Like Father, Like Son: How George Harrison’s Cat Managed to Open His Own Fan Mail

Fame has a way of rubbing off on the immediate circles of well-known celebrities, from parents to children to pets. The people and critters in The Beatles’ lives were no exception. And indeed, that included the cat that George Harrison shared with his then-wife, Pattie Boyd: a white Persian named Korky.

Videos by American Songwriter

Harrison and Boyd named their pet after Korky the Cat, a character in the British comic The Dandy. The cat seemed to be more Boyd’s than Harrison’s. Still, Fab Four fans included Korky in their correspondence to Harrison. In her memoir, Wonderful Today, Boyd recalled the day she found her clever cat had opened his own fan mail.

“I’ll never forget coming home one day and finding the boxes all over the floor, the letters scattered far and wide,” Boyd wrote. “It looked as though we had been burgled. As I put it back, I noticed that one envelope had been opened. It was addressed to Korky, [and it] contained a ball of catnip, the herbs go mad about. Clever thing, he’d found and opened his own fan mail.”

Korky the Cat Wasn’t the Only One Managing George Harrison’s Fan Mail

While Korky was sniffing out catnip-filled envelopes, George Harrison’s mother would take the rest of her son’s fan mail and respond to it directly. “My mother was a nice person, but she was naive,” Harrison recalled in Anthology. “ We all were in Liverpool in those days. She used to write to anybody who’d written to us, answering the fan mail. She’d answer letters from people saying, ‘Dear Mr. Harrison, can you give us one of Paul McCartney’s toenails?’ Still, to this day, people come up to me brandishing letters that my mother once wrote to them.”

Even before Harrison was famous enough to receive fan mail, he said his mother had multiple pen pals in Northumberland or New Zealand. She never met them in person, but she would send letters and photographs back and forth for years. So, she was already well-practiced in sending off letters by the time she took over mail duty for her world-famous son.

Pattie Boyd described the “mountains” of letters in cardboard boxes that Harrison regularly received at his Liverpool home. It would have been impossible for Harrison to go through all his fan mail with a busy recording and touring schedule to contend with. Luckily, Korky and his mom were up for the task.

Photo by Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns