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Meta link, and a story of three women
I haven't watched the US version of Being Human, nor do I intent to, but even if you, oh reader, are not familiar with either the British or American one and have no intention of ever watching a single episode of BH, check out this post for a great demonstration of what "the male gaze" means, and how you can film two identical scenes in completely different ways, resulting in very different emotional content. (Err, spoilers for two scenes in the respective first seasons of both shows.) Hint: one is cheap exploitation, and the other is not.
***
A few more pictures under the cut, this time of arguably the people who had it worst in the entire Beatles saga, the three first wives of John, Ringo and George. I'm excepting Jane Asher her, not because she was never married to Paul but because she managed to never let being romantically involved with a Beatle be detrimental to her own life. Being accomplished and famous in her own right as an actress before, during and after the five years they were together undoubtedly helped, as did ignoring any demands to settle down (as opposed to Pattie Boyd, who gave up her modelling career when George asked). As did trying to keep her life with Paul as much separately from Paul's life with the group as was possible. (Jane Asher was and is famously discreet after her break-up with Paul, but the two times she said something on the record during the relationship - in Michael Braun's 1964 book about the Beatles en tour, Love Me Do, and in Hunter Davies' 1968 The Beatles she sounds more critical than any of the Beatle wives/girlfriends has gone on record with being and unequivocably states she has no intention of being "part of a gang".) But the way Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey dealt with the rock star wives life, how they became friends, failed each other and reconciled is a poignant drama of its own. It's a very 60s and early 70s tale from the female side as opposed to the male one.
Starting with Cynthia as the literal invisible woman, given that Brian Epstein tried to keep her marriage to John secret for about a year (on the rationale that a male pop star might lose fans if he's married). She had been John's girlfriend for three years before the marriage, so while the marriage itself was triggered by her getting pregnant, one can't say either John or herself didn't know what they were getting into, personality wise. The effect superstardom would have, otoh, was unpredicable and something else again. Otherwise it would have been a pretty ordinary story of first love pettering out after the years. Cynthia, like John, was a student at Liverpool Art College when they met, and there is something poignant and very teenager-esque about the cards and letters he wrote her, like this one:
("I love you like guitars." Oh, 18 years old John.) Cynthia actually was the art student doing much better at college (well, okay, faint praise, since John failed all his grades, but she did pretty well), and she probably would have gone on as an art teacher in Liverpool, with a small circle of friends (unlike John, she was shy, but her best friend from college remained her friend through the decades), if not for what happened when getting pregnant, marrying John and the Beatles going from popular local group to stars coincided. Because not only did she spend a year in hiding complete with clandestine meetings with her husband, but because of the move from Liverpool to London she lost any immediate social circle that wasn't Beatles-related. A job of her own wasn't even a question with the new baby (and a very rarely present father of same). Which left the girlfriends and later wives of the other Beatles, and they did bond over the craziness of it all. Maureen, Ringo's wife to be, was from Liverpool like Cynthia and had been a hairdresser until she had to give that up because fans would make appointments and use the opportunity to insult and attack her. So no job for Maureen, either, but a baby (Maureen was pregnant as well when she and Ringo married), and running from the fans as much as the boys did, though for opposite reasons. When Pattie Boyd started to date George, she and Cynthia once had to disguise themselves as hotel maids to get in and be smuggled out in dirty laundry when they were vacationing in Ireland together. When their husbands were on tour, there was the I-don't-really-want-to-know awareness that there were groupies; when they were together, there was the constnat awareness of being not as important as the other Beatles to them (something Cynthia, Pattie and Maureen all go on record on saying the feel in Hunter Davies' 1968 book). Pattie in her memoirs later stated she felt Cynthia and Maureen, being the "Liverpool girls", were excluding her to a degree, but that strikes me as hindsight given what happened between Maureen and Pattie later, and also as an excuse for her own behaviour towards Cynthia (who is nothing but admiring about the glamourous Pattie in her own memoirs). In the 60s, they certainly all come across as close, as here, when they were visiting the boys on the set for Help:
Maureen and Pattie:
Maureen and Cynthia:
(Cynthia, like John, is very short sighted, and George in Anthology tells an anecdote of how on the occasions when they went out together there was an argument as to who'd put their glasses on when they entered a night club, because without them neither of them could see a thing, including where the rest of the group was. Cynthia inevitably lost.)
