George Harrison

As diaries go, it's something of a scorcher. 'Does your silence mean be gone?' reads one urgent telegram contained within it - the sender, one heartbroken ...

‘Because I can’t imagine for a minute being so naïve and just with no knowledge of life at all and everything that was to come.’ The couple first met 45 years ago when Pattie was holidaying with a girlfriend in Sri Lanka. ‘It was the first time George had been on stage since The Beatles, and they both really liked this band so much,’ she says. He was excited for me to listen to his music and then he played Layla and it was a case of, “take a deep breath”,’ she recalls. I remember after Eric and I split up, I was in a bit of turmoil, so I thought, “I’ll go and see George”. As it was — Swayne by now hastily dispatched — the path was cleared for Pattie and Harrison to have their first date. Asked for her favourite image, Pattie cites a late 1967 portrait she took of Harrison lying languidly on his bed towards the end of an extended trip taken by the couple to India. After her O-levels she took a job in a Mayfair hairdressing salon, which proved to be the conduit to a new career when a client asked her if she’d ever thought of modelling. Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, another great friend to this day, has written the foreword, and Pattie has also remained in touch with the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The same heartbreak underpinned the early years of her marriage to Clapton, too: while the couple underwent IVF, it was never successful. But because it’s all too clear how youthfully naive she was about the relationships she was getting into. ‘The way I wrote it in the diary it’s like a child, “Oh yippee’’, like it’s my birthday or something.