40 The Times Magazinehen Jenny Boyd was a
schoolgirl, she met Mick
Fleetwood, a fledgling drummer
in a teenage band. They were
both 16 and he had spotted her
coming back from school in
Notting Hill, west London.
It was the Swinging Sixties
and her dolly-bird looks and
insouciant style – all legs, huge
doe eyes and long blonde hair – were about
to propel her into the world of modelling, just
like her older sister, Pattie, who had a Beatle
for a boyfriend (George Harrison, whom she
subsequently married).
“It was not what I intended,” Boyd, 72, tells
me. “But I was lucky enough to have the look
of that time.” She is quick to add, “Oh, I never
thought I was a great beauty. Pattie was. She
was on the cover of Vogue.” She fell into the
job of modelling for era-defining fashion
designers Foale and Tuffin. “Everything
I did had a leaf-in-the-wind feeling. It was,
‘Oh, OK,’ and off I’d go.”
And so she drifted into an extraordinary
life in which, beset with anxiety and lacking
in confidence, the result of an insecure and
fractured childhood, she became an observer
at the very heart of the starriest of rock
scenes. Her journey encompasses the world of
Carnaby Street, the flower-power era in San
Francisco and the cocaine-fuelled California
rock lifestyle, and is vividly chronicled in her
compelling memoir, Jennifer Juniper: a Journey
Beyond the Muse (the title taken from a song
written for her by a lovesick Donovan).
Fleetwood had to bide his time. Boyd had a
boyfriend, Roger Waters (pre-Pink Floyd), but
was struck by the gentle presence of this tall,
skinny boy with the long hair. “But we were
both horribly shy,” she says. She had no idea
that the band he went on to found, Fleetwood
Mac, would become one of the biggest in the
world, selling 140 million albums.
Or that their eventual relationship – which
started a year later after a modelling trip to
New York gave her the confidence to dump
Waters – would be the defining one of her life,
although it went back and forth. That they
would marry (twice) and she would fall victim
to the notoriously toxic relationships within
the band, before ultimately turning her back
on the role of rock’n’roll wife. She changed her
life: went to college to train to be a psychologist
and counsellor, gained her PhD and spent her
later years working in addiction rehab.
Back at the beginning they were very much
part of the London club scene, hanging out
with the Stones and Pattie and Harrison and
the other Beatles. (“Everyone knew each other.
There was no rivalry.”) They were together for
a year. “We were like an old married couple at
a young age. Part of me wanted to feel secure
and part of me wanted to explore the world.”An imagined slight (Fleetwood not getting
up to say goodbye to her one morning when
she was leaving for a modelling job in Rome)
prompted Boyd to end it: “I thought I’d do it
before he did.” It was a misunderstanding, but
they were incapable of communicating with
each other. They were not to get together
again for another three years.
Boyd continued modelling but was
searching for some deeper meaning to life – it
was the beginnings of the hippy movement –
and bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
She was just 19. “It was definitely turn on, tune
in and drop out, the beginning of flower power,
and I was there at the start, in Haight-Ashbury,
watching it grow. It was lovely, like nothing I’d
ever come across. Creative and colourful,
everyone making things, playing music.”
Drugs had been part of the scene in
London. “I’d already been smoking pot. Not
lots – I could still carry on working – but we’d
get together and listen to great music and
that’s what we’d do. I tried acid a couple of
times in London, but I decided I didn’t like
feeling so out of control, so I smoked pot. Not
daily, but if it was there, I’d take it.” She wrote
to Pattie, urging her and Harrison to come
over. “I told them it was utopia, but they didn’t
come until August and by then all the original
hippies had moved out and it was completely
different. We took half a tab of acid each and
walked down Haight-Ashbury, but it was
horrendous. All the innocence was gone.”
It was in complete contrast to India where,
at Harrison’s invitation, she accompanied
him and Pattie and the other Beatles on their
now legendary stay at the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh. They were all
on a spiritual path. “I didn’t do anything but
meditate,” she says. Every morning she would
go up onto the roof of her bungalow and sit
there quietly with Pattie and Cynthia Lennon,
listening to John Lennon, Paul McCartney and
Harrison playing their guitars.
“We’d maybe be getting our hands hennaed
and could hear John saying, ‘I couldn’t sleep
last night,’ and they’d come up with lyrics and
it was lovely.” It was the genesis of songs on
The White Album. Boyd spent two months
with them and got to know them as people:
“John was very funny; he had a very quick
humour. You saw him and Paul together and
nobody had a chance to get in there at all.”
Donovan turned up. Boyd had met him
through Pattie and Harrison and, back in
England, he’d opened his heart to her with
the love song he’d written, Jennifer Juniper. It
had taken her aback. “We’d never even kissed.
I loved the song and his voice and l loved
having him as a friend, but it never went any
further. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. Part
of me still felt connected to Mick.”
In India, playing his guitar one day down
by the Ganges, Donovan asked her to marryhim. “He was a total romantic and it was so
sweet, but no way,” she says. His love remained
unrequited. “But when I hear the song today,
it makes me smile to think of all that innocence
all those years ago. It’s my treasure, my little
jewel. I’ve travelled through the world with it.”
Fleetwood reappeared in her life – writing
to her care of the stall, Juniper, that she and
Pattie were running in Chelsea Antiques
Market – and they got back together, marrying
in 1970 when she was pregnant with their first
daughter, Amelia. They had a second, Lucy,
and by this time it had become clear to her
that Fleetwood’s drive for success with the
band, who by this stage were all living with
them in a large house, the Kiln, excluded her.
“I loved music, and dancing goes to my
soul. There were wonderful times listening to
them create their songs. But if you’re outside
that circle, you’re outside. I was very lonely,”W
‘I REMEMBER SEEING A
PHOTO OF STEVIE NICKS
HOLDING MY DAUGHTER. IT
WAS A STAB IN THE HEART’
With her husband, Mick Fleetwood, in 1972Jenny Boyd in 1966PREVIOUS SPREAD: © ERIC SWAYNE 1963, PA. THIS SPREAD: COURTESY OF JENNY BOYD, SHUTTERSTOCK