The Beatles (60 page)

It took more than two hours to locate Storm. He’d been in the coffee shop having breakfast and had sunk into a tranquil reverie. He was thinking, planning new routines, sending out discouraging vibes to any friendly camper who might otherwise intrude, so much so that he missed hearing the repeated announcements blaring over the camp’s P.A. system: “
Would Rory Storm report to Reception. Rory Storm—please report to Reception.
”

When he finally arrived, Johnny, Ringo, John, and Paul were already deep into discussions about an exit strategy and timing. The Beatles were pressuring Ringo to leave immediately with them. They had a gig that night at the Cavern and planned to introduce him as their new mate. The whole situation caught Rory totally off guard. “He was angry,” Byrne recalls. “We’d had no warning. Ringo had been with us for four years. We were in the middle of a season-long gig, doing two shows a day—and suddenly your drummer’s going on you.” Pinched by longtime pals. Still, even the ambitious Rory recognized a golden opportunity when he heard one. The Beatles were offering Ringo a king’s ransom: £25 a week! As Byrne says, “They were also waving a recording contract around, which was a big thing in 1962. Nobody was queuing up to sign us. If they had come to me and said, ‘George is leaving and we want you to replace him,’ I wouldn’t have thought about it for very long.” The same went for Rory; a pragmatist at heart, he refused to stand in Ringo’s way. Yes, he was annoyed, but he also knew the score. “You should go,” Rory told him with a shrug of inevitability.

But not so fast. Rory insisted that Ringo finish out the week: two more nights. If Ringo left them cold, they’d likely lose a week’s wages, which would sour everything. Ringo, who “was embarrassed” by the state of affairs, agreed. And reluctantly, so did John and Paul before they headed back to Liverpool—empty-handed but content. They got what they had come for, a drummer and, ultimately, a legacy.

Forevermore, the Beatles would be John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

The Beatles played a routine show that evening at the Cavern. While they were thrashing away onstage, Brian sauntered into the bandroom, where Bob Wooler was enjoying a sly nip, and asked: “
Is it possible for us to talk later
?” The men agreed to meet at the Old Dive, one of the furtive late-night pubs on Williamson Square, where anyone demanding entrance was required to knock three times at the window, Prohibition-style, and ask for “Joe.”

Sometime after eleven o’clock, Bob found Brian in the back room, hunched over a bottle of gin. “He was terribly upset,” Wooler recalls. And he wasted no time in delivering the news: Pete was being sacked. Moreover, the other Beatles had insisted that it was Brian’s duty, as their manager, to “do the dirty work.” Desperate to get it over with, he’d already made an appointment to meet Pete at NEMS the next morning for the showdown.

Wooler was stunned. “
Why?
” he wondered aloud.

Brian ignored the question. “How do you think the fans will react?” he asked.

Wooler was frank. “They’re not going to like this at all. Pete’s very popular.”

Following Wednesday night’s gig at the Cavern, Pete made arrangements to have Neil Aspinall drive the Beatles to Thursday’s gig at the tony Riverpark Ballroom, the first of four weekly performances there that would run through the end of September. As was usual, Pete scheduled convenient pickup times with each of the guys so that he could coordinate it with Neil. When he got to John, however, there was some hesitation. Pete thought that “
his face looked scared
” and was confused when John told him not to worry about it, “he would go on his own.” That didn’t make sense. The Beatles always traveled together to gigs, especially when
they went someplace so distant. Moreover, John didn’t drive. But to each his own, Pete decided. He certainly wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

On the morning of August 16, a typical summer day in the muggiest part of England, Neil Aspinall drove Pete to NEMS and dropped him off at the curb in Whitechapel, outside the busy shop. Pete went upstairs alone. There, he “
found Brian in a very uneasy mood
,” straining for meaningless pleasantries and chitchat. This wasn’t the usual rule. Brian normally got right down to business, but this time he “
hedged a little
,” and although the manager’s smile never wavered, there was not only nervousness behind it but fear. He was delaying the inevitable, trying to build up some nerve. Finally, he just blurted it out: “
Pete, I have some bad news
for you. The boys want you out, and it’s already been arranged that Ringo will join the band on Saturday.”

