Surgeons were forced to remove part of Harrison's lung, and his wounds left him scarred and breathless. More damaging still was the psychological impact. When he returned home, he sat in his kitchen with Eric Clapton, turning over and over again the precise details of the attack. 'George was still very disturbed,' Clapton recalled, 'and didn't seem to know where to go with his life. I could only use my own predicament with addiction as a reference, encouraging the potential use of some kind of support system.' 'It changed him,' one of his closest aides recalled. 'We all felt that. And we were sure that's why the cancer came back. He'd been looking so well, but after the attack he didn't have the strength left to fight.'
Through 2000 Harrison rested, worked sporadically on material for a new album and supervised the reissue of All Things Must Pass. It included a revised arrangement of 'My Sweet Lord', carefully omitting all the elements that had made the original record so commercial. It was a typically wilful gesture, infuriating yet strangely admirable, like the man himself. There were rumours that the Harrisons might abandon Friar Park, though their home in Maui was still the subject of litigation. More surreal was the suggestion that Neil Aspinall might retire as managing director of Apple and that Harrison might take his place – a bizarre option for a celebrity recluse to consider.
There was, it soon became apparent, no time for change and precious little time for life. In March 2001 Harrison underwent surgery to remove a tumour from his lung. The following month he came under the care of the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland while staying in a lakeside home by the Italian border. He met Paul McCartney briefly in Milan a few weeks later, but otherwise lived as privately as he had always wished, albeit with the knowledge that his illness was outpacing him.
If John Lennon's murder had provided the starkest possible exhibition of the perils of celebrity, Harrison's final months were, in their way, an equally cruel reminder. It was a savage irony that this most reluctant of public figures should be exploited, not once but twice, by those who cared less for his humanity than his fame. He issued a statement in early July 2001, claiming that he was 'feeling fine' and apologising for any concern felt by fans. But two weeks later Beatles producer George Martin was widely quoted as delivering a virtual death sentence: 'He is an indomitable spirit but he knows that he is going to die soon, and he is accepting this.' When this appeared in print, the appalled Martin rang Harrison to apologise and deny ever making the remark. And he was right: his actual words were, 'He's been rescued many times . . . I guess he's hoping he's going to be rescued again. And I think he will. But he knows perfectly well there's a chance he may not be.' This story was then twisted by a succession of editors into something more sensational. Harrison insisted that he was 'active and feeling very well', but the original story was what people remembered, even after Richard Starkey had visited his friend and announced that Harrison was 'fine'.
At the start of October Harrison entered a recording studio for the last time, to tape a song entitled 'Horse to Water' with Jools Holland's band. 'He hadn't been well earlier in the year,' Holland admitted, 'but he seemed much, much better. He seemed strong, and his voice was really strong. He'll continue to improve.' Yet Harrison's lyrics had the dull ring of an Old Testament prophet confronting the apostasy of his nation from his deathbed. There was a verse about 'a friend of mine in so much misery', in which it was difficult not to recognise the haunted face of the bereaved Paul McCartney; another about an alcoholic; a third about a 'preacher' who 'warned me against Satan', the inference being that none of these apparent heroes had been able to find peace. When the song was copyrighted, Harrison assigned it to a new company: RIP Ltd 2001. It was a final stroke of black humour.
Within two weeks of that session Harrison's health had sharply declined. Aware that his struggle was entering its final weeks, he resigned as a director of Harrisongs, yielding his place to his wife, who soon succeeded her husband on the Apple board as well. The cancer had followed a familiar path, from his lungs to his brain; he was agonisingly thin and suffering hallucinations from his weighty intake of painkillers. He crossed the Atlantic for the final time, to try experimental radiation treatment at the pioneering clinic of the Staten Island University Hospital. Within a few days he was visited by McCartney. The two men, friends for more than 45 years but so often divided by the aftermath of their fame, spent their final hours together reminiscing about their shared past. 'We were laughing and joking, just like nothing was going on. I was impressed by his strength,' McCartney recalled later.
