Pattie Boyd re-surfaces with photos

Her name is Pattie Boyd, but to many, she will always be “Layla.” Not that most people make the connection — Boyd has kept a relatively low profile — but she was the woman Eric Clapton was so desperately in love with when he wrote that classic rock song.

Clapton’s desperation came from the fact that the object of his affections was married to his best friend, Beatle George Harrison, who had himself only recently written “Something,” supposedly also for Boyd.

After Boyd left Harrison and married Clapton in 1979, the latter wrote another hit, “Wonderful Tonight,” for her. That’s three classic rock songs — not bad for a young woman who grew up on a farm in Kenya, a woman who fell into modeling just as staid old London was about to become the Swinging London of the 1960s.

Meeting Pattie Boyd in person, even more than 30 years after she inspired those songs, one understands. Though no longer young — she turns 62 next month — Boyd has a grace and elegance that has survived the years. She still wears her hair long and blond, and she is slender and elegantly casual in black slacks and a soft white blouse with gold cuffs.

Boyd is temporarily back in the spotlight, promoting a showing of her photographs from all those years ago. There are about 75 of them, featuring shots of Harrison and the other Beatles, Clapton and other famous friends of the time. They’re being sold through the end of March at the San Francisco Art Exchange, a gallery that specializes in art of and by rock stars. The prints, both color and black and white, sell for anywhere from $1,400 to $3,000 each.

Boyd, who divorced Clapton in 1988 and has not remarried, doesn’t have much to say about the infamous romantic triangle, nor about the songs she supposedly inspired — “It’s very flattering,” she says simply — but she opens up more on the subject of her access to such rock royalty.

Boyd lives near London, not far from Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, with whom she still socializes

She drops names if asked, but what’s striking about talking to Boyd is that the Beatles, Jeff Beck and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones weren’t big stars to her. They were her friends, people she grew up with. Her sister Jenny inspired Donovan’s “Jennifer Juniper” and later married Mick Fleetwood.

Some of the photos were taken in India, where she traveled with the Beatles in spring of 1968, a trip largely inspired by her interest in transcendental meditation. Many photos are candid, some are out of focus or grainy, and others are blown up from original Polaroids. They come across as private snapshots of friends, and indeed, she says she had no intention of actually showing them.

Boyd met Harrison while working as an extra on “A Hard Day’s Night,” appearing as one of the schoolgirls who listen to the band play “I Should Have Known Better” in the baggage car of a train. She speaks one word in the film. Told the band members are prisoners, she replies, “Prisoners?”