“Unfortunately, the painting was never quite finished. Andrew insisted he wanted to include it in a show at the Royal Academy, along with a collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, so it went on show when it was about 90 per cent complete. Then Ronnie went on tour with the Stones. I think it’s now hanging in a theatre. I’m one of the people in the painting - I’m the one with the camera.”
Pattie has been interested in photography since her modelling days. “Towards the end of my career, I started swapping sides a bit,” she says. “I took pictures of models and would-be models. Some of my travel pictures appeared in Harpers & Queen. I did some shots of the Beatles when I was in India with them, and later I did a few album covers for Eric - and a book cover. But a lot of the time I just used to photograph family and friends.
“Ringo employed me to take pictures of the 1974 film Son of Dracula, produced by him. It was when my life was in a mess and I was crumbling emotionally. Ringo thought it would give me someting else to think about, which was kind of him.
“I do really love taking pictures. I get quite a few commissions to photograph children, which I like. If possible, I put them in a natural setting rather than in the studio. It’s less daunting for them and they feel much freer. I always find them so charming.
“Travel is another great passion of mine. I want to travel more, but always with photography as the main reason. Sometimes I see life as a series of stills and that the best pictures, the best scenes, are in my head. I did try using a video camera but I hated it, precisely because everything was moving. I like to catch things as still moments.
“I suppose what I would really like is to be sent on travel assignments - to combine my two greatest passions seems to me the best of both worlds.”
Pattie is now planning her autobiography - but in pictures rather than words. She has been widely admired for not cashing in on her past. “Everyone has secrets, things we don’t want to expose or have exposed,” she says. “Mine will be a photographic autobiography, my life in pictures. At the moment I’m going through all my pictures from the beginning. It’s quite time-consuming.
“It’s extraordinary the amount of stuff that just disappears with the passing years - not just photographs but gold albums, trophies, all the memorabilia. I wonder what happened to that autograph George signed for me when I first met him on the set of A Hard Days Night.
I play a lot of tennis. Here again, I had proper coaching from a professional so that I could play reasonably well. And in the summer I love watching polo. Some friends of mine have children who play seriously and I often go to watch them.”
Pattie remains close to all her siblings. Her sister Jenny, a psychotherapist and now married to an architect, was once the wife of Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. In fact, inspiring hit songs is something of a family tradition. Folf singer and balladeer Donovan, sometimes called England’s answer to Bob Dylan, wrote his 1968 hit Jennifer Juniper in honour of Jenny.
Pattie’s other sister Paula is a mother, while her brother Colin runs a company that sells local produce in Norfolk. “As for my two half-brothers,” she says, “David was profoundly influenced by George and absorbed his spirituality. He became a preacher. Boo, the youngest, is by far the most successful of us all. He’s a top hotelier and runs a chain of hotels. I adore him. We’re both passionate about food and talk endlessly about ingredients and new flavours.”
With Pattie’s new-found serenity came a new career. She has been a serious photographer since 1991 and her work is now attracting attention as well as commissions. Her most prestigious job to date involved photographing dozens of stars and celebrities, many of them personal friends, from the arts, music and showbusiness. It came about through Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, now a respected painter.
“Ronnie has been a close friend for long time. He used to come to Friar Park with his former wife Chrissie,” says Pattie. “Anyway, Ronnie was commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber to paint a triptych showing 50 celebrities of Andrew’s choice who are regulars at The Ivy restaurant in London. He wanted to hang the result in one of his theatres.
“Of course, Ronnie couldn’t assemble everyone all at the same time, so he asked me to photograph his sitters in the studio of his home in Richmond. I photographed them individually in colour and black-and-white, and Ronnie did the sketches of them as well. Then he worked from a combination of his sketches and my photographs. It certainly gave me the chance to assemble a wonderful portfolio of portraits.
“He’s clean and he’s reformed, a different person,” says Pattie. “We’re not exactly great friends. I see him sometimes and we’re very civil to each other. He leads a completely different life to me now. He’s a family man and he’s enjoying his life. I’m so glad he’s touring again after saying he was giving it up for good. He’d be mad to abandon it. I saw him play at the Albert Hall recently and he’s still incredible.”
