Beatles (63 page)

Paul had discovered the fact that none of the Beatles had control of themselves. They were owned, including their own songs, by other people and other companies. Paul maintained he was doing it all for their sake – not just his own. To the other three, it looked as if Paul was causing all the trouble. At this stage, they still believed Klein to be their saviour. It was a very nasty few years.

The arrival of Klein was the event that finally and officially led to the split of the Beatles, but the differences between John and Paul, opened up by the arrival of Yoko, were already apparent.

It took up so much of their energy, both physical and creative, being caught in court cases for much of the next ten years. They also had their own individual court cases at different times – either divorces, drug offences, being sued or suing other record companies, immigration problems and suchlike.

The only fun, at least for the onlookers, was the madness of Apple. They seemed either unaware, or even to be enjoying the fact, that they were being ripped off. Millions of pounds were thrown away on daft schemes, shops, businesses, pandering to eccentric notions and strange people. It was almost a morality tale, as if to point up the pointlessness of big business: getting and spending we lay waste our powers, so let’s go out with a mad spending spree. They took on some luxury offices in Savile Row in London, stocked them full of fine furnishings and equipment, and naturally half the Western hippy world flocked to try to take advantage of them, plus a few smart advisers who were supposed to be helping them sort everything out.

After the split, John took all the headlines in the first few years. He did some songs with Yoko, forming the Plastic Ono Band, and had himself and Yoko photographed naked for
Two Virgins
(1969), which amazed and amused the pop world. They had bed-ins in different hotels round the world, giving interviews about the world’s ills and how they should be cured. He forsook the puns and the whimsy of some of his Beatle songs and earlier writings, and went headlong into the avant-garde. He took to defending causes of all sorts, such as the Hanratty murder case, and filled his new Yoko-songs with emotional outbursts, class struggles and political slogans. The layman was, in the main, amused by John’s latest exploits, while there was a great deal of critical praise for several of the songs he was producing on his own, such as ‘Imagine’ (1971).

John married Yoko in 1969 and eventually moved permanently to New York, after a long legal fight to become a resident. I talked to him at the time and he denied that it was the arrival of Yoko that had broken up his marriage to Cynthia. ‘That had already gone,’ he said. It was interesting that when the Beatles split became inevitable, he announced to Paul, George and Ringo: ‘I want a divorce – just like I had from Cynthia.’ His relationship with them, particularly with Paul, had for so many years been similar to a marriage.

During 1974, John left Yoko for about a year – a year of drugs
and drink and self-abuse, which has since been well chronicled – but from 1975, after the birth of their son Sean, he settled down to family life. He had produced ten albums in all, since ceasing to be a Beatle, but after
Shaved Fish
in 1975, he said he was going to take five years off work, and play with his baby.

He had just come back to record-making in late 1980, bringing out a new album,
Double Fantasy
, in time for Sean’s fifth birthday, when he was murdered. It happened on 8 December 1980, on his return from the recording studios, outside the Dakota building in New York, where he lived.

The assassin, Mark David Chapman, had been waiting all day outside the building. On John’s departure for the studios, Chapman thrust a copy of
Double Fantasy
into his hands and John had obligingly signed it, ‘John Lennon, 1980’. On John’s return, much later that night, Chapman fired five shots into him, from a distance of five feet. The world was stunned.

For a while, reaction did verge on the hysterical, especially in America, and especially when Yoko called for a round-the-world silent vigil. The worldwide grief was genuine. In Britain, some people were rather puzzled and surprised by the intensity of the mourning, unaware that since the end of the Beatles there had arisen two John Lennons, each with a different character and image.

In Britain, John Lennon was felt to have become a harmless eccentric, an oddball who had gone off with that funny woman and was doing funny things and producing occasional funny music. As a leader of pop music, or of fashion or anything else, his days appeared to be over, part of an era that had passed, a faded 1960s figure, though he was still well enough loved. Visiting British pop stars always tried to look him up in America, as if to pay homage to a Grand Old Man, now retired, perhaps now a bit soft in the head, yet someone who had influenced them all in their youth.

