Living in a caravan - the sister who George Harrison cut out of his will

• Louise Harrison, 82, now lives alone in a mobile home in Branson, Missouri
• She has received a £1,250-a-month pension by her brother since 1980
  
• But it was recently cut off without explanation
• However, she insists she is happy and wants nothing from the rest of her family, who inherited his £100million fortune

By Tom Leonard

Published: 20:17 EDT, 27 November 2013 | Updated: 20:17 EDT, 27 November 2013

My Beatle brother: Louise Harrison poses with George in the Sixties

As a Beatle, George Harrison always hankered for the quiet life - it was his eldest sister, Louise, told since she was a little girl that she could be the next Shirley Temple, who longed to be famous.

Neither of them got their wish. The former Beatle died in November 2001, leaving more than £100million in his will, as well as Friar Park, his huge Gothic pile in Henley-on-Thames, just one of a number of lavish homes around the world.

As for his big sister, she couldn’t be further away from the 120-room mansion splendour of his life - living alone at the age of 82 in a mobile home in Branson, Missouri, and getting by on the uncertain income from a Beatles tribute band she set up.

The Harrisons were brought up to be  self-reliant and Louise says she is not the type to whinge about her lot.

She tells me she is financially ‘struggling’ but quickly adds: ‘But wouldn’t you say everyone is?’

Her one-bedroom mobile home - she has another next door - may not be worth very much, but at least she owns them and the land they are on, unlike the thousands with heavily mortgaged homes they can’t afford, she says.

‘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. Every golddigger in the world was after The Beatles,’ she says.

‘I didn’t want to become a millionaire after what happened to him. I won’t even buy a lottery ticket for fear of winning.’

She doesn’t mind not living in a castle, she adds. She would rather be broke than wealthy and heartless.

This is perhaps just as well since, as she revealed yesterday, not only was she completely left out of her brother’s will, but the monthly $2,000 (£1,250) pension he had set up for her in 1980 - and meant her to have for life - was cut off by his family estate without explanation.

At the time she didn’t have a job and was living on social security - which in the U.S. is not much - so it would have been quite a blow.

She never discovered who took this somewhat heartless decision. She insists she has never asked George’s widow, Olivia, or his son, Dhani, who received most of Harrison’s wealth. But she knows George would have been upset.

A long way from Beatlemania: The Branson, Missouri, property that Louise Harrison calls home. She has lived in America for more than 50 years and says she wants nothing from the family of her famous brother

Beatle: George Harrison a year before his death at the Australian Grand Prix in 2000 (left), and during a rare public appearance in Los Angeles in 1992

‘One of the things my brother said to me back in the Eighties was that, given his circumstances, there was no reason on this earth why a sister of his should ever experience any financial hardship.’

She insists she doesn’t care about the money or the implied slight from the family of a brother to whom she was once very close.

‘I was quite surprised, but I never argued about it, I just accepted it had been cancelled and got on with my life,’ she says.

Louise and George’s parents taught them to pick themselves up if they fell. ‘I grew up in World War II during the air raids on Liverpool. If someone drops a bomb on your house, you just move out and get on with things. Just because you’re living in a mobile home, it doesn’t mean you’ll be living there for the rest of your life,’ she insists.

And what about being left out of his will? ‘I was 11 years older than George and I don’t think either of us expected he would die before me,’ says Louise.

Sprawling estate: Friar Park, the 120-room home in Henley-on-Thames where George Harrison lived with his wife Olivia and son, Dhani, before he passed away in 2001

She may claim she’s not curious, but others will surely be puzzled to find out why the sister of one of the most famous men in popular music should be living in a trailer in Missouri, a state famous as the capital of the crystal meth drug industry.

Could her modest financial situation have had anything to do with the falling out she had with her brother, which led to them not speaking for six years? She plays down the notion that there was a rift, although she concedes ‘he might have been told some weird things about me’.

As children growing up in Liverpool’s Wavertree district, the siblings had been extremely close and they remained on good terms during his early Beatles days. By then - to borrow a line from the Fab Four - the itchy-footed Louise had started down a long and winding road.

