Thursday, September 18, 1964 PAUL McCARTNEY, just a hair past 22, is The Star. He is also the best-read Beatle, the best-spoken, the best-looking, the best-onstage personality (and he'll do a little more clowning for the fans offstage), the best-singer and certainly the best-left-handed guitar player.     Paul can also talk with more animation than any of the others except, understandably, when some cad has poured more Scotch into John Lennon's Coke than his.     Finally, Paul is the only ex-Boy Scout among the fun-loving Beatles. He was 11 then, and there's hardly any reason to believe that he will have any further association with the organization--unless he decides to buy it and toss it into his investment portfolio.     As far as The Star bit goes, none of the Beatles challenge the description. Ringo Starr sums it up by saying, "He's the biggest." And the general view is that if any one of new Liverpool millionaires elected to go off on his own and do a single, just to pick up whatever loose coins may be left in the record stores and music halls of the world, it would be Paul.   *       *       * THERE IS, OF COURSE, NO REASON WHY PAUL McCARTNEY should do any such thing. Indeed, the corporate structure of Beatles Ltd. is so complex that it would take a whole army of barristers--under the flinty eyes of the tax man--to shake anyone of the boys free. This is the way it works:     Beyond Beatles Ltd., in which manager Brian Epstein holds a 25 percent share, leaving the rugheads to split a measly 75 percent four ways, there is the parent corporation, Nems Enterprises (out of Northern England Music Supply, or something like that); British Lion Films (bought outright); MACLEN (for Paul and John's songs); Jaep Music (for Dick James, who handles the publishing end, and Mr. Epstein) and Seltaeb, which is Beatles spelled backwards and keeps an eye on the $3 wigs and all the other junk.     Parenthetically, my own tireless researches while traveling as a paying guest (these kids don't pick up any tabs) in the Beatles' entourage showed that the Beatle sweatshirt has all but put Beethoven into the discard in the sporting goods shops. That bloke, as you must know, was an earlier music maker of whom it used to be said, "Well, his songs weren't much but he made a heluva sweatshirt."     But then, this article is about Paul McCartney, who is an engaging fellow on his own. While there are some oafs who have talked darkly about success having gone to his head (the hair is jet black and the eyes are hazel), Paul himself has said:     "We can't sing, we can't do anything, we're just having a good time." In Montreal last week, he said, "We're singers first, we can't play," but he has never said anything as harsh as John Lennon's, "We're kidding you, we're kidding ourselves, we're kidding everything. We don't take anything seriously except the money."     Paul, who is a slender 5 foot 10 or so but, like John and the baby Beatle, George Harrison, gets closer to 6 feet on the two-inch heel of his zippered boots, does take quite a few things seriously besides the money.   *       *       * HE WAS MORE SERIOUS ABOUT SCHOOL, TO BEGIN WITH, notably on his English courses (all the Beatles were weak on math until they found themselves rocked into the world of high finance). He made the A level in literature in grammar school (high school here) and could have gone onto the university.     "I didn't know quite what to do then, when I was 16," he says. "When the time came to decide, we had a chance to go to get that date in Hamburg, so it was either a matter of going to Hamburg with the fellows or going on to teacher's training. I had thought about that but I had no big ambition. I know when I talked about music to my English master, he said, 'You'll never make it in music.'"     Paul's mother had to work to supplement James McCartney's earnings as a cotton salesman on the Liverpool Exchange. She was a district nurse (midwife) but became a health officer in the Liverpool schools before she died, when Paul was 14 (as happened to John Lennon) and his brother, Michael, was 13. Michael started as a hairdresser (sorry, these are just the facts), but is now working in a satirical comedy group in Britain.     Paul is just as vigorous as the other Beatles in insisting that he did not grow up under conditions of the worst possible poverty.      "Oh, there never really was any real want," he says, "but I suppose it wasn't always idyllic. I mean it was not pretty pretty with flowers all around us."     