Beatles (59 page)

‘I’ve got “You can’t love me with an artichoke heart”, which is not bad.’ He sang and played the song on his Hammond organ. ‘But I’m not sure about continuing the joke – “You can’t listen with your cauliflower ear” or “Don’t be an apricot fool”. I don’t know. I’ll just see how it turns out.

‘I’ve got no vocal range, so I’ve got to keep all my songs simple. Marianne is the same, so that’s all right.’

His voice doesn’t have much range, but it has a sizeable following from the fans, judging from the letters in
Beatles Monthly
. Fans are always asking why John and Paul don’t let him sing more. ‘It’s not true they don’t let me. I would if I wanted to. I just can’t be bothered.’

He looks upon John and Paul as the composers and writers. He feels he needn’t bother when they are so good, unless he happens to have something in his head.

‘I’m not sure which way I want to go now. Real Indian classical songs are so much different from the sort of Indian-influenced pop songs that have been turned out over here. They’re just ordinary pop songs, with a little bit of Indian background.

‘I’m not sure about the ones I’ve written. Looked at from another person’s point of view, as pop songs, I like them. But looked at from my point of view, from what I really want to do, I don’t like what I’ve done so far. I always seem to be rushed. I see things afterwards that I should have done.’

He’s amused by people who take Beatle music too seriously. He says the words of ‘Within You, Without You’ were meant to be true, but it was still a joke. ‘That’s what people don’t understand. Like John’s “I Am The Walrus” – “I am he as you are he as you are me”. It’s true but it’s still a joke. People looked for all sort of hidden meanings. It’s serious and it’s not serious.’

George thinks they could all go a lot further and probably will in music and words. He thought John’s line about taking her knickers down in ‘I Am The Walrus’ was great.

‘Why can’t you have people fucking as well? It’s going on everywhere in the world, all the time. So why can’t you mention
it? It’s just a word, made up by people. It’s meaningless in itself. Keep saying it – Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. See, it doesn’t mean a thing, so why can’t you use it in a song? We will eventually. We haven’t started yet.’

This would follow on Kenneth Tynan’s theory that the Beatle songs are in direct line from medieval English songs. They were all full of arses, shit and fucking. So in one way, it is true. George, John and Paul haven’t really done anything yet in their songs.

Meanwhile, back at the George Harrison ranch. It does look a bit like a ranch, with all that low-slung white wood. The telephone rang. It wasn’t a fan but an ex-employee with a long complicated story about how he’d loaned Jayne Mansfield £250 and she’d died without repaying it and he was about to be evicted and could George help. George said yes, of course. He put down the phone and said ‘Well, what’s £250?’

George is still a Beatle. It’s his job and, as with all jobs, everyone has to think about it now and again, and of the future. He is now beginning to think he has a duty to do it well. He might even have some sort of social responsibilities as a pop idol, which is something none of them considered for one minute not so very long ago.

He is still umbilically connected with the others, despite all the sitar exercises and higher thoughts. They’re his greatest friends. As they shared his religious interest, he shares all their passions, however mundane, from long neckerchiefs to cameras.

‘If one experiences something, the others all have to know about it,’ says Pattie. ‘They have crazes, just like you have crazes at school. But it keeps them all happy.

‘They do waste a lot, when they take up a new craze. They buy a lot of stuff they’re never going to use, but it often turns out useful. They spent a lot on cameras and film equipment, but it showed them they could make films, without having to know a lot.

‘I know now that they are all part of one thing. I didn’t realize it when I was first married. They all belong to each other. No one person belongs to one other person. It’s no use trying to
cling on or you would just become miserable. George is my husband, but he’s got to be free to go with them if he wants. It’s important to him to be free.

‘George has a lot with the others that I can never know about. Nobody, not even the wives, can break through it or even comprehend it.

‘It used to hurt me at first, as I slowly began to learn there was a part I could never be part of. Cyn talked to me about it. She said they would always be a part of each other.’

