IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SUNNY DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO WITH CLEAR BLUE SKIES AND FRESH AIR AND I AM ABSOLUTELY CREAM CRACKERED33 AFTER LAST NIGHT’S SHOW. I CAN HARDLY STAGGER FROM MY BATH BACK INTO BED TO WRITE this. [Doesn’t sound that tough.—Ed.] Cecilia Bartoli is singing Mozart arias on the excellent hotel sound system and I sip a warm tea from the finest porcelain. Ah, the simple things in life. Like luxury. The Four Seasons is totally fab, from their comfortable cottony beds to their deep-water baths. I have a high suite looking out over the Moscone Convention Center and across the bay. My wife has thoughtfully left her bathrobe behind so I can still smell her.
I lunch alone at the Yank Sing at Stevenson Place. The most fabulous dim sum in town. You see, I really do like Chinese. I am now totally committed to dining solo. The great thing about eating by yourself is you don’t have to talk to anyone. The train of thought can go by without stopping at anyone else’s station. I have now entirely adopted the John Cleese position about dining alone and I hope soon to embrace the Garry Shandling position, that it is better to have sex alone…
There was a heartrending moment at the signing last night when a lady called Wendy tells me her husband died on Wednesday, but she had to come to see me. She says she is very glad she did. I am touched and saddened by her loss, but I am also very glad she had the courage to come. The laughter has done her good. I am even more heart-struck when she tells me she has a daughter (Chelsea), age fourteen. That one really reaches home. I think it is very brave to come out with her recent loss. I’m not going to lecture you about laughter and tears, but when George lay dead and we were all sitting there very gloomy consuming Kleenex, his son, Dahni, said “Come on, Dad wouldn’t have wanted this.” And I said, “Yeah, he wasn’t all he was cracked up to be,” and we all laughed, because it was one of George’s favorite lines from Python. Laughter can be such a wonderful release. Saying the unsayable at these moments can work really well.
When George was stabbed by an intruder in early 2000 the first I knew he was going to survive that terrible experience was the quote displayed on the BBC Web site. When the police asked him about the intent of the intruder he said, “Well, he wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys….”
“Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to the Rolling Stones?” he asked me wryly on the phone with that brave Liverpuddlian humor.
“Would you like me to come?”
“Yes, please, Eric.”
Tania and I immediately jumped on a plane and flew to stay with him and Olivia at their home in Oxfordshire. We were relieved to find them both home, battered and bruised, but alive. We could so easily have been flying for their funeral. George proudly showed me his seven stab wounds. Some were both entry and exit wounds where the kitchen knife had gone right through him. One had punctured and collapsed his lung, leaving George dangerously short of breath, with his lung filling up with blood as he lay on the floor, chanting.
“I thought I was dead, Eric,” he said.
Carried out to the ambulance, covered in blood, he said to his appalled house managers, who had just started working for him, “So, what do you think of the job so far?”
If you can imagine the ultimate nightmare, an armed intruder in your home at three thirty in the morning, breaking windows and screaming at you to come downstairs, you pretty much have the picture.
“I wrestled hand to hand with the face of evil,” said George, “for fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes is an awful long time to struggle for your life with a man with a seven-inch kitchen knife while receiving multiple stab wounds. Think of it, fifteen minutes of exhausting terror.
“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 again.
“It was like a movie,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop. There was blood everywhere. I kept yelling at him to stop, but he would 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, and she ran downstairs. She knew there was another, heavier, poker by the fireplace. He meanwhile picked up the Tiffany 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 more blows to the head. Then Olivia heard the man coming downstairs after her. She felt she could outrun him, but to her relief he suddenly collapsed on the stairs; his head wounds had finally caught up with him. He would receive twenty-two stitches in his head, a measure of the success of Olivia, and George, who to his great joy learned later he had managed to stab him in the ass. Right then, though, the battle was over. There were three totally exhausted combatants. George was lying upstairs desperately wounded, his lung 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. Dahni, their son, was faced with this dreadful sight. He kept his father conscious during the long wait until the ambulance came. He will always be proud of this, but no son should have to face what he did.
By the time we got there they were back home from the hospital, patched up, but angry like all victims of violent crime, and in need of good friendship. Luckily they have that, for from all around the world, flowers and faxes poured into their home. We played guitar and sang and hugged him and were fortunate enough to be 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. Om shantih. 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 Dahni receiving blessings. We felt very uplifted by their bravery, their honesty, and their grace in dealing with such an experience. And incredibly there were many laughs. Of course I don’t suppose you’ll laugh when you hear that the intruder was declared insane and unable to plead to counts of attempted murder. Nor will you smile when I tell you he was released from a mental institution after a couple of years because he was “cured.”