The Magnificent Sevens. Frank Worrall
The very fact that she was not an easy touch made him all the keener – he would admit to being ‘infatuated’ and ‘besotted’ by her. Their time together would also be remembered for George’s infamous Christmas of 1984 spent at Her Majesty’s Pleasure at Pentonville – the jail spell following a threefold sequence of events that started with drink-driving, continued with failing to appear in court and concluded with him assaulting a police officer.
After they split in 1987, Angie would eventually make a new life for herself in Ibiza, but George would retain an admiration for her, praising her for never going to the papers to cash in on their time together, saying, ‘That’s why I admire Angie Lynn so much. She’s never spoken about our relationship and she certainly went through real hell with me.’
After the tempestuous days with Angie Lynn, Mary Shatila brought a welcome period of stability to George’s life. Boasting ‘a business background’, she helped George sort out his financial nightmare – he had clocked up enormous debts through gambling and failed business ventures, including his nightclubs and clothes boutiques – and she advised him over his bankruptcy and encouraged him to begin a new career as a public speaker. Yet the leopard could not change his spots – he repaid her efforts in his usual way, this time by seducing her sister.
He was still living with Mary when he started seeing Alex, and his first words should have sent alarm bells ringing. He introduced himself to her in Tramp nightclub with the words, ‘I love you.’ Her first sight of the fallen idol had been his infamous appearance on the Wogan show, where he told the benign Irishman that his favourite pastime was ‘screwing’. The next day, he was on the front pages of the tabloids for being drunk and disorderly on TV.
George then sold the story of how he had bedded Alex on his first date to the News of the World for £15,000. The move – apart from being hardly chivalrous – was also dishonest as they had not slept together at the time. Then there was the case of their initial wedding day – it was cancelled when they stood each other up. ‘He has been on a two-week bender and has turned into a monster,’ Alex told the Sun. ‘He is being horrible to me.’ Finally, on 24 July 1995, they would marry in a low-key civil ceremony at Chelsea Town Hall. George was 49, Alex just 23. By April 2004, they had divorced, on the grounds of his adultery with an unnamed woman, although that was merely the tip of the iceberg as far as Alex was concerned. During those nine years, she had nursed him and loved him as best she could – especially when he needed her most, after his liver transplant in July 2002. A generous, loving man when sober, he could not resist the call of the bottle, and started drinking again with his new liver. It brought out the lurking, dangerous Mr Hyde from within and, as Euan Ferguson would report in the Observer, the outcome was frightening, ‘He beat Alex and broke her arm, and cut much of her hair off while he was drunk; and towards the end, after she had nursed him through and past the operation, draining the bile from his tube with plastic gloves and a measuring jug, and tried to sort out his shambolic finances, he went on a few benders and disappeared off with other women and ended up, of course, in the papers again.’
Alex would be slammed in some quarters of the press after George died when she changed the name of her autobiography from Always Alex to Loving George. Some argued she was cashing in on his memory, but she is actually OK, a good sort. She did not even ask for the title to be changed – it was down to her publishers. She did her best for Georgie-boy and showed an understanding of alcoholism and the alcoholic that could only really come from someone who had loved one in vain. She said, ‘It is, of course, a disease. It’s partly genetic, I’ve been told, and read. George’s mother was an alcoholic. And it doesn’t go away. I’ve spoken to other alcoholics, who may have had years off the sauce, but they all say that they think of it every day. Many of them, though, have had counselling, or done the steps [of recovery in AA]. George wouldn’t hear of it. He’s actually an extremely shy man, and never wanted to deal with it in that kind of confrontational way, and that’s why it was never dealt with; it just seemed to go away some times, possibly because those times he was almost dead. And to anyone trying to deal with it, I would argue very fiercely that “cutting down” is never the answer, no matter what they tell you; the only answer is a complete halt, for ever.’
More the pity that George could not even hear the truth when it came from the person closest to him in the whole wide world. Such was the power of the illness over him. It is also interesting that Alex should mention the idea of alcoholism being a hereditary illness. His mother Ann would die at the age of 54 from alcoholism – five years fewer than George – on 12 October 1978. ‘Dickie, I don’t want to live any more,’ she told her husband as she went to bed on the night of 11 October. The following morning, when George’s dad brought her up a cup of tea, she was dead in the bed.
George admitted to being racked with guilt. He had spent many of his summers in Mallorca, soaking up the sun and the women, rather than returning to see his family in Northern Ireland during the late Sixties and early Seventies; after Ann’s death, he mentally castigated himself for staying away.
George had learned from his sister Carol that Ann had started drinking and it appears that, given his own struggle with the bottle, he simply could not cope with seeing his beloved mother deteriorate, too, so he did not visit her. In Blessed, he would say, ‘I felt guilty because I knew Mum worried about me and I’d given her plenty of cause over quite a few years … I felt guilty because of all the bad publicity I had been getting, which I knew upset Mum more than anyone else in the family. I felt that her death was all my fault … that if I hadn’t gone to England, hadn’t done the things I’d done, and if I’d only gone home more often, it wouldn’t have happened. It’s a terrible thing, guilt, and it would be a long while before I could see things as they really were and accept that there was nothing I could have done.’
It is hard not to feel compassion for a man who can come out with words like that; I know he was a bounder in many ways, but even towards the end of his own life he was tormented by demons. He was still the lost little boy missing his beloved mum. It would also make him question whether he had been born an alcoholic – whether the symptoms of the mental illness that dragged him towards drink had been genetic. When talking to journalist Ross Benson in 1990, he said, ‘… my mother’s death does pose the worrying question – Is my drink problem genetic? Was I programmed from birth to be an alcoholic?’
But my psychoanalyst friend observed, ‘Really, it doesn’t matter whether he was genetically an alcoholic or not. You can argue all day long whether it is a hereditary illness or not, but the bottom line is the here and now – and finding a way out of the alcoholism. There were programmes of recovery back then, but George clearly did not want to find a way out. He did not want to quit drinking – and there is nothing more you can do if an alcoholic will not abstain.’
And the fact of the matter remains that Ann was a different sort of alcoholic to George in one sense; she was a late arrival to the bottle, never having touched a drop of alcohol until she was past 40, while George had been a sufferer from his early 20s. George would be buried next to her in Belfast’s Roseland Cemetery.
George’s other sister, Barbara McNarry, who launched the George Best Foundation in 2006, confirms Ann did not start boozing until she was 43. Barbara said, ‘She started drinking partly due to the pressures of being a hard-working mum and dealing with a famous son. She turned to alcohol for support. It started as one or two and escalated from there. Ten years later, she was dead.’
Barbara knows the power of alcohol addiction – she certainly noticed how it took a stranglehold on her famous brother. She added, ‘His addiction ended his life prematurely. He allowed alcohol to get a grip of him and it never let him go. He was only 59 and if it wasn’t for alcohol he would still be enjoying the fruits of his genius.’
The end game for George would really begin in 2002 when he had his liver transplant. In the preceding years, he had reinvented himself as a TV pundit – commenting on matches on SkySport – and a newspaper columnist (he had a weekly column in the Mail on Sunday’s Night & Day magazine). Even as the good times rolled, there had been signs that the drinking would still cost him dearly – SkySport, for instance, always had former footballer Clive Allen standing