Paul McCartney’s divorce settlement has been making international headlines as Heather Mills has been awarded $50 million after being married to the ex-Beatle for only four years. Though this was the first divorce for McCartney, it’s far from the first divorce of a member of the Beatles. As a matter of fact, until the Mills divorce, McCartney was the only member of the group who had not been divorced.

Ringo Starr married Maureen Cox in the middle of Beatlemania in February of 1965. That marriage resulted in three children over the course of 10 years. In 1975 they divorced and Starr later remarried. He has been married to his second wife, Barbara Bach, since 1981. Maureen Cox died of leukemia in 1994.

George Harrison’s love life was made endlessly complicated by his marriage to Pattie Boyd. They married in 1966, with McCartney serving as Harrison’s best man. The marriage was a turbulent one that resulted in several songs written about Boyd. Unfortunately, not all of them were written by Harrison. After the couple’s 1977 divorce, Boyd married Eric Clapton.

John Lennon married Cynthia Powell in 1962, just as the Beatles were on the cusp of worldwide fame. The marriage was prompted by Powell’s accidental pregnancy with their son Julian. The marriage lasted until 1968.


Get the dirt on John with Cynthia Powell Lennon's biography, John. She also wrote an earlier book about him that he attempted to block from publication.


Pattie Boyd's book caters to those curious about her marriages to George Harrison and Eric Clapton.