Cool/Funny/Lovely Stories About George | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

(Michael Palin’s diary continued…)

Tuesday April 20th 1976, New York

At the show tonight George Harrison , looking tired and ill and with short hair, fulfils what he calls a lifetime’s ambition and comes on as one of the Mountie chorus in the ‘Lumberjack Song’.  He’s very modest about it, wears his hat pulled well down and refuses to appear in the curtain call.  He’s now off on holiday to the Virgin Islands.  He needs it.

Friday March 4th 1977

Towards the end of the meeting, Eric asks me if I would be interested in writing for a George Harrison TV special in the States.  I say no on grounds of time.  Eric, too, doesn’t think he can do it as he appears to have lined up an £800,000-budget film for NBC on the Rutles (Eric’s and Neil’s pop group parallel of the

Beatles).  Clearly he commands enormous respect from NBC, who are letting him direct the thing as well.

Monday March 7th 1977

Eric tells me he’s becoming vegetarian.  Presumably under the influence of George H.

Thursday April 13th 1978

Anne rings with positive news on John Goldstone’s meetings with Denis O’Brien, (American merchant banker introduced to us by George Harrison .  He’d been Peter Sellers’ financial adviser) our latest, and probably last, hope for Brian backing.  Apparently O’Brien has okayed the budget, but is negotiating over above the line costs.  So Brian is on the way to a resurrection.

Sunday September 10th 1978

Eric has equally positively decided to move out of London, though only as far as the outer commuter countryside – Oxfordshire, possibly – ‘to be near George (Harrison) and near London’.  Graham and I talked of Keith Moon, who was to have been in the movie and flying out soon to join us, but who died some time on Thursday night, after a party.  Graham, whose abstention from alcohol has increased his appeal a hundred percent – he now sounds like, as well as looks like a very wise old owl – told me that Keith was trying to cut down his Rabelaisain appetite for booze, and had some pills called Heminevrin to help out, but these should be taken under carefully controlled conditions and never with alcohol – for they act to increase the strength of anything you do drink.  So Keith had just gone too far and, although his whole life was lived constantly up to the limits, this time, like an adventurous schoolboy on a frozen pond, he’d stepped a little too far out.  What a waste.  But GC reckons both Peter Cook and Ringo S are also in trouble with booze.

Sunday October 22nd 1978, Monastir

Tom (MP’s son) decided he would like to appear in the afternoon’s filming, so he was supplied with a long robe and turban and looked very handsome.  He was the only one of the Python children to have a go, but was very proud of himself.  The room was packed and it was definitely one of the less comfortable scenes, but graced by the presence of the visiting George Harrison, who took the part of Mr. Papadopolous, the impresario in charge of the Mount.  At least Tom could say he’d been in a scene with Beatles and Pythons.

Monday November 20th 1978

To the Hemdale Preview Theatre in Audley Square at four to see the assembly of all the Brian material.  Apart from the Python team – all looking a lot more like pale-faced Englishmen after a week of British November – Tim Hampton and John Goldstone, Anne Henshaw, George Harrison and Denis O’Brien were there.

Saturday November 25th 1978

Embark for George Harrison ’s in the Mini.  Arrive at Friar Park as the sun has just set.  It must be two years since I came here with Eric to complete the mixing of ‘Lumberjack Song’ (or was it three?).  There’s a blazing log fire in the galleried hall and George has just come in from planting bulbs in the garden.  He seems very relaxed and settled into the role of a country squire – his face has fleshed out a little, he looks less frail and tortured.  We have tea and talk about the house and Sir Frank Crisp, the eccentric lawyer who built it. (Crisp [1843-1919] bought Friar Park in 1895.  He, like George, was a keen horticulturalist.  Unlike George, he was a fully paid -up member of the Royal Microscopical Society.)  And died penniless as a result.  My mother remembers Sir Frank hiding behind bushes in the garden and jumping out on her and her sister when they visited the place as little girls.  (My mother was born and brought up on Hernes Estate, which borders Friar Park.)  Saw George’s four-month-old boy, Dhani, then his other recent enthusiasm, his book.  Called I Me Mine, it’s an expensively leather-bound collection of his songs with his own hand-written notes and corrections.  We find out that George is just older than me.  He was born February 1943.  He is quite struck by this and, as a momento of him being just older, gives me one of the glass eyes made for his Madame Tussaud’s dummy!  Derek Taylor and Joan arrive later and we eat a superb Indian meal cooked by Kumar.  Quite delicious and delicate. 

