mixed with took acid, uppers and downers, while LSD heightened perception and in some ways became part of the creative process. But few were addicted.

"Nothing was regular. It wasn't like some drug-fuelled orgy. Days and weeks would go by when no one would touch a thing. You'd just get on with life."

As Clapton began to pursue Boyd in the early 70s, cracks were appearing in the marriage. When she rejected his advances, Clapton descended into drugs and went to ground for three years. When he reappeared on the scene, Harrison had started to sleep with other women and was becoming more and more difficult to live with, she reveals.

"I was unhappy in every way. George was so moody a lot of the time. Eric was pursuing me, saying how wonderful I was."

The final straw was Harrison's affair with Maureen Starr, Ringo's then wife. Boyd left Harrison in 1974 and moved into Clapton's Spanish-style manor house, Hurtwood Edge, in Ewhurst, Surrey.

"What I had felt for George was a great, deep love. What Eric and I had was an intoxicating, overpowering passion. Eric seemed to embrace life with such a joy and was so adventurous and fun-loving. We had a wonderful time at first."

But he went from drugs to alcohol and coped with life by drinking himself close to oblivion, she recalls. "I didn't realise for a few years that alcohol was a problem. In the late 70s people didn't talk about alcoholics. They thought of alcoholics as people who were living in the gutter.

"We were together 13 years and the last five or six became difficult. I did regret leaving George. Many years later I was at a party, when George and Olivia (his wife) were there. I pulled him aside and said 'Did I make a mistake by leaving you?' He said 'No you didn't, I was an absolute s***'."

She reflects that she put up with the infidelities perhaps because her own father, and her stepfather, were unfaithful. Pattie, the daughter of an RAF officer, was born in Somerset but moved with her family to her grandparents' home in Kenya when she was four. On one school holiday she was taken to a new house in Nairobi, where her mother introduced her to her new father.

"I was stunned. What had happened to our home? Where was Daddy?" Pattie later discovered that her father had had an affair and her mother left him. It set Pattie on a road to insecurity.

Despite two divorces, Boyd hasn't given up on love. "I'm happily single," she beams. "I'd love another relationship, but I now realise that men are all little boys disguised as men in long trousers."

Wonderful Today, by Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor, (Headline Review, £20).