All she needs is love.

[Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, Pattie Boydwith Penny Junor, Harmony Books, 336 pages]

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl But she doesn't have a lot to say. ... I wanna tell her that I love her a lot But I've got to get a belly full of wine. Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl Some day I'm gonna make her mine...

--Paul McCartney, 1970

MEMBERS OF MY GENERATION can tell you exactly where they were the moment they first heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and the moment they first heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The same day JFK's motorcade came to grief in Dealey Plaza, the Beatles' second album was released in the UK. Within weeks, it was embraced stateside as Meet the Beatles, and the Baby Boomers' most enduring love affair began.

It's hard to overstate how the shock-trauma of Kennedy's murder affected Americans born at mid-century. No other event, not even the horrors of the Vietnam War, so deranged the course of our development. This statement is melodramatic, and so was the event: what on earth was a child raised in the calm, ordered, idealized world of the late '50s and early '60s supposed to make of the president of the United States suddenly blown to bits at high noon on a public street with his glamorous, pink-clad first lady at his side? Such things were not supposed to happen.

The conspiracy angle didn't occur to us until years later. By then the damage, compounded by Boomer narcissism, exceptionalism, and sheer numerousness, had been done. And not only to us: the punk band Dead Kennedys, of the late '70s, said their name was "meant to call attention" to the fact that "the Kennedy assassinations torpedoed the American Dream. America growing bigger, better! Out in space! Bigger cars! Movie-star president and his gorgeous wife! Kaboom! The balance tilts."

The Beatles had made it onto American radio earlier in 1963 and had experienced the usual frustrating fate of British acts that tried to cross the Pond. After the assassination, though, as Pattie Boyd recounts in her wistful, prettified memoir Wonderful Tonight, U.S. interest in the group detonated into Beatlemania, taking the Fab Four by surprise.

The Beatles were not just exceptionally talented and winsome performers but a phenomenon in the sense of a marvel or wonder: a unifying force, a soul-poultice that came along at precisely the right time with an anodyne effect upon the seared psyche of a generation. In a word, joy. To this day, the mere thought of the Beatles--like the thought of Ronald Reagan--makes me smile.

As with CIA agents, there's no such thing as a former Beatlemaniac. So I can say without embarrassment that I knew Pattie Boyd's story long before I opened her book. Her own phrasing (or whoever's--only her ghostwriter knows for sure) was all that remained to check out. Those hoping for sensational new glimpses of the famous Harrison-Boyd-Clapton "love triangle" will not find them here, alas. Even so, Eric Clapton rushed out his own autobiography within a few months of his ex-wife's. His view of the seduction is simpler and more mundane than hers: for him it was a function of his out-of-control, drug-addled persona, while for her it was a flattering battle for possession of a latter-day Helen.

Patricia Boyd seemed like a pretty nice girl, and that's just what she was--bourgeois almost to a fault. When George Harrison fell for her at first sight on the set of "A Hard Day's Night," she at first refused to go out with him because she had "a steady boyfriend of two years" and "an old-fashioned view of romance--that it meant fidelity." As Clapton later told her in one of many importunate letters, "you are the only one I can truly rely on for strength and cheer." In the drug-, sex- and ego-crazed world of rock'n'roll, she was a rock of a higher order, a bastion of normalcy amid the chaos, a steel English Rose. She served this purpose first for Harrison and then for Clapton, his close friend. The subtitle says it all: "My life with ..." Pattie, born in 1944, belonged to a female generation still bred to be helpmeets, for better or for worse. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (drugs were less of a problem than The Drink, as it turned out) were not so much her jones as her cross to bear.

One doesn't read a rock memoir for accounts of Guitar Gods ranting over not having dinner on the table on time, yet this was the quotidian reality of life with George and Eric. When the Beatles toured, wives and girlfriends were forbidden to accompany the entourage. (If only Brian Epstein had still been alive, he'd have made short work of darling Yoko's limpet-like attachment to John--at least that is every Beatle fan's fantasy.) And when Clapton toured, Pattie would be frozen out by the "blokes," so she'd soon decamp. Of course, she enjoyed glamorous moments, at parties and openings and on vacation, but it's touching to see how prim and proper and, yes, bourgeois she remained as all around her seemed to crash and burn with an intoxicating flame.