In America, as we all immediately became aware on his death, there had emerged a different John Lennon during the last decade, someone who had become an active spiritual leader,
a symbol of a new generation’s struggles and hopes, who could still communicate with millions of young people, even when, for those five years or so, he had hardly been seen or heard. ‘Give Peace a Chance’, which he had virtually written on the spot, after one of his bed-ins in Montreal in 1969, had become an inspiration for the Vietnam generation, a permanent anthem for the peace movement, still being sung today, long after his more contrived happenings and campaigns of the early 1970s have been forgotten.

The death of John highlighted his enormous contribution to popular music and to the youth of the West. It also brought to an end any suggestion that the Beatles would ever get together again. The Beatles had died emotionally by 1970. In 1980, there was the first burial.

One of the effects of John’s death was that the three remaining ex-Beatles immediately became highly concerned about security matters. They had tried to live fairly private lives after the split, and go their various ways. Since 1980, they have realized that even as private figures they must take great care.

Ringo today lives behind the well-guarded gates of Tittenhurst Park, a 17th-century stately home with some 74 acres, near Ascot in Berkshire. His personal life became rather complicated after the Beatles finished, and he has changed homes and countries several times.

Not long after the book came out, he and his wife Maureen moved away from Weybridge to Highgate, in North London, and while there I saw them quite often. But in 1975 they were divorced, by which time they had had a third child, a daughter called Lee. It was a rather messy, acrimonious divorce, and after it, Ringo started a wandering life, partly because of the break-up of his marriage. He was seen in various foreign countries, with various foreign girls. For several years he was technically based in Monte Carlo, though he seemed to spend much of his time in the States.

He returned to England in 1981, after six years abroad, stunned by the death of John, worried that it could happen to him.

‘On the day John was killed, I flew from LA to New York to be with Yoko. I was given two bodyguards, and there were two of Yoko’s supposed to be looking after me, but in that huge block we lost all the bodyguards. I ended up getting lost and walking out into the street by the wrong door on my own.

‘Afterwards, I did have several threats on my own life, and I had to have guards living with me. I hated it. I always felt safe in America until John was shot. But you can’t go on living in fear. If the president himself can’t stay properly protected, what chances do other people have? They even got the pope.’

One of the attractions of returning to England, and moving into his old home, Tittenhurst Park (the house where John and Yoko used to live before they went to the States), was that he was within 40 minutes of his ex-wife Maureen and his three children. They are now friends once again, although not particularly close.

Ringo returned to England with a new lady in his life, Barbara Bach, an American actress, who he married in London, at Marylebone register office, in April 1981. George and Paul came to the wedding, and so did his mother, Elsie.

Barbara Bach, who is seven years younger than Ringo, was previously married to an Italian and has two children, Gianni, aged 13, and Francesca, 16. She has appeared in
Playboy
magazine, and had a good part in a James Bond film,
The Spy Who Loved Me
. She has been in 30 films altogether, some with great titles – such as
The Humanoid, Free Range Male
and
Caveman
– though few of them won many awards. It was in
Caveman
, in 1980, that she met Ringo.

In 1984, they acted together in Paul’s film
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, at least they appeared together in the film. Their parts did not call for any great exertions. It is noticeable how Ringo has remained good friends with Paul and George, better friends, in fact, than they are with each other, and when John was alive, Ringo was always close to him as well.

I went to see Ringo in March 1985, to have tea with him and his new wife at their London home, a small mews house in
Chelsea, which also doubles as their office. He was looking very fit and well, rather spruce in a suit and clean-shaven. He had just that day taken off his beard for the first time in around ten years. He kept on feeling his smooth chin, as if to reassure himself that he still had a face.