Having witnessed the ravaging effects of drugs and alcohol, it was perhaps inevitable that Pattie would put her painfully acquired knowledge to good use. In 1991, she and her good friend Barbara Bach, Ringo Starr’s wife, founded SHARP (Self Help Addiction Recovery Programme) in London.
“I’d seen the difficulties faced by Eric and, of course, I knew all about the problems of being attached to someone like that,” she says. “Barbara and Ringo also had their problems. One day, when things were really bad, they decided to confront their demons. It was an act of great bravery, like staring into the abyss, but they came through it.
“Barbara and I wanted to create a centre that was accessible to ordianry people who couldn’t afford expensive treatment. Not long ago we celebrated our tenth anniversary - I’m really proud of that.”
After loving and leaving two of the world’s greatest guitarists, it is hard to imagine a greater contrast than the calmly contented life Pattie leads today. For the past 13 years her partner has been property developer Rod Weston. He has given Pattie the stability and support that had been missing in her life.
“We first met in Sri Lanka,” she recounts. “I was on holiday with a girlfriend, and Rod happened to be there with a group of other people. All of us got on well together and remained friends. Then, four years later, we met again in Kenya. We were just good friends for years before we started living together.”
At first, Pattie was puzzled by Rod. “I couldn’t work him out at all when we got together,” she says. “I was seeing a psychotherapist at the time and I started discussing Rod. I said I was confused because his mood was always the same, his behaviour never seemed to change. I wondered what was wrong with him. The therapist said, ‘No, no, Pattie, there’s nothing wrong with him at all. That’s just how normal people are.’
“I was just so used to dealing with addiction that I couldn’t imagine being with someone who was on an even keel. Eric and I were together for 13 years altogether and it had become usual for me to tread on eggshells. I never knew what to expect or how to behave. With Rod there were no eggshells. It seemed odd, potentially even rather dull,” she laughs. “I guess I got used to normality eventually. We’re very settled and happy. Life is good.”
Rod jokes he was wary about picking up a guitar but apart from that was unfazed by Pattie’s history. “I wasn’t entirely new to her world,” he points out. “I was quite social and already knew a lot of people. We had friends in common.
“George Harrison was always nice to me. I remember going to dinner at Friar Park (Harrison’s 19th century mansion in Henley-on-Thames), and the house was full of rock stars. After dinner he handed out ukuleles to everyone - he was president of the George Formby fan club - so we all ended up playing.”
These days Pattie divides her life between town and country. I spend most of my time in the country. When I’m up in London I see friends, go to the theatre, visit galleries and museums. I’m always busy. In the country, life is different. I’m a really keen garderer and that takes up a lot of my time. I did a year’s course at the Royal Horticultural Society so I know what I’m doing. I also love cooking. I enjoy preparing food with herbs and vegetables from my own garden.
Ïîæàëóéñòà, oea. Part 2 THE FORMER WIFE OF BEATLE GEORGE HARRISON
PATTIE BOYD
TALKS ABOUT HER ROLLERCOASTER LIFE WITH SECOND HUSBAND ERIC CLAPTON
Last week, Pattie talked about her childhood among Kenya’s Happy Valley set, how she got her break as a model while working as a hairdressing assistant at Elizabeth Arden, her bit part as a schoolgirl in The Beatles film A Hard Days Night that led to marriage to George Harrison and their spiritual growth together. This week she picks up the story after George retreated into himself and, in loneliness, she turned to his best friend and fellow guitarist Eric Clapton, who fell deeply in love with her...
Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton were married in Tucson, Arizona, on 27 March 1979, at the Apostle Assembly of Faith in Jesus Christ, having booked six different churches to throw the fans off the scent. Clapton had just embarked on a major tour, and the night after their wedding he brought Pattie on stage when he performed Wonderful Tonight, the song he had composed for her. It seemed an idyllic start to married life.
“If I’m honest, I suppose my favourite is Layla,” says Pattie. “Eric wrote it when he couldn’t declare himself openly. It’s so emotional, so deeply moving.”
On their return to England, the couple held a wedding party at their home, Hurtwood Edge, in Surrey. The invitation read, “Me and the Mrs got married the other day but that was in America so we’ve decided to have a bash in my garden on Saturday, May 19 about 3pm for all our mates here at home. If you are free, try and make it, it’s bound to be a laugh.”