Derek tells of the horrors of LA that have driven him back to England – to a farmhouse in Suffolk.  So humourless and depressing were his colleagues in Warner Records, that Derek took great pleasure in puzzling them by eccentric behaviour.  He would insist on playing Hollywood record moguls a tape of Violet Bonham-Carter being interviewed.  (Extremely English upper-class daughter of former Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith; leading figure in Liberal politics.)  They sat there polite but utterly bewildered.  ‘Twenty minutes’ peace’, Derek recalled with feeling.

Friday January 19th 1979

Brian screening.  Terry Hughes, Michael White, George H, Jill Foster.  John Goldstone issues us with clipboards and little torches to make notes.

Monday June 4th 1979, Los Angeles

Some of us, TJ especially, are concerned over the American funamentalist Baptist backlash – after all, George Harrison , as producer, has already had letters threatening never to buy his records again – but Warner’s dismiss all this.

Monday July 2nd 1979

Back into London for some dubbing and post-synching on Brian.  The new work on the ‘Leper’ last week does seem to make the speech clearer, but I see-saw on the effectiveness of the sketch.  Terry J is the greatest champion of the ‘Leper’ at the moment.  I think Denis O’B would rather see it out.  I dub George Harrison ’s voice on – another to add to my collection.

Wednesday September 5th 1979

George Harrison calls.  He has just come back from appearing in court in his continuous saga of the fight for Allen Klein’s Beatle money.  He said he was very nervous before taking the stand (he went to the lavatory three times before he even left for the courthouse).  He went to see Brian – found a one-third black audience and a row of orthadox Jews – all enjoying it.  But he does tell me of an exquisite piece of justice.  Whom should George find himself in the first class lounge at Kennedy with, but Bernard Delfont – the man who turned down Life Of Brian.  George was not backward in going forward and in an informal way enquired whether or not Bernie was acquainted with the fact that Python had taken $1 million already.  George thanked him profoundly.  A heartfelt thanks – echoed by us all.

Thursday September 6th 1979

This evening all the Pythons meet at Anne’s….  As we sit around, it’s John who asks, ‘Isn’t there someone missing?’  We all agree that we have this sensation whenever the Python group assembles nowadays.  The unknown Python.  The present ‘seventh’ Python (taking over from Neil Innes) arrives a moment or two later in the person of George Harrison .  To Odin’s for a nice meal and too much wine.  George tells tales of the Beatles – of the hugely dominant Yoko who has reduced J Lennon to a housewife, of George’s liking for Paul and his ‘ego’, and Ringo who’s….’You know, very simple’. 

Other little glimpses into the lives of the rich and famous – like the fact that George admits (with a smileg acknowledging the absurdity) that he doesn’t buy clothes any more.  Clothes come to him.  And, having once again outlasted all other diners, we meander back to Park Square West.  It’s a full moon and the entire kerb is taken up with Python cars – George’s little black Porsche, John’s dirty Rolls, my Mini, Terry J’s yellow Volkswagen Polo, Gilliam’s mighty yellow Volkswagen tank and G Chapman’s rented Mercedes.  Loud farewells, door slams, car tyres reversing on the road and the Python fleet heads off in the moonlight to find a way out of Regent’s Park.

Eunarchy in the UK: George Harrison ‘s first movie
Long before The Life of Brian, George Harrison funded an award-winning film stuffed with British talent – so why has it taken 40 years to surface?

Lost treasure … David Warner in Little Malcolm

In 1979 George Harrison purchased, almost on a whim, what Terry Jones would later call “the most expensive movie ticket of all time”. After a single reading of the script of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, he mortgaged his own luxury mansion and sank the resultant funds into a project that had been abandoned, days before shooting started, by its original backer, Bernie Delfont of EMI. Why did he do it? “Because I liked the script and I wanted to see the movie,” said Harrison later. A Beatle can do that.

