One of the four members of the Beatles, John Lennon grew up in Liverpool in the UK. His biological parents were Julia Lennon and Alf Lennon. When Lennon was still a child, Alf left home to work at sea. Julia had numerous boyfriends and struggled to care for Lennon, though she loved him. Worried about Lennon’s well-being, his aunt Mimi soon took him in and raised him with her husband, George. Lennon loved Mimi and George, but Mimi was strict and no-nonsense. She was particularly insistent that Lennon get an education and even helped him to get into the Liverpool College of Art despite his poor grades in high school.

During the years when Lennon was forming the Beatles with Paul McCartney, he started skipping class to spend time with Julia. He and McCartney would sneak out of class and go to Julia’s to listen to music and write songs together. While Mimi lent order to Lennon’s life, Julia offered him the fun and excitement he craved. However, as they started to reestablish their bond, Julia died after she was hit by a car. This loss devastated Lennon and made him even more reliant on his friendship with McCartney.

Lennon struggled to maintain a sense of internal peace throughout his life. Leslie argues that Lennon’s connection with McCartney and the Beatles were his only constants and that he derived a particular sense of home from spending time with McCartney. The two understood one another on a soulish level. When they had disagreements or misunderstandings, Lennon often withdrew. Leslie speculates that this is because he didn’t understand himself apart from McCartney. At the same time, Leslie holds that Lennon and McCartney’s disagreements signified their deep love for each other.

Lennon’s relationship with Yoko Ono offered him another form of stability. Leslie casts him as codependent in this relationship and holds that Lennon was using Ono to replace McCartney. In addition, being with Ono inspired some of Lennon’s most pivotal work and creative streaks. He was experiencing one such period when he was murdered outside his New York City apartment in December 1980. While the world cast him as a social justice hero in the wake of his death, Leslie argues that this was not the sum of Lennon’s character.

Like Lennon, Paul McCartney grew up in Liverpool. His parents were Mary McCartney and Jim McCartney. When McCartney was 15 (just eight months before he met Lennon), his mother died suddenly of cancer. McCartney was devastated but showed little emotional response to the event. Leslie argues that his seeming inability to emote over Mary’s death was evidence that he wasn’t given the tools to grieve. (He attributes McCartney’s odd response to Lennon’s murder to this same phenomenon: McCartney had learned to quash his emotions to survive, particularly in the public arena.)

McCartney was a talented, focused musician from a young age. He pursued numerous musical instruments, and particularly honed his skill on the guitar, bass, and drums. He was also a vocalist and a lyricist. With Lennon, he formed the Beatles and the Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo. Like Lennon, McCartney threw himself into life with the Beatles. Although he initially wondered if he should let go of his musical dreams and work in the factory with his father, Lennon convinced him otherwise.

In John & Paul, Leslie investigates the complex relationship that McCartney shared with Lennon. He particularly focuses on Lennon’s seeming reliance on McCartney, and oftentimes his extreme jealousy of McCartney. At other times, Leslie quotes McCartney publicly and privately confessing his own jealousy of Lennon (most notably when Lennon wrote a particular song or when he became involved with Yoko Ono). However, Leslie also highlights McCartney’s profound love for his friend. Just as Lennon cherished McCartney, McCartney cherished Lennon despite the conflicts they encountered and disagreements they faced.

As of 2025, McCartney is 82 years old and is still writing, making, and performing music. After the Beatles broke up, he began a solo career and formed the band Wings with his then-wife, Linda Eastman. He has either formed or contributed to other groups including Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band, Paul McCartney’s Band, Band Aid, and the Firemen.

Married to Lennon until his death in 1980, Yoko Ono met Lennon in 1966 in London. Ono was seven years older than Lennon and was an established visual and performance artist. Although the two later framed “the story of their relationship […] as love from the moment of their first meeting,” Leslie holds that their affair and creative partnership developed over time (246). Born in 1933, Ono was a member of a prominent banking family in Japan. Her father’s work later relocated the family to New York, where Ono lived for many years. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, studying music and art, but disliked the bureaucratic system because it restricted her creative freedom. Throughout the 1960s, she began to establish herself as a prominent voice in the avant-garde art scene. She was working on a gallery display of her work at a London museum when she met Lennon.

Ono and Lennon had a deep and mysterious connection. Historically, the media demonized Ono, blaming her for the Beatles’ breakup. In John & Paul, Leslie challenges this myth. Instead of presenting Ono as an interloper, he argues that Lennon relied on her and needed their relationship to sustain him when he and McCartney were growing apart. Leslie quotes May Pang’s assessment of Ono and Lennon’s relationship to convey the distinct nature of their bond:

I believe they did love each other, but their love was unlike any concept of love that I have known or read about. They spent enormous amounts of time in bed together, but they rarely kissed or touched…They behaved more like children snuggling against each other to ward off any demons that might be loose in the night (349).

Pang’s description of Ono and Lennon’s dynamic presents the lovers as equals, rather than dependents. Her description authenticates McCartney’s belief that they were deeply in love and needed one another to survive. Ono and Lennon had a close creative partnership and were social activists. They not only produced music together but were active participants in the youth protests in the US in the 1970s.