April–May 1970
One glorious spring morning Pattie and I, yearning for a day in the big city, shed our country pants and boots for dresses and fancy shoes and drove in her cherry red Mercedes to London. We shopped on Bond Street, stopped by Apple to see Peter Brown, had a massage at a fashionable spa right off Berkeley Square, and met actor John Hurt for dinner at a French restaurant. By the time we headed back to the country, it was after midnight, but the hour drive flew by as we recounted all the details of our fun-packed day.
As we approached the house, we noticed that most of the lights were out and concluded that George and Terry must have already gone to bed. We parked the car in the back of the house near the garage and the kitchen entrance. Pattie turned the back door handle, but it wouldn’t open. She tried again.
“Chris, something is terribly wrong,” she said in a low voice, trying not to sound panicked.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t have any keys and they’ve locked the doors. What shall we do?”
“It can’t be locked, it never is,” I said.
“Try again.” She tried once more, but the door was firmly locked.
“Let’s try the front door,” I suggested. “Maybe they thought we’d come in that way.”
We walked around the side of the large mansion to the front, holding on to each other and being careful not to wander off the driveway. It was very dark that night and an eerie wind whistled through the surrounding trees and shrubs. I was terrified, and I could tell from the way Pattie was squeezing my arm that she was, too.
The front door was firmly bolted from the inside.
“What shall we do?” I asked in a low whisper. We clung more tightly to each other as the night closed around us.
“We could always sleep in the car, I guess.”
“Pattie, don’t be silly!” I said, giggling nervously. Her car wasn’t big enough for one person to sleep in.
“Well, I guess we’ll have to wake George.”
We looked at the suddenly unfamiliar house, a towering and frightening stone edifice. It looked so huge and massive in the dark night that I couldn’t help wondering what was behind the doors of all the rooms I’d never explored. The walls and windows were thick, and the wind, which seemed to be howling, would make it almost impossible to wake George, who was probably sound asleep by now.
Still holding on to each other and staying as close to the house as we could without tromping through George’s beloved flower beds, we walked to the south side of the house and looked up at the second-floor bedroom window. We both began calling George’s name, hoping that somehow he would awaken and rescue us. At first we kept our voices low, but as the minutes went by we started yelling as loud as we could. Shivering and scared, horrified by the idea that someone might be watching us from behind one of the trees or bushes on the property, we called out George’s name for what seemed like hours.
Eventually the window opened and George’s silhouette appeared.
“Who’s out there? Pattie, is that you?”
“George, the back door is locked!” Pattie cried out. “Can you let us in?”
“The back door isn’t locked.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Please, let us in. It’s freezing out here.”
We ran back down the driveway all the way around the massive house and waited for the sweet sound of a key turning in the lock. The door opened and George stood there, clad in his dressing gown, hair tousled.
“This is really weird,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “We knew you didn’t have a key, so we purposely left the door unlocked. How strange.”
A week or two later Richard DiLello arrived at Friar Park to deliver some publicity photos for George to okay. He took a spin around the property on one of the dirt bikes, fell off, broke his arm, and ended up staying for two weeks. Pattie and I loved having him around the house and got a big kick out of his reaction to life at Friar Park. The longer people stayed at Friar Park, the more out of touch they felt with the real world. Richard gradually got wrapped up in the web of that self-contained, self-absorbed place. Yet we still yearned for news of the outside world, and whenever George was out of earshot, we grilled Richard with questions. Mostly we wanted to know about Apple. Allen Klein, Richard told us, seemed hell-bent on removing every vestige of fun and frivolity from Savile Row. The phones had stopped ringing. Neil was still working on his cinematic Beatles chronicle, spending all his time in his office surrounded by reels of film. Music producer Phil Spector, always difficult and often volatile, was finishing up the remix of the Let It Be album and had managed to annoy just about everyone with his eccentric and often temperamental behavior. Derek was still holding on, but just barely. “It’s a deathwatch,” Richard said, admitting that he was just waiting for the ax to fall.
