The Sunday Times Magazine • 31she accept an open relationship as the price
of what she had?
Harrison looks shocked. “Absolutely
not,” she says. “I believe he was ... he shut
a door when I met him. And we were very
private. He wanted this normal life. And I
think that was what I gave him. So, you
know, during our marriage, there was a lot
of flirtation, there were some bumps in the
road. But we were solid. You know,” she
says, gesturing out to the house and the
vast gardens, “we made this.”
Whatever the “bumps in the road”,
it’s clear that what they had ran
very deep indeed. They did create
an idyll of a kind. They toiled
in these gardens, sometimes
until midnight. Dhani, also
a singer-songwriter, used
to call his father Capability
George. But his father was
no dilettante. On top of the
music, which he continued
until cancer stopped him, he
was the executive producer
of 23 films with Handmade
Films, including Withnail and
I. In 1978 he offered Friar Park
as collateral for Monty Python’s
Life of Brian when EMI pulled
out. He was, says Eric Idle,“one of the few morally good people that
rock’n’roll has produced”.
As a former director of the Poetry Society,
I can’t claim that Olivia’s book is going to
win any literary prizes. She’s new to poetry,
and the craft of learning it can take a whole
life. But the story she told me about the
writing of it moved me deeply. Five years
ago, after a “funny turn” that caused
temporary amnesia, she started reading
poetry. She also started writing it again and
couldn’t stop. “Carl Jung coined a phrase,”
she tells me, “a crazy word called
enantiodromia. It’s the reversal of poles.
Left brain, right brain, all the things I
couldn’t get out suddenly were coming out.
You know, I could organise you to death, but
I could not get through that other creative
side. And I think that’s what happened.
I understood George, I understand my son
much better. He’s a very creative person.
I suddenly dipped into another world.”
Well, good for her. Olivia Harrison is
clearly a remarkable person who was a
wonderful wife to a rather extraordinary
man. She took on a Beatle and stayed
happily married to him for more than two
decades. Since George’s death she has
managed his house, his garden, his
business, his legacy, in film, book and
music releases. She has become not just
a serious gardener but a serious garden
scholar. George, she says, wanted most of
all to be remembered as a gardener. One
who “wrote one or two good tunes”.
And what, I ask, about her legacy? She
looks away and there’s a long, long silence.
“I suppose,” she says, “I left behind some
nice poppies. Seriously. Somebody could
walk through the garden and be moved by
it. That,” she adds, “would be enough” nCame the Lightening: Twenty Poems for
George by Olivia Harrison is published on
ALAMY, SUE FLOOD, GETTY IMAGES June 21 by Genesis Publications at £25
From top: Friar Park, the
Harrisons’ home in Henley-on-
Thames; the grounds at Friar
Park. Below: Olivia with the
Harrisons’ son, Dhani, in 2010Olivia they had gone by the time she
arrived. What, I wonder, is her spiritual
world view today?
Olivia looks guarded. “It is,” she says,
“more towards the Buddhist sensibility
now. I think the longer you live, the more
impermanence becomes a real thing.
In the Emmy-winning 2011 documentary
film she co-produced with Scorsese,
George Harrison: Living in the Material
World, Olivia talks frankly about the
challenges of marrying an exceptionally
handsome rock star. “He was a
free person,” she says in the film,
“and he did not like to be bound by
rules. But he did like the women.
So that was a challenge.” Indeed.
Every marriage, I say carefully,
has its ups and downs and
George had certainly been a
great womaniser. Before I can
get any further Olivia butts
in. “I wouldn’t say great,”
she says. “No, no, really not.
I wouldn’t say a great
womaniser.” Righty ho.
“George,” she says, “was
pursued and also, you know,
he was a very sensual person.”
I don’t doubt it. Rock stars aren’t
known for their monogamy. Did