George Harrison’s Sister Said She Wouldn’t Want to Be Rich After His Experience With Money 

George Harrison’s sister Louise watched her brother as he achieved massive global fame as a teenager. She helped promote his music in the United States when The Beatles were first starting out. While she was invested in his success, she admitted that she would never want that for herself. After seeing what it was like for her brother to be wealthy, she said she wouldn’t even want to risk buying a lottery ticket.

The Beatle quickly grew weary of fame

Just a few years into his time with The Beatles, Harrison tried LSD for the first time. He said that the experience of using the drug made him grow tired of fame. 

“That presented a problem as well, because then the feeling began in me of, well, it’s all well and good being popular and being in demand, but you know, it’s ridiculous, really,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I think, from then on, I didn’t enjoy fame.”

He said that he realized that fame was negatively impacting his life. 

“I enjoyed it in a sort of teenage way up until then, and then I realized that this is serious stuff,” he said. “This is my life being affected by all these people clamoring and shouting, and all those newspapers writing. That’s when the novelty disappeared, around 1966, and then it became hard work.”

George Harrison’s sister wouldn’t want to be rich because of her brother’s experience

Louise explained that Harrison also hadn’t enjoyed being wealthy. As with fame, it brought some negativity into his life. 

“George never enjoyed being rich — he said that the Beatles were just targets when they became rich and there was always some predator coming after them,” Louise told the Daily Mail in 2013. “Every gold digger in the world was after the Beatles.”

After seeing her brother’s experience with fame and wealth, Louise admitted that she would never want that sort of life for herself. As of 2013, she lived in a mobile home in Missouri and was content with her life, noting that she would rather live this way than be “wealthy and heartless.”

“I didn’t want to become a millionaire after what happened to him,” she said. “I won’t even buy a lottery ticket for fear of winning.”

George Harrison’s sister helped promote his music

Early in his career, before Harrison was famous, Louise helped promote them in the United States. 

“I was running around radio stations trying to get their records played,” she said. “I was writing to their manager Brian Epstein every week with my research on the American music scene. He’d write back thanking me and asking if I could do the same for some of his other bands. I was really quite helpful in getting the band into the U.S.”

She never received a reward for this, but she said she didn’t expect or want one. 

“I didn’t need any reward,” she said. “My kid brother had a band and I wanted to see them to succeed.”