Shout! (87 page)

The main effect of the tragedy on George was to increase the secretiveness and suspicion that had always been so deeply embedded in his nature. From now on, he would be haunted by the fear that some Chapman figure—characterized as “the devil’s best friend” in “All Those Years Ago”—might ultimately come gunning for him, too. He installed elaborate security systems at Friar Park and brought in his older brothers, Harry and Peter, as security chief and head gardener, respectively. “Before John’s death, the front gates had always stood wide open,” a former associate recalls. “But afterward, they were always shut and locked.”

In the early eighties, a wholly unexpected new career beckoned, thanks to his friendship with Michael Palin and other members of the Monty Python comedy team. He was especially close to Eric Idle, whose post Python fantasies included a 1977 documentary send-up of the Beatles called
The Rutles
. One scene parodied the plundering of the Apple house, with a TV interviewer speaking to Palin outside the front door while figures in the background gamboled off with TV sets and furniture. Demonstrating a little-suspected ability to laugh at himself, George took the role of the interviewer.

Idle, Palin, John Cleese, and company had since moved from television into cinema films with Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
, a project originally financed by the Beatles’ old parent company, EMI. Not until
filming had begun in Tunisia did EMI’s chief executive, Lord Delfont, realize he was funding a breathtakingly sacrilegious skit on the story of Christ. Delfont immediately pulled the plug, leaving the cast and unit marooned on location. Hearing of their plight, George weighed in to help them, mortgaging Friar Park to raise the four million pounds necessary for the film’s completion. “Python helped keep me sane while the Beatles were breaking up,” he told Idle and the others, “so I owed you this one.”

The
Life of Brian
went on to make a fortune at the box office and bring George properly into the film business as part owner of a new company called HandMade. His partner was a former merchant banker named Denis O’Brien, to whom he had originally been introduced by the comedian Peter Sellers. Tall, dapper, and persuasive, O’Brien subsequently took over the financial management of both George and the Python team.

On the surface, HandMade appeared a spectacular success, releasing twenty-three films in ten years and taking most of the kudos for the British cinema’s strong revival during the early and middle eighties. Their slate included lasting classics like
Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday, Withnail and I
, Terry Gilliam’s
Time Bandits
, and Alan Bennett’s
A Private Function
, though there were also such notable turkeys as
Shanghai Surprise
starring Madonna. One of the more surreal moments in that era was seeing Madonna appear at a press conference with George—once a king of press conferences the world over—as her silent, scowling minder.

In 1987, his long-dormant recording career was suddenly revived by a collaboration with Jeff Lynne, formerly of the Electric Light Orchestra, a Birmingham band sometimes called “the Beatles of the seventies.” From the
Cloud Nine
album, produced by Lynne, came a single, “Got My Mind Set on You,” that took George to number one in America and number two in Britain. The following year, he and Lynne teamed with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison as the Travelin’ Wilburys, a kind of cornpone Sergeant Pepper band playing laid-back acoustic country-rock that they self-deprecatingly termed “skiffle for the eighties.” The Wilburys released a hit album and brought Orbison back to prominence as a seminal rock artist in the last months before his death.

Meanwhile, HandMade Films was proving an even more painful financial experience for George than Apple Corps had been a decade and
a half earlier. The company’s projects were financed chiefly by bank loans supposedly guaranteed by him and his partner, Denis O’Brien. In fact, as he belatedly discovered, he was usually the sole guarantor. Most banks were happy to trust in the solvency of a former Beatle but then one—Barclays—demanded an audit of George’s affairs and brought to light a deficit of something like twenty million pounds. In yet another eerie echo of Beatles history, George received the same warning John Lennon once had: If he carried on like this, he’d soon be bankrupt. The possibility even loomed of having to sell his beloved Friar Park. He launched a twenty-five-million-dollar lawsuit against Denis O’Brien, also adopting the now familiar Beatles tactic of pillorying him in a song (“Lying O’Brien”). But by the time the American courts had decided in George’s favor and awarded him eleven million dollars, O’Brien had filed for bankruptcy. “George was traumatized by the HandMade experience,” one former associate remembers. “It wasn’t so much the money he lost as the feeling of personal betrayal. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all the health troubles he suffered later really started here.”

