The Sisters in Liverpool

I was a George girl.

At the height of the British Invasion in the 1960s, movie magazines asked their teenage girl  readers who their favorite Beatle was: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr. John was supposedly the smart one, Paul the cute one, George the quiet one, and Ringo was, well, Ringo (also the short one and the last to join the Beatles, right as they were making their first record; the others had been mates since they were teenagers). Some days I thought maybe I was a John girl since he was the cheekiest and was the leader, and other days I was smitten by Paul's doe eyes in the black and white teen magazine photos. (I liked to think that when he said "I Saw Her Standing There" that he was singing about me.)

But I always kept coming back to George. He was quiet compared to the others (as the youngest, he was the equivalent of the kid brother), but he also did play lead guitar and sang. Usually their albums featured a song or two he sang.

I think I knew even then that the quiet people are often the most interesting, but let's set that aside for the time being.

And if I knew it then, I certainly could not have articulated when I was 14 that women compete with each other. In the mid-1970s, once I was well out of my Beatles phase and on my own a thousand miles from where I had grown up, I read somewhere that when a woman walks into a room, every other woman in the room immediately knows where she stands in relation to that new woman. (So much for sisterhood.) At the time, in my twenties, I thought the notion had some value, and I still do, although now I think there is a wide variety of ways in which women gauge status: in terms of conventional beauty (which I think is what I understood when I first came across the idea); in terms of professional or financial status; in terms of age or originality or of style in general. And probably in a variety of other ways. (And the comparisons and judgments about women are not done by women alone. Take a look at Amy Schumer's sarcastic video "The Last Fuckable Day" on YouTube.)

When I was a teenager, I would have been ecstatic to see the Beatles in person, and my adolescent fantasy of meeting George Harrison and eventually marrying him was not really a bad idea. Mind you, looking back I had absolutely no idea, practically speaking, of how to accomplish this. Nor did I have the confidence necessary for doing so. My fantasy was singularly devoid of details: how would I get a ticket to see the Beatles? How would I meet him? What would life with George Harrison be like? What would it be like to live with a rock star? I had no idea.

But marrying George Harrison was a nice idea at the time.

As it turned out, George married somebody else. He was the only Beatle to marry a non-pregnant girlfriend: Pattie Boyd. (And in fact Pattie was unable to have children. George was not the last Beatles to marry, though. Paul was.) George chose to marry a model and extra who had one word, "Pirates?" in A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first movie. She proved to eventually be the inspiration for the Harrison song "Something", and later, after she divorced George and married Eric Clapton, she served as the same for "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight". She was blonde, Twiggy-thin, had a gap between her two front teeth and had big blue eyes. Since divorcing Clapton, she has been a photographer but has been in many ways invisible except for her book Wonderful Tonight:
 George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me written with Penny Junot as a co-author. In her book, she admits that she lived on diet pills and snacks when she was a model. The uppers and downers, the liquor, the cocaine, the LSD. Boarding school bred, she had been so enclosed for much of her adult life that after her divorce from Clapton, she learned she "didn't know how to buy a tax disc for my car or a television license. I didn't know about water bills or rates, and I had never paid an electricity or telephone bill" (261). In the book she does recognize that hers has been "the most extraordinary life" (ix), one moneyed enough that she had the resources and interest to once fly to Hollywood from the U.K. for an auction of art nouveau chandeliers.

At the time she was living her rock and roll life, I was learning to conjugate Latin verbs, learning that y=mx+b, and later going to a university to figure out how I was going to support myself, including insuring a car, buying a television and much later arranging for health insurance and making sure I had heat and electricity. I knew how to pay rent every month. Along the way, I had an SLR camera or two and learned what I needed to learn about photography. I can't say I have ever wanted to be a model (or a model anything), but I have over the years learned to speak in public, to schmooze just enough. I know I can be funny.

Most women learn along the way one way or another that we cannot rely mostly on our looks.

