Jenny Boyd has been married to architect David Levitt OBE since 1997.
He is 11 years her senior.
When former Sixties model and muse, Jenny Boyd first met architect David Levitt OBE, on a walking holiday in Nepal, he had no idea who she was. ‘He’d just about heard of the Beatles and that was it,’ she laughs delightedly. ‘It was lovely him not knowing about rock music.’
You sense it was a refreshing change for Boyd, then 49, who had been at the heart of the music scene in the 1960s and 1970s. The singer Donovan wrote the 1968 hit song Jennifer Juniper for her.
David, an award-winning architect in his own right, knew none of this [that her first husband was Mick Fleetwood and they had two daughters, that she was the muse for Donovan's 'Jennifer Juniper", and that her sister Pattie was married first to Beatle George Harrison and then to Eric Clapton] as they trekked eight hours a day, slept in tents and ate around the campfire.
‘When you’re on a trek, you just talk to the person who is walking at the same pace,’ Jenny, now 72, recalls. ‘So we would talk a lot. But it wasn’t as if there was any kind of physical attraction.
‘I’d only recently moved from Los Angeles. I was thinking I’d made a mistake. But while I was on that trek I just knew my place was in England. As you walk, day after day, you get more in touch with yourself.’
And the connection between the couple slowly grew as they walked for miles, sharing life stories.
She could tell that not everything in David’s life had been plain sailing, either. He was divorced with three children. ‘But it was obvious he’d managed throughout it all to be a good father,’ says Jenny. ‘And that resonated with me. There was something about him that was solid.’
It was only right towards the end of the trip that she had a ‘little tiny inkling of something, but I let it go because I didn’t want to have a boyfriend. I was done with that. But then we started to see each other in London. I remember saying at one point: “No, no, I’m not ready for a boyfriend.” And he said: “We’re going to be friends.” Great line, so you relax,’ she giggles. ‘But it was so natural, and now we’ve been together over 24 years.’
They married in 1997. Finally her attraction to brilliant but emotionally damaged rock stars was over. ‘The extraordinary thing is David is so opposite to me,’ she says today. ‘Not only is he Taurus and I’m Scorpio, he’s classical music and I’m rock ’n’ roll.’
She and David live between London and LA, with a huge blended family between them. Their London home is a flat at 1960s modernist icon the Brunswick Centre (David was one of the architects), a light and airy space filled with books and paintings. Only a few photos on the wall give away her modelling past.