George Harrison’s Wife Said He Lacked ‘Normality’ With Meditation and Partying
TL;DR:
- George Harrison and his first wife, Pattie Boyd, met on a movie set.
- George Harrison’s wife said he spent long periods meditating or partying.
- The musician believed that people should spend more time meditating.
George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, married him in the midst of Beatlemania, but their relationship continued after the band broke up. In their years of marriage, Boyd got to know a version of Harrison that the public rarely saw. She explained that he flipped between two different styles of behavior — dedicated spirituality and partying — for long stretches of time. She explained how this impacted her.
George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd met on the set of a Beatles movie
Boyd and Harrison met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, the first Beatles film. She caught his attention almost immediately.
“I had a one day shoot. The train went down to Cornwall and back, so it took like eight hours all together,” she said, per Yahoo News. “And then at the end when we got near Waterloo station, George asked me out. He asked me if I’d go out with him that night. And I said no. I couldn’t, because I was seeing my boyfriend.”
The next time she saw Harrison, she was no longer in a relationship with her boyfriend.
“Luckily, there was another chance to meet up with The Beatles, when we were called back for a photo shoot,” she said. “I think [director] Dick Lester must’ve organized that, because if that hadn’t happened, I would never have seen George again. By that time, the boyfriend had gone. So I said yes.”
George Harrison’s wife said he oscillated between extremes
In the mid-1960s, Harrison embraced spirituality after meeting Ravi Shankar. He had been famous since he was a teenager and suddenly realized there was more to life than fame and fortune.
“It was like reaching the top of a wall and then looking over and seeing that there’s so much more on the other side,” he said in 1982, per The Guardian. “So I felt it was part of my duty to say, ‘Oh, OK, maybe you are thinking this is all you need — to be rich and famous — but actually it isn’t.'”
Boyd explained that despite his spirituality, Harrison didn’t let go of the drugs and partying that came with the rock star lifestyle.
“From time to time there might be some cocaine, which had crept into our repertoire,” she wrote in the book Wonderful Tonight. “George developed an interesting and extreme relationship with it. He was either using it every day or not at all for months at a stretch.”
She explained that she didn’t think his behavior was normal on either end of the spectrum.
“He would be spiritual and clean and would meditate for hour after hour, with no chance of normality,” she explained. “During those periods he was totally withdrawn and I felt alone and isolated. Then, as if all the pleasures of the flesh were too hard to resist, he would stop meditating, snort coke, have fun, flirting and partying. Although it was more companionable, there was no normality in that either.”
The former Beatle believed people should stay home and meditate
Publicly, Harrison promoted spirituality far more than partying. He shared his belief that people should stay home and meditate.
“We’re already getting going, so that we’ll have somewhere nice to be, because that’s what it is you know, everybody should just stay at home and meditate and they’d be so much happier…” he said, per the book George Harrison on George Harrison. “But still we’ve got to communicate. We’ve got to be doing things because we’re part of it and because it’s nice.”
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
