FPSHOT
Oct 20, 2003, 10:33 PM
I just saw this at Abbey Road's newspage.
It's a fantastic newspaper article, looks like from The Times,
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/features/featuredetail.asp?file=octoberfeatures692003.xml
Finding the place is a cinch: straight down Henley-on-Thames High Street, up the hill and there’s the entrance, a couple of hundred yards beyond the town. Although George Harrison lived here for the last 31 years of his life, you can’t help feeling that after the fateful and nearly fatal break-in when he was attacked by a mentally disturbed intruder, he might have come to regret choosing such an easily located address.
Two years after his death, Friar Park, a 120-room gothic pile, is still home to his wife Olivia. If George was known in his Beatle days as “the quiet one” he could hardly have chosen a more appropriate partner than the American woman known to him as “Liv”, and to the rest of us as a petite, fine-featured lady with black hair and a Hispanic complexion.
Not for her the publicity seeking antics of Heather Mills McCartney nor the manipulation of her dead husband’s legacy favoured by Yoko Ono. Unlike Barbara Bach, Ringo’s missus, she has never aspired to be an actress or model.
However, it was her handy and courageous intervention with a poker and a table lamp that saved George’s life after he had been stabbed by a deranged intruder at Friar Park in December 1999.
Talking publicly about anything has never been her style and that nightmarish assault, as well as George’s death from cancer two years later, are things she has chosen, until now, to keep to herself. She has emerged from the shadows only to launch Concert for George, a memorial film produced by her with help from their son Dhani and a team of George’s old mates, led by Eric Clapton. It had its premiere in London last week.
She appears on the driveway on a mountain bike with a red rose on the handlebar. She is dressed sporty casual in black tracksuit bottoms and trainers.
Her manner is affable as she recalls the last, and only, time we met 12 years ago. The idea for the concert came to her last year while she was staying at their house in Hawaii. Out of the concert — which took place last November, a year to the day after Harrison’s death — grew a film, the proceeds of which will go to George’s Material World charity. The cast of performers is impressively diverse. It’s not often that you see an old cockney rocker such as Joe Brown sharing a stage with Ravi Shankar, the master of the sitar. Nor will you often spy the Monty Python crew, helped on this occasion by Tom Hanks, singing the Lumberjack Song. But these are the people George knew and loved.
“People always think George was serious and a recluse,” Olivia says brightly and carefully, her accent still lightly LA. “But he was also the opposite, which is why he was so exciting. He was only reclusive from the things we’d all like to escape from: traffic, pollution, noise, cities. He didn’t put up with crabbiness other than his own. But he nurtured friendships and his friends always felt they were close friends – they’d be surprised if they knew how much he thought about them.”
Tranquil as it seems, Friar Park and its stunning gardens that we walk around was full of fun. “George was the funniest man I knew. When he died it was like, oh no, the party’s over,” she says. George spent most of his time working, alone, on his many acred garden “to escape phone calls, letters, accountants and lawyers”. But often father and son would head to the shed together, guitars in hand, and be up all night playing.
Michael Palin was a regular visitor alongside Brown, their neighbour, who would arrive with his fiddle. Clapton was the first to visit after the 1999 attack. In short, although he hated e-mails, mobiles and other aspects of modernity and the material world, George loved to be in touch and visitors were always appearing up the long curved drive.
Any suggestion that he had problems with some of his associates, notably Paul McCartney, gets a thumbs down from Olivia. When I spoke to him in 1991, George still seemed to harbour a resentment about his treatment as a very junior partner in the Beatles, and was openly dismissive of his old band mate’s publicly expressed desire to get together and write songs with him. She “doesn’t recall that”, although she can remember George stringing a left-handed ukulele for Paul on his last visit and tells how “profoundly affected” Paul was when George died: “Because you really need those friendships you had before you were famous to keep you straight.”
The thing that most kept George straight, she reckons, was his spiritual belief — and this is where Olivia gets hard to follow. For at least an hour on most days, when he wasn’t in the garden or strumming something, George would meditate or chant. “He embraced the essence of all religions, but he hated established churches,” Olivia says.