There is only one other minor aspect of Beatle life that Pattie in any way criticizes. Unlike the Beatles themselves, Pattie feels they should do something with their money in the way of helping some charitable cause. (Since the summer of 1968 they have started to donate the profits of a few songs to certain charities. ‘Across the Universe’ went to the World Wildlife Fund.)

‘I know they say a lot of these charities are just keeping the officials in money. There must be something we can do, the way Marlon Brando helps homeless children.

‘The thing with the Beatles was that they were plagued by charities in the early days, wanting them to do things. All those crowds of crippled children that were taken to see them in their dressing rooms, as if they were faith healers. This somehow sickened them.

‘I wouldn’t mind organizing some charity, but there again the publicity would come out all wrong and spoil everything, as George says. It always does. People would think we were doing it for the wrong reasons, the way some people couldn’t believe they were genuinely interested in going to listen to Maharishi. It’s difficult to know what to do.’

George himself says he knows what he is going to do. He has no worries about the future.

His interest in spiritual things will last for ever, he says. The cynics will be proved wrong. The whole interest in Indian cultures is not a passing phase.

‘Reaching a blissful state is the most important thing, but I’ve still got to do a job, being a Beatle.

‘We’ve got to do that job because we
can
do things now. We’re in a position to try things, to show people. We can jump around and try new things, which others can’t or won’t. Like drugs. People doing ordinary jobs just couldn’t give the time we did to looking into all that.

‘If Mick (Jagger) had gone to jail for taking pot he would have been the best person it could have happened to. It would have been much better than if it had happened to someone with no money, who it could have ruined. Being rich and famous makes it easier to go through with that sort of thing.

‘We’ve just really started making films.
Magical Mystery Tour
was nothing. But we’ll show it can be done. Anyone can make films, you don’t have to do all this messing around with backers and companies and hundreds of technicians and scripts worked out to the last word.

‘We’ll make perhaps one or two films a year ourselves, not necessarily with us in them. We’ll hire out our studios and people to anyone who wants them. We’ll lend our money as well. If we ever have to use backers, we’ll make sure they have no influence.

‘We’ll go round and round in circles, doing films, trying out new things. Then after films we’ll try something new. I don’t know what. We didn’t know we were going to make films when we started making records.

‘It’ll just be the same sort of scene, trying to do something new each time, going on a bit. Then we die and go on to a new life, where we try again, to get better all the time. That’s life. That’s death.

‘But as for this life, we haven’t done anything yet.’

Ringo lives round the corner from John on the same private estate in Weybridge, Surrey. It is also a large mock-Tudor house. It was built in 1925 and is called Sunny Heights. It cost him £37,000, plus £40,000 to do it up. It hasn’t got a swimming pool like John’s or George’s, but it has much bigger grounds, with lots of trees and shrubs. It backs on to St George’s Hill golf course. Neither he nor John is a member of the club and has never asked to be. But when they moved in one newspaper reporter asked the club if the Beatles could be members. He was told no, there was a long waiting list. Ringo says he wouldn’t join anyway. He doesn’t dig walking.

Ringo’s garden has had a lot of very expensive landscaping done to it. At the back, the house now looks down into a huge amphitheatre, dug out of the ground. It has lots of brick terraces and ponds, which you walk down and into from the French windows of the main drawing room. There are little woods at either side of this amphitheatre, still part of Ringo’s garden. Up one tree there is a large playhouse.

Part of the rebuilding at the back, a semicircular wall, brought in a bill for £10,000, to Ringo’s amazement. Like all the Beatles, for years he never asked for estimates, which of course was just leaving themselves wide open. It’s not that people necessarily tried to take them for a ride. They just made sure they provided their most expensive goods and services.

‘When I walk round,’ said Ringo, standing looking at his vast gardens, ‘I often think, what’s a scruff like me doing with this lot? But it soon passes. You get used to it. You get ready to argue with anyone who is trying to get too much of my money.’

