Former Fan Club President Remembers Complicated, Not-So-Quiet Beatle

The Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” is often cited as a historic television moment and a turning point in pop culture history. In less than a decade, a band of four young, mop-topped men from Liverpool were catapulted to the highest peaks of fame and success, revolutionized the music landscape and achieved icon status that remains undimmed despite bitter feuds, tragic deaths and even the simple passage of time.

“When Kennedy was shot, it was like there was a black curtain across the country,” said Beatles fan and Trappe resident Pat Kinzer Mancuso. “When the Beatles were on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ that curtain just opened up and it never closed again.”

The Beatles’ emergence into America’s consciousness was a game changer, but it had a profound effect on Mancuso, then Collegeville teen Pat Kinzer.

“The day at ‘American Bandstand’ that  I first heard of the Beatles, that changed my life. It really, really did,” she said in a recent interview.

From the start, Mancuso’s favorite was George Harrison—who would have turned 68 today—and she went on to become the president of the Official George Harrison Fan Club from 1964-1972. Through the years, Mancuso corresponded with and met various members of the Harrison family, including George’s parents. Harrison himself sanctioned the club when Mancuso met him at his home in 1968. While that might be seen as icing on a Beatlemaniac’s cake, the whole story is a little more complex—almost as much as the man himself.

Mancuso already had experience with fan clubs for some “American Bandstand” regulars. In January 1964, the Beatles were emerging on the scene and “Bandstand” was departing Philadelphia for the West Coast, Mancuso said, and “my loyalty immediately switched from ‘American Bandstand’ to the Beatles.”

Mancuso started a club for her favorite Beatle, and in the beginning there was Mancuso, a few friends and a 6-year-old neighbor whom Mancuso “conned” out of her allowance. Dues were 40 cents and three 5-cent stamps. Membership shot up after she sent an ad for the club to Teen Screen magazine, which ran in an April 1965 issue. The club eventually boasted 1,000 members from around the U.S. and other parts of the world.

Things came to an abrupt end in 1972 when Mancuso received a note on Apple letterhead, stating that the Beatles wanted all of their fan clubs disbanded. “The ‘trigger’ … was that one of the finest chapters sent out a newsletter that did not agree with either John, George or Ringo,” Mancuso  wrote in her 2003 self-published book, “Do You Want to Know a Secret? The Story of the Official George Harrison Fan Club.” Mancuso was shocked to learn the newsletter was her issue of the “Harrison Herald-George Gernal” that she had sent to Harrison’s sister Louise Caldwell, but ended up in Harrison’s hands instead.

“George read it and reportedly called it ‘garbage,’” Mancuso wrote. “He supposedly disclaimed his own chapter and the entire fan club, and he contacted someone at Apple in London who contacted (Allen) Klein to report George’s anger over the ‘Gernal.’”

The club dissolved, and the Harrison family cut off contact with Mancuso. Losing the club left Mancuso with “a big hole” that, for a while, she had trouble filling. “But eventually I did,” she said.

However, the “secret” of why everything happened haunted her for years.

Nearly three decades after the incident, she gained peace.

A man named Shaun Weiss found her website, www.georgeharrisonsecrets.com, Mancuso said. He believed he had seen her during one of her visits to England.

“In the course of the conversation, he said, ‘I bet my father has letters in his files about you.’” His father, it turns out, is former Beatles lawyer Nathan Weiss, the same man who had sent her a letter in 1968 about her club’s “official status.”

“At the end, they had a meeting in London where they dissolved the fan clubs. They said one of the bosses from Apple was there, but I never knew who it was. It turns out it was his (Shaun’s) father,” Mancuso said.

At that point, the senior Weiss was 90 and had suffered a stroke. “He had his off days and his on days,” his son told Mancuso. When Shaun Weiss asked his father about the meeting, he did remember it.

“Fan clubs were already being dissolved at the time George got my newsletter, which annoyed him,” Mancuso said. The newsletter reprinted an interview Harrison’s then-wife Pattie Boyd had given another publication. Among other comments, Boyd was quoted as saying that she and Harrison would adopt a child, the book states.

 “He’s a very private person,” Mancuso said, adding that the information in that article and Pattie’s actions upset him.

“I think he was intending to blame the whole thing on me, and when he got to the meeting, he couldn’t because the lawyer told him he was in the process of dissolving everything. George thought it already had been dissolved, so that’s why my newsletter annoyed him even more.