It was mainly George’s urgent need of cash that helped bring about the Beatles’ reunion on their 1995
Anthology
project—although of the three survivors he proved conspicuously the least charming. Most bitterly did he seem to resent the fact that they had received no collective national honor beyond their MBE each in 1965. “After all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing,” he sneered, “they gave us that bloody old leather medal with wooden string [
sic
] through it.”

Charm was, indeed, the most notable deficiency in these later years. Despite his own late burst of chart success, he began to come across like some old curmudgeon in a chimney-corner, voicing detestation of new musical styles like rap and Britpop and affecting not to listen to anything recorded later than about 1976. He even spat some venom at Oasis, a band who made their adoration of the Beatles clear in almost every note they played. True, they released a track whose title unwittingly copied his
Wonderwall
album—but he, of all people, might have understood about that. Liam Gallagher, their volatile front man, became incensed enough by George’s negative comments to vow to beat him up if ever they should meet.

Though private and publicity-shy he never became a recluse in the Howard Hughes mold, as would later be alleged. He followed Formula 1
racing and also became an obsessive fan of the 1940s musical entertainer George Formby, who used to sing in a squeaky northern accent, playing a ukulele. George took his own Formby-style ukulele with him wherever he went and frequently attended conventions of Formby soundalikes, though he always shunned equivalent gatherings of Beatles fans. “He was rubbish on the ukulele,” remembers Mal Jefferson, an old school friend and fellow Merseybeat musician who occasionally met him at George Formby conventions. “I saw him play once, and then get slaughtered by a nine-year-old lad.

“Afterward, I offered to buy his uke off him and, to my amazement, he agreed. ‘But I paid two grand for it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get back what I paid. I need every penny at the moment. I’ve just lost forty million with HandMade Films.’ As a joke, I wrote him out a check for £2001—but George said, ‘Thanks very much’ and stuffed it into his pocket.”

At the time of the
Anthology
came a brief period of rejuvenation, when he took to combing his hair back in the same Teddy-boy style that used to get him into such trouble at Liverpool Institute. But as time passed, he looked increasingly scruffy and unkempt in his old parkas and shapeless gardening hats. Despite his public reconciliation with his former Beatles colleagues, his bitterness toward Paul continued to fester. In a BBC Radio 2 interview during the late nineties he was heard griping about how “Paul McCartney ruined me as a guitarist,” still apparently unable to recognize the inestimable luck of having lived and worked alongside such provocative talent.

He remained a devotee of Transcendental Meditation and, despite all John’s mockeries and fulminations, had never turned against Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Despite losing the Beatles as figureheads, TM and the Maharishi had prospered in Britain; they now owned Mentmore House, the former country seat of the Rosebery family, where they were rumored to teach their followers to fly in rooms with shock-absorbing mattresses nailed around the walls. They had also produced a political wing, the Natural Law Party, that fielded a huge array of parliamentary candidates in the 1992 general election. They hoped that George himself might run, thereby guaranteeing at least one NLP MP in parliament. He declined, but showed his support by giving his first-ever solo concert in the U.K. and donating its proceeds to their election campaign.

His greatest asset proved to be his marriage to Olivia, not a rock star’s cipher wife but a woman of character and compassion, who became
deeply involved in charity work to help orphans in Romania. Though George no longer engaged in casual affairs, as he had when he was with Patti, Olivia still found life with him anything but a bed of roses. The rockiest moment occurred when a Los Angeles prostitute known only as Tiffany identified him as one of her clients, alleging that while a sexual service was performed for him, he was playing his ukulele and singing a George Formby song. But Olivia stood by him, becoming—in one insider’s words—“the bedrock of his existence.” Together they proved model parents, raising their son Dhani in comparative normality—and totally out of the media spotlight. Despite his ambivalence toward “the material world,” George acquired several properties overseas, including estates in Maui and the West Indies, and traveled by private Gulfstream jet.

