The Beatles were always like a family.
Not squabbling brothers, exactly - although John Lennon and Paul McCartney were as hotly jealous and competitive as any siblings - but a weird, dysfunctional family, with Paul as the bossy, lecturing mother, John as the obstreperous, violently independent father, and George and Ringo as the kids, occasionally walking out in a strop but generally aware of their place.Yet all four men - complex personalities magnified by fame into legends - had their own families: loving, broken, harassed, resentful. Where are they now?
The Beatles' shadow falls over everyone, but of all the wives and children the Fab Four left behind, Lennon's are, understandably, the most affected.
Cynthia Lennon, who married John when she was 21 and pregnant, has been most obviously scarred. Hidden from public view as John rose to messianic acclaim (pop stars were not supposed to have wives), the unpretentious, long-suffering Cynthia turned a blind eye as her husband enjoyed the perks of his success, only to be sidelined permanently when she came home one day to find a pair of Japanese slippers on the welcome mat of her home, and performance artist Yoko Ono in her bed.
She accepted a divorce settlement of only 100,000 pounds and went through two failed marriages - "on the rebound," she admitted - to an Italian hotelier and an English engineer, before settling with her current boyfriend on the Isle of Man.
For Julian Lennon, who was 17 when his father died, the ghost of John's voice on the Beatles' "new" single "Free as a Bird" must be a sickening sound. After more than 10 years of battling to establish himself as a pop singer, simultaneously blessed and cursed with a voice and face eerily reminiscent of John, Julian is once again reduced to the role of abandoned son; the young man pitied because his millionaire father left him an allowance of only 100 pounds per week.
He is currently writing songs for his new album, his publicist curtly explains, and talking about the Beatles is not considered helpful to his career.
Yoko Ono, in contrast, has never shied from invoking the memory of Lennon. Two years ago, she appalled Beatles fans by creating collages using the bloodstained shirt and shattered spectacles of her murdered husband. It was she who allowed Paul, George and Ringo access to John's old demo tapes and who now promotes her new role in a TV sitcom, "Mad About You," by posing in a bed with a married couple - a banal echo of her bed-ins for peace in the '60s.
Sean Ono Lennon has led perhaps the most unreal life of all the Beatlekinder: brought up by a thoroughly domesticated John for the first five years of his life, he was - after the murder - initially shut off by his depressed mother, who felt unable to face him because he brought back too many memories.
Sean also spent childhood days in Michael Jackson's Neverland playhouse, and, after showing no musical aptitude whatsoever as a child, is now a guitarist and pianist in his own band Ima (Japanese for "now"), who have just recorded an album with Yoko.
The only fatality, apart from John Lennon's, to have occurred within the Beatles' extended family was that of Maureen Cox Starkey Tigrett, Ringo Starr's first wife. She died last year after a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia.
A charmingly blunt woman, she split from Ringo in 1975, but 12 years later sued her own divorce solicitors, saying she was "thick as two short planks" and had been conned by them, and that Ringo was "a sodding great Andy Capp."
She and her daughter Lee, it was revealed, spent $150 a week on cosmetics. "It's really easy to do," she told a rapt High Court.
Ringo's daughter Lee, 24, made headlines three months ago, when she had emergency brain surgery after collapsing with a mystery infection. In September she was reported as having had a second operation on her brain and was scheduled to have daily radiation treatment. Before this, she ran a '60s-style boutique in Los Angeles, having tried in vain to learn to play the drums.
Ringo's sons, Zak, 29, and Jason, 27, are both drummers; Zak also followed his father into a spell of alcohol abuse.
The real victim of Ringo's alcoholism, however, has been his second wife, Barbara Bach, a former model who memorably starred in "The Spy Who Loved Me." Ringo met her on the set of an extremely lowbrow film called "Caveman" in 1981, and did his own caveman act on her several years later - "I trashed Barbara so bad that our staff thought she was dead," Ringo explained in a 1992 television interview. The couple went to the Betty Ford drying-out clinic and are now over their booze problems.
Poor Ringo's soap-operaish life of tragedy and farce was sealed when his 23-year-old stepdaughter, Francesca, made headlines for her drug-taking, boozing and lesbian affair with a 16-year-old. She also walked through a glass door, causing lacerations to her face that required 70 stitches.
George Harrison's family cannot compete with such bloody, heartbreaking history, although his first wife, model Patti Boyd, famously became involved in a rock 'n' roll love triangle, driving George's best friend, Eric Clapton, into such frenzies of desire that he wrote the frantic, impassioned "Layla" for her.
Patti left George for Eric in 1974, and George found true love again three years later, marrying Mexican-born secretary Olivia Arrias after she gave birth to his only son. Dhani, 16, is the youngest and most private Beatle child.
Paul McCartney's kids have also grown up in his image: sensible, businesslike and creative. Mary, 25, works in music publishing for her father's company, while 23-year-old Stella is a clothes designer. Paul's son, James, 18, is still in school; like his sisters, he attended a state school - Paul and Linda's attempt to keep their feet on the ground.
Indeed, the only whiff of scandal attached to the McCartneys concerns Linda's vegetarian food empire, which has been criticized twice in recent years - for producing pies that contained meat, and veggie burgers which contained twice as much fat as advertised.
Even press attempts to incite a cuisine war between Linda and Jane Asher, the cakemaking actress who dated Paul for four years in the '60s, have been ineffective.
Despite being asked on every interview she has ever done, Asher refuses to speak about Paul, making her perhaps the only Beatle "family" member whose life is not overshadowed by the monolith that was - and is - the Beatles.