Late last year Ringo Starr announced to the world that he would no longer be signing autographs or answering fan mail. The world at first was stunned. And then outraged. From Ringo, only silence while the furor mounted. Three long, tense months passed until a few weeks ago the silence was mercifully broken.

“It's 2009 and I feel fine,” Ringo reported, along with the news that he was resuming his John Hancock duties. The world can now breathe a sigh of relief. All is forgiven.

And that's just it with these Beatles guys—all is always forgiven. They're not only Teflon, they're Teflon covered in Pam. As untouchable and impervious as the mob or maybe even Revenue Canada. It defies reason.

Despite early dust-ups with Jesus, Charles Manson, the CIA, and LSD, no band can claim to have weathered so many years of fame and scrutiny with so little scarring. Look at the Stones—the anti-Beatles in more ways than one, reduced now to pop-culture punching bags, swaying wearily in the winds of history as all trace of their credibility withers away. While the Stones busied themselves with self-parody, the Beatles became an unassailable monument.

It helps that the Beatles broke up when they did. They never overstayed their welcome. More bands should really look into this. But even before they imploded, the mythology was already firmly in place. Turning this mythology into an industry was inevitable, yet no amount of naked cash-grabbery or reheating of the leftovers seems to make a dent in their reputation.

Obviously, somebody allowed 1978's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to happen, somebody signed off on the recent Across the Universe sap-fest, but do you think the Beatles took any heat for it? Time after time, they manage to keep a comfortable, yet profitable, distance from the flames.

They even had the big hairy balls to release two “new” songs as a marketing ploy to shift Anthology units in 1995 and bring long-simmering Fab Four reunion fever to a boil, even though one of them was already completely dead. The words “crass exploitation” escaped nary a lip and Anthology went on to set crazy sales records.

Not even Las Vegas—the land of laughingstock has-beens easing gently into endgame careers of nightly schmaltz-peddling—has been able to make a bitch out of the Beatles. Unbelievably, the indignity of some Cirque du Soleil monkey thrusting his bumpy leotard around inside a neon trapezoid to the strains of “Eleanor Rigby” didn't seem to faze anyone, least of all the Beatles.

Heather Mills, the former Mrs. Paul McCartney, found out the hard way that you don't fuck with a Beatle. She may have snagged 50 million—chump change—but it was clear from the get-go that her effort to paint the beloved ex-mop-top as an abusive lout would fail miserably. He's the cute one, for Christ's sake. And now she's the deranged-pariah one. And, say, how's erstwhile McCartney adversary Michael Jackson doing these days? Exactly.

But getting back to Ringo, I have a pet theory about him: he's the luckiest man in showbiz, given that he's proven even more Teflon-coated than his former bandmates. Not only that, it's beginning to look more and more likely that he will simply refuse to die—just for the irony. He will bury Paul. He might even outlive Keith Richards. And still slaving away over a pile of fan mail, Ringo will be heard to remark, “It's 2049 and I feel fine.”