24

GEORGE

The new millennium began terribly, with a horrible attack on George. Tania and I were in Montecito, staying with Steve Martin, when we heard the news that a crazed intruder, off his meds, had broken into Friar Park and fought with George and Olivia until she smashed him across the head with a Tiffany lamp. Some people said, “Oh it was just a burglary that went wrong.” Some burglary. Some wrong. The reality was horrendous. George and Olivia had fought desperately for their lives for fifteen minutes, against a man armed with a kitchen knife. George had been stabbed multiple times. When the police arrived, he was at death’s door. Now, mercifully, he was out of the emergency room. I called him.

“Would you like me to come over?” I asked.

“Where are you?” he said.

Tania and I caught the next plane.

We were relieved to find them alive. We kept thinking we could so easily have been flying for their funeral, but mercifully they were home, though bruised, wounded, and shocked. George had seven stab wounds, which he displayed rolling up his shirt. Some wounds were exit wounds where the blade had simply gone right through him. One stab had punctured and collapsed his lung, leaving him dangerously short of breath, lying on the floor chanting while his lung filled up with blood.

“I thought I was dead, Eric,” he said.

Carried out to the ambulance on a stretcher covered in blood, and quite possibly dying, he said to his two new housekeepers, who had just started working for him and whom he had not yet met, “So, what do you think of the job so far?”

The first I knew he was going to survive those dreadful early hours was the unmistakably George quote displayed on the BBC website. When the police asked him about the intent of the intruder, he had said, “Well, he wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.”

“Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to the Rolling Stones?” he had asked me wryly on the phone.

It was the ultimate nightmare, an armed intruder in your home at three thirty in the morning, breaking windows and screaming loudly at you to come down.

“I wrestled hand-to-hand with the face of evil for fifteen minutes,” said George.

Fifteen minutes is an awfully long time to struggle for your life against a man with a seven-inch kitchen knife while receiving multiple stab wounds.

“He came racing up the stairs, screaming dementedly,” George told me.

Having called the police, Olivia ran out with a poker to find her husband on the ground and a man attempting to kill him. She bashed the intruder on the head fifteen times with the poker, but amazingly he was able to get up and turn on her. He knocked her over, and she lost the poker and retreated to their bedroom, where he followed her. Although stabbed by then, George was able to get up and go to her aid. At which point Olivia picked up a huge Tiffany lamp and began to bash the man about the head.

“It was like a movie,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop. There was blood everywhere. I kept yelling at him to stop, but he’d just get up again.”

He grabbed the cord of the lamp and came at her with it. “I thought he was going to strangle me,” she said. She knew there was another, heavier poker by the fireplace and ran downstairs.

He meanwhile picked up the lamp and began to beat George with it.

“I’d had it by then,” said George. “I just tried to put my feet up to stop him.” But he took several blows to the head. Then Olivia heard the man coming after her. She felt she could outrun him, but to her relief she heard him suddenly collapse. All his head wounds had finally caught up with him. Later, to his great joy, George learned she had managed to stab him in the butt. He was to have twenty-two stitches in his head, a measure of the success of Olivia; but right now there were three totally exhausted combatants. The battle was over. George was lying upstairs desperately wounded, his lungs filling with blood, chanting Hare Krishna. The intruder was collapsed on their balcony, and Olivia was sprawled at the foot of the stairs as the police entered. It was a scene from a horror movie. Blood was everywhere. Dhani, their twenty-one-year-old son, was faced with this dreadful scene. He kept his father conscious during the long wait until the ambulance came. He can always be proud of this, but no son should have to face what he did.

By the time Tania and I arrived at Friar Park, George and Liv were patched up, but angry, like all victims of violent crime, and in need of good friendship. Nobody had more good friends all round the world, and flowers and faxes poured in. We played guitars and sang. George was very shaken. I had never seen him like this. He needed constant hugs.

We were present for a puja, where a Vedic priest performed a short ceremony to thank Shiva for their survival and to clear the lurking presence of evil from their home. We went upstairs and walked around the various sites where the violence occurred, which is where I lost it. Many of us were weeping. It was impossible to be with them at these places and hear them say, “This was where it got really bad,” without weeping. But after the ceremony even an old agnostic like myself felt cleansed. It is the power of ritual within us that is so important, and how wonderful to see George, Olivia, and Dhani receiving blessings. We felt very uplifted by their bravery, their honesty, and their grace in dealing with such an experience.

George died of cancer in November 2001. Impossible to believe he wasn’t weakened by the attack. The first I realized he wasn’t going to live was when I spoke to him on the phone in Switzerland. He had finished an album.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I’m working on the liner notes,” he said, “but if I don’t finish them, then you will.”

What did he just say? “If I don’t finish them”?

I went to visit him a few times as he was dying, in a house in LA owned by Paul McCartney, to whom he had already said a tearful farewell. Jim Keltner told me that when I walked into the room it was the first time he saw George perk up and smile. We talked, though interrupted by his terrible hacking coughs.

Tania and Lily had flown to Chicago for Thanksgiving, but I wanted to stay close to George. When they returned we made a little package of food to take over to the house. We were twenty minutes too late. We were met at the door by our security friend Gavin de Becker.

“He’s just gone,” said Gavin simply.

