George Harrison’s Sister Announces Tell-All Book
The Quiet Beatle’s older sister is planning to tell all.
“So much garbage has been written about George and the Beatles,” Louise Harrison, 80, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on Monday. “Half of the stuff has been written by people who spent maybe an hour on a plane with the Beatles. Now I think it’s my duty to get the truth out.”
Harrison, who lives in Branson, Missouri, has completed most of the manuscript for her book, which is set for tentative release in 2012-2013. She is currently compiling unpublished photographs and letters from her brother with the help of her ex-husband, Walt Kane; she also manages a Beatles tribute production called Liverpool Legends in her hometown.
Harrison has an unusual angle for her Beatlemaniac memoirs: she was living in America when her brother hit it big. “I would relay information over to [band manager] Brian Epstein,” she recalls. “I told him that the Beatles weren’t getting any airplay over here, that they really needed to play on The Ed Sullivan Show, which they had never heard of.”
She also tells the Tribune that her brother’s famous nickname was misleading. “He wasn’t quiet, but the weekend they flew into New York to do Ed Sullivan, George was very sick…He was given some shots and vaporizer treatments, and I was in charge of watching over him,” she explains. “George was told to use his voice as little as possible. That’s why at all the press conferences he was so quiet, and so the press thought he was the quiet one. George used to have a good laugh about it.”
Harrison’s announcement coincides with this week’s tenth anniversary of her brother’s death from lung cancer at age 58.
Related
• Photos: the Private Life of George Harrison
• George Harrison Gets Back: Rolling Stone‘s 1987 Cover Story