Why George Harrison Couldn’t Complain When Authors Wrote False Things About Him in Books
By the 1990s, George Harrison was used to authors writing books about him. Some were more truthful than others. However authors chose to portray him in their books, George couldn’t complain about it.
George Harrison was used to being written about in books
Since The Beatles became famous, the press and other writers have written about George. Fan magazine made false accusations, and the press held uninspiring interviews and stereotyped the band.
In the early 1960s, Larry Kane spoke with George about Beatles fan magazines (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters). The radio DJ asked if the rumors bugged him. They did.
“It drives you up a wall sometimes,” George replied. “Since we’ve been over here they’ve been asking us, ‘Is John leaving?’ Well, the new one today is it’s me leaving. You know, that’s just because some idiot in Hollywood has written in the papers that I’m leaving, so now I will have for weeks people coming up time after time and asking, ‘Is it true you are leaving?'”
That was early in The Beatles’ careers too. Imagine how tiring the rumors got toward the end of the band’s life and beyond. By 1969, George made the stupid lies into jokes.
In 1992, Rockline’s Bob Coburn (per George Harrison on George Harrison) asked George, “It’s pretty common knowledge that you’re a fairly private person, and I was wondering, with all the multitudes of books and articles and films and TV specials and everything else that’s been documented about you–and the Beatles, of course–does it ever bother you to think that there’s so many people that know so much about you probably better than you know yourself?”
George replied, “That side of it doesn’t bother me, really. It’s a long time now that this has been going on, and so I got used to it back in the ’60s.”
George couldn’t complain about what authors said about him in their books
Authors and the press didn’t leave George alone after The Beatles. Once the band became nostalgic, more and more writers began to pen pieces about the Fab Four. However, their material wasn’t always factual.
George told Coburn, “The thing that does bother me is the information that they know, where what they think they know about me is correct, because a lot of the time you’re reading stuff which is absolutely wrong, and you get an impression, or a writer has given you the impression, that his concept of what I am. An that’s the only problem, that’s the thing that bothers me.”
However, George couldn’t do much about what the authors said about him in their books. Coburn asked, “What do you do in those cases? Sometimes just let it slide, and others you go, ‘Hey, I can’t put up with this…’?”
George replied, “I think, ninety-nine percent of the time I’ve let it slide. Because the moment you get uptight [and] I start saying, ‘Hey, that book stinks, it’s not true,’ all I do is give the book more publicity.”
The former Beatle said the authors wrote out of malice
In 1987, George told Charles Bermant (per George Harrison on George Harrison) that most authors wrote Beatles books out of malice.
Bermant asked, “If I had read every Beatles book and seen every documentary, in a general sense, what would I have missed?”
“A lot of the stuff in the books are [sic] wrong,” George said. “A lot of them are written out of malice, or from people with axes to grind for one reason or another. And they’ve perverted certain things for their own gain.
“Not many are actually factual and honest. There is a saying in the old house that I have, it’s in Latin, translated it says, ‘Those who tell all they have to tell tell more than they know.’ So you probably know more about the Beatles from reading those books than there actually was.”
On what people miss, George said, “Well, there’s that expression, you don’t see the forest for the trees. Basically, the Beatles phenomenon was bigger than life. The reality was that we were just four people as much caught up in what was happening at that period of time as anybody else.”
Outside of print, many Beatles films, documentaries, and even musicals tried to tell The Beatles’ story. However, they also fabricated things for their own gain. If it was one thing that George hated most about his legacy, it was the lies people told about him and The Beatles.
