26 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Came the Lightening, a collection of
“twenty poems for George”, with photos
of her, George and the gardens at Friar Park,
is described in a foreword by her friend
Martin Scorsese as “a work of poetic
autobiography”. It opens with Another
Spring, a poem about George’s death from
lung cancer in November 2001, her hope
for just one more spring together, her
whispered final words to him and the
feeling she was left with, of being “alone in
winter feeling spring will never bloom”. It
ends with Tree Time, an ode to Friar Park, its
“frozen lake”, its “velvet lawn”, the “gloomy
glen” where she and George “marvelled at
eclipses and awaited meteor showers”. In
between there are poems about the time
they spent together at their home in Hawaii
(a 63-acre plot on the remotest part of
Maui), her own arrival at Friar Park (“in
John and Yoko’s long white car”) just before
Christmas in 1974, and about working
together in the garden, as they did for more
than a quarter of a century.
They were together for 27 years, married
for 23. Their wedding, at Henley register
office in September 1978, a month after the
birth of their son, Dhani, was, like much
of their life together, low-key. They had
friends, but they liked to be private. Their
love, though, was not low-key. That’s clear
from the poems, which are both love song
and elegy.
Still, neither of us needs to spell out the
fact that it’s quite a leap for the widow of
one of the most revered songwriters of the
20th century to publish lyrics of her own.
George’s songwriting gifts may at times
have been dwarfed by those of the Lennon-
McCartney powerhouse, but Something,
described by Frank Sinatra as “the greatest
love song of the last 50 years”, was, for a
while, the Beatles’ second most covered
song after Yesterday. Here Comes the Sun,
written in Eric Clapton’s garden while
playing truant from an Apple Records
meeting, is still the most streamed Beatles
song. It’s also the first song I hear on the car
radio when I leave Friar Park.
Olivia is clear that she didn’t want to
write a conventional rock biography.
“In my world everyone’s written their
autobiography,” she says. “I don’t want to.
And I actually had no choice. I’m not a poet.
It just came out in that form. And I tried to
tell, I mean, everything in it, every line in it,
there’s no artistic licence. You know, it’s all
really autobiographical.”
She started writing poems for the first
time soon after George died. “I went to
Hawaii,” she says, “and when the moon
would come up out of the ocean it would
rise just to the roofline. I called that ‘moon
writing’. I would just sit there and write,
going through this grief and this change,
just writing on my own, hitting it head-on.”
These early poems, many of which she still
can’t bring herself to read, are not the ones
in her book — those came more recently.
Besides, in the years immediately
following George’s death, there wasn’t
much time for poems or anything else.
“I got very busy,” she says, “managing lots
of things and the gardens and business and
the people that, you know, change.” The
people who dropped out of her life, she
means? Harrison grimaces. “I think more
the people who came in. I did have to
jettison a few. Yoko actually said to me, ‘You
don’t know what’s going to happen, but
I do.’ And she was right. There were people
who had other ideas about how I should live
my life. And I was pretty shocked by that.”
Naively I assume she’s talking about
friends disappearing or being clumsy in
their attempts to console. No, she’s talking
about a series of protracted legal battles she
had to fight in order to gain independence.
“That took years. And after George died
I was still doing it. I thought, no, you can’t
let people just walk all over you. That’s not
a good message for other people ... I had
more than one person tell me, ‘Well, Mrs
Harrison, you’re not going to want yourbusiness in the papers.’ And I said, ‘Well,
you know what? I’ve been in the papers, I
don’t care. But do you want your business
in the papers? Go ahead, make my day.’ ”
I’m beginning to see how anyone who
underestimates this tiny, soft-spoken
woman might well come to regret it. As,
indeed, they did another tiny, soft-spoken
woman: Yoko Ono. In Olivia’s poem
HE: Never Hurt No One, she writes about
the night they were woken by “that call at
an hour you know is bad news”, telling them
that John Lennon had been killed.
Relations between the Beatles members
had been pretty frosty since the band split
up (though Ringo Starr and George
maintained a friendship of a kind). But
John’s death rocked them all. It was also one
of the reasons that, soon afterwards, George
bought the house in Hawaii as well as built
a house on Hamilton Island, off the coast
of Queensland, Australia. Yes, there was
grief, but there was also fear. Fear that
would later turn out to be well founded
when, on December 30, 1999, a mentally
ill man broke into Friar Park and attacked
George with a knife. George suffered
multiple stab wounds and a punctured lung.
Olivia smashed the intruder’s head with
a poker and saved her husband’s life —
though was also injured when the attacker
turned on her. When I ask her if what she
did that night changed her view of herself,
she is matter-of-fact. “I thought, OK,” she
says, “I know I’m not the flight person.
Yeah, you know, something happens,
I always have to go see what it is.”
Dhani thought his father’s injuries took
years off his life. George had been
successfully treated for throat cancer in
1998, but not long after the attack he was
diagnosed with lung cancer. This time it
proved terminal.
Yoko had been a widow for more than
20 years by the time Olivia and George
knew that his cancer would kill him. Were
she and Yoko friends?
“Yes,” Olivia says, “though I haven’t seen
her in a long time. She’s not been very well
recently, but she always befriended me ...
We didn’t spend a lot of time together, but
she’s just magnificent. You know, we would
sit in a board meeting together [the Apple
Corps board, of which they are both
directors], and she would take everyone
completely out of this realm into another
realm, which I loved. She’s the most
disarming person.”
Well, indeed. In his book about the
Beatles, One Two Three Four, Craig Brown
recounts how, in one of the many letters
Yoko sent John while he and his fellow
Beatles were at an ashram in Rishikesh in
1968, she told him, “I’m a cloud. Watch for
me in the sky,” which proved to be the
beginning of a cloud theme. By the time of
that trip to India the Beatles had had
enough of fame. By 1966 they were probably
the most famous people on the planet.Below: George and Olivia
Harrison with their newborn
son, Dhani, August 1978.
Bottom: Olivia, Paul
McCartney and Yoko Ono in- Opposite: Olivia in the
palm house at Friar Park
➤ PREVIOUS PAGES: MIRRORPIX. THESE PAGES: CAMERA PRESS, MARY McCARTNEY, REX