Evening Standard March 1968
You step through a large white hoop like an airlock on a submarine to get to Ringo’s play room. It is the top floor of an annexe built on to the dark brown living room end of his home, and it’s a splendid place of flashing lights, panda rugs, a fruit machine, table for snooker and table tennis and miles and miles of taped pop.
It is, in fact, like the last word in youth clubs. Shaped like a Dutch barn, at one end there is a patch of wall on which guests are invited to record their visit (Gerald Scarfe obliged with a caricature of his host) and at the other there’s a panelled-off control room where Ringo keeps the oddments and impedimenta of his latest hobbies.
I went down there this week. Ringo lit some joss sticks and we played pool; and Ringo, prancing around the turquoise felt with his best Paul Newman-in-The-Hustler expression, won. His wife Maureen stayed in bed all day. She had ‘some bug’.
Says Ringo: ‘John just lives up the road. Sometimes I go up there to play with his toys, and sometimes he comes down here to play with mine.’
The Starrs have lived in mock-Tudor country on the side of a Weybridge hill for just over two years. They moved there shortly after Zak, their first son, was born ‘because we were afraid some fan would pinch him and take him home to put in her scrapbook.’
Zak is now a toddler. Their second child, Jason, is nearly eight months. ‘I suppose I’d like a little girl eventually,’ says Ringo. ‘They’re so cuddly.’
They have a nanny who lives in, a chauffeur, a gardener and a lady who does the housework. Since they went to India Maureen’s mother has been staying with them: ‘Maureen’s dad’s at sea. He wouldn’t give it up for anything.’
He’s very proud of his garden which is terraced, has a Wendy house up a tree, and overlooks a golf course, and he’s fond of his nine cats, most of which are Siamese with tabby markings. ‘We get quite a few foxes around here, too. The first night I heard them I thought some girl was getting assaulted down at the end of the road.’
They rarely go out in the evenings nowadays and they watch a great deal of television. There are six sets scattered throughout the house. Ringo likes situation comedy, or a good play and the Cilla Black Show.
Their neighbours, who are mostly hidden by the lush wooded hills, are still mainly strangers although they do send invitations to coffee mornings ‘to meet the Major and all that kind of rubbish.’ And their friends are John and Cynthia, George and Patty and Paul and Jane.
‘Maureen is friendly with some of the girls who work at the hairdressers she goes to, and they come back for tea some days, and I’ve got a friend in Liverpool called Roy.’
He suddenly becomes animated: ‘You know, he’s a joiner, and he’s only got about thirty records but he gets so much pleasure from them.
‘Yet I’ve got a cupboard here with about five hundred LPs and when I want to play one I have to close the cupboard again because I don’t know which one to put on any more.’
He’s pre-eminently the married man nowadays. Beatles’ music publisher Dick James tells a story about when he first met Ringo. They were in a coffee bar in Soho and Ringo was dreadfully shy. After several attempts at conversation which ended in one-sentence answers and some embarrassed silences, Dick asked him if he had a girl. Yes, said Ringo, he had a girl, her name was Maureen and they’d met at the Cavern. She was a hairdresser and he was going to marry her.
‘Suddenly,’ says Dick, ‘Ringo was chatting.’
‘I like the security of marriage and the family,’ says Ringo. ‘In fact, I’m thinking of selling my Facel Vega and getting an ordinary family saloon, something like a Mercedes.’
He has a passion for hobbies and consumes new ones at an enormous rate. At the moment he’s developing his own photographs. A few weeks ago it was taking movie film (‘We used some in Magical Mystery Tour so that gave me an extra push’), and before that it was photography, putting, snooker, making light machines with coloured slides, and painting eight-foot-tall sunflowers on the garden walls. The rain has washed most of them off. Next week it might be fixing up his new fountain by the fishpond or sorting out his favourite records.
