Beatles (60 page)

‘I suppose you can’t expect it. They’ve heard so much. They want to see you. Fame, that’s what it is. They don’t realize we’ve stopped playing. They still want to gape.’

He and John were coming back from London one night, being driven by John’s chauffeur in John’s Rolls, when they passed a pub all lit up, with people sitting around in their shirtsleeves drinking. They couldn’t get over it. To them it was like a scene from a fairy tale they’d dimly forgotten about.

‘It looked great. We were past before it had really hit us. We were in suits and felt a bit stiff. We’d been to visit Queenie (Mrs Epstein). It wasn’t long after Brian had died. When we got home, we decided to change and go and have a drink. I took Maureen round to Cyn’s to sit with her while me and John went
to the pub. It was just like the old days. We brought them back crisps and Babycham.

‘The pub itself hadn’t changed. It was just like pubs when we used to know them, straight out of Coronation Street. The barman was very pleased when he recognized us. We had a bottle of brown each. We had to sign a few autographs, but it wasn’t too bad.’

He thinks now, having done it once, they should be able to pop in for a quick drink more often. He’s never tried going for a walk on his own, because, of course, he doesn’t go in for walking. None of the Beatles takes any exercise whatsoever, except Paul when taking Martha for a walk.

Playing billiards or his one-armed bandit is about Ringo’s only exercise. ‘There’s the garden. What’s wrong with that? I often walk round the garden.’ He appears to need no exercise to keep fit, and has kept his same weight – between nine stone and nine stone six – for the last six years. Considering the unhealthy life he led touring, and his years of illness as a child, it is surprising. But they are all somehow fit, though rather pale-looking. They’ve had regular medical checkups for each new film and other big contracts, and nothing has been found wrong with them. John put on weight when they stopped touring, but he soon slimmed it off.

Ringo at last passed his driving test, after failing three times and driving without a licence for two years. He now has three cars, a Mini Cooper, a Land Rover and a Facel Vega. ‘Don’t ask me how you spell it. I was away from school when they had spelling.’

Apart from his parents, he has helped other relations and friends, loaning them money to buy their own house.

‘I do have a load of rubbish. I leap out and buy something, then it doesn’t last a week. Camera stuff, I’m always getting it. I want something better or extra, so I’m changing cameras all the time. I don’t know how much I’m worth. If I said give us my money tomorrow, I want it in me hand, I’ve no idea what it would come to.’

He doesn’t carry cash around with him. ‘Tell me, what do those pound-note thingies look like? And do they still make those cute-like half-crowns? Maureen does the shopping, but she just uses a card that says, this is money.’

When they sign a bill in a shop it is sent on to their accountant’s office. He sends it back to them, for their confirmation, before he pays it. ‘Mine comes to about £1,000 a month. Last month it was £1,600, but I’d bought a new lens.

‘I’ve only been caught once. We were at Brian’s and me and Maureen decided to come home early. We’d come in someone else’s car, so Peter (Brown) gave us his car to drive home.

‘Halfway home, on the dual carriageway, miles from anywhere, in the middle of a Sunday night, we ran out of petrol. There was no garage and even if there had been, I had no money.

‘I flagged a car down and told him I’d run out of petrol. I said could he lend us five bob so I could buy a gallon to get us home. He said are you Ringo? I said yeh. He said it would be no use loaning me money as there was no garage open anywhere around, but he’d drive us home in his car, which he did. It was great. He only turned out to be a journalist, from the
Daily Telegraph
. Well, it’s those sort of unimportant things that are always getting in the papers that you don’t want in. I took him into the house and gave him an LP. He never wrote about it.’

They were all given cheque books at one stage several years ago, to help in emergencies, but they never use them. ‘I’ve never signed a cheque in my life,’ says Ringo. ‘I don’t know how to. I lost my cheque book the minute I got it.

‘I’ve never been refused in a shop yet, when I’ve asked to sign the bill, even in shops I haven’t been in before. No one’s asked me yet to prove that I really am Ringo.’