From that almost informal exchange of favours between good friends sprang arguably the most interesting British production company of the 1980s, Handmade Films, backed by Harrison and his producing partner Denis O’Brien. Handmade gave us Brian and Withnail & I, The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa, and the early work of Terry Gilliam. That legend is well known; less well known is that Brian was not Harrison’s first foray into film production; that distinction belongs to Stuart Cooper’s superb adaptation of David Halliwell’s play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, retitled Little Malcolm. It was made in 1973, won the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1974, and then was lost to public view for nearly four decades as one of the many contested assets of what Cooper today calls “the Beatles’ divorce”.

“George never said this to me,” says Cooper, “but I definitely got the feeling that Little Malcolm may have been the first and last time George ever went to a play. But he was a big, big fan of it and also a big fan of [its star] Johnny Hurt, so he was in our corner already. Also, at the time, the other Beatles all had a film gig, John had done Imagine , Paul, I guess, directed Magical Mystery Tour , and Ringo was in Candy and The Magic Christian. So the only one without a film gig was George. He financed Malcolm through a company called Suba Films, which existed solely to receive profits from the animated Yellow Submarine . It was financed entirely by Yellow Submarine ! It wasn’t a big budget, somewhere around a million, million and a half pounds – not expensive. He financed it top to bottom. He stepped up, wrote the cheque, and we made the movie.”

Cooper, then 31, hailed from wealthy Newport Beach, California, and had won a scholarship to Rada, one of six Americans chosen. Although Cooper always planned to become a director, among his classmates was Anthony Hopkins, and just graduating were Hurt and David Warner, soon to become friends, both of whom would later appear in Little Malcolm. Mike Leigh, who in 1965 would direct the first stage version of Little Malcolm (running five hours and starring the apparently cuts-averse Halliwell), was a little younger. The Leigh production flopped, but a two-hour version ran in the West End later that year starring Hurt. Harrison saw this one and loved it.

It’s easy to see why. Malcolm is an impotent, powerless nobody sustained by hopeless compensation-fantasies, a recently expelled art student who sees himself as at war with what he calls “the Eunarchy” of social conformists and the sexually timid. All his art is self-portraiture while his pseudo-radical groupuscule, the toothsomely named Party of Dynamic Erection, is camouflage for the knock-kneed terror that its members – Wick, Irwin and Nipple (Warner) – all feel in the presence of women. Hurt’s magnificently verbose, quasi-fascist ranting and his fondness for loyalty tests, public shaming and show trials (“Do you plead guilty or very guilty?”) soar aloft on language that’s part-Beckett, part “free love” advocate Wilhelm Reich, with more than a hint of the Beatles’ beloved Goons. In some moments there are clear pre-echoes of David Thewlis in Naked and the mad squabbling of Withnail & I. This is a 40-year-old movie that hasn’t dated an hour.

After filming in Oldham in gas board buildings emptied out by a strike, using Kubrick’s great cinematographer John Alcott, Cooper says it seemed only moments after the final cut was printed that the movie was impounded. “In the end, we got hung up by the Beatles’ breakup, when all of the Apple and Beatles assets went into the official receiver’s hands. So Little Malcolm just basically sat there for a couple of years. Whatever heat and buzz we generated was all lost. It didn’t diminish the movie but it stopped the momentum. George had to fight to get it back.

“Berlin was the first airing we managed, but it won best direction and the response was incredible. We got great reviews from Alexander Walker and Margaret Hinxman, but by then it really didn’t have any legs. It was a film that got lost, and I had to put it on a shelf and say to myself, well, there might be a day for that one day – and here we are now, after so many years.”

Little Malcolm won the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1974 (Cooper’s next movie, the sombre and chastening Overlord, won another Silver Bear in 1975), and the post-ceremonial bacchanals were memorable indeed. “We partied with Fassbinder the night we won the Silver Bear in ’74,” laughs Cooper. “He loved Malcolm, and watching him – I think everyone has a pretty clear idea of how Fassbinder looked at that point; scruffy, sunglasses, leather, unkempt beard – watching him drinking with Johnny Hurt with his horrible scruffy beard, and still dressed like Malcolm, really – they could have been twins! Fassbinder could have played Malcolm!”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/30/george-harrison-little-malcolm-handmade

Has anyone here ever heard of or seen this film? This is the trailer: 

Late BEATLES star SIR GEORGE HARRISON was a humble man – he was once too nervous to approach CROCODILE DUNDEE star PAUL HOGAN.

