Saturday, September 20, 1964 SOMEWHERE along the way, in the two years since the other madness--the world of the H-Bomb--one of the deeper thinkers traced the Beatle coiffure all the way back to the Neanderthal man. While it is true that there were no union barber shops in those days (and, for all we know, no Rock and Roll), that statement was nonetheless a slander.     No, not on the Neanderthal man. On George Harrison, for this is the Beatle generally credited with inventing the celebrated hairdo. In his words, it happened in 1960, when he was just a sprite of 18:     "I went to the swimming pool where we were in Hamburg and by the time my hair dried, without the benefit of a comb or a brush, it looked like it does now."     This statement has never been challenged by the other Beatles. Indeed, the fact is that George Harrison not only first combed--or, rather, didn't comb--his hair that way, but he was also the first to let it grow that way in the first place.   *       *       * FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE INTERESTED IN THE ROLE PLAYED by parents in this society, it all began, actually, with George's father, Harold Harrison, who in those days was in Britain's merchant navy but later--until autumn, in fact--drove a school bus in Liverpool for $45 a week.     "I used to cut his hair for him when he was little," the man has said, and it has been confirmed by Mrs. Louise Harrison, "and I always gave him a really short back and sides and he always said that he would never have his hair cut when he grew up. Well, he certainly kept his word."     He did, indeed, and this is what he told me when relentlessy pursuing this item of history aboard the Beatles' chartered jet:      "I read the thing my father said, and it's true. Even in those days I felt an idiot with my hair short. Even when you told a barber how you wanted your hair cut you came out practically bald, so I did let it grow."     But George makes the same disclaimer about the Beatle hair--his is brown, like his eyes--as the others do, and just as strenuously:     "All this fuss [read it "foos," because he has the thickest accent in the crowd] over our hair is a bit annoying. We had the hit records, like 'Love Me Do' and 'Please Please Me,' long before people outside of Hamburg or Liverpool ever saw us."   *       *       * GEORGE HARRISON, CALLED "THE BLOODY SPHINX" BY JOHN Lennon and "The Great Stone Face" by Ringo Starr, is rather gaunt and ascetic in apperarence. Someone once said that he's the only one who could ever make the Beatles look like the Budapest String Quartet (that is, if they ever wanted to look like that).     He's more of a brooder than the others, and more of a loner--the only song he himself has written was called, most appropriately, "Don't Bother Me," But while he may not say much, he either has the sharpest tongue next to John Lennon's, which is no mean achievement, or is the most easily offended.     There's a nice illustration of this in what happened when Noel Coward made his celebrated crack about the Beatles: "I've met them. Delightful lads. Absolutely no talent."     John shrugged it off, saying "He forgot what he was like at our age," but George snapped back with this:     "He's jealous because he never wrote anything that ever lived."     Thus the Baby Beatle, not exactly burdened down with credentials in this area, made it clear that he, for one, doesn't happen to be very high on the considerable achievements of Noel Coward, playwright-composer-director-actor. But then the boy has also been pretty outspoken about some of the Empire's other shining lights, such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney--and lead guitarist George Harrison (don't look for Ringo Starr here; nobody ever says anything bad about little Ringo).     "Well, the songs that John and Paul write," George told Al Aronowitz, of the Saturday Evening Post, "they're alright, but they're not the greatest."     Asked what he wanted the most in the terms of music, he said, "I'd like to hear John sing in tune, and I'd also like to become a good guitarist."     He meant that last point, too. Always high on such guitar men as Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy and lately moved by that pretty good classical strummer from Spain, Andres Segovia, George does brood about his own limitations. He told me that it always depressed him to listen to the swinging guitarists in the Bill Black Combo, which backed up the other acts in the million-dollar Beatle tour of the U.S. and Canada that ends Sunday night at the Paramount here.     "I get fed up," George said, "because I can't do it so good."      So much for the music. The cash is also an irritation--a small irritation, naturally--in the life of this Beatle.   *       *       *  WHILE HE HAS SAID THAT BE WOULD LIKE TO RETIRE WITH A "whacking great pile of money," George resents suggestions that he's chasing the dollar any harder than the others.     "I don't like people to think I'm a miser, counting every penny," he says, "but I am more interested than the others in business." Business--big business--is precisely what Beatlemania has become, of course, and George is the one who asks manager Brian Epstein the questions about what's going on in the store, as it were.     It is even possible that the Baby Beatle understands the Mother Country's tax structure better than the  others--and they happen to have the kind of law that makes you glad our side won the Revolution: the Crown can dip into the more astronomical straight incomes over there for as much as 98 cents on the dollar.     No such awful thing can happen to a Beatle, of course, because all the loot goes into the corporate operation as fast as it can be sorted out. The boys just draw a stipend for walking-around money, or to buy fast cars or plush London hideaways to rest their heavy heads in. Little things like that.     On this subject, George himself happens to have a $60,000 house somewhere around London, an XKE Jaguar (well, Paul has an Alfa Romeo on order) and a $60,000 Mini-Mirior, "just for nippin' around." He also appears to have undisputed possession of an item named Patti Boyd. A pretty 20-year-old model-actress, she had a bit part in "A Hard Day's Night" and then, chaperoned 'by the old married couple,' Mr. and Mrs. John Lennon, enjoyed a vacation with George in the South Seas.     [Whether George will marry Patti Boyd or Paul will marry Jane Asher or Ringo will marry Maureen Cox falls into the category of the state secret in Whitehall. One British journalist on the Beatles' flying carpet (Lockheed, four motors) suggested to me that any announcement would have to come from the Prime Minister, or perhaps the Queen herself. He may have been joking, of course.]   *       *       * GOING BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL, IF WE CAN GET THIS essay away from girls and money for a change, George is just as intent as John and Paul about disputing the slum image--sometimes bordering on the situation of that hard-lucky Oliver Twist--which was originally pinned on the new Liverpool millionaires.     The Harrisons had three mouths to feed on a seaman's pay before George arrived--a daughter, now Mrs. Louise Caldwell, married to an American engineer and living in South Illinois, and two other sons, both tradesmen. They lived in a Council House, like our public projects, but without all the comforts, in Woolton, outside of Liverpool.     "Oh, we never starved," George says, his lean and angular face very serious. "I can never remember my family having such a bad time where everybody owes money and all that. The fact is, we were all working class, all the families. We never had a lot of things, any of the Beatles, but I can't stand all those stories about us all as scruffs with no clothes on our backs."     He says he quit the Liverpool Art Institute in his mid-teens to become an electrician's apprentice out of choice, riot necessity. "I wasn't paying much (say "mooch") attention in school," he says. "I know some people think all of us ("oos") should have, but we were all so much more interested in our guitars. And I was keen on soccer, cricket and swimming, besides."     The electrical career failed him, George has said, because he "kept blowing things up."     He liked the electrical guitar better anyway, of course. He likes it so much, what with all the wonders it has performed for him in such a short time, that he doesn't even mind being labeled the anonymous Beatle, or the Quiet One.      "I don't care," he says. "Everybody wants to put you into a category of some kind, so John is the married one and Paul's the cute one and Ringo's the one with the funny ("foony") name and all those rings.     "I don't happen to be talkative because nobody's asking me anything usually, so they've made me the Quiet One. The fact is, we're all the same. If we weren't the same we wouldn't be together so long, we'd be having arguments all the time and break up."     At this moment, in its turbulent and troubled history, it would appear that no greater calamity could befall what's left of the British Empire. ____ Last of the Series