Going out together: Pattie and Cynthia were both dosed with LSD along with George and John by a dentist the first time any Beatles encountered LSD, but unlike them they found it a nightmare experience and hated it, which contributed to alienation from their husbands but enabled them to help with other. For a while. There were awkward experiences like a costume party when John danced with everyone but Cynthia who locked herself in the bathroom and when Pattie and Maureen tried to coax her out said she wouldn't until John noticed she was gone. (He didn't.) They were not so secretly horrified when John thought up the scheme of the Beatles (and their wives, and roadies, but no one else) moving to a Greek island (where would the kids go to school, pray?), and relieved when it didn't come to anything. While Maureen hated the trip to India from the start, Pattie had actually been the one to discover the Maharishi and tried her best to share George's increasing dedication to Indian culture and Hindu spirituality, while Cynthia saw the whole Maharishi phase as a God send because it made John go off LSD while it lasted and was impressed by the Maharishi himself. But if India was a turning point for the Beatles, it was also one for their wives; it would be the last time they did something together and were all together as well.
Maureen Cleave, in the famous more-popular-than-Jesus article, had compared John with Henry VIII, looks-wise, and one of the most startling demonstrations of both the pseudo feudal atmosphere around the Beatles in the late 60s and the power of the patriarchy to me is that when he laid down "the law of the husband" and, not content with divorcing Cynthia, demanded that everyone in the entire Beatles circle should stop seeing her, not only the people financially depended on him (i.e. roadies, various employees) but his fellow Beatles other than Paul and their wives followed suit. Cynthia had actually been on a brief vacation with Pattie's younger sister Jennie Boyd when she returned to find John and Yoko together, so Pattie (and Maureen) knew about what happened even faster than usual. But they deferred to their husbands, and John. I find this sad and chilling to this day, because seriously, what would/could have happened if they had done something as simple as paying a visit to check on Cynthia, see how she was? It's not like John, a la Henry VIII., could have had them banished as well. Or maybe he could have. Cynthia, decades and reconciliations later, explained it to herself as Pattie and Maureen being afraid of their own future at that point and maybe seeing the signs on the horizon. If Cynthia could be dumped, exiled, made non-existant, then so could they. But it was a graphic illustration of how the comradery that had been established by facing the madness of life with a Beatle together could fail and be treated as nothing against the command of a husband (and that husband's friend).
Not so coincidentally, as soon as the Beatles were over and John was out of the country in 1971, the other wives did reestablish relations with Cynthia, first Maureen and later, after her divorce from George, Pattie. But by then their marriages had collapsed as well, and in a way that involved each other. "Maureen was the last person I'd have expected to stab me in the back", Pattie writes about the short George/Maureen affair, and the sense of betrayal between them certainly seems to have been far stronger and more devastating than between George and Ringo (Ringo forgave him pretty fast), or Ringo and Maureen (who became friends again during their respective second marriages; Ringo was at Maureen's side when she died, together with her second husband). Or George and Pattie (who moved in with Eric Clapton and after that marriage collapsed was getting along with George far better than with Eric.) Nobody ever asked Maureen why (Peter Brown asked George and says George shrugged and replied, "incest"), and thus the friendship between Maureen and Pattie became another casuality of the 70s. On the other hand, Maureen was there for Cynthia - who was visiting her - on the night of December 8th to December 9th 1980, when Ringo, the only other ex Beatle in the States at the time of John's murder, called to tell them John was dead. Which was good, because Cynthia needed someone at that time. She didn't get home fast enough before the media did (and thus Julian found out via them), but Maureen and her oldest son Zak stayed with her. Julian wanted to go to New York for the funeral (as it turned out, there wasn't one, because John was cremated, but they didn't know that at the time), and Yoko, whom they called, agreed, but only under the condition that Cynthia would not come with Julian ("It's not like you're an old schoolfriend of mine, Cynthia", Cynthia quotes her saying, which put an end to the prospect of a Cynthia and Yoko reconciliation for the next few decades, though they appear to have made up last year; bear in mind, though, that Yoko had just seen John shot in front of her). Cynthia writes that letting Julian go on his own to New York after his father's death was one of the worst moments of her life; he was 17, the same age Cynthia had been when her father died, and the same age John was when his mother Julia had died. But Maureen was there for her this time, enduringly, and Cynthia never forgot it. When Maureen died of cancer in the mid-90s, she said:
“We’ve shared life’s ups and downs. With the Beatles, and without. I was staying with her when John was killed. But Maureen did not live in the shadow of the Beatles.”
