How George Harrison’s wife saved him from an attempted assassination
Since they took over America, there has never been anything quite like the level of fame The Beatles managed to achieve. Crowds of screaming fans would gather outside the hotel they were staying in, standing in the sun or rain for hours, hoping to get something as simple as Ringo Starr walking past a window or John Lennon’s hand as he closed the curtains.
While there are undoubtedly a lot of people out there who would relish the idea of living like a rockstar for some time. Who wouldn’t want thousands of adoring fans cheering for them? Who isn’t remotely enticed by the money, the lifestyle and the fame? However, as The Beatles will have been able to attest, having such a large fanbase came with lows and highs.
In addition to the constant security and pressure to stay in their hotel rooms, The Beatles realised how much of a hindrance fanbases could be when they went on tour. It became borderline impossible to hear the music they were playing over the people screaming at the mere notion of songs. Ringo Starr famously stopped relying on sound to keep time, given he couldn’t hear his fellow band members, and instead watched the shaking behinds of his contemporaries to maintain a rhythm.
This inability to hear the music was one of the deciding factors in the band’s decision to eventually quit touring. While this was one of the downsides they faced in light of their fame, they had much worse encounters, specifically with obsessed and borderline unhinged fans.
The most notorious incident of this will be John Lennon. “John Lennon, 1980. Handing it back.” These were words The Beatle wrote on a copy of Double Fantasy, which Mark Chapman handed him to sign. It was Chapman who would later shoot John Lennon four times, killing him in the process. “I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was evil,” he later admitted, “My big answer to everything: I wasn’t going to be a nobody anymore.”
It wasn’t just John Lennon who had one of these life-threatening instances with a fan, though. One night, George Harrison was almost murdered in his own home by a schizophrenic fan that believed he was a witch. He entered Harrison’s house with a knife, and the two ended up having a scuffle, which led to The Beatle getting cut in the process. It’s tough to know how this fight might have ended had Harrison’s wife not been in the vicinity.
Upon seeing her husband wrestle with the knife-wielding intruder, she decided to help him. Olivia Harrison got behind the intruder and wound up, striking him on the back of the head with an iron poker. The blow wasn’t enough to know them out, but it disorientated them enough to allow Harrison to regain his composure and get on top of the fan. Harrison was stabbed in the process, but he ultimately managed to escape with his life, which he will certainly have been grateful for.
While the rockstar life may look appealing from the outside, it comes with a lot of unwanted attention and subsequent risks, which The Beatles found themselves on the other side of more often than not.