The sight of him peacefully laid out in saffron robes with a bindi on his forehead was too much. I stepped forward to kiss him goodbye and totally broke down. I held him, my shoulders shaking with grief.

We were all weeping.

“C’mon,” said Dhani, “Dad wouldn’t have wanted this.”

His funeral was a simple affair at the Hindu Temple on Sunset with the familiar incense from Friar Park, a large photo of George, and his recordings of the chants of Ravi Shankar. Afterwards, friends gathered at the nearby home of Mo Ostin, where I tastelessly said, “I’d like to thank Marlboro, without whom we wouldn’t all be here today.” Later the next year I was proud to eulogize George at the Hollywood Bowl.

When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame posthumously my first thought was, I bet he won’t show up. Because, unlike some others, he really wasn’t into honors. He was one of those odd people who believe that life is somehow more important than show business, which I know is a heresy here in Hollywood, and I’m sorry to bring it up here in the very Bowel of Hollywood, but I can hear his voice saying, “Oh very nice, very useful, a posthumous award, where am I supposed to put it? What’s next for me then? A posthumous Grammy? An ex-knighthood? An after-lifetime achievement award?”

I think he would prefer to be inducted posthumorously because he loved comedians, poor sick, sad, deranged lovable puppies that we are, because they, like him, had the ability to say the wrong thing at the right time, which is what we call humor.

He put Monty Python on here at the Hollywood Bowl, and he paid for the movie The Life of Brian, because he wanted to see it.

His life was filled with laughter and even his death was filled with laughter.

In the hospital, he asked the nurses to put fish and chips in his IV.

The doctor, thinking he was delusional, said to his son, “Don’t worry, we have a medical name for this condition.”

“Yes,” said Dhani, “humor.”

And I’m particularly sorry Dhani isn’t here tonight because I wanted to introduce him by saying, “Here comes the son,” but sadly that opportunity for a truly bad joke has gone.

What made George special, apart from his being the best guitarist in The Beatles, was what he did with his life after they achieved everything. He realized that this fame business was, and I’ll use the technical philosophical term here, complete bullshit, and he turned to find beauty and truth and meaning in life, and more extraordinarily, found it. This is from his book I, Me, Mine:

“The thing that most people are struggling for is fame or fortune or wealth or position, and really none of that is important because in the end death will take it all away. So, you spend your life struggling for something, which is in effect a waste of time…I mean, I don’t want to be lying there as I’m dying thinking, Oh shit, I forgot to put the cat out.”

And he wasn’t. He passed away, here in LA, with beauty and dignity, surrounded by people he loved.

Because he had an extraordinary capacity for friendship. People loved him all over the planet.

George was in fact a moral philosopher; his life was all about a search for truth, and preparing himself for death.

Which is a bit weird for someone in rock and roll. They’re not supposed to be that smart. They’re supposed to be out there looking for Sharon. Not the meaning of life.

He was a gardener, he grew beauty in everything he did, in his life, in his music, in his marriage, and as a father.

I was on an island somewhere when a man came up to him and said, “George Harrison, oh my god, what are you doing here?” And he said, “Well, everyone’s got to be somewhere.”

Well, alas he isn’t here. But we are. And that’s the point. This isn’t for him. This is for us, because we want to honor him. We want to remember him. We want to say, “Thanks, George, for being. And we really miss you.”

And this is the big drag about posthumous awards: there’s no one to give ’em to.

So, I’m gonna give it to the love of his life, his dark sweet lady, dear wonderful Olivia Harrison, who is with us here tonight.

Liv, you truly know what it is to be without him.

Thank you, Hollywood Bowl, you do good to honor him.

A year later, on the anniversary of his death, Olivia and Dhani mounted a wonderful memorial concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Never have I seen so many grown men in tears. George had the capacity to reach in and take your heart. Eric Clapton had organized the music with Dhani and they had rehearsed for three weeks with some of the greats, like Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne and, of course, Paul and Ringo. They all played George songs, a very nice touch. Olivia had asked me to ask the Pythons to sing “Piggies,” but I said, “Liv, we can’t, we’re not musicians, that’s not really what we do.” I persuaded her, and bless her forever for this, to let us come on instead as waiters and sing “Sit on My Face.” It was such wonderful bad taste, and a laugh is exactly what you need for sadness. At the end, we all slowly turned around and bowed to the huge photo of George behind us, revealing to the entire audience our ancient bare posteriors. I’m so proud of that moment. You often hear the statement “It’s what he would have wanted,” but never, I think, was it more appropriate. He would have loved the sheer tasteless joy of what we did. Although we were without John, we hadn’t been onstage together in London for almost forty years, and in the dark before the lights came up, the crowd somehow sensed we were there and went crazy. I felt the hairs on my neck stand up. When we did “The Lumberjack Song,” Tom Hanks came on quietly as a Mounty in George’s role.

There were many tears backstage during that concert. I had to resort to the bathroom on several occasions, but Paul in particular was wonderfully comforting, like a big brother:

“Come here, you need a hug.”

At the end, when we all stood quietly onstage while Joe Brown sang simply and unforgettably to his ukulele, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and rose petals began to fall from the ceiling of the Royal Albert Hall, I think everyone fell apart. I can still hardly remember that moment without tears. We all knew what we’d lost.