The MY SWEET LORD star, who owned film production company HANDMADE FILMS, found the perfect opportunity to pitch a script to the Australian actor in a Los Angeles hotel months before succumbing to cancer in 2001 – but the legendary guitarist found it difficult to work up the courage to approach him.

Hogan explains, “There was this guy who was hanging around with a script and apparently wanted to approach me and couldn’t work himself up to it.

“I was out in the car park and he worked up his courage and said, ‘Oh, excuse me Paul, I’m a bit nervous about all this. I saw you by the pool and I was going to come to talk to you but I was too nervous. I’ve got this script and I’d like you to have a look at it.'”

Hogan didn’t take up the offer after sharing a drink with Harrison, but was left stunned at the rocker’s modest attitude.

He explains, “I got in my car and I thought, ‘That was one of the Beatles and he was too nervous to talk to me!'”

http://www.contactmusic.com/ne…..e-harrison

Aw, George. I don’t know why I find this so funny.

Interview with Sir Jackie Stewart:

The day I played George Harrison ‘s chauffeur in my tartan cap

I first met George Harrison when the Beatles turned up at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1969.

George enjoyed motor racing and, in 1979, he released a single called Faster which, the cover explained, was “inspired by Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda and dedicated to the entire F1 circus”.

The chorus ended:

No one knows quite how he does it but it’s true they say

He’s the master of going faster.

I can just see George sitting somewhere getting an idea in his head, then scribbling the words on the back of a cigarette packet. That was his genius.

We had fun shooting the music video for Faster, in which I made a cameo appearance as George’s chauffeur, wearing a white hat with a tartan band, similar to my old racing helmet.

I drove the Daimler while, on the other side of a glass partition, George sat strumming on his guitar, singing.

Our closeness seemed to confirm the old saying that opposites attract. While I like to organise my life with military precision, George took a more laid-back approach.

I remember one time, at an airport, I was starting to worry whether we would get to the gate on time but George just smiled and said he wanted a cup of tea.

“OK,” I fretted, “but I don’t think we have time.”

“There’s always time for a cup of tea,” he said.

If we had been dropped from the same height, George would have been a feather, drifting this way and that on the breeze; I would have been a lead weight plunging straight down.

There were times when we could have been living on different planets, when George was procrastinating and I would be all action, when he was wearing way-out clothes and I was traditionally dressed. But we were alike in paying fanatical attention to detail.

He could be amazingly fastidious, keeping his cars immaculately clean, working on a song until it was so precisely right that it would sound as if it had evolved out of nothing, dreamily and effortlessly.

We shared many wonderful times. On one occasion, when he was staying with us in Switzerland, we went to the French Grand Prix in Dijon. It was a clear, warm evening when we arrived home. Helen had prepared a barbecue, and Paul, who was 12 at the time, brought out his guitar.

George started to play, running through all the great Beatles hits, singing parts of the songs, explaining what the lyrics meant to various members of the band. I remember sitting there, thinking this had to be one of the greatest privileges anybody could have.

George had a great soul. His instinct was to forgive rather than to condemn and, when people behaved badly, he would make excuses for them. I learnt so much from him.

In the late 1990s, when we started to spend more time in England, we saw more of George, his wife Livy and their son Dhani.

We always enjoyed our visits to their home at Friar Park which George took great pride in restoring: reviving the underground canals and the 60-foot mountain modelled on the Matterhorn in Switzerland, complete with Alpine flowers and streams.

He spent endless hours contentedly tending to the plants. “I’m a gardener,” he would say.

George was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001. He spent some time in Lugano, in Switzerland, and there he was visited by Ringo Starr . Ringo told me that even though George was, by then, very weak and confined to bed, he listened intently as his old friend told him about some problem.

“Anyway, I’ll have to go and sort it out,” Ringo said. “That’s a trip I’m not going to enjoy.”

“Well, look,” said George, trying to sit up in bed, “would you like me to come with you?”

That was typical.