One evening George and Terry went to London, most likely for a recording session, and Richard, Pattie, and I took our customary positions, sitting on pillows on the floor in front of the blazing fire in the main hall, drinking wine and chatting. Richard went upstairs to fetch something from his room, which was off the second-floor landing and tucked back into the darker, scarier part of the house. As he walked around the minstrels’ gallery that surrounded three sides of the main hall, he spotted someone climbing in a window in the upstairs hallway.
“Hey, man what are you doing?” he asked in a steady but surprised voice.
The guy was so shocked that he bolted back out of the window and disappeared. Richard returned to the minstrels’ gallery and shouted down at us.
“Some guy was just trying to climb in the window.” Calm Richard was uncharacteristically shaken.
“What? Is he still there?”
“No,” Richard said as he looked fearfully over his shoulder. “I think I scared him away.”
The local police searched the grounds with flashlights, finding a ladder pushed up against the outside wall of the house but no other sign of the intruder.
We never felt totally safe after that.
And then the Krishnas came to live at Friar Park.
At first we thought it would be a great adventure, and we were happy for George because now he’d have people to chant with whenever he felt like it, and they’d be a big help with the gardens. I was a little in awe of the Krishnas. From the moment they moved in, a saffron glow seemed to permeate the entire house. They created a temple in the formal dining room, filling the entire room with candles and incense burners. I often went there to meditate. Shyamasundar and Mukunda would often join us in the kitchen for a cup of tea, thanking us with little prayerful bows, their orange robes flowing softly around them, before leaving to join George in the garden. The women sometimes cooked delicious spicy vegetarian dishes for us in their kitchen upstairs. Every morning we’d awake to find a prayer or spiritual reminder on the kitchen blackboard, reminding us of our earthly bondage and our essential spiritual nature.
“That’s cool,” I’d say.
Pattie would nod her head in agreement as she prepared the morning tea. “Isn’t it nice to wake up to those little sayings?”
We just hadn’t figured on the children. In the beginning, the patter of their little feet above us brought smiles to our faces. But then they started playing in the fountain on the south side of the house. The first time one of the children almost drowned, Pattie frantically called the doctor—the child, just three or four years old, was choking and struggling to breathe. We honestly thought he wouldn’t make it. As the doctor tended to him, patting his back and calming him down, the Krishna women stood around with no visible concern on their serene faces. And no remorse, either. Weren’t they a little ashamed of themselves for losing sight of their children and allowing one of them to climb into a fountain and nearly drown? Pattie and I looked at each other, perplexed.
But the kids continued to run loose on the grounds, climb into the fountain, play in the water, and sure enough, one of them almost drowned again. When the doctor arrived the second time, he was very upset. With a stern look on his face and speaking through clenched teeth, he delivered a little lecture.
“Mrs. Harrison, I’m sorry, but I am not prepared to come out a third time,” he said. “These people really need to take care of their children.”
When the doctor left and the Krishnas disappeared back upstairs, Pattie and I tried to figure out what to do.
“Oh God,” I said, looking at Pattie in dismay. “I hope he doesn’t think we’re the irresponsible ones.”
“Me too,” she said grimly. Later she had a talk with the Krishna women, but they were upset about the doctor’s critical remarks and told her that they trusted Krishna to take care of the children who were, after all, only on loan to them in this lifetime.
“What is wrong with them? They can’t even take care of their own children!” Pattie was thoroughly exasperated and ready to kick them out right then and there, but George wanted them to stay. So they stayed—and stayed and stayed and stayed. The washing machines were always full of diapers and kids’ clothing. Even the cleaning ladies complained about the fact that the machines were never available. The cleaning ladies also grumbled about the mess upstairs in the wing the Krishnas occupied—clothes strewn all over the place, candles leaving piles of wax, dishes piled up in the sink. The sickly sweet odor of saffron permeated everything, even our clothes and our skin; in the morning I could smell it in my hair. The little sayings on the blackboard, often taken directly from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scriptures, began to piss us off. We interpreted them as preachy little quotes intended to chide us for our profligate ways or undisguised attempts to convert us.
