Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  There’s a dazzling Cape Kennedy kitchen, a sweeping Last Supper dining room at the front, and a flap in the living room French windows where his cats can come in off the garden and tread muddy little mitten marks all over the milk chocolate carpets. He’s fond of his cats and while talking lets them sit in his lap licking his hands, and watches impassively while they claw all hell out of his green velvet Victorian three-piece suite.

  The living room is big and dark, and the colour, which is generous, and diverse in the extreme, is confined mainly to the trappings and ornaments, giving the impression of a colour negative superimposed on a black and white picture. There’s a gigantic Sergeant Pepper badge sellotaped to one wall, a pouffe which looks like a psychedelic hovercraft and a lace table cloth. The slight edge of working class culture is carefully preserved.

  I reminded him that it was just five years since the start of Beatlemania, and I wondered was there anything he regretted.

  ‘For the moment there are lots of things that have happened which I’ve regretted… but nothing in the long run.’ He speaks slowly and with extreme care, and you get the impression that he’s watching himself, guarding against the unintentional image-shattering slips of the tongue.

  ‘The morning after Magical Mystery Tour was shown I regretted that we hadn’t done it in a more professional way, but a week later I realised that we’d done what we intended… to make a practice film.

  ‘It was like getting a bash in the face. You know next time. It annoys some people that we always jump in the deep end without knowing what we really want, but that’s the way I like to do things.

  ‘There is one thing I used to regret and feel guilty about. When Ringo joined us I used to act all big-time with him because I’d been in the business a bit longer and felt superior. I was a know-all. I’d been in the sixth form and thought I’d read a bit, you know. It began putting him off me, and me off me.

  ‘You see I went through a big part of my life without realising that I had any faults. I used to think “how lucky I am”. And I can’t remember going wrong, although I must have done. Then about two years ago I said to myself — “Come on, Paul, you’re not that great”.’

  The conceit which that sentence seems to imply is not, I think, intentional. Anyone who has seen any of the Beatles at any social function will understand how they might imagine that they are that great. The screaming may have stopped, but the admiration, the obsequious, grinning, ingratiating faces are always there. To many people outside their small circle of friends, to be recognised by a Beatle makes it good to be alive. To be spoken to by one is very heaven.

  When their television film was roasted by the critics at Christmas, McCartney was genuinely surprised and hurt. ‘You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who didn’t like it,’ he told me the morning after. For one reason or another (and they can’t all have liked it) no one had been prepared to criticise the film.

  Is he in love with his own image? ‘I don’t think it is narcissistic to say that I like my image the way it is. And I don’t think that if society is in our image that it is such a bad thing. Because it could have been so much worse.

  ‘We could, for instance, have turned out like four Hitlers. You and I know that our generation is all right. We haven’t been inciting wars and all that kind of crap. When people start puttng down youth they forget all that. It would have been so easy for our generation to have turned nasty, because all the guidance we’ve had has been so bad. You know, politicians telling lies and things. All that rubbish about Charlie Vietcong.

  ‘I’m sure that if we, the Beatles, had wanted to make a lot more money we could have gone in the other direction — like Hitler. You know the idea behind the film Privilege isn’t that far from reality.’ (In the film Privilege a pop singer becomes the tool of the Church of Fascism.)

  ‘When we first started we were eighteen and wanted to get rich. And if there was a possibility of getting rich by singing we were willing to forget everything. Well, let’s face it, that’s what swinging London is really about.

  ‘But now we don’t have to do things for ourselves so much any more. Instead of trying to amass money for the sake of it we’re setting up a business concern at Apple — rather like a Western Communism. A lot of people think that it’s just a shop. But we want to make it a complete business organisation on the lines of ICI — not just for us, but for the general good. Apple could be a social and cultural environment, as well as a business environment.’ Apple is at the moment a group of companies concerned with shops, music publishing, electronics and film making.

  ‘We’ve got all the money we need. I’ve got the house and the cars and all the things that money can buy. So now we want to start directing this money into a business. Not as a charity. No one likes charity, it makes them wince. Too sickly. We want to get something going where the underwriters will get a decent share of the profits, not two pounds a week, while we make a million.

  ‘We had to do it for ourselves. When Brian died we had to take a look at what we consisted of, and who owned bits of us, and then we got the idea of not only doing it for ourselves, but for everyone.

  ‘Now we’re really looking for someone like Brian, not in the managerial sense, but someone we could respect and be able to listen to and take advice from. We meet lots of people who are good at business, but they’re not necessarily nice people. Every big company has the sort of person we want — the trouble is they all have good jobs already.’

  Despite India (‘It’s as much a holiday as anything’), Apple (’The concept will spread: it will be fantastic’), LSD (‘Well, I’m glad I admitted it. At one time we couldn’t even say the word “whisky”’) it is the music that he still cares most deeply about. And he still has enormous, almost adolescent enthusiasm for his songs, and for the Beatles: ‘I hope to keep on writing and working for years,’ he says, ‘doing what I’m doing at the moment.’

  POSTSCRIPT That was McCartney at his most sophisticated. It was not a lifestyle which was to last, and after his marriage to Linda Eastman in 1969 and the break-up of the Beatles a year later he began to spend an increasing amount of his time first in Scotland and then in Sussex where their four children were brought up. As well as being a singer and composer he is now the owner of a very large and profitable music publishing empire. He is now vastly, vastly rich.

  March 1968

  Ringo Starr

  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, tables 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 nannie 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 see 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 ambitions 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 going meditating 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 ever 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 then 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 his 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 by 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 says. 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”.’

  POSTSCRIPT Despite several sorties into the film world, Ringo has never really managed to build himself a second career. Although he was excellent in That’ll Be The Day he has generally been savaged by the critics for his other film performances. I think he is a better actor than he realises. He is now married to American actress Barbara Bach and lives in John Lennon’s old Ascot home, Tittenhurst Park.

  May 1968

  George Best

  The little lad of five or six with the red jersey and the Un
ion jack stuck in the handlebars of his tricycle wanted to know ‘is Georgie Best cummin’ before bedtime?’; bare-faced, hen-legged girls with backcombed (yes, backcombed) hair were pretending to buy ties for imaginary boyfriends, taking sly peeps into the changing room, and leaving love-letters, fan letters and pictures of themselves; meeker, younger girls plastered themselves against the windowpane, busts flattened by the pushing from behind; knowledgeable lads inspected the white S-type Jaguar, and grown men, who ought to have known better, stood on tip-toes and grinned and said: ‘There he is.’

  And there he was, tangerine sweater, waves and £200 gold ring: George Best, Footballer of the Year, darling of the terraces, telling them all to clear off his shop front because the people couldn’t get in to buy.

  To see real fan worship these days you just have to go up to Manchester. It’s astonishing. And it’s all for Georgie, the dark, pretty lad from Belfast who has become a sort of Mancunian El Cordobes.

  ‘I’m getting about two hundred fan letters a day now,’ he whispers an octave above the giggling din as the crowds clam back to the boutique windows. ‘We get scenes like this all day and every day. Sometimes it’s much worse. You should see them at Old Trafford after the match on Saturday.’

  We’re sitting in his Manchester shop which he has named ‘Edwardia’ and which forms part of a developing reflection of Carnaby Street called ‘The Village’.

  It is also the meeting point for the Best Set—a fashionable, trendy, pop, or whatever, branch of post-school, pre-semi northern society. The northern edition of one national daily newspaper devotes a half page every week to the fashions of the Best Set.

  It isn’t just that George Best is a peculiarly talented footballer with a fine head of hair. He is something of a phenomenon — the one outstanding example of how football has developed from a sport to an entertainment.