In the summer of 1967 he had a large extension built on the house, containing extra living rooms, guests’ rooms, a work room and one very long room, which is used as a cinema or billiard room. The work was done by a building firm that he half owned. This was about the only investment he has made on his own. Unfortunately, it had to close in mid 1967, thanks to the credit squeeze. ‘We built a lot of very good houses, but nobody had the money to buy them. I didn’t lose money when the firm closed, except that I was left with a dozen new flats and houses, which stood empty for a long time.’

Inside, the main drawing room is perhaps the nicest of all the Beatles’ living rooms, though it’s a shade dark on the garden side, as there is a terrace that obscures some light. It is beautifully furnished. It has a deep brown Wilton carpet which covers the whole room. This cost a fortune. It was made especially for him in one piece, which is why it cost so much. He now shudders to think what he paid for it. He doesn’t want the price repeated. It was about double what normal people pay when they’re buying an entire house.

One room is a bar, all very olde-worlde and very corny, though it has genuine bar bits and pieces. He has a cowboy holster hanging up in it, which Elvis gave him.

There are various golden discs and other awards scattered throughout the house, but not too many. In his main room he has a couple of sparse book shelves. They contain mostly well-thumbed paperbacks, some new but used-looking books on Indian religions and some new but highly unused-looking volumes of history and Dickens. Of all the Beatles, John is the only one with proper book shelves.

Ringo has a couple of rooms devoted to his own toys. They’re very expensive ones, mainly film camera equipment. He has made some excellent and ingenious films, though he is very
shy about showing them and doesn’t really think they’re all that good. He has one 20-minute film in colour, which consists mainly of close-ups of Maureen’s eye, with a background of electronic music. In it there is a scene filmed while driving down the M1, with shots through a car window into the headlights of approaching cars. There is another excellent sequence he did by sitting on a garden swing with his camera, then shooting at the house and garden as he swung up and down. He did all the shooting, cutting and editing of the film himself. He used expensive equipment, but even so the results were very interesting. One or two shots in
Magical Mystery Tour
were done by Ringo, using his own cameras.

He also does a bit of painting, but not much. His wife Maureen spends hours doing very intricate patterns and designs. She’s done one based on the
Sergeant Pepper
symbol, all in sequins, hundreds and hundreds of them. It took her six weeks, on and off, while she was waiting to have Jason.

Zak, their first son, was born in September 1965, and Jason in August 1967. Ringo doesn’t think they’ll have any more for a bit. He wants to give Maureen a rest.

They have a living-in nanny for the children and a daily woman for cleaning, but like John and Cyn, Ringo and his family live their self-contained life in the middle of the house. There is no outward sign of being attended on. Maureen does all the cooking for Ringo. But unlike the Lennons’, the whole house has a lived-in feeling.

They both tend just to potter around, when Ringo’s not working. Like John, they have pop records and the TV going all the time, even in rooms they’re not in. They watch TV a lot. They have six sets. From the main couch in the drawing room Ringo can change channels without getting up, just by operating a knob on the couch.

Ringo will give a smile, or just nod, when a Beatles song comes on the TV or radio, if there is anyone else with him. John and Paul don’t appear to notice. George doesn’t watch telly or play pop records.

‘I don’t play our songs myself. Maureen puts them on sometimes. She’s a Beatles fan and Frank Sinatra. In the old days we used to celebrate like mad every time we were on the radio.

‘I don’t mind if people attack us. We’re so popular it doesn’t matter now, but the critics can kill some records, when a lot of people might have enjoyed them.

‘When you’re coming up, everyone is all for you. When you’ve made it, they want to knock you if they can. If only 30 people turn up at the airport to see you, people say, that wasn’t much of a crowd, you must be finished. They expect things to be the same as when we were touring. They think, ah the Beatles, there must be a million people round them.’

He is as amused as the others by those who try to see hidden meanings in their records, particularly in America. ‘It’s bound to happen there. They have a hundred fellers doing what ten fellers do here. They’re all looking for something different.’

Like all of them, he is trying to lead a private life for a change. He thinks that as they’ve stopped touring and stopped being public property, people should leave them alone. ‘But people just stare at us everywhere, as if we were a circus. I can understand it when I’m Ringo the Beatle. But when I’m Ritchie the person, I should be freer.