Shout! (88 page)

Aware that the end could now not be far away, he set about making arrangements for his departure and healing the two major emotional breaches in his life. There was a reconciliation with his older sister, Louise, now in her seventies, to whom he’d barely spoken since she lent her name to an Illinois bed-and-breakfast called the Hard Day’s Night. He also got together with Paul McCartney, ending the chill that had never really abated since Paul had tried to boss him around on the
Let It Be
sessions. Hugging one another as they never had even as boyhood cronies, they agreed how little all such things matter in the end.

Nor did the eerie repetitiveness of Beatles history cease with his death on the last day of November. As with Linda McCartney three years earlier, the quest for privacy created some initial confusion about where the event had happened. Initially, it was reported to have been at the Laurel Canyon mansion of Gavin de Becker, a security consultant who specializes in providing safe houses for celebrities. On the death certificate, however, it appeared as “1971 Coldwater Canyon,” an address that proved fictitious. The discovery brought faint echoes of a time when all Beatles output was thought to carry hidden subtexts and messages. For 1971 was the year of George’s greatest triumph, the concerts for Bangladesh. As in Linda’s case, too, the ruse brought a threat of official prosecution that hung over Olivia Harrison until she filed an affidavit stating the true address six months later.

In fact, the place where George died had symbolized a Beatles reunion perhaps more significant than any in the previous twenty years. He had been staying at 9536 Heather Road, Beverly Hills, a property owned by Paul McCartney and loaned to George as a last sanctuary that the media would never find. With him at the last, as well as Olivia and Dhani, were his two favorite Indian gurus, Mukunda and Shayamsundra, chanting the same Hare Krishna mantra that used to echo through
the lush carpeted corridors of the Apple house and up and down Oxford Street. Olivia requested a worldwide minute’s silence as a mark of respect. (One could imagine George somewhere fuming over the fact that John got a full five minutes’ silence in 1980.) At Varanasi, India, hundreds gathered beside the River Ganges, expecting his body to be brought there and cremated according to Hindu custom. But, like so many watchers outside Apple in days of yore, they were doomed to disappointment. Cremation had been quietly carried out in L.A., immediately after his death.

His obituaries touched levels of hysteria and hyperbole remarkable even for the early twenty-first century. He was lauded not only as a towering figure in popular music but also as a philanthropist, a visionary, a mystic, even a messiah. On BBC radio, the former Traffic drummer Jim Capaldi said that if Christ had been reborn into the world, He could just have easily written the opening line of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

His estate was valued at £99 million, a figure said not to include his properties in Hawaii, Switzerland, and Italy. Everything was left to Olivia, in trust for Dhani. Neither his sister, Louise, nor his surviving brother, Peter, received a penny.

On the first anniversary of his death his closest musical blood brother headlined a memorial concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall that eerily re-created that 1969 concert billing of “Eric Clapton and Friends.” It also brought a further reunion of the Beatles’ surviving, uncontentious half, with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr instantly agreeing to join Clapton’s ensemble. Before the show, tickets with a face value of £150 were changing hands for up to £1,000.

George was not great; just an average guitarist who got incredibly lucky. But he was also an indispensable part of the greatest engine for human happiness the modern world has known. The pity was that it never seemed quite enough for him.

Of the four Beatles, Ringo Starr may have had the least natural talent with which to sustain a solo career. But what he did have was an enormous fund of goodwill, both inside the music business and outside. Whereas John, Paul, and George, in their different ways, all had to battle to prove themselves as individual performers, there was general, unspoken agreement that Ringo
had
to make it.

The conflict and bitterness of the breakup seemed not to have affected
his essentially happy, optimistic nature nor in any way compromised the affection that all the other three still felt for him. Apart from that one atypical loss of self-control at Cavendish Avenue, even Paul had never shown him hostility nor said a bad word about him. Rather as divorcing parents worry about the children, so all three felt concern about how Ringo would fare without them around to look after him. To be sure, it was probably the one point on which they all agreed. The little unselfishness and team spirit they had left they focused on him.