What made it even worse was that George was spending more and more time with them. He was disappearing into spiritual bliss while Pattie, Terry, and I continued to gather in the kitchen for our nightly ritual of wine, marijuana, gossip, and belly laughs, telling stories about the Krishnas’ latest antics and trying not to worry too much about George. After a while, though, the laughter was forced, and we drank too much wine and smoked too many cigarettes and stayed up too late talking because we were all trying to find a way to cope with the realization that George would rather be with the Krishnas than with us. He was slipping away from all of us, and while Terry and I felt the despondency of losing a dear friend, Pattie was in despair, fearing she was losing her husband. She never once complained but every so often, in the saddest tone of voice, she’d say, “Where’s George?”
George walked around all day with his hand in his prayer bag, quietly repeating the words, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare.” Friends didn’t stop by as much, except for occasional visits from Eric Clapton, who enjoyed sitting with Pattie and me in the kitchen. We kept our voices low and tried to contain our laughter. The house was so quiet—that’s what I remember more than anything, how quiet it was. Whenever we felt like we couldn’t take it anymore, we escaped to the pub in the village.
Then, one day, they were gone. I don’t know why they left, but they packed their children and all their belongings in their wood-paneled truck and drove off, waving and chanting all the way down the driveway until they disappeared around the first bend.
That night as we fixed dinner, Pattie and I clicked our wineglasses together and in unison, with great joy and relief, said, “Hare Krishna!”
“Good morning!” I sang out to Pattie as I walked into the kitchen for breakfast.
“Oh, Chris!” Pattie cried out. “You won’t believe what’s happening!”
“What?” I said. From the look on her face I thought someone close to us must have died. “What’s happened?”
“Paul did an interview for the papers. He said he is no longer with the Beatles. He says they are finished.”
“Finished?” I couldn’t put my mind around it. How could they be finished? They were the Beatles. Wouldn’t there always be the Beatles?
“It’s on the front page of all the newspapers. Terry went to get them this morning.” Pattie pointed to the kitchen table, and for the first time I noticed the newspapers strewn around the table next to a half-empty cup of tea. All I could think about at that moment was George, sitting there reading about the demise of the Beatles at the very same moment as the rest of the world.
“Where’s George?” I asked.
“He’s in the garden,” Pattie said. “He’s beside himself! After all, when Ringo and then John and then George quit, Paul talked them into coming back. Now he just up and leaves, without telling anyone except the newspapers?”
Later that day John Lennon stopped by to talk to George. We watched them wander off by themselves, heads bent low. It struck me, then, that this was the first time I’d seen John without Yoko.
“George, why don’t you start working on your album?” Pattie said one night at dinner. We’d all been tiptoeing around George for days, trying to think of ways to help him out of his funk. He was always off by himself, tending to his vegetables, chanting in his top-floor sanctuary, or locked up in the music room playing the guitar and writing new songs.
“Yeah,” George said thoughtfully. Then he smiled, lifting all the hearts around the table. George had talked about a solo album, but as long as the Beatles were together, it never seemed the right time. Terry looked at Pattie, who looked at me, and we all looked at George with more hope than we’d thought possible just a few hours earlier. “I guess I have enough material now, with the new songs and the old ones that never got on Beatle albums. Why not?”
“I could help you,” I said. “I could type up the lyrics.”
“That would be great,” he said.
And so began the work on George’s first solo album, All Things Must Pass.
I set up my workplace in the kitchen, using a brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter, complete with a correction key that magically erased the mistakes. I typed the lyrics that George had written in pen or pencil on pieces of paper torn from notebooks, Apple stationery, and the backs of envelopes. Some of the lyrics were neatly printed while others were hastily scrawled, and he drew thick lines to separate the verses. Sometimes he’d read the lyrics to me and I’d type them as he dictated. We started with his old songs, the ones that had never been included in a Beatles album. He’d come into the kitchen every so often and hand me a piece of paper with scribbled lyrics to a new song, sipping his tea as he looked over my shoulder. Then I’d hand him the typed lyrics, he’d change a word here and there, and give me the handwritten draft to retype.