Pete stared dazedly at Brian. The news knocked him sideways. He was “
in a state of shock
.” After a short but numb swoon, he managed only one word, mumbling, “
Why
?”

Rather than tap-dance, Brian told him the truth: the other Beatles didn’t think he was a good enough drummer.
And neither did George Martin
, who had decided to sign the band to Parlophone. The Beatles had known this for two weeks and had kept it from Pete. Brian could be shrill and irrational at times, a bully with a knack for delivering a vicious tongue-lashing, for picking apart his victim for sport, but he was also a master of tact, appealing to people’s most unresolved feelings, expressing sympathetic concern, and deploying great reserves of compassion when the situation demanded it—and this was one of those situations. There was no ruthlessness to it, he assured Pete in as soothing a voice as was possible. It was a business decision. “
The lads don’t want you
in the group anymore.”

It’s unlikely that any of Brian’s finesse had a consoling effect on Pete. It hit him so suddenly, caught him so seriously off guard, Pete recalled, that “
my mind was in a turmoil
.” All that time he’d put in with the Beatles, their would-be friendship, the dreams. Now, for
this
to happen—on the eve of a record deal. He considered it a “
stab in the back
.” Partly to defuse Pete’s rage and partly to remain in the boy’s good graces,
Brian offered to form another group
around Pete.

Somehow, as Pete stalked out of the office, Brian found the nerve to ask him to play the three remaining gigs before Ringo joined the Beatles on Saturday. And somehow Pete, insanely, agreed. If Brian believed him, it was because there was never any doubt in his mind, or anyone else’s, that Pete was an honorable guy. But like his drumming, the agony became
too overpowering. The promise rang hollow; it was nothing more than an exit line.

Pete’s face, pale, downcast, alerted Neil Aspinall to the fact that something had gone wrong. “
What’s happened
?” he asked.

Pete barked back: “They’ve kicked me out!”

Neil, skimming the spaces between what he heard and guessed, suggested they go someplace to talk. The Grapes, opposite the Cavern, was nearby, and the two boys dug in there to drink and sulk.

Pete was stunned
and demoralized, not just by the dismissal but by the cutthroat way in which it had been handled.
Where were the Beatles
? he wanted to know. Why hadn’t they been men enough to tell him themselves? A confrontation would have made it easier to accept. This way just “
disgusted
” him. Neil agreed, vowing to quit his job as road manager in protest over Pete’s treatment. Neil’s loyalty to Pete was complicated. The dark, handsome Aspinall, just turned twenty-one, was a different type of “guest” or “lodger” in the Bests’ house than history has recorded.
Throughout his residency there
, he’d been having an affair with Mona Best, well into her forties. By the end of 1961, she was pregnant, and the birth of a son, born on July 21, 1962, less than a month before Pete’s dismissal, was registered as Vincent Roag Best despite—or maybe to blur—the fact that Neil Aspinall was his father.
^*
Neil and Pete were like brothers—now perhaps more.
It was all Pete could do
to talk him out of quitting that night.

Pete promised Brian that he would finish out the week, but by the time he got home the absurdity of that idea loomed large. “
I’m not going to the gig
,” he told Neil. “I couldn’t play with them, knowing that this has happened and I’m out.” Later he would admit: “
Once I was home
at Hayman’s Green, I broke down and wept.”

Pete’s fate mattered naught to Ringo Starr. “
I never felt sorry
, for [him],” Ringo admitted much later, dismissing the entire matter by saying: “I was not involved. Besides, I felt I was a much better drummer than he was.”
Unlike Pete, he would be considered by many to be the Luckiest Man Alive. But Ringo Starr began life battling more adversity than Job.

The saga of Ringo’s personal history—more like a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune—is one of the erratic tragic chapters in the glittering Beatles legacy. In contrast to the others, who were middle- (John) or working-class (Paul and George), Ringo was “
ordinary, poor
,” a hardship case. “
He was not a barefoot, ragged child
,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford, a neighbor who doubled as his surrogate sister, “but like all of the families who lived in the Dingle, he was part of an ongoing struggle to survive.”