Thanks to these helping hands from all directions, Ringo’s post-Beatle career looked potentially bigger than either John’s or Paul’s. In 1970, following Beatles practice for some years past, he put out two albums: the country-flavored
Beaucoup of Blues
, recorded in Nashville, and
Sentimental Journey
, a collection of standards aimed mainly at pleasing his mum. The more than a little help from his superstar friends spawned two massively successful singles, “It Don’t Come Easy” in 1971 and “Back Off Boogaloo” in 1972, both his own compositions, produced by George Harrison and warbled in the same chewy lead vocal style, as though he were simultaneously masticating egg and chips.

In 1973 came the
Ringo
album, which, amazingly, brought him two American number-one singles: “Photograph” and a cover version of Johnny Burnette’s “You’re Sixteen.” The album’s numerous celebrity sidemen included not only George but both other concerned “parents,” John and Paul, playing on separate tracks. A year afterward came a third successful album,
Goodnight Vienna
, including a hit cover version of the Platters’ “Only You.” With George simultaneously triumphing in the American singles charts and John and Paul’s relatively small impact there, the Beatles’ long-eclipsed second division seemed to have turned the tables with a vengeance.

Following his droll cameo appearances in the Beatles’ own films and Terry Southern’s
Candy
, a screen acting career seemed to beckon even more alluringly than Ringo’s musical one. Those early comparisons with Keaton and Chaplin seemed justified when, also in 1973, he costarred with David Essex and Adam Faith in
That’ll Be the Day
, a nostalgic evocation of the seaside summer camps he used to play with Rory Storm’s Hurricanes, before John rang him at Skegness and offered him Pete Best’s old chair in the Beatles. The previous year had seen his debut as a documentary director with
Born to Boogie
, a film about his close friend the glam-rocker Marc Bolan. Then suddenly in the mid-seventies
it was as if a turbojet had been removed from Ringo’s back. His albums were recorded with ever-decreasing energy and conviction—like the spiritless
Rotogravure
of 1976—and sold in ever-decreasing quantities. He refused to appear in the sequel to
That’ll Be the Day
, turning instead to Hollywood, which cast him in a series of increasingly dire potboilers. He became best known as a guest on TV talk shows, always jokily sidestepping the only question that interested his audience: what had it been like to be a Beatle?

His marriage to Maureen in the end lasted for ten years—though it probably never recovered from Maureen’s fling with George—and by the early seventies the two of them were living separate lives on separate continents. In 1970, Ringo began a relationship with American model Barbara Bach, his costar in a risible movie called
Caveman
. Their marriage in 1981 was attended by Paul and Linda McCartney and George and Olivia Harrison, proof of Paul’s and George’s undimmed fondness for him and a symbolic act of togetherness in the aftershock of John’s murder.

In the early eighties, Ringo’s artistic fortunes sank to their nadir. Signed to the RCA label in 1981, he made an album called
Stop and Smell the Roses
that failed to register despite further fraternal contributions from Paul and George. Its follow-up,
Old Wave
, was considered too feeble for release either in America or Britain. Over the next decade his main public exposure would be on children’s television and video as narrator of the Reverend W. Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine stories.

As with so many of his contemporaries, decades of heedless rock-star life finally began taking their toll when he entered his forties. Even his buoyant spirits could not completely protect him against the slump in his prestige other than with juvenile steam-railway enthusiasts. Despite his delicate stomach, he had always been a heavy drinker; now his consumption of champagne and table wines increased to several bottles per day, with Barbara usually matching him glass for glass. In 1988, they entered a drying-out clinic together, which not only saved their health but also seemed to consolidate a marriage that few had expected to last.

Following this internal spring-clean, Ringo’s enthusiasm for drumming returned, with a consequent small revival in his career. In 1989 he went back on the road, leading (shades of Rory Storm!) an “All-Starr Band,” including distinguished sidemen like Billy Preston, Dave Edmunds, and Nils Lofgren, and featuring his own elder son, Zak, as
backup drummer. A successful U.S. and Japan tour that year was followed by a less successful European one in 1992. The once modest and self-knowing character who, as George Martin noted, “couldn’t do a roll to save his life,” now billed himself unblushingly as “the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Drummer.”