***
A few more pictures under the cut, this time of arguably the people who had it worst in the entire Beatles saga, the three first wives of John, Ringo and George. I'm excepting Jane Asher her, not because she was never married to Paul but because she managed to never let being romantically involved with a Beatle be detrimental to her own life. Being accomplished and famous in her own right as an actress before, during and after the five years they were together undoubtedly helped, as did ignoring any demands to settle down (as opposed to Pattie Boyd, who gave up her modelling career when George asked). As did trying to keep her life with Paul as much separately from Paul's life with the group as was possible. (Jane Asher was and is famously discreet after her break-up with Paul, but the two times she said something on the record during the relationship - in Michael Braun's 1964 book about the Beatles en tour, Love Me Do, and in Hunter Davies' 1968 The Beatles she sounds more critical than any of the Beatle wives/girlfriends has gone on record with being and unequivocably states she has no intention of being "part of a gang".) But the way Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey dealt with the rock star wives life, how they became friends, failed each other and reconciled is a poignant drama of its own. It's a very 60s and early 70s tale from the female side as opposed to the male one.
Starting with Cynthia as the literal invisible woman, given that Brian Epstein tried to keep her marriage to John secret for about a year (on the rationale that a male pop star might lose fans if he's married). She had been John's girlfriend for three years before the marriage, so while the marriage itself was triggered by her getting pregnant, one can't say either John or herself didn't know what they were getting into, personality wise. The effect superstardom would have, otoh, was unpredicable and something else again. Otherwise it would have been a pretty ordinary story of first love pettering out after the years. Cynthia, like John, was a student at Liverpool Art College when they met, and there is something poignant and very teenager-esque about the cards and letters he wrote her, like this one:
("I love you like guitars." Oh, 18 years old John.) Cynthia actually was the art student doing much better at college (well, okay, faint praise, since John failed all his grades, but she did pretty well), and she probably would have gone on as an art teacher in Liverpool, with a small circle of friends (unlike John, she was shy, but her best friend from college remained her friend through the decades), if not for what happened when getting pregnant, marrying John and the Beatles going from popular local group to stars coincided. Because not only did she spend a year in hiding complete with clandestine meetings with her husband, but because of the move from Liverpool to London she lost any immediate social circle that wasn't Beatles-related. A job of her own wasn't even a question with the new baby (and a very rarely present father of same). Which left the girlfriends and later wives of the other Beatles, and they did bond over the craziness of it all. Maureen, Ringo's wife to be, was from Liverpool like Cynthia and had been a hairdresser until she had to give that up because fans would make appointments and use the opportunity to insult and attack her. So no job for Maureen, either, but a baby (Maureen was pregnant as well when she and Ringo married), and running from the fans as much as the boys did, though for opposite reasons. When Pattie Boyd started to date George, she and Cynthia once had to disguise themselves as hotel maids to get in and be smuggled out in dirty laundry when they were vacationing in Ireland together. When their husbands were on tour, there was the I-don't-really-want-to-know awareness that there were groupies; when they were together, there was the constnat awareness of being not as important as the other Beatles to them (something Cynthia, Pattie and Maureen all go on record on saying the feel in Hunter Davies' 1968 book). Pattie in her memoirs later stated she felt Cynthia and Maureen, being the "Liverpool girls", were excluding her to a degree, but that strikes me as hindsight given what happened between Maureen and Pattie later, and also as an excuse for her own behaviour towards Cynthia (who is nothing but admiring about the glamourous Pattie in her own memoirs). In the 60s, they certainly all come across as close, as here, when they were visiting the boys on the set for Help:
Maureen and Pattie:
Maureen and Cynthia:
(Cynthia, like John, is very short sighted, and George in Anthology tells an anecdote of how on the occasions when they went out together there was an argument as to who'd put their glasses on when they entered a night club, because without them neither of them could see a thing, including where the rest of the group was. Cynthia inevitably lost.)