He was wearing the usual handful of rings, as he always had in the ’60s, plus a glittering blue earring in his left ear. It looked a bit incongruous. A gentleman of 45 in a suit wearing a punky style earing. He had also acquired a tattoo in recent years, a star and moon on his left arm, which he rolled up for me to inspect. His wife Barbara has an identical one on her thigh. ‘On the fleshy bit,’ said Ringo, but she refused to display it. The phone rang and she went to talk to Ringo’s stepfather, Harry. Ringo’s mother, Elsie, had had a heart attack just a couple of days previously. Ringo and Barbara had rushed up to Liverpool to see her in hospital and she now appeared to be recovering. Elsie is now 70, the same age as Harry, and they live in the same bungalow as they did in 1968, when I visited them.

Ringo bustled around their little kitchen, opening cupboards, looking for something to make for tea. I admired his fine head of lush, dark hair, but I wondered where the grey bits had gone, especially that grey patch at the front he has had all his life. Dyed it out, he said, just as for years he dyed out all the white bits in his beard. That’s what had really made him shave it off. He could have lived with a pepper and salt beard, but huge white patches were appearing and he was fed up having to dye them. He pulled back his hair to prove it was all genuine, no bald patches, not even any receding bits at the edges. ‘Not like some people I could mention,’ he said. ‘How old are you now, Hunt, hmm?’

He looked fitter and healthier than he did in 1968, despite a slight thickening of the waistline and the suspicion of a heavy jowl. Most of all, he was decidedly happier and chirpier. In 1968, when I used to go and visit him, he often seemed so edgy, prowling around, constantly on edge, as if bugged by something, or worried about the future, either his marriage or his future life with the Beatles.

Barbara finished talking on the telephone and came into the kitchen to see what he was making for tea. She felt his chin, another check on its smoothness. She had never in her life seen him clean-shaven, at least not close up.

‘I did see Ringo first in 1966. I took my younger sister to the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert. I was about 19 at the time. My sister had a Beatles wig and was a real Beatles fan. I wasn’t really interested. All I can remember about their performance was that it was rather short – and rather loud.’

When they first met in 1980, during the filming of
Caveman
, Ringo says he fell in love with her from the moment he saw her getting off the aeroplane.

‘She gave me a hard time for two months, just picking on me. Oh, I don’t know, little things. I threw a party for St Valentine’s day and she kept on saying but what is the point of the party, what are you doing it for? She kept on cross-examining me. Either that or she ignored me.

‘When we decided to get married, I said come on then, where do you want to live?’

‘I wanted to go back to Europe,’ said Barbara. ‘But Ritchie can only speak English, so that meant England.’

‘I wanted to go to England as well. It’s the least police state I know. I feel secure here. I have no bodyguards at all. I feel so English. Not British. Just English. It’s the fish and chips.’

Ringo eventually found a tin of salmon in one of the kitchen cupboards and was opening it, pouring on some vinegar to give extra taste, then he mixed it all up and dished out three bowls. Not
smoked
salmon, I said? I thought you superstars lived on smoked salmon.

‘I’ll tell you something about that smoked salmon stuff,’ he said, putting on a strong Liverpool voice. ‘They don’t cook it …

‘I remember the very first time I had it. It was when Brian brought us to London and he insisted that we all tasted smoked salmon for the first time in our lives. We never had it in the Dingle. It was Brian’s treat. We all went ugh, awful. I quite like it really.’

All the same, judging by Ringo’s tea, and by meals I have had at other Beatle homes, none of them can exactly be described as foodies, though Ringo at home likes to think he at least does his bit, making the breakfast on Sunday morning for himself and Barbara.

I asked her about her
Playboy
appearance. Had it been, er, on the centrefold?

‘It was on the
cover
, do you mind,’ she said.

‘She’s still hoping to make the centrefold,’ said Ringo. ‘When she’s 50. That will be in a year’s time.’

‘He lies all the time about my age.’

‘Well you work it out, Hunt. She’s 29, and she’s got a kid of 31. You went to school.’

‘It’s a few years yet till I’m 50,’ said Barbara.

‘I can’t wait. They’re all the fashion, women of 50. When she gets to 50, she’ll be the Joan Collins of Ascot … oh, no, stop it …’