That night there was an impromtu jamming session on a specially constructed stage in the garden. It featured a reunited Cream - Clapton, singer and bass player Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker - as well as two of the Rolling Stones - Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman - and all of The Beatles except John Lennon, who later said he would have attended if he had known about it.
“I did feel remorseful afterwards that I hadn’t invited John to our wedding party,” admits Pattie, “but I knew he wouldn’t come. He was living in America at the time, and the authorities were threatening not to allow him back in if he left the country.”*
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the marriage was in trouble. “We’d lived together for four years before we got married, and I thought I knew Eric pretty well,” explains Pattie. “In the beginning everyone was thrilled because he had kicked his heroin habit and although he was drinking alcohol, it didn’t seem such a bad thing by comparison. But as time went on his consumption of it increased. At first I tried to keep up, but I found I couldn’t keep pace with him. It just made me ill.
“About eight years after we first got together, it reached a point where it wasn’t fun any more. I said to myself, ‘There might possibly be a problem here called alcoholism.’ It was a taboo subject then. Nobody admitted to being an alcoholic and out of control.
“There was a concert in Australia where Eric played lying down on his back because he just couldn’t stand up. A few people thought it was funny but the sad truth is that it was desperate. I set out to try and help him, looking for doctors who treated alcohol problems and trying to make him face things.”
Clapton has since acknowledged that being a “full-blown, practising alcoholic” had a destructive effect on his marriage.
There was another problem too - Pattie’s inability to have children. It had been a factor in her previous marriage, but to a lesser extent. As Pattie says: “It was certainly one of the tensions - more so for Eric than for George.”
Their marriage difficulties finally became too great to bear. When Eric returned from a tour of Australia and Hong Kong in the autumn of 1984, he found that his wife had moved out. They got back together in 1985 but Pattie left the marital home for good in 1987 and they divorced the following year.
Pattie was mortally wounded when she found out that Eric had fathered two children with other women while they were still married. His son Conor, by Italian model and actress Lori del Santo, was born in August 1986. Tragically, the little boy fell to his death from an open window of a New York apartment in 1991, prompting one of Clapton’s saddest songs, Tears In Heaven.
It was only after Conor’s death that Clapton revealed to Pattie that he also had a daughter, Ruth, born in 1984 following a relationship with Yvonne Kelly, who he first met while recording an album on Montserrat in the Caribbean.
“Actually, I saw Ruth in London the other day. She really is a lovely girl,” says Pattie. “But I was devastated when he told me. It didn’t help, not being able to have children of my own.”
For Pattie, divorcing Clapton was one of the hardest decisions she’d ever had to make. She still loved him, but she knew he was still seeing other women, including Conor’s mother. She felt he was treating her as a best friend, someone to share confidences with, rather than as a wife. “He really believed I would be pleased and happy for him that he had a child (Conor). He didn’t seem to realise how deeply hurtful this was for me,” says Pattie.
The subject of children is still painful for her and she has never discussed it publicly before. “When I was married to George, it just didn’t happen,” she says. “At first I didn’t think there was a problem. After a time I went for tests and the doctors said things seemed okay. Later on, after further investigation, they found I had a blockage and I started to do something about it. I tried all sorts of treatments, I had IVF, but nothing worked.
“When I was married to Eric, we thought we should try adopting. But I was 36 by then, and in England that was considered too old. So it never happened and it was a great regret to me. It was very painful for years. Eventually, I had to realise that it just wasn’t to be.”
Nevertheless, Pattie’s life is not bereft of kids, “All my brothers and sisters have children,” she says. “I actually have 13 nieces and nephews, who come to stay sometimes. So I’m a devoted auntie.” She is also devoted to her two cats, Polo and Molly.
Clapton eventually overcame his dependencies, spending time in recovery in Antigua, and it was here that he founded his own rehab centre, Crossroads, to help fellow victims of drugs and alcohol.
“George and I, on the other hand, really got a lot out of the experience. We decided to stay on after the others had left and went to South India. We stayed two-and-a-half months altogether. It changed our lives and had a lifelong effect on George and on his music,” says Pattie, who is still a devotee of meditation.
Back in England after their Indian adventure, it was perhaps inevitable that they would fall foul of the narcotics squad. They had had a lucky escape when Mick Jagger was arrested at a party in 1967, but were arrested for possession of hashish two years later on the very same day that Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman.