Going out together: Pattie and Cynthia were both dosed with LSD along with George and John by a dentist the first time any Beatles encountered LSD, but unlike them they found it a nightmare experience and hated it, which contributed to alienation from their husbands but enabled them to help with other. For a while. There were awkward experiences like a costume party when John danced with everyone but Cynthia who locked herself in the bathroom and when Pattie and Maureen tried to coax her out said she wouldn't until John noticed she was gone. (He didn't.) They were not so secretly horrified when John thought up the scheme of the Beatles (and their wives, and roadies, but no one else) moving to a Greek island (where would the kids go to school, pray?), and relieved when it didn't come to anything. While Maureen hated the trip to India from the start, Pattie had actually been the one to discover the Maharishi and tried her best to share George's increasing dedication to Indian culture and Hindu spirituality, while Cynthia saw the whole Maharishi phase as a God send because it made John go off LSD while it lasted and was impressed by the Maharishi himself. But if India was a turning point for the Beatles, it was also one for their wives; it would be the last time they did something together and were all together as well.
Maureen Cleave, in the famous more-popular-than-Jesus article, had compared John with Henry VIII, looks-wise, and one of the most startling demonstrations of both the pseudo feudal atmosphere around the Beatles in the late 60s and the power of the patriarchy to me is that when he laid down "the law of the husband" and, not content with divorcing Cynthia, demanded that everyone in the entire Beatles circle should stop seeing her, not only the people financially depended on him (i.e. roadies, various employees) but his fellow Beatles other than Paul and their wives followed suit. Cynthia had actually been on a brief vacation with Pattie's younger sister Jennie Boyd when she returned to find John and Yoko together, so Pattie (and Maureen) knew about what happened even faster than usual. But they deferred to their husbands, and John. I find this sad and chilling to this day, because seriously, what would/could have happened if they had done something as simple as paying a visit to check on Cynthia, see how she was? It's not like John, a la Henry VIII., could have had them banished as well. Or maybe he could have. Cynthia, decades and reconciliations later, explained it to herself as Pattie and Maureen being afraid of their own future at that point and maybe seeing the signs on the horizon. If Cynthia could be dumped, exiled, made non-existant, then so could they. But it was a graphic illustration of how the comradery that had been established by facing the madness of life with a Beatle together could fail and be treated as nothing against the command of a husband (and that husband's friend).
Not so coincidentally, as soon as the Beatles were over and John was out of the country in 1971, the other wives did reestablish relations with Cynthia, first Maureen and later, after her divorce from George, Pattie. But by then their marriages had collapsed as well, and in a way that involved each other. "Maureen was the last person I'd have expected to stab me in the back", Pattie writes about the short George/Maureen affair, and the sense of betrayal between them certainly seems to have been far stronger and more devastating than between George and Ringo (Ringo forgave him pretty fast), or Ringo and Maureen (who became friends again during their respective second marriages; Ringo was at Maureen's side when she died, together with her second husband). Or George and Pattie (who moved in with Eric Clapton and after that marriage collapsed was getting along with George far better than with Eric.) Nobody ever asked Maureen why (Peter Brown asked George and says George shrugged and replied, "incest"), and thus the friendship between Maureen and Pattie became another casuality of the 70s. On the other hand, Maureen was there for Cynthia - who was visiting her - on the night of December 8th to December 9th 1980, when Ringo, the only other ex Beatle in the States at the time of John's murder, called to tell them John was dead. Which was good, because Cynthia needed someone at that time. She didn't get home fast enough before the media did (and thus Julian found out via them), but Maureen and her oldest son Zak stayed with her. Julian wanted to go to New York for the funeral (as it turned out, there wasn't one, because John was cremated, but they didn't know that at the time), and Yoko, whom they called, agreed, but only under the condition that Cynthia would not come with Julian ("It's not like you're an old schoolfriend of mine, Cynthia", Cynthia quotes her saying, which put an end to the prospect of a Cynthia and Yoko reconciliation for the next few decades, though they appear to have made up last year; bear in mind, though, that Yoko had just seen John shot in front of her). Cynthia writes that letting Julian go on his own to New York after his father's death was one of the worst moments of her life; he was 17, the same age Cynthia had been when her father died, and the same age John was when his mother Julia had died. But Maureen was there for her this time, enduringly, and Cynthia never forgot it. When Maureen died of cancer in the mid-90s, she said:
“We’ve shared life’s ups and downs. With the Beatles, and without. I was staying with her when John was killed. But Maureen did not live in the shadow of the Beatles.”