It was their shared beliefs that brought them together back in 1974. At the time she was working in Los Angeles for A&M Records, the distributor of George’s Dark Horse label. He was temporarily living in Malibu and coming out of what he called “the naughty period”, the phase of rock’n’roll debauchery that accompanied the disintegration of his marriage to Patti Boyd. But that was not the tenor of the new relationship.
“It was our spiritual aspirations that provided a common bond between us,” says Olivia. “I was doing yoga and meditation. We had our differences, but that was what kept us together. What struck me about George was that he wasn’t impressed by anything or anybody, even then, except Ravi Shankar.”
One thing he hadn’t done was have any children, a situation that changed in 1978 with the birth of Dhani. Reluctant as she is to talk about herself, Olivia is even more protective of her only child.
Raised and educated in England but miraculously ignored by the paparazzi, Dhani has barely been spotted in public before now. His presence, centre stage, playing guitar and singing along to his father’s songs in Concert for George, marks a watershed about which she feels some ambivalence. The most heart-stopping moments in the film come when the camera focuses on a young man who looks the spitting image of his father, aged 25. “It is uncanny, but what can you do?” she frets. “He’s been thrown in at the deep end now and that’s life. It’s like he’s inherited the family business.”
Dhani runs a small design company that has worked on the artwork of the concert DVD. “That’s what he studied at university,” says Olivia. “He happens to be a musician as well and which one will manifest we don’t know yet.”
Rather surprisingly, she is happy to talk about what she refers to simply as “the attack”. On the night of December 30, 1999, she and George awoke to find an armed intruder in the house.
Michael Abram, a mentally disturbed Liverpudlian, was on a mission similar to the one in which Mark Chapman dispatched John Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York 19 years previously. After a vicious struggle in the hall, Harrison ended up with four stab wounds in his chest. Olivia beat Abram off and was then assaulted herself. At no point will she acknowledge the truth: That she saved George’s life. “I guess not everybody gets tested the way we did,” she says. “George was incredibly brave.” And so were you, I point out. “Yes, but I’m female and you just do what you have to do.
It's a fantastic newspaper article, looks like from The Times,
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/features/featuredetail.asp?file=octoberfeatures692003.xml
Finding the place is a cinch: straight down Henley-on-Thames High Street, up the hill and there’s the entrance, a couple of hundred yards beyond the town. Although George Harrison lived here for the last 31 years of his life, you can’t help feeling that after the fateful and nearly fatal break-in when he was attacked by a mentally disturbed intruder, he might have come to regret choosing such an easily located address.
Two years after his death, Friar Park, a 120-room gothic pile, is still home to his wife Olivia. If George was known in his Beatle days as “the quiet one” he could hardly have chosen a more appropriate partner than the American woman known to him as “Liv”, and to the rest of us as a petite, fine-featured lady with black hair and a Hispanic complexion.
Not for her the publicity seeking antics of Heather Mills McCartney nor the manipulation of her dead husband’s legacy favoured by Yoko Ono. Unlike Barbara Bach, Ringo’s missus, she has never aspired to be an actress or model.
However, it was her handy and courageous intervention with a poker and a table lamp that saved George’s life after he had been stabbed by a deranged intruder at Friar Park in December 1999.
Talking publicly about anything has never been her style and that nightmarish assault, as well as George’s death from cancer two years later, are things she has chosen, until now, to keep to herself. She has emerged from the shadows only to launch Concert for George, a memorial film produced by her with help from their son Dhani and a team of George’s old mates, led by Eric Clapton. It had its premiere in London last week.
She appears on the driveway on a mountain bike with a red rose on the handlebar. She is dressed sporty casual in black tracksuit bottoms and trainers.
Her manner is affable as she recalls the last, and only, time we met 12 years ago. The idea for the concert came to her last year while she was staying at their house in Hawaii. Out of the concert — which took place last November, a year to the day after Harrison’s death — grew a film, the proceeds of which will go to George’s Material World charity. The cast of performers is impressively diverse. It’s not often that you see an old cockney rocker such as Joe Brown sharing a stage with Ravi Shankar, the master of the sitar. Nor will you often spy the Monty Python crew, helped on this occasion by Tom Hanks, singing the Lumberjack Song. But these are the people George knew and loved.
