BOYD: LIFE WITH MICK FLEETWOOD, THE BEATLES AND NEW BOOK JENNIFER JUNIPER

Donovan wrote a love song about her. Her husband founded Fleetwood Mac. She lived with the Beatles in India and her sister married George Harrison. Now Jenny Boyd has written a memoir. Interview by Nina Myskow

When 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 marry him. “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,” she says. Until then the band had been heavy drinkers more than anything. “I was very straight for quite a while; didn’t drink because I was pregnant. However, one night on the road I stayed up and had a drink and thought, ‘This helps, this is fun. I can talk to Chris [Christine McVie] and I’m not this little silent thing, Mick’s little shadow.’ ”

Isolated and desperate for Fleetwood’s attention, Boyd had a two-week affair with Bob Weston, the band’s guitarist, which caused havoc. Weston was sacked, the band’s tour was cancelled and the first of several splits occurred in the marriage. But they got back together and the band moved to Los Angeles to chase their dreams.

Matters did not improve there when Fleetwood Mac’s career moved up a notch. “They had to finish this album by a particular time and that’s when the cocaine came into their lives in a big way,” Boyd says. Her life became divided. “Either I’d be with the children and drinking camomile tea, [or] if I went to the studio I’d join in with them.

“If I got pretty out of it, an evening all together, I’d feel terrible the next day. There was a more grown-up part of me that would say, ‘That’s not cool.’ I was quite torn. The music, if you’ve had a few drinks, sounds even better. You’d have your line of coke, everyone would be offered it, and then you could drink more and you wouldn’t be flat on your back.”

It wasn’t a happy time. “Sometimes I felt, ‘God, is it really worth living?’ I did once think when I was driving down Sunset Boulevard coming down to Pacific Coast Highway, ‘I could just swerve. I could just crash the car.’ Then I thought, ‘No, I’ve got the children.’ I was so unhappy because I could never forgive myself for the affair. Being naturally monogamous, it haunted me. I wanted Mick’s attention. I wanted our relationship to be OK, but it was so far removed from that.

“Now I look back and think that this was his moment, what he’d been longing for all those years, to be where he was. And yet it’s the cocaine. I think it turns people’s hearts cold. It’s like battling an alcoholic. There’s a sweet lovely person inside, but you’re dealing with the demons outside. He was on top of the world. There were moments that were great – rock awards or this or that – and I felt proud of him. But it was at such a cost.”

In the band’s well-documented convoluted relationships – the two famous couples (John and Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham) both split – Boyd was collateral damage. Her marriage did not survive Fleetwood’s affair with bandmate Stevie Nicks. Boyd had been the last to know. “When I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, I remember seeing a picture of Stevie in Rolling Stone magazine holding Amelia, my eldest, captioned, ‘Stevie and her daughter,’ and it was like a stab in my heart.” The shock and hurt when Fleetwood confessed turned eventually into a rueful acceptance. “At some point Mick said, ‘Well, she’s got some great lyrics from this.’ We both laughed as if nothing was surprising any more anyway.”

Now she says, “We were all part of the same family and I understood it. I can see how it would happen, because when you’re creating together and thrown together for months and months and months, there has to be a bond and that can easily become an attraction. And then it’s, ‘Oh, I never realised how lovely her eyes were.’ It’s an obvious thing.”

Boyd and Nicks reconciled decades later. “At one point I’d sent her a card saying, ‘I don’t know why I’ve never told you before but I think you are a wonderful poet, such a great writer.’ ” When they eventually encountered each other, Nicks apologised. “She said, ‘I don’t know why I’ve never said it before, but I’m so sorry that happened. We didn’t mean it to.’ I told her, ‘I forgave you many years ago, but I do appreciate you saying that.’ We have a mutual respect for each other.”

Boyd and Fleetwood divorced, married again (in 1977) and split up six months later for good. She married another drummer, Ian Wallace. “But he was very much a drinker and a drug user. I’d swapped one husband for exactly the same one with a different name.”

It was a drug-related near-drowning experience in Hawaii with Bob Weston that persuaded her to turn her life around. “I’d been given magic mushrooms and thought I could breathe underwater. I was quite far out and frightened of the sea, and coming out of that I thought, ‘Now I need to give back to life. I’ve been given so much; now is the time.’ That was the beginning of stopping all that.”

At the age of 37 she enrolled in Ryokan College in Los Angeles to study for a BA in holistic health. “I was still a kid in many ways. On the first day, it was such a big step for me that I passed out. It was not just coming out of the rock’n’roll bubble – I would speak in an English accent and they’d all look at me.”

She went on to achieve a master’s in counselling psychology and a PhD in humanities and started working at Sierra Tucson, an addiction treatment centre. “I was on my own path. I’d be sitting in board meetings going, ‘If my friends could see me now.’ ” Eventually she returned to the UK, running her own very successful workshops. Her rock’n’roll days were behind her.

She has been happily married to the distinguished architect David Levitt since 1997. They met on a trekking holiday in Nepal. “It was like meeting a soulmate. He’s a really good and loving father, very English, very grounded, creative. I wouldn’t have thought that’s the sort of person I would marry, but 24 years later I think, ‘Wow, it worked.’

“We are very different. He loves classical music. When he told his kids he’d met me and I’d had a husband who was in some band called Fleetwood Mac, they were going, ‘Fleetwood Mac?’ He understands about Mick; I am friends with his first wife. He says, ‘We’ve had lives before we met each other.’ So wise.”

Boyd had not really kept in touch with Donovan, “Although oddly my daughter has been best friends in LA with his daughter Ione [actress Ione Skye] and son Don since they were teenagers, without any help from Donovan or me.” But a decade ago they met up in the most bizarre of venues: Stowe public school. “We heard Donovan was playing there and David used to go to Stowe, so he said, ‘Why don’t we go?’ We saw him afterwards in the headmaster’s office and he gave me this lovely little note about long-term friends and how precious they are.”

She sees Fleetwood when she visits their children in LA. “Or I’ll go to Hawaii where he lives. Our daughter Amelia got married last September and, standing next to each other, we gave speeches. We were there as parents.”

Fleetwood has been very supportive of her book. “He was always supportive. Even when I was studying he’d say, ‘Don’t forget your own innate wisdom – don’t forget you’ve got that.’ Reading it, he said he had no idea that was what I had been going through. How lucky to be able to say, ‘Look, this is how it was for me.’ All those years later to be given the opportunity to do that and still remain good friends.

“We were talking on the phone at some point when I was writing it. I said, ‘It’s so funny. Here we are, chatting away about our grandchildren, and I’m writing about a time that was extremely painful. Back then we’d never have known that all these years later we’d be like this. We’d never have known that here we are. Yet here we are.’”

Interview by Nina Myskow