A team was focusing high-density doses of radiation on Harrison's brain tumour in an effort to win him a few extra months of life, but according to an indictment filed several years later one medic was overcome by the lure of Harrison's fame. Olivia Harrison alleged in 2004 that the medic drove his children to the house that the Harrisons had rented, 'where [George] was bedridden and in great discomfort'. There the medic made Harrison listen while his son played the guitar, and then asked him to autograph the instrument for the boy. The frail musician refused: 'I do not even know if I know how to spell my name any more,' he said. The medic allegedly told him, 'Come on, you can do this,' placed a pen in Harrison's hand and helped him scrawl his name on the guitar.
Harrison abandoned the treatment and flew to Los Angeles for a more conventional course of radiotherapy. During the flight Harrison was so weak that he nearly died, but he clung to life for another two weeks. On 28 November, however, it was obvious that he was close to death, and his old friend Ravi Shankar flew to Los Angeles to visit him. Shankar's daughter Anoushka recalled, '[George] had a look that I'd never really seen before, so full of love and peace. He wasn't able to say anything with his lips, but his eyes were saying it. That house was just so full of love.'
The following day George Harrison died at 1.30 p.m., in the presence of his wife, his son and fellow devotees of Krishna. 'George aspired to leave his body in a conscious manner, and that was a goal of his life,' his wife recalled. His friend Mukanda Goswami said simply, 'He was a very spiritual person, who was unafraid to die.' He passed from this world with the scent of incense in his nostrils, while his friends chanted the praises of Krishna. His body was covered with a yellow silk blanket, and sprinkled with rose petals and holy water. The official cause of death was less poetic: 'metastatic non-small cell lung cancer' accompanied by 'head and neck squamous cell carcinoma'.
There was none of the shock that had accompanied Lennon's death 21 years earlier; just a profound sense of regret that this complex and determined man had died at the age of 58. His son Dhani captured Harrison's spiritual nature: 'There was no urgency for him. Occasionally he'd get motivated, but not because he felt like he was going to die. He never sat and felt sorry for himself. He had no fears or worries left when he died.' He would be missed, said Richard Starkey, for his humour and his generosity of spirit. Paul McCartney, who still remembered how a single misplaced word had haunted him when Lennon died, pronounced careful but heartfelt tribute: 'I am devastated and very very sad. He was a lovely guy and a very brave man, and he had a wonderful sense of humour. He is really just my baby brother.'
Harrison's body was cremated, and his family took his ashes to Varanasi in India, where the holy waters of the Ganges, the Yamuna and Saraswati meet. Olivia Harrison delivered a suitably spiritual requiem: 'We are deeply touched by the outpouring of love and compassion from people around the world. The profound beauty of the moment of George's passing – of his awakening from this dream – was no surprise to those of us who knew how he longed to be with God. In that pursuit, he was relentless.'
In a bizarre repeat of the aftermath of Linda McCartney's death, the media noticed a discrepancy on Harrison's death certificate – creating a five-day mystery that was solved when the real location of his death, a house in the Hollywood Hills that had been leased to Paul McCartney, was revealed. (The certificate listed Harrison's home as being in Lugano, Switzerland, presumably for tax purposes.) By January 2002 'My Sweet Lord' was
the best-selling single in Britain, and Olivia Harrison was preparing a lawsuit against a member of her extended family, whom she accused of stealing her husband's possessions and selling them the day after George's death. In July she held a private commemoration of her husband's life at Friar Park, attended by McCartney, Starkey and George Martin. And on 29 November 2002 – 'one year to the day', as the posters said – she organised the Concert For George at the Royal Albert Hall, at which many of his closest friends paid musical homage. Dhani Harrison, looking eerily like a reincarnation of his father circa 1963, remained on stage throughout. As Eric Clapton admitted, George Harrison would probably have said something like, 'Thanks very much, but I don't really want this.' He would, Clapton added wryly, 'try to queer the pitch a bit . . . He could be very contrary.' But the Harrison that was celebrated was the spiritual seeker, the master of subtle melodic shifts and deeply personal lyricism. Both of the surviving Beatles were there. Starkey almost upstaged the event: 'I loved George; George loved me,' he declared confidently. By contrast, McCartney appeared uncertain, almost embarrassed – perhaps intimidated to be in the company of Harrison's closest allies. Anxious not to appear to be seeking the limelight, he performed with uncharacteristic restraint, though his emotion was clear to see. But it wasn't hard to imagine Harrison's cynicism as McCartney led the band into a soulful rendition of 'All Things Must Pass' – one of the songs that the other Beatles had refused to take seriously in January 1969.
