George Harrison Threw Orange Juice at The Beatles’ Press Agent for Adding More Interviews to His Schedule
George Harrison got angry when The Beatles’ press agent added more interviews to his schedule. He threw orange juice at him in frustration.
When George decided to join The Beatles, he couldn’t have imagined that he, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr would become internationally famous. Around 1963, Beatlemania erupted. Suddenly, the four boys from Liverpool, who’d been so poor that they had their girlfriends hold their microphones on broom handles years before, were caught in a tornado.
He soon realized the intense fame he and his band received was more than he bargained for, and it scared him.
George Harrison started to get sick of interviews early on
The Beatles didn’t become famous overnight. They spent years in Hamburg, Germany, performing for gangsters. Then, they honed their performing skills during their residency at Liverpool’s Cavern Club.
By 1963, they’d earned a recording contract and a manager, Brian Epstein. They conquered England, then Europe.
According to Joshua M. Greene’s Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, George soon realized the price he had to pay to be a famous rock star.
“Fame made him stand out,” Greene wrote. “Strangers claimed to love him. People had things to sell him and favors to ask. Young girls wrote him about their fantasies.”
Soon, fame nagged at him. Besides the clamoring fans, the journalists spearheaded a headache for George with their interviews. “Businessmen dangled schemes before him, and reporters clamored to broadcast his every move,” Greene continued. “‘You get used to it,’ George told a London reporter, ‘signing autographs, waving at people.’
“‘It’s funny,’ George told a Manchester television reporter. ‘You see your pictures and read articles about George Harrison . . . but you don’t actually think, ‘Oh, that’s me. There I am in the paper.” He smiled and added, ‘It’s just as though it’s a different person.'”
George did reap some of the benefits of fame, though. He bought fast cars and nice homes. However, in interviews, George claimed he was still an “eggs and chips man.”
George still felt unhappy. In his 1980 memoir, I Me Mine, he wrote, “… in the real world… we didn’t have any space… like monkeys in a zoo.”
George didn’t like that The Beatles’ press agent gave him more interviews
The Beatles performed to half a million people across 25 cities on their 32-day U.S. tour in 1964.
Greene wrote that the band toured the U.K. seven times between 1961 and 1965, including three times in the U.S., one in Europe, and two around the world. “They played more than fourteen hundred club dates, often as many as three in a day, in addition to fifty-three radio shows, thirty-five television programs, and one of the most prolific and grueling record outputs in pop music history,” Greene wrote.
“George’s world became claustrophobic, shrunk to the confines of hotels and cars and stages and recording booths. On those rare occasions when he had a day off, the impositions of fame followed him home.”
Eventually, George and the rest of The Beatles couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. “To see a movie with friends, he had to rent a private screening room and organize arrivals and departures like a military maneuver. Celebrities and VIPs insisted on seeing him, usurping any personal time he may have had. George rebelled.”
George shouted at press aid Derek Taylor that he wouldn’t meet Shirley Temple. However, Geoge couldn’t get out of interviews. “Usually George just gave in to the caricature of himself depicted by reporters and offered quick retorts and quotable one-liners,” Greene continued. “‘What do you do when you’re cooped up in your rooms between shows?’ ‘Ice skate.’
“It was simply the fastest way to get reporters off his back. Wit and irony came naturally to him, but occasionally the incessant preoccupation with his every move sent him over the edge.”
Before The Beatles visited the U.S., George was at his wit’s end with interviews and snapped at The Beatles’ press agent, Brian Sommerville, for adding more interviews to his schedule.
George got so angry that he threw orange juice in Sommerville’s face. The press agent then boxed in George’s ear.
That wasn’t the last time the Beatle threw a drink in someone’s face
Six months later, George threw a drink at United Press International photographer Robert Flora during a night out at the Whiskey A Go Go.
However, George didn’t hit Flora. He hit actor Mamie Van Doren. Taylor had arranged for the group to meet actor Jayne Mansfield, but it didn’t turn out well. Somehow, Mansfield, George, John, and Ringo ended up at the famous club.
“Somebody conned us into going to the Whisky A Go Go,” George recalled in Anthology. “It seemed to take us twenty minutes to get from the door to the table and instantly the whole of Hollywood paparazzi descended.
“It was a total set-up by Jayne Mansfield to have pictures taken with us,” George said. “John and I were sitting either side of her and she had her hands on our legs, by our groins – at least she did on mine.
“A photographer came and tried to get a picture and I threw the glass of water at him. He took a photo of the water coming out of the glass and soaking – accidentally – the actress Mamie Van Doren, who just happened to be passing.
“We got out of there; it was hell. We left town the next day, and I remember sitting on the plane, reading the paper and there was the photo of me throwing the water.”
George would’ve liked his fame better if everyone had stopped wanting a piece of him all the time.
