It’s Difficult Letting Go of Yesterday : A Beatles fan thinks a meeting with Paul McCartney would put an end to an obsessive nightmare that began decades ago.

Lorraine Bate sat--propped up by a pillow on the bed that nearly fills her small, crowded bedroom--looking at a pile of letters, Beatle postcards and old brown and blue envelopes with British postmarks.

Even more claustrophobic than her abode is the importance these letters hold in her mind. “These were my life for 10 years . . . and they’re just a dream,” she said bitterly, as one of her hands made a swirling motion over the pile.

Bate contacted The Times a couple of weeks ago offering to review Paul McCartney’s “Liverpool Oratorio” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for us, though only if she could be assured of meeting McCartney in the process. The reason, she said, was these 60 letters, all written to her from George Harrison’s parents, that she wants to entrust to McCartney to deliver to the Beatles Museum in Liverpool. That journey would signal a completion for her, an end to “a nightmare,” though she would still like to see a book written about her and the letters.

Bate’s bed, on which her boyfriend Michael Brewster and a white Maltese pooch also sat, is hemmed in by shelves of books purchased at celebrity book-signings, and pictures, some autographed, of Tom Selleck, Gloria Estefan, Chuck Norris and others. At the foot is a home entertainment center, with one shelf filled with prescription pill vials. Those are for the pain and symptoms of injuries that remain from a 1983 car wreck, but that’s not the problem she was discussing with an Oprah-ready intensity.

“Hero-worship is the worst possible nightmare. If, by having a book done, I can even save one kid from putting his hopes and dreams on Michael Jackson or Madonna it will all be worth it,” she exclaimed, in the talk-show tones of a noble victim.

Now 40, she was heading into her teens in 1964 when Beatle records, wigs and gum cards began proliferating in Santa Ana shops.

“I became very involved with the Beatles because I was shunned by the kids at school because of my obesity,” Bate said. “I always had to stay a step ahead, be a little smarter than the average, because in this country there’s a stigma attached to obesity--linking the words ‘fat, dumb, and lazy.’ I was never dumb or lazy, but I was going insane from loneliness and depression. I was a latch-key kid and my parents didn’t have much time for me. I had no friends in school. So I threw myself into being a Beatle fan.”

She began writing fan letters to the Beatles and soon found that one of the addresses she had gotten out of a fan magazine was actually the home address of Harrison’s parents. Their first response mailed on Oct. 13, 1964, was a note reading, “Dear Lorraine. Thank you for your letter. Hope you like this pic,” along with a Beatles fan club postcard. Encouraged, Bate said she began firing off 50 letters a week.

“I took that first letter to school, and people were tearing pieces off the envelope. One girl cut a lock of hair off my head. Suddenly I was the most popular kid in school, though the only time the kids wanted to be around me was if I got a letter and let them see it. Then after a while I started having to defend the authenticity of them. Then eventually the letters were commonplace to them, and it didn’t mean anything to anybody but me, so I just held them in my heart,” she said.

In some of the earliest exchanges, Bate would write a list of Beatles questions on school notebook paper--burning issues like “Are You going to appear on ‘The Virginian,’ an American TV program?”--which would be mailed back with brief answers, such as, in this case, “No.”

As her barrage of mail to the Harrisons continued--including gifts of Avon products for Mrs. Harrison and a silver St. Christopher medal and onyx ring for George that cost $15 of baby-sitting money--the responses began to get longer and more personal.

Usually Louise and Harold Harrison’s letters would just disseminate some minor bit of Beatles info, such as settling for Bate’s schoolmates what the opening lines of “Norwegian Wood” actually were. “The kids couldn’t tell if it was ‘I once had a girl,’ ‘I once hurt a girl’ or ‘I once heard a girl’,” Bate recalled. Sometimes they would send George’s autograph, some British Beatles trinket or, far more important to Bate, some personal word of encouragement to her. They’d occasionally ask about her studies, or inquire about the health of a quadriplegic classmate Bate was helping.

Though most were just brief notes, they took on a skewed importance to Bate.

“To me the letters show the kindness, love and affection that they showered on one person. For me they were my family because my parents were very active with civic organizations, while shortchanging the attention they gave to me. So for all intents and purposes Mr and Mrs. Harrison were my parents for a very long time,” she said.