Released and given a modest fine, that night they went to a party attended by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon where Pattie spotted her sister Paula smoking a joint and offering it to the Princess.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Pattie. “It was the same day that we’d been busted and there was my sister trying to hand Princess Margaret a joint.”
By this time Pattie had given up her career as a model.*** “George didn’t like me modelling,” she explains. “He told me to stop. I didn’t mind really because I had already achieved quite a lot. Before we married I’d been featured in the English, French, Italian and American Vogue. I’d been on two covers**** of English Vogue and once on Italian Vogue. So I’d had a successful career and I felt I’d achieved something on my own. Besides, I really didn’t mind being the wife at home.”
Eventually, however, it was no longer enough. Pattie’s initially happy marriage began to founder amid rumours of George’s infidelities and his self-absorbed retreat into mediation. She turned to Eric Clapton for comfort and to make George jealous.
“Eric was a strong presence in our lives,” says Pattie. “He was a brilliant guitarist and was already an established star. He’d played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before forming Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. He and George were great friends.
“I suppose you could say that we had a two-part romance. First we had what you’d call an affair. I did want to make George take notice, though I didn’t understand my motives at the time. Sometimes you act unconsciously, and it’s only afterwards that you realise why you did it,” she says.
The only flaw in the this plan was that Eric fell completely under her spell and wrote his famously coded song Layla - recorded under the name Derek and the Dominoes - as a covert tribute to Pattie.
He even turned up at her home an begged her to leave George but Pattie wouldn’t. “I wanted to be there, but I also didn’t want to be there,” she says. “You can love someone but it doesn’t necessarliy mean you can live with them. Even though George and I both loved each other, it finally became essential that we went in different directions.”
Worn down by George’s inability to declare his affection, and by Eric’s persistence, Pattie left home and moved in with Eric. She and George divorced in 1977, and Pattie married Eric two years later in Arizona. And who should attend the wedding but George - with his new wife, Olivia.***** Despite the circumstances, George maintained his friendship with Eric, dismissing the stolen-wife theory as “rubbish”. As he told a mate: “If it had to be, it has to be - as long as we are still friends because that’s the most important part.”
As for Pattie, she never lost her affection and admiration for her first husband. “We were so different, from completely different backgrounds. He came from the north of England, Liverpool, and I suppose I felt more sophisticated than him. But we grew up together spiritually. It’s something you never lose.”
Pattie was devastated when George, having survived a near-fatal attack by a deranged intruder at his home in Henley in December 1999, died from cancer just two years later. “I just didn’t realise how ill he was. I kept imagining he would recover. I hadn’t seen him for six months, but I never dreamed it was the last time. I was distraught. He was my first love and the most important influence in my life. I will always miss him.”
The film was A Hard Days Night. Pattie’s role was tiny, defined as ‘Girl on train’ and amounting to two small scenes and a single word of dialogue before The Beatles perform I Should Have Known Better.
“It was all very cloak-and-dagger because this was the height of Beatlemania. I boarded the train at Paddington. It was the first time filming had ever been done on a moving train; usually they would have built a set. The train pulled up somewhere in the suburbs and The Beatles finally got on board. I met them and they said hello. I couldn’t believe it. They were so like I’d imagined them to be.”
Pattie remembers that when she asked George to sign an autograph for herself and her sisters, he put three kisses under each of her sisters’ names - and seven under hers.
“George made a pitch but I already had a boyfriend, although we weren’t living together, so I turned him down,” says Pattie. “Then a week later we were called back for more filming at Pinewood. That week gave me time to think. When I first saw George, I thought he was extraordinarily good-looking, very charming and, like me, very shy. He had an amazing sense of humour, not in a practical-joke-sort-of-way like Paul, but with words, in a very dry way. I liked him immediately. So when he asked me again I said yes. I thought it would be fun. I imagined it would only be for one evening and that would be it.”
Little did she know. “It was quite a fast romance and pretty soon we were seeing each other every day,” she says.
Initially, they kept their relationship secret, fearing the reaction of fans. In fact, it was said that George even asked permission from the band’s manager Brian Epstein before taking Pattie out on their first date.