Sometimes he’d walk in with his guitar, sit down at the table, and sing the songs I’d just typed. Listening to George play his twelve-string guitar in that huge kitchen with daylight streaming in the windows, his feet moving back and forth in a little shuffle that was uniquely his own, was magic. It was such fun for me to be involved, even in a small way, in the creative musical process. In the studio I’d seen the music grow and change as the musicians recorded the songs, and the producer and engineer worked together mixing and editing the songs to shape the final product, but now I was witnessing the real birth of a song, from the very moment it was conceived and penned onto paper.
I didn’t know then that Pattie felt excluded from the process as George and I worked so intently together, but I wonder now how I could have been so insensitive to her feelings. I just assumed she was overjoyed, as I was, about George’s shift in mood and the positive energy that seemed to spread light throughout the house. The garden was in full bloom, the windows were thrown open to the light breeze that even contained a hint of approaching summer, and the meals Pattie cooked seemed lighter and brighter, full of spring vegetables—yellows, greens, oranges—and fragrant herbs.
I must have been in a different world, because I also had no idea that Eric Clapton was writing love notes to Pattie or that they were secretly meeting for romantic trysts. Eric would stop by now and then and spend a few hours hanging out with us in the kitchen. I assumed he wanted to see me as much as he wanted to be with George and Pattie. We’d become good friends and I had set my sights on him. I knew he liked me, and now that he had broken up with Paula, Pattie’s sister, I hoped something might develop out of our friendship. I even called him one day and asked if he would pick me up so I could spend some time at Hurtwood Edge. When he drove up in his Ferrari, I didn’t notice the look on Pattie’s face nor did I pick up on the way he gazed longingly at her.
I was just clueless.
“Chris! Guess what? I’m going to Los Angeles next week,” Pattie literally bounced into my bedroom, waking me from a little nap. “MGM is having a huge sale in their props department—lamps, chandeliers, furniture, all sorts of things that would be perfect for the house!”
My face must have registered both excitement and disappointment. I wanted to go with her. I couldn’t stand the thought of being at Friar Park without her.
“I wish you could go,” she said, reading my mind. “We’d have so much fun together in LA! Maybe George would get you a ticket, too—I’ll ask him.”
Later that day Pattie told me she’d talked to George. “He thinks I should go alone,” she said with a pout. I knew she was disappointed and nervous about hurting my feelings, so I told her not to worry, reassuring her that I had lots to do and the week would fly by. But I was crushed. I felt rejected—by George. Why didn’t George want me to accompany Pattie? I wondered if the thought of Pattie and me cavorting around LA by ourselves made him jealous. Sometimes he could be weird like that. Or maybe it was the money. Renovating Friar Park was expensive and the government taxes were taking something like 95 percent of his income. But a ticket to LA wasn’t all that expensive, and I’d be keeping Pattie company, which was one of the reasons he brought me to Friar Park after all, wasn’t it? My whole life, I realized a little glumly, depended on his moods and whims. I had no power. I was a lady-in-waiting, an employee who was being paid to live someone else’s life and not my own.
Pattie left and I was all alone in that huge house with George and Terry off doing their thing and no one to laugh with or drink with or cook meals with. Once again, for maybe the fifth time in three months, I polished all the doorknobs in the house (but not in the far-off rooms of the distant wings, which still terrified me), but let me tell you, that is one boring job. After two days I was beside myself. When George and Terry announced one morning that they would be gone all day, I figured it was a perfect opportunity to escape for a few hours. I decided to drive to London—Pattie told me I could use her little red Mercedes while she was gone—and it was such a lovely day that I put the top down and turned the radio up full blast. Freedom! I realized then what I’d been missing—my life! George and Pattie had been wonderful to me, and I loved being in the fantasy world at Friar Park, but it wasn’t real and it wasn’t mine.
I stopped in at Apple to see everyone. Derek, Richard, Peter Brown, Neil, Mavis, and Carol were all there that day, and I had a great time visiting with them. I had lunch with my friend Leslie Cavendish, and then I just drove around London for a while, enjoying the feeling of being behind the wheel again and choosing where I wanted to go. I returned to Friar Park just before dark.
