By Katerina Valouxi,
Being a Beatle apparently came with being scandalous. Besides defining a whole era of music, not only of their time but as we know it today, and shaking up the sounds of the 60s, the Beatles were not only creating ground breaking music but also engaging in scandals and gossip that shook the rockstar world as well as the fans’ expectations. A few of those scandals involved the notorious love triangle between Pattie Boyd, George Harrison and Eric Clapton, the tumultuous relationship of John Lehnon and Yoko Ono, as well as the lesser known but equally strange case of the Beatles attempt to buy a Greek island.
The love triangle between the Beatles’ George Harrison, the model and photographer Pattie Boyd, as well as the singer Eric Clapton, is one of the most popular love scandals of the 60s music scene, being the reason why timeless anthems like the Beatles’ “Something” and Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla” were created. The story begins in 1964, when Pattie Boyd and George Harrison met on the set of the Beatles’ debut movie, “A Hard Day’s Night”. They began dating after the film’s premiere and got married less than two years later, in 1966. Harrison and Clapton were already friends since 1964, even collaborating in the Beatles’ “While my Guitar Gently Weeps”, in which Clapton played the guitar solo. However, Clapton slowly grew infatuated with Harrison’s wife and in an attempt to make her leave him, without succeeding, he wrote “Layla” –a song that drew inspiration from “The Story of Layla and Majnun”, a tale about a seventh-century Bedouin who went crazy because of unrequited love.
However, George Harrison’s excessive drug abuse during the 70s as well as his numerous non-marital affairs, including one with Ringo Starr’s wife which was the last straw according to Pattie Boyd, led to their divorce in 1977. After years of being pursued, Boyd finally begun a relationship with Eric Clapton just weeks after being divorced from Harrison. However, her second marriage soon went down the same path as the first –Clapton’s growing alcohol abuse made him exhibit abusive behavior towards Boyd who also went into a period of alcohol dependency. Their divorce was finalized in 1989, because of Clapton’s repeated affairs and also after a period of Boyd’s failed attempts to have a child. Despite all of these dramatic, romantic entanglements, George Harrison and Eric Clapton’s friendship remained intact. In fact, Harrison jokingly referred to himself as Clapton’s and Boyd’s “husband-in-law” as long as they were married.
John Lennon was inarguably the most conflicting, controversial figure out of all the Beatles members, and his relationship with Yoko Ono started out as a scandalous affair that ended up defining pop culture. In 1966, they met in the Indica gallery where Yoko was exhibiting her work, but they did not start officially dating until he divorced his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, and they got married in 1969, in Gibraltar. On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, the couple started a “bed-in” protest, inspired by the “sit-in” protests of the time, during which they did not leave their hotel bed for five days as part of a campaign for world peace. When the Beatles split, Yoko was accused of being the reason that the band broke up, a rumor that Lennon himself debunked. The couple was also monitored by the FBI for three years and chased by the Nixon administration which served them with deportation papers because of their anti-war beliefs, but they eventually won their case in 1975.
Their relationship might have been the creative drive for various projects of theirs, but it was also defined by toxic and abusive behaviors. John Lennon was known for his violent outbursts and he even admitted to being verbally and physically abusive to his first wife. Moreover, in “The Lives of John Lennon”, a 1988 biography of the musician written by Albert Goldman, the American author reveals a story from an assistant that worked for Yoko Ono, who claimed that her miscarriage in 1968 might have been a result of Lennon’s beating. However, this is a claim that was never confirmed by Yoko or anyone else, but all claims regarding Lennon’s toxic behavior still pose questions about his polarizing persona and whether or not a person who was abusive towards both his wives and his first son could possibly and genuinely advocate for peace and unconditional love.
A lesser known bizarre fact about the Beatles is their attempt to buy a Greek island in 1967. In June of that year, the members of the band decided to go island-hunting in Greece, looking for a quiet, isolated place in order to stay there for periods of time to write, create music and live in a little hippy society away from the public eye. Lennon himself said to a Greek reporter that they were tired of the social inequalities which they observed in the British society and Greece posed as an idyllic escape from the brutality of England. According to the archives that exist in England’s National Archives, the island that would become the Beatles’ property was called Aegos, a name that did not match that of any existing Greek island. Apparently, it referred to five little islands that were not named, in which each member of the band would have their own villa.
Another rumor claims that the island was Tsougria, a small island located near Skiathos. However, because of the dictatorship that dominated Greece during that time, the heavy political climate that prevailed, as well as the bureaucracy system, their plan did not go as expected. One can’t help but notice that, while the global superstars were against imperialism, violence and confinement, they chose to “imperially” acquire a place in a country that was ruled under a system in which freedom of speech and expression were not just forbidden, but violently punished. The government and the media that were under constant surveillance tried to take advantage of the Beatles’ visit to Greece as a way to improve the country’s image and draw the attention away from the dictatorship’s torture tactics and banishments, however without succeeding –the Beatles left Greece without managing to seal any deal that allowed them to own an island.
References
- Inside the George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd Love Triangle. Gold Radio. Available here
- The Beatles’ Travels in Greece and the Dream of an Island Utopia – GreekReporter.com. GreekReporter.com. Available here
- John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Relationship: A Look Back. Peoplemag. Available here
- The Seven Deadly Sins of John Lennon. Faroutmagazine.co.uk. Available here
