The Magnificent Sevens. Frank Worrall
No one asked for anyone’s autograph at the meetings. There were bigger ‘stars’ than George Best who used AA – Clapton and Hopkins for two.
No, it was just Georgie playing silly buggers, making up a story for his ever-growing anecdotal library, and, if truth be told, also making up an excuse. George Best did not leave AA because he was being pestered; he left AA because he did not want to stop drinking – because he could only tackle his demons so far before it became too painful.
Looking at it another way, George Best left AA because he was not pestered enough. I remember one night at London’s biggest meeting near Knightsbridge when George was sat a couple of seats away from me. Film stars and pop stars were sat in front of the two of us. The format is that a selected person ‘shares’ for 30 minutes on their life – basically telling how they got to AA, how they are ‘recovering’ and their hopes for the future – and then the meeting is thrown open to the ‘audience’. This particular night, George’s hand kept shooting up, but he could not get in to share. After about another 20 minutes, he stood up and said, ‘Look, if you’ve not got time for me to fuckin’ have my say, I’m fuckin’ off.’ And with that, he turned and walked out of the hall in a rage. I and another couple of people went after him, trying to persuade him to come back, saying that he would get his turn. He told us to ‘fuck off away’, and made his way back to the Phene Arms.
No one had bothered him and that – rather than what he would claim was a constant pestering – would be the reason why George Best decided AA was not for him. His ego could not take it if he was not the centre of attention; his illness had him hung, drawn and quartered. He was self-obsessed to the extreme. But if we accept that, we must also have compassion for this clearly tortured man. Ultimately, he was a sick man, not a bad man.
My psychoanalyst friend puts it this way, ‘If someone said to you, “Don’t drink out of that bottle, it contains bleach, and will poison you and eventually kill you,” you would leave it alone, wouldn’t you? Yet George was constantly being told that he was drinking stuff that would kill him, but could not leave it alone. He was a prisoner of the bottle, a prisoner of alcohol, and he died an alcoholic, from alcoholism. It’s all very sad.
‘So, while in one sense George could not live with the limelight, in another he could not live without it. He needed the allure of celebrity to satisfy his illness; the illness that told him he had to be the centre of attention to quell that feeling inside him that continually told him he was not good enough.’
George knew he was trapped with the bottle, and that AA could have provided the answer if he had stayed; he was just too far gone to make a commitment. Then he would show his knowledge of the illness he was a victim of by once saying, ‘If a thousand drinks are not enough, then one is too many for an alcoholic like me.’
The alcohol had really taken a hold of George by the end of the Sixties. Many pundits believe that he lost his way when his best pals – team-mate David Sadler and Manchester City star Mike Summerbee – both announced engagements in 1969, leaving him deprived of his two ‘best social companions’. But it is likely he would still have hit the bottle big-time even if they had stayed by his side. They held him back a little from the excesses that would follow but, even by 1969, he had his own key to the Brown Bull pub in Salford.
Before George made it his local, the boozer had been struggling – a real spit-and-sawdust pit that was never full. George’s presence turned it into one of Manchester’s places to be – the landlord would look after him, and he had the pick of the bedrooms where he could take any pretty young things who took his fancy from the nearby Granada studios. George was heading nowhere quickly – by 1970, his interest in training was fading and the drink was becoming the most important thing in his life. He was banned from driving for six months after crashing his car on a boozy night out, and the fact that he was recognised wherever he went only added to his need to find solace in drink and women.
Busby was at his wit’s end with his star man – he even suggested that George should go to see a psychiatrist for help. George treated that with the contempt he felt it deserved, laughing out loud at his manager’s suggestion. In truth, Busby had come up with a sound idea – George clearly suffered from clinical depression and may have found some answers on the couch.
Unfortunately, the only couch he deemed worthwhile was one that also included a pretty young woman, and they were freely available. The women in his life were invariably beautiful and feisty but would eventually tire of his antics. He could not commit to one woman for life; his illness would not allow that. He needed fresh reassurances that he was still desirable, that he was still worth loving. He had many brief flings – what he would term ‘nameless faces on the pillow’, and he once boasted of having sex with 7 women in 24 hours in Manchester, George’s own self-confessed Magnificent Seven – but George would eventually admit that the Romeo years only left him ‘with a deep feeling of emptiness’.
The mainstays of his life were his first wife Angie, his second Alex, the model Angie Lynn and the ‘mother-figure’ Mary Shatila. Yes, there were countless others who stayed a little longer than a night – including Miss Worlds Mary Stavin and Marjorie Wallace and actresses Juliet Mills and Sinead Cusack – but those four were his strongest relationships. He had a habit of ending his numerous autobiographies during the years with a word of thanks to the woman he was involved with at the time – in 1990 he paid tribute to Shatila as ‘… my lover, my friend and my strength…’ while 11 years later he would admit that ‘I owe Alex some good years for all she’s been through….’
These women who stood by him got a raw deal. He could not stay faithful – booze, he admitted, was his constant ‘other woman’ and, under its influence, he would embark on wild affairs – yet they all retained a certain love and affection for him. The relationships would follow a similar path: he would be the naughty little boy, she would be the scolding parent; he would be the patient, she would be the doctor; he would be the one who could not be saved, she would be the one who would try desperately to bring him salvation. Then, when the woman would realise he was beyond change, they would split up. It was an unenviable, vicious circle.
The four women also had their own lives before they met George – and three of them would give it all up to try to tame him. His first wife Angie – whom George described as independent and determined before they married in 1977 – was the personal fitness trainer of pop legend Cher; Alex was an air hostess with Virgin Atlantic; and Shatila was brilliant with money – she rescued George from bankruptcy. Only Angie Lynn would continue her career as a model – much to George’s disgust – and they would constantly engage in rows over his jealousy. His wife Angie bore him his only legitimate child, Calum, but she could not live with his excesses in America – which, for a bohemian like George, was a true hedonist’s paradise and possibly the worst choice of destination – and similarly struggled with him in Fulham in the late Seventies and early Eighties. She left him with the words, ‘You’re wasting your life, George. You’re not going to waste mine as well…’ and the marriage was annulled in 1984. She would later add, ‘My priorities changed. I had a baby. I couldn’t look after another baby.’ In turn, George would also one day admit, ‘I don’t know how she put up with me so long.’
Yet, many years later, Angela would show how George retained the love of his women even after they had split by saying of his relationship with Alex, ‘Alex is a sweetheart but, of course, she is a nutcase to take George on. She is a very nice girl. She deserves a medal for marrying him. I just thank her every day for looking after him because he would have been dead years ago if Alex hadn’t been around.’ Angie thanked her for looking after her ex-husband – the patient/doctor love continued even years after they had parted.
Both Angie and Alex suffered physical and mental abuse from George, and it is telling that his son Calum, having witnessed his father’s excesses, had little time for him during his growing years and chose to live with his mother in California until completing his education.
Of the four women, Angie Lynn was the girl George could never tame, the one most similar to him in attitude and outlook. She refused to give up her independence for him and would even visit a late-night club frequented by prostitutes and addicts, much to