I came in the back door, as usual, and headed down the long tiled corridor to the kitchen. Terry confronted me in the hallway.
“George is very upset that you took Pattie’s car,” he said.
“Well, she told me I could use it,” I said, staying calm on the outside but inside thinking, Oh, shit, George is upset with me? That did not feel good.
“He said you’re not insured,” Terry said.
That conversation threw me. I wondered why George didn’t speak to me himself rather than send Terry to convey his displeasure. That thought led to others, each a little more paranoid than the one before. Was I falling out of George’s favor? First, he didn’t want me to go to LA with Pattie, and then he was upset that I’d used Pattie’s car when she was gone. Maybe he thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to the work that needed to be done in the house. Maybe he believed I had become too comfortable at Friar Park, shedding my role as companion and helpmate and daring to imagine that I was part of the family. Perhaps he was trying to put me in my place and remind me that I was just a visitor at Friar Park and my stay there was coming to an end. But at the same time, I knew George was fond of me and enjoyed my company. He sought me out, confided in me, asked for my help, respected my opinions. Why, then, was he so angry with me, and so ungenerous?
Pattie came back from Los Angeles, gushing about the wonderful time she’d had and all the quirky and amazing items she’d bought at the auction—lamps, mostly, and a chandelier, but all unique and perfect, she said, for Friar Park.
“Oh, Chris, you should have been there!”
“Was it wonderful? Tell me about it, Pattie,” I said. “I’m soooo jealous.”
After listening to her stories, I told her what had happened with her car.
“But I said you could use it,” she said, giving me one of those blank looks that meant she was thinking and trying to figure out how to respond. When Pattie is deep in thought, her face gives nothing away.
After a moment, she pursed her lips in disapproval. “Oooh that George,” she said.
A few weeks later my doubts and fears were confirmed. I’d slept in late that morning and was feeling a little guilty about it.
“Good morning,” Pattie said when I walked into the kitchen. “Would you like some tea?”
Something was wrong. I’d spent nearly every day of the last three months with her and I’d gotten pretty good at reading her moods.
“Chris, look, I have to tell you something,” she said, setting a teacup on the pine table. “George is going to tell you that he thinks you should go back to Apple.”
I knew what that meant, of course. I had lost favor; George had tired of me. I also knew that Pattie didn’t have the power to stop him. First Leon, now George. Those awful feelings of rejection washed over me.
“Shit,” I said. I sat down at the table and took a sip of tea, trying to pull my thoughts together. “What’s this all about? Do you know?”
“No, I really don’t. You know how George is. He just said this morning that he thought you should go back to Apple and that he was going to talk to you. I wanted you to know beforehand.”
“Okay.” I felt a great sadness. I loved George and couldn’t understand why he wanted me to leave. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that he had picked up on the fact that I was bored and missing the city. Maybe he thought I’d be better off at Apple. But still, this was pretty much a directive, not a discussion.
“I don’t want you to go,” Pattie reassured me. I looked at her and for one moment I wondered if she might be the one who wanted me to leave. Maybe she was bored with having me around, tired of my always being underfoot. I was so hurt and felt so rejected, an outsider now, no longer part of the family.
Somehow I had to save myself. The only way to do that, I realized, was to beat George to the punch. I might even be able to salvage our friendship if I brought up the idea of leaving before he did.
George walked into the kitchen a few minutes later and said a cheery hello, an absolutely normal sort of greeting. I stood up and walked toward him, meeting him halfway across the vast kitchen. I got right to the point.
“George, I really need to talk to you,” I said, drawing on every ounce of courage I had. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and now that I’ve finished typing up the lyrics, there’s really not much for me to do here. I think it would be a good idea if I went back to work at Apple. What do you think?”
I saw the relief on his face. “Well, yeah, sure, if that’s what you want to do, Chris,” he said. I nodded my head and after a moment’s silence, he gave me a big hug.
I saved face that day, but much more important, I salvaged my friendship—and my future—with the two people who meant the most to me in the world.