“So, he (Weiss) said it wasn’t my fault, which is all I needed to hear. I felt like a whole lot of baggage was taken off me.”

What transpired in the 1970s changed Mancuso’s perspective of Harrison, and her mix of good and bad experiences with the Beatle mirror what others have said about him.

“The perception that most people have is that he was ‘the quiet Beatle,’ and he was anything but quiet,” Mancuso said. “If he was quiet, it was only because he was private. He was not the calm, nice individual. He was very nice to me when I met him at his home. A lot of people that were friends with him at the time say he was a very, very nice man, ‘but if you cross him at all, God help you.’”

When asked if that experience tainted her memory of her first meeting with Harrison, in which he amiably posed for pictures and signed anything Mancuso and her friends put in front of him, including the fan club’s charter, Mancuso said no.

 “Those feelings will always be good.”

Mancuso still hangs onto more good—the people she met because of the fan club.

To this day, Mancuso maintains a friendship with a German woman, Marianne Markendorf, who contacted her when they were both teens—and Markendorf was living in East Berlin. Although Mancuso’s book notes that rock music was forbidden in that part of Germany, “it’s not something the communists could keep out because it was over the radio waves and could be picked up.” An aunt who lived in the West had sneaked a copy of Teen Screen across the border when she visited for Christmas, and Mancuso’s ad was in that issue.

Mancuso traveled to see her longtime friend in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What is the best thing to come out of running the fan club? “My goddaughter,” Mancuso said: Prapai Tapunoi—“Noi” for short.

When Harrison became taken with Indian culture, Mancuso decided her club should sponsor an Indian child through Christian Children’s Fund.

“They wrote me back, saying they didn’t have any kids from India right now. Can you imagine that?” she asked.
Instead, the organization paired Mancuso and her fellow Harrison fans with a girl from Thailand, Noi, who was only 3 but incorrect birth records listed her as 5.

Among the presents and donations from the club members were George Harrison Fan Club T-shirts, a record player and Beatles albums. In her book, Mancuso states Noi’s first words of English were, “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

The club also raised $30 to buy her a bike for her birthday one year. There was enough left over for a new dress and an ice cream party, too.

“After the fan club ended, I sponsored her on my own, and when my husband and I got married, we sponsored her together.

“I got this idea that it would be cool if we could bring her over to the United States.”

It took some time and loads of paperwork, but Noi came to live with the Mancusos on Dec. 24, 1979. Mancuso and her husband Tony became Noi’s godparents, and the teen attended Perkiomen Valley High School. She continued her education through graduate school at the University of Michigan, and currently works as a nurse practitioner and lives in Maryland, Mancuso said. Noi became a U.S. citizen and is currently trying to bring her sister, her sole surviving immediate family member, to America.

“That’s the thing that I’m proudest of that I’ve done in this life. They say that God put you here for a purpose, and I truly believe that my purpose is to save her from poverty and give her a better life. I know that I did, and I’m proud of that,” Mancuso said.

Although Noi prefers salsa music, she likes the Beatles and is aware of their influence in her life, Mancuso said.

“She was the first person who called me on the phone after George passed away and told me,” Mancuso said. “She felt like someone like a father to her had died, because she realizes the impact he had on her life. Not him personally, but that we sponsored her because of him.”

Despite the rocky road, Mancuso remains a Beatles fan and can see their impact on pop culture and music to this day.

“A lot of things we do nowadays is because of something they started,” Mancuso said. “I don’t know of anyone who changed the world the way the Beatles did.”
“Look at Justin Bieber—he (had) a Beatle haircut!”

Today, Mancuso keeps herself busy as a certified Disney specialist and works as an independent contractor at in Skippack; her branch is called Pixie Dust Tours.

She has also struck up a friendship with Peter Asher, half of the ’60s duo, Peter and Gordon. Although her George Harrison experience left her wary of celebrities, Mancuso says she has come to know and accept that Asher genuinely likes her “for who I am, not what I am.” They exchange e-mails as friends, she said, not celebrity and fan.

So, if she saw Harrison in heaven, what would she say to him?

“You sure you want to print this?” she asked, laughing.

“I’d probably tell him off, and then I’d probably give him a hug.”

See George Harrison-related content at www.georgeharrison.com.