There was plenty to fear from the fanatically devoted fans, as Pattie found out to her cost. “One night, I went with some friends to a Beatles concert at what was then the Hammersmith Odeon.* I knew we had to get out before the end of the show, and we left by a side exit. Then ten fans spotted me and started chasing me, kicking me from behind. We got to our Mini and jumped in, and these girls started rocking the car. They were furious because I’d bagged a Beatle. It was so frightening.”
The band’s management also worried what fans might think. “Once there was a film premiere and Brian thought it would be more appropriate if George turned up with Hayley Mills on his arm rather than me, so she was his date for the night. I felt crushed.”**
But within a year they were living together and by the time Pattie was 21 they were married. The wedding took place on 21 January 1966, at Epsom Register Office in Surrey, with the bride and groom wearing his-and-hers fur coats designed by Mary Quant. Paul McCartney was the only other Beatle in attendance and Brian Epstein acted as best man.
The newlyweds lived in manorial splendour in Esher, in the heart of stockbroker country. “John Lennon and Ringo Starr lived nearby in Weybridge,” says Pattie. “I felt I’d joined a very exclusive club. We all spent a lot of time together. We didn’t go to many parties - they always seemed so formal and grown-up. We just hung out with each other and other musicians. It was quite an insular life.
“Actually, though, in a strange kind of way, we could escape a lot of the attention. Rock and roll is different to acting. It’s not really showbiz. It’s raw and personal. Rock stars are less concerned with creating an image - if they don’t want to do something, they just won’t do it. They’re performers, not actors - at least the people I was with. So in that company I didn’t have to perform either. I could just be myself.”
George himself was hardly a social animal. Dubbed ‘The Quiet Beatle’, he loathed the fame game. In a grudging acknowledgement of his status, he once remarked laconically: “I guess if you’ve got to be in a rock group, it might as well be The Beatles.”
Being with George, Pattie avoided some of the social pressures that might have tested her shyness. Even so, her influence on the other Beatles was considerable. John was said to harbour an innocent fancy for her and called by ‘Battie’, while Paul included the track Honey Pie on The White Album simply because she expressed a liking for it. Pattie attended many of the band’s recording sessions and was the only Beatles wife present for A Day In The Life.
Of George’s band mates, she says: “John was always great fun to be around. He had a certain energy and was super-talented - quite wonderful. Of course, I was devastated when he was murdered. We all were. It was one of those terrible events everyone remembers. As for Paul, in a way I felt as if I didn’t really know him. He was just Paul, as he projected himself to the public, and I didn’t feel I knew any more about him than anybody else. Ringo was really funny. I’ve stayed friendly with him over the years and still see him quite often. He and his wife Barbara Bach live quite close to me in Sussex.”
It was Pattie who introduced George to meditation and Indian mysticism, and who inspired The Beatles famous journey to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India in 1968. “I was always interested in Eastern philosophies and wanted find out about meditation,” says Pattie. “I went to some lectures and became initiated into transcendental meditation. When the Maharishi came to England, George said he wanted to meet him and became passionate about his teachings.”
In time the whole band followed the Maharishi to India, with wives, girlfriends and Pattie’s sister Jenny in tow. For Pattie and George, at least, it was a deeply rewarding experience. “It was a very simple routine,” she recalls. “The accomodation was utterly basic, without any kind of rock-star comforts. We just meditated until breadfast, then for the rest of the day or attended lectures given by Maharishi, learning all the time.”
The other Beatles were rather less enamoured. John, in particular, was unconvinced that the Maharishi was the genuine article and later wrote the disparaging song Sexy Sadie about him. “John had his own concerns then,” explains Pattie. “He had started his relationship with Yoko and wanted to get back to her. And Ringo’s (first) wife Maureen was allergic to the flies in India, so they didn’t stay very long. At least Paul and Jane (Asher, who was his girlfriend) seemed to have a good time. In any case, I think the other three Beatles wanted to get back to London to start up a certain record company called Apple.
PATTIE BOYD TALKS to HELLO! Magazine, August 31, 2004. Part 1 of two:
COVER: “MY LIFE WITH GEORGE HARRISON” PATTIE BOYD’S MEMORIES
In The First Of A Two-Part Memoir PATTIE BOYD TALKS ABOUT HER FASCINATING LIFE AS A TOP MODEL AND BEATLES WIFE
Pattie Boyd occupies a unique place in the history of rock music. Married first to Beatle George Harrison, then to his best friend Eric Clapton, she was at the very heart of the cultural and social revolution that swept the old order aside during the Swinging Sixties.
