The Sunday Times Magazine • 29World leaders jostled to be photographed
with them. Mikhail Gorbachev later told
Paul McCartney that “the music of the
Beatles taught the young people of the
Soviet Union that there is another life”.
All very heady, but it wasn’t much fun, as
George recounted in I Me Mine — his
witty and slightly anarchic 1980 collection
of memories, photographs and song
lyrics — to have trouble landing at an
airport because thousands of fans are
running down the runway, and then
climbing on, and then falling off, the wings
of your plane.
When he and Ringo rented the flat in
Mayfair below their manager Brian
Epstein’s, they struggled to get in and out.
“The fans,” he wrote, “all shapes, all
manner of humanity, were everywhere.”
They could not even get their lease
renewed because of all the litter. No
wonder he decided, with his girlfriend at
the time, the model Pattie Boyd, to move
to a bungalow in Esher, near the London-
Surrey border, with a high wall. It was
Pattie who first went to see Friar Park, in
1969, and thought it was, she says in her
memoir, Wonderful Tonight, “the most
beautiful place [she] had ever seen”. It
had been a school run by a Catholic
teaching order and was now lived in by six
nuns and a monk. When Pattie and George
moved in it was a wreck, with grass growing
through the floor.
By the time Olivia arrived at Friar Park,
Pattie had left George for Eric Clapton.
Remarkably the three of them had stayed
friends. Pattie was sick of George’s
infidelities. Clapton, who wrote Layla for
her, had been in love with her for some
time. George was apparently relaxed
about the whole thing. “I was happy
that she went off,” he said years later,
“because we’d finished together, and it
made things easier for me.”When Olivia arrived, the house and
gardens were still in the early stages of
renovation, but it must still have been
quite a sight for the Mexican-American
daughter of a seamstress and a dry cleaner.
How did she feel?
“You know, George and I both came
from very modest backgrounds. Poor,
you’d say.” In her poem SHE: 34° North,
she talks about her childhood in LA and
the shock of moving to an area where hers
was the only brown family. Olivia’s
grandparents had migrated to California
from Guanajuato in central Mexico. She
and her four siblings grew up in a “happy
but humble home”. She describes how she
tried to prepare her “husband-to-be” the
first time she took him back to see it, and
his reassurance that it was “a mansion
compared to my youth”. Harrison spent his
early years in a two-up, two-down with an
outside loo. “From 34 degrees to 54 north,”
she writes, speaking of the latitude, “such
a gap between us yet there was no force/
That could pull us apart”.
What George and Olivia also shared
was an interest in eastern mystical
philosophies. She had studied meditation
with the Indian guru Maharaj Ji before she
met George. His interest in the spiritual,
clear to everyone after My Sweet Lord
became the biggest-selling single of 1971,
continued until he died. Throughout
The Beatles: Get Back — Peter Jackson’s
documentary series about the making of
the album Let It Be, released last year and
nearly eight hours long — there’s a Hare
Krishna devotee constantly present, at
George’s request, as a “spiritual observer”.
In 1973 George donated Piggott’s Manor
in Watford, now Bhaktivedanta Manor,
to the Hare Krishna movement. In the
early days at Friar Park he invited several
families of Hare Krishna devotees to
TERRY O’NEILL / ICONIC IMAGES, MICHAEL LOGAN, GETTY IMAGES join him and Pattie. Perhaps luckily for
Above: the Beatles during
a break from recording at
Abbey Road Studios in- From left, George
Harrison, Ringo Starr,
Paul McCartney and John
Lennon. Below: Olivia, circa
1970; George with his first
wife, the model Pattie Boyd