There are flowers now--McCartney Sr. has been installed in a $28,000 house in Cheshire, outside of Liverpool--and there was music in the other time.     "My dad played the piano and the trumpet, too, until his teeth fell out," Paul says, laughing. "In fact, he had a band--Jim Mac's Jazz Band, a spare time thing--before I was born. 'The worst band in England,' I heard. Anyway, I remember that he wouldn't teach me how to play the piano. I did take one or two lessons when I was 10, but it was too much like school. Then I took some more lessons at school and got nowhere, and I tried the trumpet too but you can't sing with a trumpet in your mouth, so I got a guitar, finally."     The elder McCartney has not turned on too whole heartedly for the jackhammer beat from which the Beatles--back in the Hamburg days in 1960--took their name. "Some of our material is a bit way out," Paul says, "for a razzamatazz chap like him."   *       *       * AMONG HIS SMALL IRRITATIONS TODAY, PAUL HAS STRONG views about the adults who, for some strange reason, have read a sex angle into the wild and frenzied adoration which teenagers everywhere (not to mention some of the older girls) have showered on the Beatles.     "Actually," Paul says, "the psychiatrists don't say anything very clever about us, just things which sound moderately clever. I don't think there is a sex angle. If there is, there is a heluva lot more sex when women go to wrestling matches and scream their heads off. With us, the psychiatrists feel that because it's children screaming we must be some sort of bad influence.     "I think some of them forget that when they were kids they were doing the same thing for Crosby and Sinatra and Rudy Vallee. And they forget the Charleston and the Black Bottom and the other dance crazes of those days, weren't they sexy? Hell, I can remember that even the waltz was considered bad once, because people held themselves so close. It's all so silly, we feel soft--stupid, you would say--discussing it.     "What we do when we sing is spontaneous, stamping our feet up and down, little things like that. It's certainly nothing like Elvis Presley, and for that matter we never thought of him as the least bit suggestive; we were never offended by it. It was the adults--the mixed up adult world--that brought sex into it. And they made such a point of boys going wild over Presley. Hell, I remember in the old days when I heard Bill Haley sing 'Rock Around the Clock' and those other songs I got very excited--I felt a tingle up and down my spine. I suppose some nitwits would say I was a queer, but I'm not a queer. None of us are queers,"   *       *       * AN AGNOSTIC, LIKE ALL THE OTHER BEATLES, PAUL IS ALSO outspoken on the subject of religion. He was born a Catholic and there are effusive fan magazine articles quoting him on his strong belief in the deity, but this is what he told me:     "I just don't honestly don't know about God--if He is there or He isn't there. I can't say I know, one way or another, but it's all cloaked in such ways that you feel if you say there is no God you will be struck down by a thunderbolt or something. It's all so silly, isn't it!"     And on the matter of the Beatles' general irreverence--towards nearly everything:     "Reverence," he says, in his quiet, earnest way, "often goes too far. Take the Royal Family--I don't feel all that reverence for them. We talked to Princess Margaret, all of us, just like people because we would have felt ridiculous saying, 'Your Highness' or 'Your Worship.' It's much better this way--not that we want to be so irreverent that we sound stupid."     And on the Beatles' movie, "A Hard Day's Night":     "We were surprised that some of the critics found so much meaning in it. The picture was nothing at all but a string of little things--I suppose we were spoofing the general popular film, especially some of the silly musicals made in England, and Hollywood, too. We were just trying to make something that was not a bad film; you know, so that nobody would say, 'Well, it's not so bad for them.' I know we didn't feel like actors. We were just sort of playing out a weekend the way it is in our own lives now."     There's one more item here--the matter of Jane Asher, the 18-year-old aspiring actress back home who has been identified by Paul McCartney as his girlfriend and, by other authorities, such as Walter Winchell, as his wife.     "I haven't married Jane," this Beatle says, "but every time I deny it someone says I have married Jane. It's very difficult, isn't it!" ____ IN THE WEEK-END EDITION: George Harrison, the Baby Beatle.