In 1997, while gardening at Friar Park, he noticed a lump had appeared in his neck. Its cause was found to be a cancerous tumor in his throat, the result—as he himself acknowledged—of a lifetime’s heavy smoking. After an operation at the Margaret Hospital in Windsor followed by a course of radiation therapy at Royal Marsden in London, he was pronounced to have made a complete recovery. He himself told the media he was completely fit again and had taken to heart this warning never to smoke again.

On December 30, 1999, the “devil’s best friend” he had feared for so long finally called on him. It was, indeed, an eerily exact replay of the December night seventeen years before when Mark David Chapman had murdered John Lennon. A similarly deranged Beatles fan, thirty-four-year-old Michael Abrams, broke into Friar Park, believing himself to be on “a mission from God” to murder George. His intended victim later recounted how his first instinct on coming unexpectedly face-to-face with Abrams was to shout his old sixties peace mantra, “Hare Krishna!” As the two grappled at the foot of the main staircase, Abrams stabbed George four times in the body with a knife. “I felt my chest deflate and the flow of blood to my mouth,” George said later. “I truly thought I was dying.”

So he certainly would have done but for his wife, Olivia, who, like an avenging angel, laid into Abrams with a poker and the base of a lamp while her husband lay bleeding and helpless on the ground. Her later testimony would uncannily recall Yoko’s description of the “horrible confused” look in John’s eyes after Chapman had pumped five shots
into him. Olivia was likewise to remember how, as George lay bleeding among his meditation cushions, “he was very pale and… staring at me in a really bizarre manner.” The struggle continued until police arrived and overpowered Abrams. “I should have got the bastard better,” muttered the intruder as he was led away.

The Apple office, through Neil Aspinall, initially played down the seriousness of the incident. Not until Abrams’s trial at Oxford Crown Court eleven months later was its full horror revealed. Olivia appeared as a witness, though George, still seemingly traumatized by his ordeal, was allowed to give evidence by written statement. After Abrams had been sentenced to be detained indefinitely in a secure psychiatric unit, a statement was read on George’s behalf by his son, Dhani, now twenty-two and an almost exact replica of his father at the same age.

The attack inevitably deepened George’s paranoia over personal privacy, to the point where he seriously considered leaving Britain altogether and settling in either America or the West Indies. Security at Friar Park was immediately strengthened, with guard dogs and, it was rumored, ex-paramilitary bodyguards added to the existing razor-wire fence, electronic front gates, and video surveillance system that had failed to stop Abrams from entering the house. His stable-door security mania even extended to the police officers who had rescued him from Abrams. Police Constable Matt Morgans, who had cradled him in his arms until medical help arrived, later gave an interview to the local newspaper, the
Henley Standard
. George was so incensed by the interview that he threatened an official complaint against his rescuer.

According to George’s Henley neighbor, Sir John Mortimer, there was a sick aftermath to the episode—one which revealed how far Britain had traveled as a society from the loving, sunny sixties. A car full of people drove past Friar Park’s gates, loudly cheering because George had been attacked. Other anonymous sickos sent flowers to his would-be killer in the hospital.

In March 2001, a routine checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, revealed cancerous cells in one of his lungs. He underwent surgery and was said by his doctors to have made “an excellent recovery.” He himself assured the media, in his familiar mordant way, that he had “no plans to die.” But he seems to have realized already that the writing was on the wall. Most of that following summer was spent in Switzerland, at a villa near Lugano’s San Giovanni clinic, where he was
receiving treatment from the world-famous oncologist Professor Franco Cavalli. Partnered by his son Dhani, he wrote and recorded a new song, “Horse to the Water,” for inclusion on an R&B album also featuring Jools Holland, Van Morrison, and Sting. With typical graveyard humor, he copyrighted the song to “Rip 2001 Ltd.” “He never felt sorry for himself,” Dhani was to recall. “We took the view ‘be here now’ and made the most of our time. He used to say, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to finish all these songs.’ I’d say, ‘Well, not if you do it first. Get off your arse and finish them.’”