His 25 percent share of Apple meant he never had to work again unless he wanted to. By the nineties, he had moved to the tax haven of Monaco, acquiring a top-floor apartment in a luxury sea-front building overlooking the famous Sporting Club. Barbara and he took a full part in the principality’s jet-set social life, were received by its ruler, Prince Rainier, and could often be seen strolling along Avenue Princess Grace hand-in-hand, in matching black outfits, as if making their virtuous way to some Quaker meeting house.

Both Ringo’s sons, Zak and Jason, went on to become rock drummers, both creditably refusing to exploit his celebrity to advance their careers and always working under their real family name of Starkey. Zak in particular turned out to be a brilliant performer, although, ironically, his role model was not his father but the manic Keith Moon of The Who. Far from resenting this, Ringo even arranged for Moon to give Zak lessons. And no one could have been prouder when, long years after Moon’s death from suicidal alcohol and drug abuse in 1978, The Who recruited Jason to be drummer on some of their various comeback tours.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was Ringo’s former wife, Maureen, the former mousy little Liverpool hairdresser who, after the divorce, might have been expected to sink into comfortably maintained obscurity. Instead, Maureen went on to marry Isaac Tigrett, the founder of the Hard Rock Café chain, and then to present Tigrett with a baby daughter, Olivia. Ringo remained on good terms with her and close to all three of their children. The original family not only survived but provided each other with crucial love and support in the double ordeal that was soon to come.

In 1995, Ringo and Maureen’s fashion designer daughter, Lee, by then twenty-five, was rushed to a London clinic to have fluid removed from her brain. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, she underwent radiation treatment at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and, after several agonizing weeks for her parents and brothers, was pronounced to be in the clear. Late that same year Maureen herself
was found to be suffering from leukemia. Again, the prognosis seemed favorable, especially after an apparently successful bone-marrow transplant from her son Zak. But by Christmas, the illness had shown itself to be incurable. Maureen died in January 1996 with Ringo and her children at her bedside.

In 2000, Ringo bought a property in Cranleigh, Surrey, mainly to be near Jason and his girlfriend Flora, who had by now presented him with two grandsons, Louis and Sonny. Coincidentally, their near neighbor in North London happened to be Paul McCartney’s daughter Mary, herself the mother of a son, Arthur, by her TV producer partner Alistair Donald. The Beatles grandchildren were often to be found playing together, establishing who knows what early links for bands far into the future.

That November 5, the villagers of Cranleigh asked the newly arrived celebrity in their midst to be guest of honor at their Guy Fawkes night fireworks display. It must have seemed small stuff to Ringo, after all the red carpets that had been unrolled for him all around the world, but he turned out good-naturedly enough on the village green to give the signal for the display to start, then stood and watched the Catherine wheels, the Roman candles, the little rockets whooshing only halfway to Heaven. As he advances into his sixties, the only cloud on his horizon seems the health of his daughter Lee who, in late 2001, was reported to be having further hospital treatment in Boston for a second brain tumor called an ependymoma.

He may have been no more than history’s most famous bit-part player, but still, his must be the last word about it all. Look at the
Beatles Anthology
television documentary, that laughably incomplete and doctored account. Fast-forward through show bizzy Paul and crabby George until you find Ringo, playing his usual cameo role on some sun-soaked L.A. balcony, his close-cropped hair and gray-grizzled beard giving him an almost uncanny resemblance to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Not only is he the funniest, most honest, and self-knowing of the survivors; he is also the only one willing to show real emotion. Tears glisten in the big mournful eyes as he says that for him, above all, the Beatles will always be “just four guys who loved each other.”

Which perhaps best sums up the whole story.

PHOTO CREDITS

First photo section, pages 1–8:
John in garden, Mimi Smith, Julia—Hunter Davies. George and family—Freda Norris. Ringo as a boy, Ringo’s parents, Mary McCartney, Michael and Paul—Hunter Davies. Quarry Men—Colin Hanton. Rory Storm and The Hurricanes—Keystone Press. Rooftop cowboys—Keystone Press. Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr—Sutcliffe family (photographer: Astrid Kirchherr). John and Stuart on the beach—Sutcliffe family. At the Top Ten Club in Hamburg—Jurgen Vollmer. Mathew Street—Pix Features. Cavern Club—Dick Matthews. The band in suits—Albert Marrion. Recording “Love Me Do”—Rex Features (photographer: Dezo Hoffman).