He doesn’t feel any urge or necessity to give money to charity and doesn’t see why they should. ‘Brian gave stuff now and again, on behalf of us. John did Oxfam a Christmas card, didn’t he? That made them a lot of money.

‘I don’t fancy it, really. Most of the people running charities are not nice people. What good did the Aberfan Fund do, except
for all the lawyers? They gave each person £5,000 for losing a child. Ridiculous. Five million quid doesn’t equal losing a child. I think a lot of people are making money out of charities. No, they’re not for me.

‘The government’s taking over 90 per cent of all our money anyway – we’re left with 1s. 9d. in the pound. The government spends it on helping people, doesn’t it? That’s like helping charities.

‘Not that the governments are any good. They can’t make anything work. Buses, trains. None of them works. I was in the car yesterday going to town and I passed five number 7 buses, one lined up behind the other, all with just two people on. Why couldn’t they all be on one bus?

‘The government takes too much in taxes. There’s no initiative, you get taxed right through life. When they’ve left nobody rich, no one will have any money to give the government.

‘Everything the Government does turns to crap, not gold. The railways made profits when they were private firms, didn’t they? It’s like Victorian England, our government. Outdated.

‘All governments are the same, Labour or Tory. Neither of them offers me anything. All they do is oppose each other. One says one thing, and the other has to say something different. They both do it. That’s all they do. Why can’t they all get together and work for the country?’

They all say that Ringo is the sentimental one, although they all have bits of Ringo in them. One of the things Ringo is sentimental about is preferring England, which is something they say they don’t care about. When the Greek island and other foreign ideas were being discussed, Ringo was the only one who wasn’t very keen. He would have liked living all together on a hundred-acre site in Devon, but he doesn’t fancy going away for a long time to a foreign country. The others say they could do it easily.

‘I couldn’t live anywhere but England. That’s where I’m from. That’s where my family is. England’s no better than anywhere else, I know that. It’s just that I’m comfortable here.’

He does take holidays abroad and he likes to be with the others, usually John. He and Maureen wouldn’t go off alone to California on a whim the way George and Pattie did. Like John, he prefers going places with his Beatles buddies. ‘It’s nice to be together.’

He’s lost none of the old-fashioned Northern idea of marriage, of the man being the master at home. ‘That’s how it is. My grandfather (Starkey) always had his seat in his house, which only he sat in. I’m the same I suppose.’ Both he and John have a bit of Andy Capp in them. Paul and George are much more middle class in their domestic setting.

But Ringo is a bit alarmed that he appears more of the lord and master than he thinks he is. ‘Maureen was telling me the other day that the cleaning woman fears me. I don’t plan or expect it. I think it’s just Maureen rushing around saying we must get this ready or that done for me coming in.’

When they’re out, he squires Maureen in the traditional working-class way. Some years ago they once went out for dinner at Woburn Abbey, the home of the Duke of Bedford. Ringo had been friendly with his son, Rudolph, a keen pop fan. ‘I thought it would be a good laugh, to see how the others lived, that’s why I went.’

He was sat down at the baronial dining table, miles away from his wife Maureen, in the middle-and-upper-class way, much to his alarm.

‘I said oh no. Come over here, luv. They were trying to make us sit apart. Very funny people.

‘I don’t think women like to be equal. They like to be protected, and, in turn, they like looking after men. That’s how it is.’

They gave up London some time ago and rarely go out at nights. ‘Swinging London was OK before it became swinging London. When we were just becoming famous it was nice to go around and see people knowing you, which is how all famous show-biz people are supposed to do. But it was a drag.’

They don’t entertain people in any formal sense at their
home. He has one or two friends, like Roy Trafford, from his early Liverpool days. John is the main person who pops in, then sits down for tea or whatever’s going.

Maureen prefers the quiet life, although her life is really Ringo’s. Anything he wants to do, she wants to do. They are very happy.

She is the only Beatle wife who stays up for her husband and waits for him, no matter how late or in what condition he’s likely to arrive.

‘When he’s recording I often stay up till 4.30 in the morning. He’s usually got up late the day before and perhaps not had a proper meal before going out. So I try to have something for him when he comes home, however late. Then I know at least he’s got a meal inside him. They all just peck at things when they’re working.

