Deeply heartfelt and revealing letters from Eric Clapton to Pattie Boyd while she was married to George Harrison are to be sold at auction, laying bare one of rock’s most notorious love triangles.

Boyd was a model and an icon of swinging London in the 1960s, marrying Harrison in 1966 after meeting him on the set of Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night – she claimed he wrote the Beatles ballad Something about her, though he later denied it. Towards the end of the decade Harrison and Clapton began writing music together, and Clapton became besotted with Boyd.

In a 1970 letter, part of a lot of Boyd’s possessions being sold by Christie’s from 8 to 21 March, Clapton – with impeccable penmanship – beseeches Boyd: “What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband, or if you have another lover? All these questions are very impertinent I know but if there is still a feeling in your heart for me… you must let me know!” He refers to his own “home affairs” as “a galloping farce”: Clapton was dating Boyd’s sister Paula while ostensibly in a relationship with aristocrat Alice Ormsby-Gore.

Speaking to Christie’s, Boyd said she initially “thought it was a letter from a weird fan”, and only realised after Clapton followed up on the phone.

View image in fullscreen

Clapton wrote another letter a few months later, on a title page torn from a copy of Of Mice and Men. “For nothing more than the pleasures past I would sacrifice my family, my god and my own existence … I am at the end of my mind … I have listened to the wind, I have watched the dark brooding clouds I have felt the earth beneath me for a sign, a gesture, but there is only silence. Why do you hesitate, am I a poor lover, 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. My love is yours.” Each of the letters is estimated to sell for between £10,000 and £15,000.

He refers to Boyd as “Layla” and that year wrote the classic rock song of the same name about her. After he played her a cassette recording of Layla, Boyd says: “I was taken aback by its beauty – but at the same time I felt guilt.”

Boyd elaborates on her feelings at the time. “George and I were going through a bit of a spiky time together. The Beatles had this chaos and anxiety surrounding the band, and George was being dismissive. Then Eric keeps coming over to our house asking me to run away with him. Well, that was tempting, but I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t right.”

Boyd and Harrison split in 1974 due to his multiple infidelities. She and Clapton barely saw each other until the middle of the decade, when they reconnected and eventually married in 1979. He wrote other songs about her, including Wonderful Tonight, a doting ballad written during – and about – Boyd’s preparations for a night out.

View image in fullscreen

The original painting by Emile Théodore Frandsen de Schomberg that adorned the release of Layla, credited to Derek and the Dominos, is up for sale with a high estimate of £60,000. There are also postcards and other letters between Clapton and Boyd during their courtship and marriage.

Boyd told the Telegraph that Clapton gave her his blessing to sell the various items: “I thought, why don’t I just sell everything and let everybody else enjoy it? … The letters from Eric – they’re so desperate and passionate, a passion that blooms once in a lifetime, I think. Even now, if I were to read those letters, it makes me terribly sad. I’ve had them in a little trunk and occasionally I’ll have a look and start to read, and my heart beats, it jumps, because it’s heartbreaking. They’re too painful in their beauty.”

Elsewhere in the auctioned items is a postcard from Harrison to Boyd’s mother in 1964, during a Beatles world tour, reading in part: “Everything is going OK I suppose, but I don’t half miss your daughter!” In 1971 he writes to Boyd from New York following a sea crossing surrounded by, he complains, “more straights in tuxedos”; another note reads “Pattie, don’t forget I love you”. Numerous other letters, handwritten lyrics, and photographs of Harrison are also for sale, plus doodles of giraffes and dogs, colourful handmade Christmas cards, and a sketch for a fictional record with Harrison sat beneath an apple tree: “To me, that says an awful lot about George. It’s so gentle, so sweet,” Boyd has said of the latter.

As well as clothes, photos and other ephemera – including a nonsensical letter from John Lennon to his Beatles bandmates, and Clapton’s custom Live Aid plectrums – there is also a sketch by Ronnie Wood, another of Boyd’s lovers during this period that expands the love triangle to a pentagon: Wood’s first wife Krissy Findlay had dated Clapton, married Wood, then had an affair with Harrison, before Boyd and Wood got together prior to her relationship with Clapton. “I had a lovely thing going with Pattie [in the mid-1970s],” Wood later wrote in his memoir. “We loved to go to Paradise Island on many occasions … Eric and I have always had this kind of sparring thing about girls we’ve known.”

• Eric Clapton
• George Harrison
• Pop and rock
• The Beatles
• news