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George Harrison and his ex-wife, Pattie Boyd, were friendly after their divorce. Here’s what he told her during their final conversation.
While George Harrison and Pattie Boyd’s marriage ended poorly, they were able to establish a friendlier relationship in the years after their divorce. Boyd saw Harrison just months before his death. In their final conversation, Harrison made a passing comment about Boyd’s garden. Boyd said it was something only he would think to say.
Pattie Boyd recalled her last conversation with George Harrison
In the months before Harrison’s death, he visited Boyd at her home. She believed he dropped in as a goodbye.
“He came with some little gifts and we played music and had some tea,” Boyd said, per People. “It was lovely to see him, but I knew he wasn’t well. I sensed that he wanted to see me rather than leave it too late.”
As they walked in Boyd’s garden, Harrison pointed to a small group of flowers in the breeze.
“‘The flowers are shivering,’” she recalled him saying. “Only George would think flower shiver. It was so sweet.”
Pattie Boyd and George Harrison remained friends after their divorce
Harrison and Boyd’s relationship ended poorly. He treated her with cold distance and had an affair with Ringo Starr’s wife; Boyd had an affair with Harrison’s friend, Eric Clapton. They were far friendlier after separating, though.
“You can meet someone and just recognize the essence of their being,” Boyd said. “And they’re always a joy to be with. Even if a year goes by and you don’t see them, when you will reunite, you’re still on the same page. Just because things didn’t work out as we planned, it didn’t diminish our love for each other.”
She said that Harrison even congratulated her on her wedding to Clapton.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m glad you’re going off with Eric instead of some idiot,’” Boyd said. “So he appreciated my choice!”
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney also recalled their final conversation with their bandmate
During Ringo Starr’s last conversation with Harrison, Starr told his former bandmate he was on his way to visit his daughter in the hospital.
“I was going to Boston, ’cause my daughter had a brain tumor,” Starr said in the documentary Living in the Material World. “And I said, ‘Well, I gotta go to Boston,’ and [Harrison] goes — they’re the last words I heard him say, actually — and he said, ‘Do you want me to come with ya?’ So that’s the incredible side of George.”
Paul McCartney also visited with Harrison before his death. They’d known each other the longest of all the Beatles.
“I sat with him for a few hours when he was in treatment just outside New York,” McCartney told Uncut. “He was about 10 days away from his death, as I recall. We joked about things – just amusing, nutty stuff. It was good. It was like we were dreaming. He was my little baby brother, almost, because I’d known him that long. We held hands. It’s funny, even at the height of our friendship – as guys – you would never hold hands. It just wasn’t a Liverpool thing. But it was lovely.”