When we were Fab: Ed Sullivan with The Beatles Ringo Starr George Harrison (died November 2001) John Lennon (died December 1980) And Paul Mccartney On The Set Of The Ed Sullivan Show. 1964

Forbidden by her father from pursuing her dream of becoming a film star by going to stage school, she married Donald Caldwell, a Scottish mining engineer, when she was 25. They moved to Canada and then to Peru before settling in Benton, Illinois.

When The Beatles formed, she was very excited for her brother.

‘I was running around radio stations trying to get their records played,’ she recalls. ‘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.’

Did she get any reward for that?

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

She and Caldwell had two sons but divorced in 1970. She then moved to New York where she spent a lot of time with George, staying at the ritzy Plaza hotel and partying with him and Cynthia Lennon.

In New York, where she briefly ran a travel business, she met her second husband, glass salesman Walter Kane. Walter got on famously with George and the couple would spend a month in Britain each year, staying at Harrison’s Friar Park home.

George (pictured with his parents Harold and Louise in Liverpool) joined a local band The Four Vest on stage during his secret US trip and ended up playing with them at a birthday party 

But the marriage didn’t last and they split up in 1983.

Louise says both her husbands were alcoholics. ‘When I got my second divorce, George said: “Don’t go getting married, I’ll take care of you”.’

But instead of growing closer, they moved apart. Insiders say the privacy-obsessed Harrison distanced himself from his sister in the mid-Nineties because he disapproved of the way she was exploiting her connection with him.

She would be paid to speak at Beatles conventions and in 1993, when she asked him to join the board of a peace project she had set up, he refused.

The final straw came two years later when her old home in Benton was converted into a Beatles-themed B&B called A Hard Day’s Nite. Louise didn’t own the venture but did supply it with Beatles memorabilia and helped publicise it.

For the next six years until his death, they didn’t meet - despite several trips by the Beatle to  the U.S. - and had minimal communication.

But almost 20 years on, she questions whether her brother was ever really angry with her. ‘If George had really been upset about something, he could always have called me.’

But she concedes that many of her letters to him went unreplied. ‘I think he was just too busy,’ she says.

The pair did, however, have a final reconciliation. Louise drove hundreds of miles to see Harrison at his hospital bedside in Staten Island, New York. There were reports that the desperately frail Harrison initially refused to see her, but his wife made him change his mind.

Staggering: British rock group the Beatles performing their last live public concert on the rooftop of the Apple Organization building for director Michael Lindsey-Hogg's film documentary, 'Let It Be,' on Savile Row, London, England

Holding hands, the siblings chatted about old times for 90 minutes, laughing at how he used to be teased for his sticking-out ears.

Louise, who still has another sibling, Harry, in Britain, says her Beatle brother apologised to her.

‘You know, I could have been a lot more help to you; I’m sorry,’ she later recalled him saying. He could, of course, have changed his will at that point but he didn’t.

Given his supposed views on the Fab Four B&B, one wonders what Harrison would have thought of her Beatles tribute band, Liverpool Legends. Louise says she set it up only because she needed an income after losing the pension.

‘I wanted to get guys who looked and sounded as much like The Beatles as possible but I also wanted the kind of guys that if George was still here, they would be his friends. I’ve always been very proud of how they’ve turned out. I’m more like their mum than their manager.’

Louise, who is a grandmother, moved from Illinois to Branson about seven years ago, effectively to follow the band. The town has a profusion of live entertainment venues and they saw a gap in the market for a rock ’n’ roll band.

However, business has been slow, she admits.

‘I am struggling for money, like everyone, but I am not on the breadline. I am not “skint”, as they would say in Britain. I feel very fortunate to own outright the land that my two homes sit on - which is better than most,’ she says.

‘I’m 82 now and still in good health and good spirits. I’m fine.’

In some ways, her famous brother - who once told her of his dream to play guitar for just a handful of people in an obscure little bar - would be jealous of her modest but anonymous life, she says.