Wonderful Tonight: An Autobiography by Pattie Boyd, Penny Junor, Penny Junor (With)

From Barnes & Noble

When 20-year-old model Pattie Boyd met Beatle George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night, little did she know how profoundly the encounter would change her life. Marriage to Harrison transported her to a rarified world of wealth and fame, introduced her to the era's most iconic figures, and placed her squarely in the amorous sights of George's best friend, Eric Clapton -- who began a long, ardent, and ultimately successful campaign to woo and win her. In this compulsively readable memoir, the woman at the center of one of the 20th century's most famous love triangles recalls her "sweet, turbulent life" in rock 'n' roll. She reveals why her marriages failed, citing Harrison's worrisome mood swings, Clapton's epic addictions, the multiple infidelities of both men, and her own personal crisis of confidence. Raw and painful yet remarkably free of malice, Wonderful Tonight views an unparalleled era in music history from a survivor's valiant vantage point.

From the Publisher

An iconic figure of the 1960s and ’70s, Pattie Boyd breaks a forty-year silence in Wonderful Tonight, and tells the story of how she found herself bound to two of the most addictive, promiscuous musical geniuses of the twentieth century and became the most famous muse in the history of rock and roll.

She met the Beatles in 1964 when she was cast as a schoolgirl in A Hard Day’s Night. Ten days later a smitten George Harrison proposed. For twenty-year-old Pattie Boyd, it was the beginning of an unimaginably rich and complex life as she was welcomed into the Beatles inner circle—a circle that included Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, and a veritable who’s who of rock musicians. She describes the dynamics of the group, the friendships, the tensions, the musicmaking, and the weird and wonderful memories she has of Paul and Linda, Cynthia and John, Ringo and Maureen, and especially the years with her husband, George.

It was a sweet, turbulent life, but one that would take an unexpected turn, starting with a simple note that began “dearest l.”

I read it quickly and assumed that it was from some weirdo; I did get fan mail from time to time.... I thought no more about it until that evening when the phone rang. It was Eric [Clapton]. “Did you get my letter?”... And then the penny dropped. “Was that from you?” I said....It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written me.

For the first time Pattie Boyd, former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, a high-profile model whose face epitomized the swinging London scene of the 1960s, a woman who inspired Harrison’s song“Something” and Clapton’s anthem “Layla,” has decided to write a book that is rich and raw, funny and heartbreaking—and totally honest and open and breathtaking. Here is the truth, here is what happened, here is the story you’ve been waiting for.

The New York Times - Stephanie Zacharek

Wonderful Tonight, which Boyd wrote with Penny Junor, is a charming, lively and seductive book, and like all good memoirs, it also works as a cultural history…In Wonderful Tonight, Boyd seems like a real person who happened to be lucky enough to live shoulder to shoulder with rock deities. The prose is clear and unpretentious, and although she writes candidly about the pain her husbands' infidelities caused her…this isn't a bitter tell-all screed. There's an aura of sweetness around Boyd's approach.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0307393844
  
• ISBN-13: 9780307393845
• Format: Hardcover, 336pp
• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Pub. Date: August 2007
• Sales Rank: 21,627