LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.

5 thoughts on “LIFE misses the Beat”

  1. So cool, I love that picture. Jennifer Juniper on AHDN? cool mistake! Yes I think they thought Susan Whitman was Jenny!!! 🙂

  2. Thanks Doug! I’m so excited to hear about Prue’s photos of herself and the girls!!! Can’t wait till you get them! – Lynn

  3. Lynn – Absolutely, yes of course you’re welcome to the picture! Prue says one of her sons has found a stack of prints “of me and the girls,” apparently from the Youthquake period, and I am hoping very much to see them.

    The “holy grail” for me are the color slides from the train set of AHDN for “I Should Have Known Better”, that everybody knows, that include Pattie, Sue, and Tina, but the ones with Prue. Based on a Christie’s auction listing I found, color photos of Prue in her schoolgirl uniform exist, but I have never seen them, nor has she.

    I use very minimal image editing tools — Xnview mostly, and sometimes Paint in Windows 7 — so I’m sure your touch-up of Prue’s photo by Ringo looks better than my simple stitching job.

  4. Hi Doug, I was also shocked to see the erroneous info that LIFE printed in their George Harrison Tribute about Jenny Boyd appearing in A Hard Day’s Night! That falsehood was published in Bob Spitz’s error-mangled Beatles book, but LIFE should’ve known better. I wrote them about the error at the LIFE website a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t get a reply. I think the mistake about one of the schoolgirl extras being Pattie’s sister is because Susan Whitman, the other blond who combs John’s hair in the publicity photos, looked similar to Pattie.

    I love the new photo of Prue with Vidal Sassoon! I hope it’s OK if I copy it for Pattie Boyd’s Sixties Style group’s YouthQuake album. I recently made a scan of Ringo’s photo of Prue smoking and touched up the page seam if you’d like to use it. – Lynn

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