Life skills travel,  and so when I arrived in Liverpool (Liverpool England, THE Liverpool) at the beginning of International Beatle Week in late August, I went to the local Marks and Spencer. I did this because I realized upon my arrival that I had for some reason neglected to bring much more underwear than what  I had on. Not all lingerie dries overnight in a hotel room, and though I like to shop when I travel, this purchase seemed more pedestrian than usual. But I needed to do it.

Marks and Spencer (M&S) is an old British standby. I had heard that the Liverpool store was the biggest M&S outside London, and I knew hat M&S was also where the late former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had bought her underwear. I checked online to see how the U.S. and U.K. sizes compared (bra sizes the same, knicker sizes different) and then I took the sisters shopping.

I bought basically invisible-to-most souvenirs. The lingerie department was huge, as were the choices. Strapless and multiway bras. Sports bras. Mastectomy, maternity, nursing. Balcony, plunge, longline, spacer. Minimizer. Padded. Underwire. Padded underwire. Colors. Florals. Abstracts. M&S versions of Victoria's Secret and, on the other had, lingerie that was more, um, utilitarian. Beige. (Perhaps for Margaret Thatcher a form of beige under-armor.) So too with the undies: boy shorts, thongs, high-cuts, regular (that is, Bridget Jones granny panties), lace polyester, cotton. Colors and patterns. Wisps of lace: the less fabric, the more expensive.

I will spare you the details, but I bought one set, purple and red as a cheerful and useful souvenir, and then, facing the reality that I needed a less-visible color to wear under light colors, I bought a pair in beige.

I tried not to think of this as Old Lady Beige or Industrial Beige. The clothes were comfortable and offered support. (I am a woman of a certain age. At one point not long ago, when I asked my gynecologist what happens next, he said, "Everything shrivels.") I like to think of my clothes as affirming who I am, a reflection of my personality, even if beige is not my favorite and probably never will be.

I have never been a trendsetter or a fashion plate. But we are all what we wear, after all, and I usually choose other than beige. Oh well.

I doubted very much that Pattie Boyd would have shopped in M&S. My guess is that the more upscale John  Lewis department store or a boutique featuring French lingerie (Givency?) would be more her style. And price range.

But by taking care of myself as I had learned to since the days when I aspired to be Mrs. George Harrison, I had developed some self-reliance, and, as problems when traveling go, this one was not very bad at all.

And the next day I went to International Beatle Week and saw Pattie Boyd twice that weekend.

The first was at a largely under-promoted book signing at the cafe in The Beatles Story, basically a museum for the Beatles on Albert Dock along the Mersey, a wise re-use of a red brick building initiated in part by Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, another British Invasion group. (One of their hits was "Ferry Cross the Mersey".) The line formed a half hour before Pattie, now seventy-one, and her small entourage arrived through the back door: the person I took to be her personal assistant;  and a man who may or may not have been her third husband, Rod Weston, a property developer whom she had known since the 1980s and who was almost ten years younger than she, and whom she had married a few months previously. (Even a number of years after her divorce from Eric Clapton and the death of George Harrison, those two had to be difficult acts for him to follow.) The crowd, a mixture of male and female, young and old, was fairly subdued, and the  Canadian university student in front of me was working on a social history and the Beatles thesis.  The women behind me were local and commented how much Beatle Week had grown since its beginning twenty-five years ago. "Pattie Boyd," one said. "I never imagined they would get anybody of her reputation here."

And then it was my turn.

Pattie didn't initiate a conversation, but then she didn't have to. She's Pattie, a celebrity, an image, and a photographer herself.

I asked her to sign it to "Sandy with a Y" and she was attentive and smiled, not objecting when I asked for a photo. I told her I found her book a good read.

The gap I remembered between her front teeth was gone. She did have excellent posture, just as she said in her book. She was wearing a black cardigan and slacks and the whitest white blouse I have probably ever seen. Near-cleavage. In one word: gracious. In that I-am-next-to-Pattie-Boyd moment, I sensed that there was somebody home in there. Moneyed? Of course, but also doing her job in her own style.