Pattie served gladly at the altar of her husbands' creativity, an altar at which she herself worshipped, but she proved to be more than an artist's mate. Like her counterparts Marianne Faithfull, Nico, and Anita Pallenberg (who did crash and burn), she rose to the estate of Muse, inspiring several of George's and Eric's best love songs. If Pattie was no Maud Gonne or Lou Andreas-Salome or Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (of Tom Lehrer's immortal "Which of your magical wands / Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?"), neither were her consorts Yeats or Nietzsche or Mahler.

Patricia Boyd and (ultimately five) siblings and half-siblings were the castoffs of a deeply troubled, childish mother and her two morose and vacant husbands. They were "brought up" in the white-mischievous world of colonial Kenya on the money of her mother's family and then drop-kicked at vulnerable ages back to the "home country" where, sketchily educated, they were knocked about from one "living situation" to the next for years until they could escape. "We didn't see him much because he was always rushing off" fairly summarizes the men in Pattie's life. It's a guilty pleasure to see how dysfunctional a family could be long before our own era--and inspirational to see how a resilient survivor personality like Pattie Boyd's deals with the crazy hand she's been dealt.

Beauty rears its ugly head, of course: there would be no "Wonderful Tonight" without Pattie's long blonde hair, corn-flower-blue eyes, neoteny (the retention of such juvenile characteristics as large, widely-spaced eyes), and diastema (that adorable little space between the front teeth that drove director Les Blank, for example, so mad he made a film in 1987 called "Gap-Toothed Women" to celebrate it). Beauteous, British, and boozhwah --Pattie had it all.

Except for the ability to have children. Infidelity was a constant irritant, one she usually dealt with stoically like a nice girl should, but infertility was the real deal-breaker. Her book finally gets down to grit in the chapter where Clapton fathers a son upon a lover while still married to Pattie. Anyone who has ever grieved a lost, stillborn, or inconceivable child will feel for her at this, the nadir of her existence on the planet. And her belated realization that she ought to never have let herself be seduced away from sour, dour George only darkens the tragic postlude.

Another celebrity memoir--who cares? High-minded persons have no interest in such guilty pleasures, right? Except, as Tom Carson noted recently, a book is either a pleasure or it's not, and reading Shakespeare won't hasten the cure for cancer any more than will reading Dan Brown. In Trash Culture, Richard Keller Simon even argues that modern pulp fiction, supermarket tabloids, heaving-bosom women's magazines, TV sitcoms, and the like are just contemporary versions of Homer, Euripides, Spenser, Swift and Flaubert:

   The suffering and fall of the ancient
   nobility is now the suffering and fall
   of aging movie stars, and although
   they do not speak in the same dramatic
   language, they suffer and fall,
   and even learn about themselves, in
   much the same fashion.

But back to essentials. Could there ever be another Beatles? Another band that seems to effortlessly evolve the soundtrack of your life, beat-driven and lyrical at once, with no two songs alike, so branded that it's hard to even imagine cover versions? The answer seems a solid no, for several reasons.

First, the music industry is running scared before a fickle, attention-deficient audience that revels in tearing down its idols after one brief season of adulation. (Paris Hilton, asked by paparazzi why she was leaving a party so soon mumbles, "Yeah ... it was fun ... I'm over it.") Instead of nurturing and developing their artists, industry moguls behave like corporate CFOs fixated on maximizing quarterly earnings while killing the company.

Second, there is the cult of Cool--one thing that the Beatles--for all their hipness and avant-garde, cutting-edge withitry--never were. They wore their hearts on their (record) sleeves. They said that All You Need Is Love. Cool, by contrast, exudes detachment, distance, mockery, jaded cynicism, irony, inertia, remoteness, unresponsiveness, self-absorption, lack of feeling, disinterest, disengagement--love's opposite. Cool is a deadly virus that continues to insinuate itself into our DNA.

Third, there's too much product now, and it's too easy to produce. There is no quality control. The filters are all gone, replaced by niche markets. Talented artists require equally talented Svengalis, like Brian Epstein and George Martin, to edit and believe in them.

I'm glad my generation had our Beatlemania. "And in the end, the love you take / Is equal to the love you make"--is there any sentiment more beautiful, more simple and more true?

Marian Kester Coombs writes from Crofton, Md.