The Love You Make (60 page)

Ostensibly, the concert was a huge success, but the euphoria over this achievement would not last George a fortnight.

Bangladesh had turned out to be something of an embarrassment, too. All the recording artists who had blithely signed record and film releases for the album and movie were now involved in a legal spiderweb with all the different record companies they recorded for. The unraveling and permissions went on for years. So did the tax problems. The Inland Revenue Service insisted that taxes be paid before any money from the album or film could be released, and George wound up paying the taxes himself. On July 25, 1973, he had a meeting with Patric Jenkin, the chief financial secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at which he wrote a National Westminster Bank check for one million pounds payable to the IRS. There was also more than a touch of scandal when
New York
magazine reported that some of the Bangladesh concert proceeds had allegedly found their way into Allen Klein’s pockets. Klein responded with a $100 million lawsuit, which was eventually dropped.

Now came the rub for George Harrison. His long-awaited second solo LP,
Living in the Material World,
released the summer of 1973, was an artistic disaster. Although his spirited “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” single drove the album to the top of the charts, on the whole the LP was a long, repetitive diatribe on God, Krishna, and the Hindu religion. The lyrics were preachy, sanctimonious, and worst of all, boring. It seemed that with
All Things Must Pass
George had put all his eggs in one basket.

Even more painful for George, his marriage had come to an ugly end. His relationship with Pattie ended with such explosive force that it took Ringo and Maureen’s marriage with it. George was cheating on Pattie a great deal by then, and it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that he had reverted to his old Don Juan ways. He seemed to want to seduce every woman he laid eyes on. He even once suggested to Neil Aspinall that they swap wives. As much as Neil was amused by the offer, he was happily married and said no. In a story revealed here for the first time, another object of George’s
amours
was Maureen Starkey. Why he should suddenly want to seduce the wife of one of his closest friends after knowing her for ten years remains inexplicable.

Maureen and Ringo had moved into Tittenhurst Park after John had moved to America, and one night they invited George and Pattie to join them for dinner. After a hearty meal with much wine, they all sat around the long white dining room table, with George strumming his guitar and singing love songs. Suddenly, he put down his guitar and blurted out that he was in love with Maureen.

The others were speechless. Maureen turned bright red and shook her head, Ringo stormed off, and Pattie burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom. The couple left Tittenhurst soon after.

Just a few weeks later, Pattie returned to her own home, Friar Park, from a shopping spree in London, reportedly to find George in bed with Maureen, just as Cynthia and Jane Asher had found their men with other women. Neither Maureen nor Pattie will confirm that this often-reported incident actually took place, but they pointedly will not deny it either. Says Pattie on the subject: “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

When George was later asked why of all the women in the world he had to choose his buddy’s wife, George shrugged his shoulders and said, “Incest.”

So much for the spiritual world.

In retaliation for catching George at play, Pattie began to lead an independent life and pursue her career against George’s explicit wishes. She agreed to model again and appeared at an Ozzie Clark fashion show. She had her first extramarital affair, with Ron Wood, the pixieish guitarist from the group the Faces (and now with the Rolling Stones), and not long after packed and left Friar Park while George was in London. She told him she was taking a vacation, and he never questioned it. Pattie moved out of England altogether for a while, to settle in Los Angeles with her sister Jenny, who had married rock star Mick Fleetwood. It was no coincidence that Eric Clapton was also living in the United States, in Miami.

Eric Clapton had made a near-miraculous recovery from heroin. Concerned friends led him to Dr. Margaret Patterson, who had experienced promising results in treating heroin withdrawal symptoms with electro-acupuncture. This reportedly not only eased the pain of withdrawal but was an invaluable aid in staying off the drug. Clapton, encouraged by the reports of the breakup of George and Pattie’s marriage, went through Dr. Patterson’s treatment. He was finally “clean” in 1973 when he went back to Miami to record what they were calling a “comeback” album,
461 Ocean Boulevard.
The album was an enormous success and gave Clapton the confidence to launch a national tour of the U.S. and England. When Clapton went out on tour, Pattie joined him on the road, and they have been together ever since. They were finally married on March 27, 1979, but that was only a formality, for rarely have two people ever been so deeply committed to each other. To this day they continue to be as romantic and playful as they were at the start. They still live in Hurtwood Edge, and Clapton continues to pursue his successful career.

For a short time after Pattie moved out, George took up with a twenty-four-year-old girl named Kathy Simmonds, reportedly a onetime live-in of Rod Stewart’s. George’s drinking increased, and he became more gloomily religious than ever. Although he considered himself a great cocksman, he was very much alone. In an attempt to rejuvenate his career, he launched another album in the fall of 1974,
Dark Horse,
and embarked on a twenty-seven-city tour of North America, making him the first solo Beatle to tour the United States. The album and tour were equally disastrous. The album was yet another religious tract, the tour more of a Hindu revival meeting than a rock concert. The show opened with Ravi Shankar conducting twenty-four Indian musicians in an hour of pretty but boringly esoteric Indian music. The young audiences, anxious for their first chance to see a real live Beatle on stage, were at first politely restless, then resentful. When George finally took the stage himself for the second half of the show, he tried to coax his audiences into chanting mantras with him and singing Hare Krishna. When they wouldn’t respond with gusto he chastised them like a schoolmarm. He changed the lyrics of his best songs to reflect his religious beliefs and turned his performance into a pseudoreligious experience.