Moving as the occasion was, the concert could only hint at the breadth of Harrison's character. 'George was the funniest man I knew,' his widow declared. 'When he died, it was like, Oh, no, the party's over.' With sly humour that her husband would have relished, she recalled, 'He didn't put up with any crabbiness, other than his own.' In the years to come she and Dhani would oversee the repackaging of Harrison's albums, and Dhani would launch his own musical career, besides taking on the much-needed role of providing Apple with a link to the 21st century audience. 'My job description is being enthusiastic,' the 30-year-old said in 2009.
No such obvious role was open to Richard Starkey. Alcohol and drugs had clouded his life in a comforting haze for two decades after the demise of the Beatles; then the effort to maintain sobriety and the habit of work filled his time. 'I've finally become everyone I used to hate!' he joked to a friend in 1990. But there was a darker subtext. Once the Beatles had re-formed, to his great delight, and disbanded again; once his second or third album crafted with skill and without stimulants had been released and widely ignored by the public; once a proposed supergroup with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had failed to materialise; once he had launched a new record label (Pumkinhead Records) without any noticeable impact; once the fifth or sixth incarnation of his All-Starr Band had filled the same halls as its predecessor, what was left? 'Living sober was difficult,' he recalled, 'I had to start again.' But starting was no longer the problem; the challenge was to fill his life with something that was as much fun as partying and as exciting as being in the Beatles, and there were few things that were both legal and sober enough to qualify.
In public Starkey was still the lovable joker with the maudlin face; it's hard to imagine any of the other Beatles being easy-going enough to discuss the group's relative penis sizes, as he did on Howard Stern's show in 1998. His humour was natural and unforced: seemingly without effort he exuded charm and self-respect. But sometimes a sourer side of his personality became visible. It was there when he dismissed yet one more enquiry about the Beatles with a sullen refusal to talk about anything except his new album, which he must have known would be forgotten in weeks; and likewise when he told a newspaper in 2005, 'I have this thing about England, that they don't really love me enough. That's just how I feel. It's not a fact, it's just a feeling.' Increasingly he carried that defensiveness with him, to the point where it became part of his psyche. In 2005, when McCartney performed 'Sgt Pepper' at the Live 8 concert with U2, Starkey complained, 'I was never asked to do it. He didn't ask me. It's too late now. It's very disappointing.' The same spirit seemed to inspire his plan to make a documentary that would set the public straight about who he really was. In his heart he was still the child who had suffered when his friends were having fun, and who had spent several years confined in hospitals. No matter that the child now lived in Monte Carlo, with additional homes in Los Angeles, Colorado, London and, just for good measure, the traditional rock star mansion (17th century, of course) in Surrey.
In 2008 his persona began to attract public criticism for the first time. He was offered the opportunity to act as the mascot, effectively, of his hometown's reign as European City of Culture. 'We never let Liverpool down,' he told the local paper, and the same message inspired the title track of his Liverpool 8 album. Banal though it was, reducing his history to humourless doggerel, 'Liverpool 8' allowed him more TV exposure than he'd been given in years. But his once well-attuned aerial for the public mood was failing him. On a TV chat show he announced that there was nothing about Liverpool that he missed – a mild enough comment but still considered undiplomatic from the mouth of the city's unofficial cultural ambassador and enough to trigger a backlash from Liverpudlians. Two weeks later he walked off the US TV show Live With Regis and Kelly after being asked to perform an abridged version of 'Liverpool 8'. More bad press resulted. Record company officials let slip that they were puzzled by the frequency with which Starkey muttered the phrase 'peace and love'; one counted twenty obsessive repetitions during a one-hour business meeting. His unkind fate was that he was now more newsworthy for his minor lapses of judgement than for his talent and charm.