“People always think George was serious and a recluse,” Olivia says brightly and carefully, her accent still lightly LA. “But he was also the opposite, which is why he was so exciting. He was only reclusive from the things we’d all like to escape from: traffic, pollution, noise, cities. He didn’t put up with crabbiness other than his own. But he nurtured friendships and his friends always felt they were close friends – they’d be surprised if they knew how much he thought about them.”
Tranquil as it seems, Friar Park and its stunning gardens that we walk around was full of fun. “George was the funniest man I knew. When he died it was like, oh no, the party’s over,” she says. George spent most of his time working, alone, on his many acred garden “to escape phone calls, letters, accountants and lawyers”. But often father and son would head to the shed together, guitars in hand, and be up all night playing.
Michael Palin was a regular visitor alongside Brown, their neighbour, who would arrive with his fiddle. Clapton was the first to visit after the 1999 attack. In short, although he hated e-mails, mobiles and other aspects of modernity and the material world, George loved to be in touch and visitors were always appearing up the long curved drive.
Any suggestion that he had problems with some of his associates, notably Paul McCartney, gets a thumbs down from Olivia. When I spoke to him in 1991, George still seemed to harbour a resentment about his treatment as a very junior partner in the Beatles, and was openly dismissive of his old band mate’s publicly expressed desire to get together and write songs with him. She “doesn’t recall that”, although she can remember George stringing a left-handed ukulele for Paul on his last visit and tells how “profoundly affected” Paul was when George died: “Because you really need those friendships you had before you were famous to keep you straight.”
The thing that most kept George straight, she reckons, was his spiritual belief — and this is where Olivia gets hard to follow. For at least an hour on most days, when he wasn’t in the garden or strumming something, George would meditate or chant. “He embraced the essence of all religions, but he hated established churches,” Olivia says.
It was their shared beliefs that brought them together back in 1974. At the time she was working in Los Angeles for A&M Records, the distributor of George’s Dark Horse label. He was temporarily living in Malibu and coming out of what he called “the naughty period”, the phase of rock’n’roll debauchery that accompanied the disintegration of his marriage to Patti Boyd. But that was not the tenor of the new relationship.
“It was our spiritual aspirations that provided a common bond between us,” says Olivia. “I was doing yoga and meditation. We had our differences, but that was what kept us together. What struck me about George was that he wasn’t impressed by anything or anybody, even then, except Ravi Shankar.”
One thing he hadn’t done was have any children, a situation that changed in 1978 with the birth of Dhani. Reluctant as she is to talk about herself, Olivia is even more protective of her only child.
Raised and educated in England but miraculously ignored by the paparazzi, Dhani has barely been spotted in public before now. His presence, centre stage, playing guitar and singing along to his father’s songs in Concert for George, marks a watershed about which she feels some ambivalence. The most heart-stopping moments in the film come when the camera focuses on a young man who looks the spitting image of his father, aged 25. “It is uncanny, but what can you do?” she frets. “He’s been thrown in at the deep end now and that’s life. It’s like he’s inherited the family business.”
Dhani runs a small design company that has worked on the artwork of the concert DVD. “That’s what he studied at university,” says Olivia. “He happens to be a musician as well and which one will manifest we don’t know yet.”
Rather surprisingly, she is happy to talk about what she refers to simply as “the attack”. On the night of December 30, 1999, she and George awoke to find an armed intruder in the house.
Michael Abram, a mentally disturbed Liverpudlian, was on a mission similar to the one in which Mark Chapman dispatched John Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York 19 years previously. After a vicious struggle in the hall, Harrison ended up with four stab wounds in his chest. Olivia beat Abram off and was then assaulted herself. At no point will she acknowledge the truth: That she saved George’s life. “I guess not everybody gets tested the way we did,” she says. “George was incredibly brave.” And so were you, I point out. “Yes, but I’m female and you just do what you have to do.