A famous beauty, she inspired some of the greatest love ballads ever written - George Harrison’s much-recorded Something and Eric Clapton’s wistful Layla and Wonderful Tonight. At the end of her marriage to George, the two musicians are even said to have fought a guitar duel over her.
In the quietly elegant woman she is today, it is still easy to glimpse the tall and willowy teenager with cascading blonde hair and striking blue eyes who turned heads at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. When he first began dating her, George Harrison proudly told his fellow Beatles that she looked like Brigitte Bardot.
“Creative artists have always had their muses,” reflects Pattie. “When George told me Something (described by Frank Sinatra as “the greatest love song in the last 50 years”) was for me, he just mentioned it quietly. I was young and very shy, and it didn’t seem a big deal. I had no sense of being part of history. That only came later.”
Today, she divides her time between her elegant penthouse apartment in London and her pretty country cottage in Sussex. Happily settled with her long-time partner, property developer Rod Weston, and enjoying a burgeoning career as a photographer, she ponders calmly on the heady days when she was the ultimate rock chick.
There was little in Pattie’s quiet, middle-class upbringing to suggest that she would one day be pursued by two of the world’s greatest guitarists. She was born the daughter of an Army officer at the family home outside Taunton in Somerset. When she was four years old, her father was posted to Kenya, where he took up horse breeding.
“Eventually, there were four of us - myself, plus my two younger sisters Jenny and Paula, and my brother Colin. We pretty much ran wild. We played and hung out with the local kids,” recalls Pattie.
Her carefree idyll ended when she was sent to a boarding school in Nakuru, outside Nairobi, at the age of seven. “I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t work out if it was a punishment,” she says. “I was so emotionally confused. It has left a legacy of insecurity.”
Eventually, Pattie’s mother remarried and moved back to England with the children and their new stepfather. “I was amazed at all the bright lights in London,” says Pattie. “In Africa the nights are so dark, but London seemed permanently lit up. It was quite magical and wonderful.”
The family settled in Wimbledon, but Pattie was packed off to another boarding school, this time in East Grinstead, Sussex. “I grew quite estranged from the family. There was a stepfather and two more brothers, my mother’s new children. Sometimes I was taken out of school and there were these very silent lunches at the local hotel.”
When Pattie left school at 17 she had no inkling of the extraordinary life that awaited her. “I had no ambitions at all. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Few Women thought about careers then. It was just assumed that you would get married and that would be the end of it.
“I was very shy but also rebellious. In a vague way I knew I didn’t want to conform. I told my parents I was leaving home to share a flat in London with some girls I’d met. Of course, that meant getting a job.”
It was the dawn of the Swinging Sixties, a time when London’s post-war greyness was suddenly full of colour and possibility. Pattie went to work in the hairdressing department of Elizabeth Arden, a job that lasted barely two months before she was talent-spotted.
“When I was at Arden I saw Vogue magazine for the first time,” says Pattie. “There were the most stunning photographs of Jean Shrimpton. She looked so very young. She became an icon for me and I dreamed of becoming a model. Then one day a client who worked for a fashion magazine came into Arden and asked if I wanted to be a model. It was the classic story, really. I just couldn’t believe my luck.
“For the first three months it was quite hard work, traipsing around various advertising agencies looking for work and trying to persuade photographers to take pictures of me for my portfolio. Finally, the jobs started coming in. I did a lot of work for magazines and catalogues. By this time I knew David Bailey socially and I’d met Jean Shrimpton.
“Then I went to a go-see (casting) for a TV commercial for Smith’s crisps. The director was Dick Lester. Meeting him changed my life. It was one of those sharp right turns that alters things forever.
“Some time later he called me back again, and I automatically assumed it was for Smith’s, but he told me he was casting for a film he was directing, starring The Beatles - their first feature film. He also said I would have to wear a school uniform. I remember telling him I had no desire to be an actress. I was quite horrified - the idea of meeting famous rock stars dressed as a schoolgirl!”
