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Another new Beatles document this fall deals not with their public performances but with their all-too-human private personalities. It is the "authorized" biography of the boys by Hunter Davies (McGraw-Hill; $6.95).
Davies, who for two years wrote the "Atticus" feature in the London Sunday Times, is the perfect prototype of the modern hagiographer: a onetime gossip columnist with a novelist's background (Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). With the help of his subjects, who are getting a cut of the royalties, he offers the largest selection of spicy morsels yet compiled on the Beatles. For example, here is Paul McCartney on sex: "I got it for the first time at 15. I suppose that was a bit early. I was about the first in my class." Or Ringo Starr on the Beatles' tours: "The only fun part was the hotels in the evening, smoking pot and that." Or John Lennon on the art of writing lyrics: "We know we're conning them, because we know people want to be conned. Let's stick that in there, we say, that'll start them puzzling."
Davies reveals that John has had bouts of shoplifting, that in school Paul "always got good marks for all his essays," and that John, George and Paul have sometimes been vegetarians. It is further disclosed that Ringo's wife Maureen collects trading stamps.
Four-Way Plug-In. The Beatles, as Paul has been warning recently, "are not the four moptops any more." They are four iconoclastic, brass-hard, post-Christian, pragmatic realists. Some of this does break through Davies' skein of anecdotes. So does the curious relation among the Beatles. Film Director Richard Lester once described it as "the four-way multiple plug-in personality," in which each one is only a phase of a larger unit that has far more reality for them than any other human relationship they know.
What Davies finally suggests is the Beatles' isolation and boredom. Ringo is the most content, living a suburban, intensely domestic life in a house full of gadgets, including six TV sets. Paul roams restlessly through the youthful London underground, where artists and the remaining hippies overlap. George Harrison searched desperately for his own thing, seems to have found it briefly in Indian music and mysticism. Since Davies' book went into type John has left his wife and son for the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, and has put his suburban house up for sale. John trims away friends, will lie for hours curled on a sofa staring at the rain. He has gone for three days without speaking.