He was scarcely the only celebrity who felt exploited by being asked for signatures that would appear within hours on the auction site eBay. But when his patience snapped, he was unwise enough to advertise the fact on his website. In November 2008 he posted a 40-second video message that aroused global derision. Speaking into a camera so close that he seemed to be inside a box, Starkey lectured his fans in a strangely monotonous voice, 'warning' them 'with peace and love' that he was too busy to sign any more autographs. As he repeated his catchphrase for the fifth time in this brief clip, it was difficult not to wonder whether he was undergoing some kind of psychological distress. Paul McCartney supported his friend, saying that Starkey was simply 'speaking his mind'. The following year the two men performed several songs together in Las Vegas, eliciting cries of 'Beatles reunion' from the press. It was Starkey's natural turf. As producer Don Was noted, his most enduring legacy wasn't his fame, but his musicianship: 'He had a completely different approach to rock 'n' roll drumming that has influenced everybody who came after him in a major way.'
In the wake of Linda McCartney's death in April 1998 at the age of just 56, Paul McCartney's all too visible grief demonstrated that fame was no defence against sadness. He was bereaved in a world that expected its heroes to suffer in public, and he fulfilled that role, and his private duty, in exemplary fashion – leading two poignant memorial services and then completing an album of his wife's music. He made a disguised return to public life that October, to promote his second collaboration with producer Youth under the name of the Fireman – a ruse that allowed him to explore uncharacteristic musical dimensions. An album of rock 'n' roll standards in Linda's memory, an exhibition of paintings, an orchestral album and A Garland For Linda, a performance of classical pieces, completed an 18-month cycle of remembrance. By December 1999 nobody questioned the propriety of staging a much-hyped performance at the replica Cavern Club in Liverpool.
McCartney was annoyed in March 1999 when he was romantically (and wrongly) linked with a textile designer. Two months later he attended an awards ceremony and was introduced to Heather Mills – a one-time glamour model who had lost a leg in a collision with a police motorcycle and had since become an outspoken charity campaigner. By November the British press were speculating that McCartney and Mills were lovers, and in January 2000 he was formally introduced to friends as her boyfriend. In March McCa
rtney confirmed publicly, 'We are an item.' He told a reporter that he still spoke to his late wife, and that she approved of his new partner. Meanwhile, Mills' carefully erected public face began to crumble: as early as June 2000 press headlines read, I HAD TO TELL PAUL I WAS ACCUSED OF BEING A HOOKER.
McCartney proposed to Mills in July 2001. Nearly a year later hotel staff overheard a passionate argument at a Florida hotel. 'I don't want to marry you,' McCartney is alleged to have said, before flinging her engagement ring out of the window. The following month the pair were married at Castle Leslie in Ireland. Their daughter Beatrice was born in October 2003, though leading British tabloid newspapers confidently announced that she was 'a boy'.*41 But in late April 2006, two months after the couple visited Canada to protest against seal hunting, they announced that their marriage was over: 'Having tried exceptionally hard to make our relationship work given the daily pressures surrounding us, it is with sadness that we have decided to go our separate ways.' The Beatles family gathered round: Olivia Harrison and Barbara Bach took McCartney's daughters Stella and Mary out for lunch in London; Yoko Ono pleaded for the press to allow the McCartneys some privacy.
When McCartney and Jane Asher ended their engagement in 1968 there was a brief flurry of excitement in the press, and then the subject was discreetly dropped. The public had no knowledge of his affair with Francie Schwartz until she published her account in Rolling Stone magazine several years later. No investigative reporters were detailed to pry into the previous life and loves of Linda Eastman – or, for that matter, the more universally mistrusted Yoko Ono.
Thirty years on, the media focused relentless attention on McCartney and Mills. Both had calculated that they could channel this prurient interest to their own benefit; celebrity was not just their past but the product they were selling. Neither imagined that they might not be able to control the circus. Mills had embellished her personal history with the same recklessness with which the media promoted its modern heroes. McCartney had employed PR man Geoff Baker, and many before him, to shape reality. But both McCartney and Mills suffered from a cardinal sin in the ruthless arena of 21st-century fame: naivety. They trusted that they would always be loved; that McCartney, as a national icon, was impervious to criticism; that Mills, as a tragic victim, was beyond reproach. Their downfall was not emotional or psychological – there are millions of divorces every decade in Britain alone – it was tactical, and they were quickly given a stern lesson in the cruelty of the global media machine.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 41