‘If it turns out he has eaten a proper meal at work, or with the boys, then it doesn’t matter. I can easily use up the potatoes. Nothing’s wasted. But I usually give him a meal. He might eat it quickly, as he’s tired, but he does like something when he comes home.

‘I don’t mind staying up for him. I might change the furniture round, to put the hours in. I just mess around really. I spent two hours the other night deciding where to move a lamp. I might make things, curtains or clothes. I put sequins on an old lampshade the other day.’

She spends a lot of time answering correspondence. Maureen takes great interest in all Ringo’s fan mail. Perhaps through having been a fan herself, she knows how much it means. Apart from Mrs Harrison, George’s mother, she is the only one in the Beatle circle who bothers. She doesn’t do as much as Mrs Harrison, as she has a large house and two young children to look after.

When people send birthday cards, she still drops a little note saying thank you, adding that Ritchie is too busy working to write himself. She always calls him Ritchie, never Ringo, even writing to people who only know him as Ringo. ‘I don’t know why, really, Ringo just seems funny. His name is Ritchie.’

In odd moments she gets him to sign big batches of autographs. She doesn’t send them to everyone who writes, because that would take too long. She just drops in his autograph, with her little letter of reply, when people seem really nice and polite.

‘I like answering the letters. I’ve been doing it for five years now. I get some lovely replies back from the parents.

‘I do get behind sometimes. When I was having Jason I got behind for a few weeks and had three shopping bags full of them.

‘I don’t do it just because people are polite. I know that if I liked someone enough to write a nice letter to them I would like some sort of reply. I’ve had letters from fans saying this is their 15th letter. They must feel awful. What they’ve been doing is writing to the office. The office gets thousands and just can’t cope. Not that I want any more sent to me than I get now, thank you.’

She makes quite a lot of clothes, when she is filling in the hours waiting. ‘I like instamatic things. I’m in such a hurry that I never use patterns. I might start off making a dress, but keep going wrong, cutting it down and down, till I’ve ended up making a handkerchief.’

When she knows she’s just going to have a go at something, she always buys cheap remnants, so there won’t be much waste. She’s very careful, when it comes to money. All her shopping is done at a Weybridge supermarket. She always gets Pink Shield trading stamps with everything she buys, which appears rather pointless, when she could buy anything she wanted anyway. She likes sticking the stamps in the pages. She gets out her little book now and again to see how much she’s got.

Ringo thinks it’s a bit of a joke, but he’s proud of the way she manages the house and looks after him. He’s also very pleased by things she’s made, such as the sequined Sergeant Pepper design.

They haven’t started thinking about Zak’s or Jason’s education, as they’re so young. Like John, Ringo would like them to go to an ordinary council school. ‘But Zak’s not ordinary, is he? They wouldn’t let him alone. It’s eased off now a bit, but he’d still get picked upon. If the only way to get him a bit
of peace is to pay for it, then we’ll have to. If they want to go to a boarding school, then I’ll let them. But I’d rather have them at home. I just want them to be as free as possible and love one another.

‘I say all those sort of things, of course, but I don’t know how I’ll turn out when they get older. But I don’t want them to have the restrictions I had, you know, your mother telling you not to play near the window, or watch you don’t break anything. You never know, do you, when it’s your turn to be a parent.’

But he wouldn’t like them to have the sort of education he had, or, at least, lack of education. Those lost years of illness have had some effect on him, not in any serious way, at least not what he would call serious. His spelling, for example, is non-existent, but it doesn’t worry him. His knowledge of where towns and places are is also very strange.

‘I know I can’t spell, but I can read anything you want to give me. English is hard for anybody to spell. My maths aren’t bad. But I’m best really with my hands. I can do most little jobs, if I’m just left on my own. I can eventually work things out on my own. It’s when things are written down I’m no good.’

Ringo came into the group last, long after all the others were settled in their positions and personalities. He felt it was all a marvellous stroke of luck. He moved in with them at the second they took off. The others never looked upon it as luck for one minute. They all knew they could be a success.