Eric Clapton poured his heart into a love letter written to the model Pattie Boyd, his muse and sometime lover, in 1970.
“I am writing this letter to you, with the main purpose of ascertaining your feelings towards a subject well known to both of us,” it began. “What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband … if there is still a feeling in your heart for me … you must let me know!”
The husband in question was the Beatle George Harrison, the other corner of the most famous love triangle in rock music. Harrison’s love letters to Boyd are very different, but just as heartfelt.
“Hope you’re OK. I miss you. I’m starving — many grilled cheese sandwiches. Love you.”
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The two letters, among a batch of memorabilia to be auctioned by Boyd next month, perfectly reflect the two contrasting styles of romantic epistle: the elaborate and the succinct, overstatement and understatement, the high-flown and the practical, the bended knee and the seductive wink.
Almost all love letters fall into one of these two distinct categories: the florid Claptonesque style versus the sparse Harrisonian.
Henry VIII favoured the latter. In a letter to Ann Boleyn that radically altered the course of history, he asked: “I beg to know expressly your intention touching the love between us.” Napoleon also kept it brief. “Since I left you,” he informed Josephine, “I have been constantly depressed.” This is the Napoleonic equivalent of “many grilled cheese sandwiches”.
Ernest Hemingway was similarly clipped, informing Marlene Dietrich: “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home … But we were always cheerful and jokers together.”
At the other end of the scale was Beethoven, who became positively symphonic when addressing his lover (still unidentified but probably a diplomat’s daughter): “My thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved. Be calm-love me-today-yesterday-what tearful longings for you-you-you-my life-my all-farewell. Oh continue to love me-never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved. Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.”
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The other distinguishing feature of the Clapton-style declaratory love letter is that it tends to focus on the feelings of the writer, his or her anguish, longing or insecurity, as much as the object of desire. “Am I a poor lover?” Clapton wrote to Boyd. “Am I ugly, am I too weak, too strong, do you know why? If you want me, take me, I am yours. If you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me. To cage a wild animal is a sin, to tame him is divine.”
His protestations are all about his own desire: “I would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move … I have listened to the wind, watched the dark brooding clouds. I have felt the earth beneath me for a sign, a gesture, but there is only silence.”
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Harrison went to the other extreme: “Pattie, don’t forget I love you.” Some of his love letters are simple, hand-drawn pictures: “Happy Christmas, Pattie. All my love, George.” In a letter written to Boyd’s mother during a Beatles world tour, he declares: “Everything is going OK I suppose, but I don’t half miss your daughter!”
Frida Kahlo expressed similar impatience, writing to her fellow artist Diego Rivera: “Once you finish the fresco we will be together forever once and for all, without arguments or anything, only to love one another.”
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In a letter to Elizabeth Taylor after their first divorce, Richard Burton tried to appear insouciant and laconic but only succeeded in revealing how desperately in love he still was: “You’re off, by God! I can barely believe it … I don’t much care who you’ll find happiness with. I mean as long as he’s a friendly bloke and treats you nice and kind. If he doesn’t I’ll come at him with a hammer and clinker.”
The love letter voted the most popular of all time in a poll, commissioned by the life insurance company Beagle Street on Valentine’s Day, was written by Johnny Cash to June Carter in 1994. Firmly in the Harrison mould, it is less of a romantic outpouring than a simple, practical description of their relationship.
“We get old and get used to each other. We think alike. We read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted. But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realise how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met.”
In their romantic correspondence Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf exemplified the distinct styles of love letter. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” wrote Sackville-West. Woolf, by contrast, wrote Orlando, an extended ode to her lover, which Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”.
Clapton and Harrison both wrote songs for Boyd, love letters in music that again reflect their divergent styles. In Layla, Clapton was still beseeching; the song is about the singer and his torment at the hands of his muse: “You’ve got me on my knees/ (Layla) I’m begging, darling, please/ (Layla) darling, won’t you ease my worried mind?”
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Harrison’s Something is just as sincere but less profuse and more ambiguous: “Something in the way she moves.” Frank Sinatra called it “the greatest love song ever written”.
Boyd married Harrison in 1966, two years after they met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. Clapton became besotted with his friend’s wife. Boyd and Harrison split in 1974. Clapton and Boyd reunited in the mid-Seventies and married in 1979. The marriage collapsed after a decade, undermined by his drinking and infidelities.
To judge from the history of their triangular entanglement, neither Clapton’s high-flown effusions nor Harrison’s ironic restraint were enough to build an enduring relationship in the turbulent rock scene of the Sixties and Seventies.
Pattie Boyd is now married to a property developer.
