‘It’s not so bad these days, but it happens. Cyn was attacked not long ago in the street. Some girl kicked her on the legs and said she had to leave John alone, or else. Isn’t it amazing, after all the years that John and Cyn have been married?
‘I’m still very frightened when I see a gang of girls in the street. I can’t face them. I have to go the other way. I always think perhaps they’re going to hit me.’
Being a Beatle wife, like being a Beatle, produces difficult relationships with old friends, as well as new ones. Her sister Jennie — who works in the Apple Boutique — is very close to her and spends a lot of time with her at the house. She is also very interested in Indian religion and culture. But apart from Jennie, Pattie has few close friends.
‘People will suddenly make a snide remark — “It’s all right for you, you can afford to do that.” That sort of thing. Old friends you would think wouldn’t come out with such silly things.
‘It comes out with new people you meet as well. You think, here’s a nice person, then they say something that shows they think I’m different. The other day I was doing a bit of work for Vogue and a woman said, “I don’t think of you as a model now, you’re more of a celebrity.” I’m not an actress or a star or anything. I’m just me, as I always was.
‘The wives have got to do something, when they’re hours and hours in the recording studio. We have ideas, but the next thing, we’re all leaving Esher anyway, going off to our hundred acres estate in the country, and then it was Greece or somewhere. There’s always these mad ideas around.
‘I would like to do something, on my own. I took up the piano and went to lessons for a time. But it was going to take too long to be any good. I do believe you can do anything you want, if you spend enough time at it, but that was too late.
‘Then I went to a clairvoyant, who said my grandmother had played the violin and that I was meant to play it as well. I don’t know how she knew my grandmother was a violinist. So I thought I’d try. I went to lessons for a while. But that was worse. You’ve really got to start the violin young.
‘I’m now learning the dilruba — that’s an Indian instrument. I’m also going to Indian dancing classes under Ram Gopal. It’s lovely. Jennie and I go every day before he does his ballet rehearsals.
‘I just don’t want to be the little wife sitting at home. I want to do something worthwhile.’
Pattie is involved in all things Indian, but George, as with everything he has always taken up, does it almost with a fanaticism. He used to practise the guitar till his fingers bled. Now he sometimes plays the sitar all day long. When he’s not doing that, he is reading book after book on religion.
He’s not cranky about it. As he goes on and learns more, he becomes more humble and more light-hearted about it. He doesn’t preach as much, although there is always the danger, when he is being quoted, of making him appear more fanatical than he is. Paul and John would have been the first to cut down his pretensions or to mock his illusions, if there had been any.
Even from the first, before Maharishi came along, as George was discovering Buddhism and yoga for himself, the others were as fascinated to hear what he’d found as he was.
‘Look at this book. An Indian gave us each a copy of it when we were in the Bahamas. It’s signed and dated 25 February 1965. My birthday. I’ve only recently opened it, since I became interested in India. It’s fantastic. That Indian really was something. You can tell by his name, it’s really a title, showing you how learned he is.
‘I now know it was part of a pattern. It was all planned that I should read it now. It all follows a path, just like our path. John, Paul and George converged, then a little later Ringo. We were part of that action, which led to the next reaction. We’re all just little cogs in an action that everyone is part of.
‘The only thing that is important in life is Karma, which means, roughly, actions. Every action has a reaction, which is equal and opposite. Everything that’s done has a reaction, like dropping this cushion down, see, there’s a dent in it.
‘Your Samsara is the recurrence of all your lives and deaths. We’ve been here before. I don’t know what as, though the friends you had in the previous life are likely to be the friends you have in this life. You hate all the people you hated last time. As long as you hate, there will be people to hate. You go on being reincarnated, till you reach the absolute truth. But heaven and hell are just a state of mind. Whatever it is, you create it.
‘We were made John, Paul, George and Ringo because of what we did last time, it was all there for us, on a plate. We’re reaping what we sowed last time, whatever it was.
‘The reason why we’re all here is to achieve perfection, to become Christ-like. Each soul is potentially divine. This actual world is an illusion. It’s been created by worldliness and identification with objects. It doesn’t matter what happens, the plan can’t be affected, even having wars or dropping an H-bomb. None of it matters. Of course, it does matter to the people concerned, and a bomb would be terrible, but it’s only what happens in ourselves that ultimately matters.
‘I used to laugh when I read about Cliff Richard being a Christian. I still cringe when I hear about it, but I know that religion and God are the only things that exist. I know some people think I must be a nutcase. I find it hard not to myself sometimes, because I still see so many things in an ordinary way. But I know that when you believe, it’s real and nice. Not believing, it’s all confusion and emptiness.
‘Life will all work out, as long as you don’t bullshit. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve blacked out most things that happened to me before I was about 19. I’ve got so much going forward now. I see so many possibilities. I’m beginning to know that all I know is that I know nothing.’
Transcendental meditation came along just at this stage. He was looking for something and someone to tie all the ends together. He has never missed a day’s meditation since he started, unlike the others. Now and again they forget, or are too busy.
The other big part of George’s life is his music. John and Paul were knocking out songs together from the day they met. But George never got round to it for a long time, although he helped with an instrumental piece they did on their Hamburg records. His songs have always been created separately from John and Paul’s. He does them completely on his own. In this, as in other recent things, he has influenced them — making them aware of Eastern rhythms and instruments.
George’s first song did not appear till their second long-playing record, With The Beatles, in the November of 1963. It was called ‘Don’t Bother Me’. He wrote it in a Bournemouth hotel during a tour. He had been ill and was resting.
‘I was a bit run-down and was supposed to be having some sort of tonic, taking it easy for a few days. I decided to try to write a song, just for a laugh. I got out my guitar and just played around till a song came. I forgot all about it till we came to record the next LP. It was a fairly crappy song. I forgot about it completely once it was on the album.’
He forgot about writing songs for almost two years after that. ‘I was involved in so many other things that I never got round to it.’
George rather plays down his Beatle songs, considering them a very minor sideline. He can’t remember how many he’s written and isn’t even clear which albums he did songs for.
His next songs were on the LP Help!, which appeared in the August of 1965. He did two for this, ‘I Need You’ and ‘You Like Me Too Much’.
He did two songs for Rubber Soul in the December of 1965 — ‘Think For Yourself’ and ‘If I Needed Someone’. When he was trying to think of the LPs he’d written songs for he forgot to mention this. Both of these were well up to the standards of the rest of the songs on that album.