PROFILE Widow of 'quiet Beatle' busy finishing his work

Olivia Harrison isn't close to winding up his many projects.
By RANDY LEWIS
LOS ANGELES TIMES
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Olivia Harrison likes to quip that were she to write a book about her 27 years with "the quiet Beatle," she'd call it "Never a Dull Moment."
George Harrison mixed his well-known passion for music and his quest for spiritual truth with utterly worldly penchants for auto racing, gardening and socializing with a zeal that seemed to run counter to the public image of a shy, inward-looking musician and family man who rarely made a splash in public after the Beatles broke up.
"People would say to him, 'You're not touring and you're not recording -- what do you do with yourself?' " says Olivia, a Southern California native who came into Harrison's life after his first marriage painfully and famously fell apart when his wife, Patti Boyd, fell in love with one of his best friends, Eric Clapton.
"He had an extraordinary work ethic," she says, occasionally twisting the wedding ring she still wears. "He never stopped. He always had something going."
So much so that 31/2 years after his death from cancer in 2001, Olivia still isn't close to completing the various projects he started.
More work to do
Not that she's complaining. In an interview at the Santa Monica offices of Harrison's Dark Horse Records label, Olivia says her only goal is to bring to fruition projects George had begun, or intended to, before his death.
There's the re-release later this year of the 1971 live album (and now DVD) from "The Concert for Bangla Desh." She's also determined to continue the philanthropic work of the Material World Foundation, which George set up in 1973.
She also helped supervise the six-CD boxed set "Dark Horse Years -- 1974-1992" that came out last year. She'll be active on George's behalf as Cirque du Soleil assembles a Beatles-centered production slated to open next year in Las Vegas. And she's hoping to see the two albums he made with the Traveling Wilburys reissued on CD.
More immediately, she's overseeing U.S. publication this week of "The Concert for George," an elaborate tribute book to the guitarist-singer-songwriter by Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and dozens of others who took part in the 2002 London memorial concert of the same name. Proceeds go to the Material World Foundation.
Oh, and she just collected her first Grammy, as a producer of "The Concert for George" DVD. She can set it next to the five inscribed for the Beatles that sit unobtrusively on the cabinet behind her desk.
"I need a five-year plan just to finish all the things he started," she says with a chuckle, noting that all the activity helps her feel that, spiritually, she's still carrying on a relationship with him.
Memories
She smiles easily and speaks honestly, even about the reason she prefers to veer away from certain subjects.
The couple spent much time in Hawaii, but when she's asked about favorite memories or locales in the islands, she demurs. "I'm sorry, I can't talk about Hawaii. It's too ... " Her voice trails off before she can fill in the missing word.
One memory she doesn't hesitate revisiting is the tribute concert that Clapton organized and that is memorialized in the new 308-page book, which is being published in two editions: a regular, albeit elaborate, handmade version (limited to 2,150 copies) selling for $540, and a $940 "deluxe" edition signed by Olivia and including several additional mementos from the concert. The 350 copies of the deluxe edition quickly sold out.
"My initial reason for doing the book was that for the concert, a big tidal wave just swept over all of us, and after the concert it was like it was still reaching shore," she says. "It felt like there was still a bit to be said.
"When you watch the DVD, all the images are going by, and it's like a moment in time. With a book, you can hold it and take your time to look at a photo, to look at those eyes looking back at you. You can sit down quietly with a book. That's what I wanted."
The heart of the "Concert for George" book, beyond the dozens of gallery-quality photos, is the anecdotes and other remembrances of Harrison provided by Olivia, Clapton, McCartney, Starr, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, the couple's son, Dhani, and others.
Clapton notes that during rehearsals for the tribute concert, "I thought that if he were here he'd probably say, 'Thanks very much Eric, but I don't really want this.' ... I thought, 'What would I say if he said that?' And I then thought, 'Well I'm doing this for me, actually.' And that's more the truth of it; I needed to do it for him, but it was for me most of all because I needed to be able to express my grief in that kind of way."
In the upstairs office, decorated throughout with Indian-influenced artworks and artifacts, Olivia says George's sense of humor was often overlooked because of his reputation as a spiritually focused musician.
His wit, overshadowed in the Beatles by John Lennon's, still came through from time to time. Years after the Beatles disbanded, he said, "The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles. The second biggest break was getting out of them."