In October of 1975 he followed up with an equally boring and pedantic album called
Extra Texture
—
Read all About It,
but that didn’t stop A&M Records in Los Angeles from signing a $2.6 million deal to distribute George’s newly created record label, Dark Horse. The major attraction on this label was to be George himself, who was scheduled to deliver an album of his own in January of 1976, after his contracts with Apple Records ran out. When George’s first album for them,
,
was seven months late, George got a note from A&M President Jerry Moss saying either he’d turn in the album or they’d sue him for $10 million in damages. It was Warner Brothers Records that came to George’s rescue by offering to buy the album from A&M. Warner’s rushed the record into the stores, but
was another qualified flop.

But George had yet to face what was perhaps the single greatest embarrassment of his career. It had been widely remarked in the years following the release of
All Things Must Pass
that the big hit single, “My Sweet Lord,” bore an uncanny resemblance to the Chiffons’ hit single of the early sixties, “He’s So Fine.” In 1976 the publisher of “He’s So Fine,” Bright Tunes, brought a plagiarism suit against George. In a widely publicized trial, George appeared in court with his guitar and demonstrated for the judge how he had composed the song in the first place. George was found guilty of “unconscious plagiarism” and eventually paid $587,000 in damages to Bright Tunes. The great irony was that by the time the settlement was made, none other than Allen Klein had purchased the Bright Tunes catalog, and the money ended up in his company.

On George’s frequent visits to A&M Records before his legal run-in with the company, he made the acquaintance of a twenty-seven-year-old, Mexican-born secretary named Olivia Trinidad Arias. She was sweet, dark, and pretty, and it wasn’t hard for a man with even the most cynical heart to fall in love with her. George’s relationship with Olivia was probably the first time in his life that he was truly in love and not simply infatuated with a Brigitte Bardot look-alike. She moved into a rented house in Beverly Hills with him and later they traveled to Hawaii and London. They were together for over four years before, much to George’s great pleasure, Olivia gave birth to his first child, a son named Dhani, on August 1, 1978. George and Olivia were married a month later in a quiet ceremony at Friar Park.

Olivia remains a distant figure to all of George’s associates. He guards his relationship with her carefully, and perhaps wisely so. She is kept away from his celebrity life and is introduced to only his closest friends. The couple lead a quiet life at Friar Park, just the way George said he always wanted it, with plenty of time to spend with Dhani or at work in the garden.

Nevertheless, George doesn’t seem very content. As with the other Beatles, there is something gnawing away at him. One would like to think that it is the absence of his former associates or the loss of his glory as a Beatle, but it is not. Just the opposite, it is probably the omnipresent shadow of the four moptops still hanging over everything that he does. He has been unable to solve his problems with his spiritual tools, although he is as fervent as ever in his Hindu beliefs. The last time I saw him at Friar Park, he rattled on about Karma and gardening and will still lecture anybody who will sit still long enough to listen to him. Alas, he doesn’t record much anymore. He has recently developed a penchant for racing cars and has driven at several charity events. George is the third richest of the Beatles and has become a shrewd and successful investor in motion pictures. One of his more profitable investments was Monty Python’s
The Life of Brian,
which he helped bankroll to the tune of $5.5 million. The film grossed upwards of $70 million as of this writing. George’s other film investments,
Time Bandits
and
The Long Good Friday,
were relatively just as successful.

In 1981 George published an exorbitantly expensive, leatherbound edition of his autobiography with a small, exclusive publisher in England. The book was ghost written for him by Derek Taylor, who works for him still. The volume is mostly full-color reproductions of the original lyrics to his songs, along with a few photographs, but precious little text. In his reminiscence of his days with the Beatles, he omits all reference to John Lennon, as if he never existed. Once, long ago, in what seems like another time altogether, young George Harrison worshipped John so much he followed him everywhere he went, dressing in similar clothes and combing his hair like him. Now the two of them had no use for each other during what were to be the last five years of John’s life.

While John and Paul
were fabulously rich, and George was about to be, everybody worried about what would happen to poor Ringo. Although a millionaire in his own right, he was by far the poorest, and he was a man of expensive tastes. His first two solo albums, the only major source of revenue for him, were hardly successes. So the three other Beatles decided to help him with a record. This was as close as the four Beatles would get to a reunion, a collaboration on tape but not in the same place at the same time. The Beatle magic was still working on this album, even long distance. Under producer Richard Perry’s excellent direction, each of the ex-Beatles contributed at least one song.
Ringo
became one of the most popular albums of the year, ringing up three hit singles, including two number-one singles, “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen.” The success of the album both surprised Ringo and made the other Beatles a little jealous. John, half kidding, sent Ringo a telegram that said, “How dare you? Why don’t you write me a hit song?”