Among the Harrisons’ letters to Bate (most penned by Louise) were assurances that George knew of her doings and regarded her as his staunchest fan. “She wrote me that George would always wear the ring I sent him and never take it off,” Bate said.

Then during 1967’s Summer of Love, Bate learned that Harrison was staying in Los Angeles, taking sitar lessons from Ravi Shankar. She and another Beatle fan made a bus pilgrimage to find him, walking 30 blocks to Shankar’s studio, and then hiking to a house on Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills.

Though they heard an organ being played in the house--a tune that Bate later recognized as the song “Blue Jay Way” when it was released later that year--a security guard told them they had the wrong house and threatened to call police. Later as they trudged down the hill, Harrison and his wife, Patti, drove past in a white limousine, laughing and waving.

She went to the house a second time to try to meet him, and wishes she hadn’t succeeded.

“I really thought he was going to know me. George came to the door. I said ‘Hi, do you know who I am?’ He said ‘No, who the hell are you? Why should I know you?’ ” Bate mentioned all the letters and asked why he wasn’t wearing the onyx ring. “He said, ‘What ring?’ and that everything sent to him went to charity. And I’d sent so many gifts.

“I reminded him, ‘Hey, your fans put you where you are.’ and he said, ‘No, I put me where I am, because I have talent. Now I put J.W. Woolworth where he is, and you don’t see me going around banging on his door.’ Then he really cut loose on me, saying I was selfish, egotistical and full of bull. He told me I wasn’t humble. He was into that. He told me to take off my rose-colored glasses. So I left. I turned around and I looked and him and said, ‘George, I love you’ and he shut the door. My whole world just fell to pieces then. I had a nervous breakdown. This was in August, and I stayed in bed for the rest of the summer. I couldn’t function.”

In their next correspondence, Louise Harrison diplomatically wrote: “I was surprised you met George and he made you cry. He is a very sincere person and most people would do well to accept his criticism.”

Bate said: “She led me to believe in all these letters that George knew I was his most faithful fan, and I was very gullible. I just think now that she was trying to make a very lonely, unhappy little girl happy by telling her nice things, to instill self-confidence in me, and she never in her wildest dreams thought I would meet up with George.”

She continued to correspond with the Harrisons--one of the last letters was from Harold informing her of Mrs. Harrison’s death--until 1973, when she stopped at the urging of boyfriend Brewster.

She’d met Brewster in 1971. Bate recalled: “I had a phone job with the Herald Examiner and called him and asked if he’d take a subscription and he did. I liked the way he sounded and asked if he wanted to meet me and he said ‘yeah.’ We decided to meet at a church. I gave him a real long chain I’d made out of shiny gum labels.

“He was the answer to a prayer. It was my Michael who stopped the merry-go-round and shook the hell out of me and said, ‘Stop living in a dream world.’ ”

Her ’83 auto accident, which also injured Brewster, left her with spinal and other injuries that have required eight surgeries so far--including what she called “the Gloria Estefan operation” in which her back was “butterflied like a shrimp” (she insisted on showing me the 18-inch scar)--and will require more. She considers each operation life-threatening and says she has put her affairs in order, including purchasing a burial plot, except for coming to terms with the letters.

Bate claims she’s had Sothebys appraise the letters at $1,800 but isn’t interested in the money. Rather, she feels they belong in a museum “for generations of people to see after my passing,” that she should meet with McCartney and that her story should be in a book, to caution other obsessive fans. “It’s time to set this injustice straight, to let the demons loose and put it to rest before I die,” she said.

This Fixations column is usually a lighthearted affair, as in most cases folks’ excessive interests manage to enrich and expand their lives. This is the other side. As Bate’s hand kept passing over her precious letters, I felt as if the oxygen were being sucked out of the room. I get the same feeling when reading the Bronte sisters’ smothering tales of misunderstood intentions and broken lives. Those novels always irked me, because they never allowed that people could escape the gravity of their tragic circumstances.

Maybe Bate will find a way to meet McCartney, who, if nothing else, has a reputation for being more polite than Harrison. But what can he tell her that Harrison in his own gruff way hadn’t, that her boyfriend hasn’t and that even she hasn’t told herself?

Let it be.