The next day at the convention I saw her again, this time for an hour and twenty-five feet away, when she was interviewed to a full house in the  Adelphi Hotel ballroom by writer Mark Lewisohn. Her interview, as the rest of the convention speakers were, was projected onto two screens. (The Adelphi is a monument to the past, a place of chandeliers, winding staircases, oriental rugs, high ceilings, and dust.) Pattie's interview followed that of photographer Bob Gruen (who did the John Lennon photo in front of the Statue of Liberty) and was before May Pang (the woman with whom John spent his "lost weekend"--eighteen months, actually--exiled from Yoko Ono). If May Pang seemed to have New York hustle and came across as an entrepreneur (and she said she had never tried drugs), Pattie seemed understated. Refined, even.

I don't know what the British equivalent of softball questions would be, but Lewisohn began gently. Eventually  Pattie did say that she had found George Harrison "quite exotic" because he had come from the north of England. She told the story of meeting him on the movie set, a story that probably everyone in the room already knew, and about going to India to meet Ravi Shankar. She said she had loved to work before George asked her to stop, and that "Magic Alex" who had proposed a number of outlandish and doomed-to-fail projects to the Beatles "was a bit of a con merchant." George was closest to Ringo of all the Beatles. Jane Asher was the one of the Beatle women she felt closest to. Although Beatles' manager Brian Epstein got a lot of criticism after the fact, "he did his best at the time." George was "a man of opposites", a hundred per cent one way and then a hundred percent another way, and living with such a person of extremes could be difficult. She admitted that at the time, the Beatles were very much  part of her life, so much so that "I can't say 'wow" every time they pick up a guitar." She was again classy, again in dark clothes and a white blouse.

As the interviews went on during the day (with Donovan and Peter Asher), Lewisohn mentioned that Pattie had told him she was very nervous and really didn't want to do the interview. She had not appeared to be a professional speaker, but she had done a credible version of celebrity interview. In a few months, the Beatles Story would have  a permanent display of her photos from her time with the Beatles, and a newer and improved edition of her book would be out next year. The woman next to me in the audience speculated that Pattie was looking toward her legacy, and maybe so. On the screens in the hotel she looked as if she might have had a little Botox. Maybe. The wireless microphone was clipped to her blouse, near the cleavage. She had class, but she didn't look like someone who had worked, worked the way most people do, most of her life. (I am not going to bother to google how much she is worth.)

Just as travel does, the screens magnified things. At the end of the hour, as Pattie got up to leave, her blouse moved a bit, and for a couple seconds it was apparent that she was wearing a beige bra.

Most likely it was not from M&S.

I do all my own writing, I have no co-author, and I have been paying bills and registering my car almost as long as I can remember. I even paid off  a mortgage. For my camera I have no celebrity subjects or status to make the photos I take commercially marketable. I do get a pedicure now and then and have my hair done, but usually I do my own manicure, ragged though it sometimes is. I am on husband number zero and I am a non-celebrity.

After a certain age, I have learned, women in my non-celebrity world become invisible. It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that this invisibility has an occasional advantage: freedom, which means that I can do whatever I want and most people don't care (or even notice).
Some days it is okay that I seem to be wearing an invisibility cloak. Other days, not so much.  This cultural  ageist and sexist attitude is unlikely to change.

But still we live in the physical world. Alfred North Whitehead called it "the withness of the body," and my sense is that most people, including women of a certain age, might prefer to be more frequently recognized and on occasion affirmed and even celebrated. I mean, we're all on the same face of the earth even if our individual bodies constitute the immediate environments of our lives.

Pattie Boyd and I  are not sisters except that we are both women. Sort of the same vintage, give or take.

She was a model. I am certainly not although I look presentable enough on most days. I doubt someone dresses Pattie every day; I assume she puts her knickers on one leg at a time and clasps her bra much as I do mine. But in that unlikely venue, surrounded by Beatles fans of many ages, that one quick, unplanned accidental glimpse brought to mind our unlikely, tiny, temporary commonality at this point in our lives as women of a certain age: from time to time we both need support.

Copyright Sandra Engel