The Dingle, which was christened by immigrant settlers after the arcadian glade in Ireland, bore little resemblance to its romantic namesake. One of the oldest inner-city districts in Liverpool, it was grim and “
really rough
,” the very edge of civilization, and housed the “
artisan working class
”—a miscellany of carpenters, plumbers, joiners, and “others with a trade,” who became as tightly intertwined as the terrace houses. Sixty families, a mixed bag of Irish and Welsh, were often jammed shoulder to shoulder on a short, sooty Dingle street, each clinging to its tiny stake, impervious to the vagaries of fate. There was nothing grandiose about their provisions: generally, a poorly ventilated, postage-stamp-size house patched together by crumbling plaster walls, with a rear door that opened onto an outhouse. Parents shooed their children to the embrace of nearby Prince’s Park, on which it is said New York’s Central Park planners had based their design. “
Most of us were brought up there
,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “People lit coal fires, and so the green parks became our lungs.”

When Richard Starkey, Ringo’s father, married Elsie Gleave in 1936, he followed the Dingle tradition and set up house a scant hundred yards from where he was raised. The Starkeys moved into an unusually roomy—Ringo recalled it as being “
palatial
”—three-bedroom terrace house at 9 Madryn Street, a narrow artery lined with humble plane trees (a species known to every local schoolchild who recited: “The plane trees / kind to the poor, dull city”) and grids of discolored, cracked pavement. Richard’s parents, John and Annie, lived nearby at number 59, just as later his sister, Nancy, would move into number 21, following her marriage to Tony Christian. The Starkey houses might well have been interchangeable in the way the occupants shuffled back and forth between them all day long.

Richard and Elsie had met at Cooper’s, one of Liverpool’s larger commercial bakeries, where he worked near the ovens, methodically icing cakes. To him, Elsie was “
the cherry on top
,” an attractive, risible woman, with lovely, big, clear eyes and a wonderful singing voice. She had been raised in
neighboring Toxteth Park, the youngest of fourteen children, and at an early age was bundled off to her grandmother’s, where she spent most of a happy, if somewhat alienated, childhood. Elsie Gleave learned early that a woman should be self-sufficient, that independence meant getting a job, that spare time was devoted to the piano, and that evenings were for going out on the town. “Dancing feet,” she would say, needed a regular workout.

Indeed, dancing was her only salvation from the hardscrabble Dingle life, and the fleet-footed Richard Starkey, who liked swing and seemed born to perform it, proved a kindred spirit. Most of the time, Elsie and Richard joined the crowds at Reece’s, a cafeteria-style restaurant where some of the strongest dancers capered into the early dawn hours. It was a raucous, ebullient scene. Vendors circled through the hall dispensing cheap, red wine they called plunk from jugs, and when Elsie felt especially gay, she would say, “Make it a big one—a plunk plunk.”

For three years, the Starkeys were a fixture on the ballroom circuit, but eventually Elsie’s thirst grew parched for other desires. Working-class tradition dictated that newlyweds have a baby within a year of marriage—if not sooner. Elsie tried everything necessary to conceive, but without results. “Elsie was nervous that she’d never have a child,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “She never asked for much, but that was all she really wanted.”

Just when Elsie got accustomed to the idea that children might not be in the cards, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, named Richard after his father, on July 7, 1940. There was much celebration on sleepy Madryn Street, whose houses were unusually dormant thanks to the escalating war with Germany. Relatives stopped by at all hours to gaze upon the baby “with the big, soulful eyes,” who everyone agreed was the “spitting image of his mum.” He had his mother’s long face and sensuous mouth, to say nothing of the thick, dark hair that would serve him handily twenty years hence. Ritchie, as he was called, bore hardly any resemblance to his father, who was “quite a handsome man, with curly hair and a thin, narrow smile.” This was Elsie’s boy, from head to toe, and she doted upon him to the point of preoccupation.