‘I’ve always had crazes, but now if I want to do something I go out and buy all the equipment. Then sometimes if there’s a lot of setting up involved I can’t be bothered and go off whatever it is. I don’t stay with one hobby for much more than a couple of weeks at a time. Sometimes I’ll have a week and I’ll just play records; then I might spend a day just playing with my tape recordings; and sometimes I put the video tape machine on and film myself playing snooker.
‘I suppose I get bored like anyone else, but instead of having three hours a night I have all day to get bored in.
‘Even this house was a toy. In Liverpool I’d always lived in a four-roomed house and the height of my ambition was a semi in Aigburth’ (a lower middle class Liverpool suburb).
‘Sometimes I feel I’d like to stop being famous and get back to where I was in Liverpool. There don’t seem to be so many worries in that sort of life, although I thought there were at the time. But I had to come here to realise that they counted for very little.
‘Still the happiest times of my life have been as a Beatle. And you know what I regret most – never being able to see a Beatles’ stage show from the audience. I would have loved that. It isn’t the same when you see it on film later.’
We leave the pool table and go back to the cathedral he calls his living room. Television replaces the constantly jiving records.
Despite his five headlined years (or perhaps because of it) he’s still remarkably touchy about press reports, and constantly surprised that his movements should attract the attention they do.
‘It’s amazing,’ he says, over and over again, ‘they must be barmy. Why everybody had to be against our doing meditation I don’t know. What would have happened if we’d suddenly turned Catholic instead? If we’d been sitting with the Pope every day we’d have been “good old Beatles”.
‘You know I went through a stage of thinking seriously about having plastic surgery on my nose because that was all the papers seemed to write about. I never noticed “my feature” until the press pointed it out. It didn’t hurt me, but I got fed up with reading about it.’
He’s looking very suntanned since he came back from India and he hasn’t shaved for over a fortnight. And the rinse that he had for his part in the film Candy has been almost washed out of his hair so that his grey streak along the right side of his head is beginning to show again. ‘I looked like Jeff Chandler when I had my Tony Curtis hairdo. The mop top covers it up now,’ he says.
He has, he says, no ambition, but rather fancies the idea of himself in comic film roles, because his face makes people laugh. And there’s all that pathos in those great drooping, doggy, Pagliacci eyes.
He’s the supreme fatalist. Nothing ever seems to get on top of him. He has problems, but he can cope. ‘I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying “Yes”.’
He never knows the cost of anything: ‘I haven’t had any real money worries since I was eighteen, although I probably only had £10 in the bank then. I could afford never to work again, I suppose, but I’d have to be careful, and I’d probably have to sell this house in about ten years.
‘I’m rich by working-class standards, but not immensely rich, and not by the standards of those who really do have money. I spend money like water, you see. A lot of it went on this house.’
Like all Beatle houses it’s as colourful as a butterfly, and chock-a-block with knick-knacks and ornaments and souvenirs. There are pictures of John, hundreds of last summer’s psychedelic posters and dozens of arty-tarty odds and ends picked up in antique shops. He’s a great hoarder.
When he first moved down to Weybridge he had a bar built because he couldn’t go out to pubs, but these days he hardly drinks. On the aeroplane going out to India he became a vegetarian ‘for health reasons,’ he days. He smokes between twenty and forty American cigarettes a day, and the house is littered with ash trays and squashed filter tips.
He looks very small and vulnerable wandering around his mansion in his purple pants and flowery yellow shirt, and he’s so open and guileless that it is disarming.
‘Do you remember when everyone began analysing Beatle songs, well I don’t think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about,’ he says, and it’s good to hear someone admit it. Or he might say: ‘As a drummer I’m fair, that’s all, and I don’t care about being good any more.’ … ‘You know I’m not very good at singing because I haven’t got a great range. So they write songs for me that are pretty low and not too hard.’ … and ‘I didn’t really feel that I was involved with the Beatles for the first couple of years.’
Maureen’s mum calls us for our tea and we move from one television to another. There’s a programme showing about an office party and Ringo becomes reflective. ‘I like England, you know, and I like living down here. But you know the thing I miss most of all – a good “do”.’
