Silver on the Beatles

        John and Ringo, who are both married, live in Weybridge, Surrey, a prosperous residential area, wooded and stock-brokered. Their lives are rather unworldly; they get up around midday, go to bed when they are sleepy, usually do not know what day it is. Both have large, Tudor-style houses stuffed with incredible assortments of things: John’s, which is heavily paneled and carpeted, contains Cynthia (his wife), a son, Julian, a cat, a roomful of model racing cars, a gorilla suit, a suit of armor, a slot machine, five television sets, countless tape recorders and telephones (of which he knows not a single phone number), and a well-stocked library. John is a great reader. He is also a writer: his books, In His Own Write and Spaniard in the Works, have sold very well, and he expects to write more. An illustration called “The Fat Budgie,” drawn by John for In His Own Write, was used as a Christmas card by the Oxfam charity and outsold any card they had ever issued. Outdoors, John has a swimming pool and three cars —a Rolls-Royce, a Mini-Cooper, and a Ferrari. All the cars are black. John has painted the chromium plating on the Rolls black, too, which annoyed the Rolls-Royce company.

        Ringo’s cars are all maroon. He has a Facel Vega and two Minis, and used to have a Rolls-Royce as well. His house has a bar called the Flying Cow, which is fully fitted out even to having beer on tap and a selection of cigarettes. He wishes it were a real pub, and that his friends would drop in and use it even if he were not there. The house is full of trophies, books, gold discs, a collection of arms (there is a holster that Elvis Presley gave him, a miniature cannon from his wife); he has a brass-bound desk with a wooden sign saying Big Daddy— a present from an American admirer when Ringo’s son, Zak, was born. In the enormous garden are three dogs, a tree house, a goldfish pond, and a washing line with an old tin can hanging from it for him and his wife, Mareen, to shoot at with their air guns.

        George, who has a wife called Patti, lives nearby in Esher. They have a large white bungalow with a conservatory and a music room, a housekeeper, a Ferrari, and two Minis. All of these are surrounded by an old brick wall which used to be part of Queen Victoria's country estate. George, the most practical and uncompromising Beatle, is up by 10:30 in the morning and usually does know what day it is. He is very much concerned about his rights as an individual. In a newspaper interview he said he had asked to be successful, not famous. “People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are.’ Well, I made Mr. Hovis [a bread manufacturer] what he is and I don’t go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house. I can’t understand some of them being so aggressively bad-mannered.”

        Invasions of privacy affect the other Beatles, too. John is bothered by gawpers who even picnic in his garden; Ringo and Maureen, coming back from a night out in London, found seven girls sleeping at their front gate. This kind of singular treatment over the last four years has given each Beatle a life that only the other three can understand. They are consequently each other's greatest friends and actually spend most of their nonprofessional time together. George and Patti and they all go over to Ringo’s; Ringo shows up at John’s, and George comes over later. Or Paul down from London with his girl friend, actress Jane Asher. Or they all go up to London to see Paul.

        Often they go to night clubs in London, though seldom together. They are also able to go around in public more easily than would be expected, having a simple device for not being recognized; they comb their hair back. And while people are still saying, “Is it? No, it can’t be! But surely it is!” whichever Beatle it is has vanished. Paul, who can assume a very innocent expression when he wants to, has a ready answer for “You're Paul McCartney!” “Who, me?” he says, looking thunderstruck.

        Paul, the only Beatle who still lives in London, has an elegant nineteenth-century house, an Aston Martin DB6, and a Mini. He also has another home in Liverpool and a two-hundred-acre farm in northern Scotland. He is intensely interested in learning about things, almost to the point of resenting people who know things that he doesn't. He spends a lot of time writing songs, and is fascinated by avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Berio. He means to write electronic music himself, but does not yet have the machines for it. The most independent of the Beatles, he is also interested in success in his own right and was pleased when his song “Woman,” written for Peter and Gordon under the pseudonym of Bernard Webb, got into the American Top Twenty without having the booster of the Beatles name attached to it.

        “Fame, in the end,” Paul told Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, “is getting off your parking fine because he wants your autograph, and fame is being interrupted when you’re eating by a fifty-year-old American lady with a ponytail.

    “Fame is what everyone wants, in some form or another; there must be millions of people all over the world annoyed that people haven't discovered them. ‘What’s up?’ they ask themselves.”

Read another excerpt from The Pop Makers:

Not All Roses: The Yardbirds (as scanned by Peter Stanfield)