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When a celebrity passes away, that passing seems to serve as permission for some biographers to write about the dark side of the dearly departed. Marc Shapiro carries on this dubious tradition in BEHIND SAD EYES: The Life of George Harrison.
As fans of the "Fab Four" will recall, Harrison was considered the "quiet Beatle," the spiritual one who kept to himself and was content to stay in the background. Like his fellow Beatles, Harrison grew up amid lower-middle class surroundings. He displayed a musical talent that overrode his scholastic career. As a teenager, he hooked up with Paul McCartney and later John Lennon to form the Silver Beatles; once Ringo Starr supplanted Pete Best as the group's drummer, the quartet was on its way to stardom.
The long and winding road to fame had its share of stumbling blocks, along with the perks that fall to those in rock-and-roll. But Shapiro holds Harrison to a higher moral standard. He describes Harrison's rite of passage into manhood during the Beatles' tour to Hamburg in the early 1960s: "As promised, George would regularly write home to let his parents know that everything was all right. Needless to say it was a sanitized version of what had become, for George, a willing descent into debauchery."
This same attitude is seen when Shapiro derides Harrison's use of drugs, which was, unfortunately but almost inevitably, part and parcel of the rock scene. Only Harrison is singled out for these perceived indiscretions. Shapiro depicts Harrison as Machiavellian. For someone who was supposed to be in the background, he is given a lot of influence with having Pete Best replaced by Ringo. Shapiro also tells us that Harrison did not get along particularly well with Paul or John in later years.
To be fair, it was no secret that Harrison was constantly pressing to come out from the shadows of Lennon and McCartney. He was tired, and rightly so, of being thrown a bone, so to speak, with only a song or two on each album. The group's record producers, however, decided that many of Harrison's tunes were less than, well, tuneful.
Shapiro portrays Harrison as a seeker, the one who turned the rest of the band onto Transcendental Meditation. He remained a follower of the faith, with the ebbs and flows of piety the devout often face. But he also writes about the almost soap opera-ish triangle between Harrison, his wife Pattie and Eric Clapton, who eventually won her heart. Mixed in this storyline are the occasional affairs and the seeming indifference towards the love triangle.
Even when Harrison displays his generous side, Shapiro shows that no good deed goes unpunished. Commenting on the ex-Beatle's "philanthropic best" with his involvement in the Concert for Bangladesh, he writes "Unfortunately, the occasion . . . would also expose his weakness as a human being," again holding Harrison up to that higher standard.
As Harrison moves through middle age, Shapiro lightens up a bit, giving him credit for his comebacks both as a solo artist and as a member of the Traveling Wilburys. But the darkness was never far behind. He battled cancer. While recovering from the ordeal he was brutally attacked in his own home by a disturbed "fan" (Harrison was a fanatic about security, especially after the murder of John Lennon). Only the brave intervention of his second wife, Olivia, saved him from almost certain death. Sadly, Harrison's cancer resurfaced; he faced the end with dignity and peace.
BEHIND SAD EYES is Shapiro's attempt to lift the window shade on this mystical life. It might be easier to take if his prose was not so stilted. In his introduction, he relates how difficult this undertaking was: "normal."
And so to the task at hand: to discover the real George Harrison in all his varying shades of light and dark. And it is not an easy life to put in order. George Harrison spent his entire life trying to hide from us and, depending on how one addresses that elusive beast called Fame, he either failed miserably or succeeded to the nth degree.
The author continues to pat himself on the back later in the introduction when he states, "You've been here before, But, you've never been here this way." Shapiro's treatise is full of gossipy tidbits many readers will enjoy; whether his words reach the Beatle's über-fans is another story.
--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (ronk23@aol.com)
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