Pattie Boyd and George Harrison divorced in 1977, but the cracks in their marriage began to show long before this. The pair met in the early days of Beatlemania and weathered Harrison’s fame together. Boyd was once a model, but Harrison insisted that she stop working. With her new free time, she discovered a much-loved hobby. Before long, however, Harrison made this difficult for her to do too.

Pattie Boyd said she loved to cook for George Harrison

When Harrison and Boyd met, she was a model. After they married, though, he told her to stop working. While bored at home, she discovered a love of cooking.

“Cooking was my thing,” she wrote in the book Wonderful Today. “Having given up modeling full-time, and with no children, I needed to find some role for myself, some raison d’étre. Preparing wonderful meals for George and all the people who came to Friar Park became a passion. I was good at it and loved the whole process. I took cookery books to bed with me and woke up in the morning knowing what new dish I wanted to create.”

She said she liked every step of the process.

“Driving into Henley and buying all the ingredients was a pleasure,” she wrote. “I loved finding new shops and buying the best of everything, finding new brands, new tastes, specialist cheeses, unusual vegetables, different shaped pastas, exotic varieties of wild rice, fruit, nuts and pulses, olive oils, vinegars, and spices. I loved bringing it all home and unpacking it, laying it out on the kitchen counter, and the business of washing and chopping.”

Boyd liked to experiment with food and find new, interesting vegetarian options.

“Then, at last, the cooking: I was insane about getting the sauces smooth, and I loved combining tastes and textures to see what worked, and creating delicious, nutritious, and exciting dishes,” she wrote. “As we were vegetarian, it was a challenge to keep meals interesting, but I threw myself into it.”

George Harrison stopped wanting to eat Pattie Boyd’s food

Harrison befriended musician Ravi Shankar, who asked if his nephew, Kumar, could stay with Harrison and Boyd. Kumar wanted to help around the house but wasn’t sure what he could do. Harrison instructed him to cook for him. From then on, Harrison preferred Kumar’s cooking to Boyd’s.

“I felt crushed,” she wrote. “He had taken away my one pleasure, the one thing that made me feel I had done something worthwhile with my day, something creative — which being surrounded by musicians all the time was an important part of my self-esteem.”

She felt this was Harrison’s way of telling her he didn’t need her.

“In depriving me of the satisfaction of cooking for him and his friends, I felt he was telling me, in a roundabout way, that he didn’t want me around.”

She felt increasingly distant from him

As their marriage wore on, Harrison became increasingly cold in his interactions with Boyd. She worried he was having affairs — he was — but he brushed off her concerns. 

“When he wasn’t recording, he would be at the Apple offices, which I knew were full of pretty girls — and George was sexy, good-looking, witty, and famous, an irresistible combination,” Boyd wrote. “George had never used aftershave or cologne in the past, but since we had come back from India he had taken to wearing sandalwood oil, which I imagined was to attract other women. But if I accused him of anything he would deny it. He made me feel I was being unreasonable, nasty, and suspicious.” 

During periods when he focused on his spirituality, Boyd said Harrison practically ignored her altogether. She felt increasingly despondent.

“My diary is full of entries about my unhappiness and the disintegration of our relationship,” she wrote. “On July 24 it simply says, ‘Silence reigns and my cheeks get wet.’ I felt so helpless.”

Eventually, they ended their marriage.