With a Love Like That: The Beatles and the Women Who Loved Them

An intimate look inside the Beatles and their relationships with their muses, the eight women who shared the Beatles’ lives from their teens through Beatlemania and to the breakup.

The story of the women behind the Beatles has never been written. From their earliest teens, the boys who became the Beatles clearly loved women, and their choice of women partners reveals peculiarities of temperament and ambition that illuminates the Beatles in a surprising new way. In relaying the lives of the Beatles’ women, With a Love Like That charts unrecorded collaborations and reveals startling autobiographical stories behind the band’s most famous songs. It also unfolds as an eye-opening alternative history of the forces that brought the Beatles together and ultimately tore them apart.

Like the young Beatles themselves, the eight women who embarked on a journey with them that would forever change music knew nothing of where it would lead. Among them was Cynthia Powell, who was an anchor for John, became his first wife, and also had a child with him. Mo Cox was Ringo’s first wife, who would start a family with him and eventually have a long-term affair with George. Iris Caldwell had romances with Paul and George in the Beatles’ early days, and Dot Rhone loved Paul, but was too naive for the rock star lifestyle. Jane Asher was also romanced by Paul, and would become his fiancee, only to break up with him when she learned of his infidelity. Pattie Boyd famously married George Harrison, only to be wooed by Eric Clapton. Then, of course, there were the two relationships that effectively ended the Beatles: John and Yoko Ono, and Paul and Linda Eastman.

Drawing from interviews in which key figures in the Beatles’ story will recount the truth of their private lives for the first time, With a Love Like That will reveal a side of the Beatles we have never seen before.

Michael Feeney Callan is the critically acclaimed author of biographies of Robert Redford, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Harris, Julie Christie, and Sean Connery. He has also written fiction, worked for the BBC, Ireland’s Ardmore Studios, and PBS as a writer, producer, and director of television dramas and documentaries. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.