The Maureen Cleave Beatles Interviews for the London Evening Standard, published March 1966
constructed from republished accounts in:
Teen Life Magazine, November 1966 - "I Love Being A Family Man"
Datebook Magazine, August 1966 - "I’m Not Thick ... Just Uneducated"
The Maureen Cleave Interview
It was, as Mr. Brian Epstein rightly pointed out, the Americans who discovered Ringo. And it is curious to reflect that when Ringo was 18, he almost became and American. If the immigration forms had not been so complicated he would have set off to visit Lightnin’ Hopkins who, according to the album sleeve he read, lived in Houston, Texas.
Ringo in those early Beatle days was bejewelled and silent with a melancholy cast of countenance and a passion for staying in the background. "A good drummer knows his place," he used to say.
He was there by courtesy of the other three Beatles, and he knew it. The others were childhood friends. "Tell us," the journalists would say, "about the early days in Liverpool." And Ringo, whose early days had been different from the others’, would say nothing. On the cover of their first English album is a picture of Ringo with his hair brushed back off his forehead - which shows how different he was.
It took two years to make him feel like a real Beatle; "two years," he said, "to get each other sorted out. But from then on I had the feeling there was four of us in it. I suppose we get on together because there are only the four people like us; we’re the only ones who really know what it’s like. When there was all the Beatlemania we were pushed into a corner, just the four of us. A sort of trap really. We were like Siamese quads eating out of the same bowl."
When they first began, Ringo announced his intention of ending up "sort of unforgettable." He started to achieve this ambition with certain natural advantages. First, there was his face: it would be hard to find a crowd that Ringo’s face would not stand out in. Then there was his name which Americans thought was romantic and surely the name of a deputy sheriff of Dodge City. And there was his wit which is sharp and sparing of words. "What," asked the American journalists when Ringo first arrived in America, "do you think of New York?"
"Tall," said Ringo.
Ringo is the least brilliant Beatle; one might go so far as to say he is the most ordinary. On the other hand he is the most sensible and the most mature. He is now 25 1/2, the eldest of the Beatles. Though the smallest, the cutest and the favorite of tiny children, he seems less complicated, and indeed, gives the impression of being utterly contented. He knows exactly what will make him happy and he has the patience to wait for it to come his way. This makes him a charming host and restful company. Things turn out right for Ringo.
The courtship of his wife, Maureen, is typical of his relaxed attitude towards life. He met her in Liverpool in the Cavern five days after he became a Beatle. "God rest its soul," he said piously. Maureen was 16.
"Take you home, girl?" Ringo said. He had no driving license but he did have a car.
"O.K." she said, "but I have my girlfriend with me."
Ringo took them both home. He took them both home the next week and for the next six weeks. "The three of us were getting quite friendly," he said.
One day he said to her: "Could we go out one night?"
"O.K." she said.
"Could it be just you and me?" said Ringo, greatly daring.
"O.K." she said.
Two years later they got married. The record industry was shocked to the marrow. Pop singers who had made the mistake of marrying before they became famous, usually had the sense to keep quiet about it; but to marry at the height of your fame with the world at your feet was the act of a fool. Ringo, of course, would never allow the mere fact of being a Beatle to get in the way of what he wanted to do. "All this stuff about drink milk and not get married," he said. "Well, I’ve always been the marrying type. Anyway," he added reasonably, "I was rich already so it didn’t matter."
He is very happily married. His wife, Maureen, is 19, pretty and level-headed. There is nothing giddy or teenage about her. She doesn’t talk much but what she does say is sensible. She adores him and calls him Richie. They always sit very close, side by side, and Ringo always lights two cigarettes simultaneously, one for her and one for him. They do everything together - even airgun practice - and get on well together: Ringo gave in to her over the christening; and she gave in to him over the nannie for the baby he insisted on so that she is free to spend time with him.
"Her place is with me," he said comfortably. "I own her, of course. When I married her, her parents signed her over to me. That just knocked me out; she’s still a minor you see. When you’re married it’s not like when you’re courting. You both become different people because you get to know each other so well. She can shout at me now without opening her mouth - that’s being married."
They both dote on the baby Zak, who is a large, healthy, engaging and strikingly precocious child under one year. Ringo worries a good deal about him and his future. "Is his head knitting up right?" he will ask anxiously, and Maureen tells him that this doesn’t happen for ages. They take endless photographs of the child. "All the important events in his life," Ringo said, showing me a picture of Zak eating a chocolate biscuit. "It’s a drag wondering how he’ll grow up. Of course he’ll be used to having nannies and that, and people doing things for him which we’re not used to, but I would love him to be just normal." A terrible thought struck him. "Suppose he grows up to be a fat schoolboy!"
"I used to be terrified of babies and dogs. Babies cried and dogs bit me. But what knocks me out about this baby is him shouting his head off in his own senseless way - laughing at bits of wood. That’s what I like about babies."
Ringo lives in Weybridge an hours drive from London, at the bottom of a wooded hill of which John lives on top. His house, too, is large and Tudor-ish. It has an enormous garden with sloping lawns and trees and crocuses opening flat in the hot spring sun; a goldfish pond, a tree house, and old air-raid shelter, a kennel for Daisy and Donovan the Folk Dog, his two airedales; a washing line with an old tin can hanging from it. This is for Ringo and Maureen to shoot at with their air guns. They do most things together.
Ringo likes to call all this the grounds. "Would you care to see the grounds?" he asked, offering a walking stick for the paths are rather steep. We set off. Ringo had his own walking stick, silver topped, in one hand he pushed the baby Zak in his pram with the other. Zak wore a sensible woolly bonnet and, in his handsome pram, looked the picture of British babyhood. His father remained somewhat surprising figure in the setting of a Surrey garden. He wore tight blue jeans, high black suede boots, a black suede waistcoat and the usual number of gold rings, gold bracelets and watches, old St. Christophers and so forth. His hair is now very long, the luxuriant black sideburns giving his face a fierce aspect.
Zak and his mother look very English; so do the garden, with its lawns, and dogs. Ringo does not. There are vital traces of the cowboy and of Elvis in Ringo that persist in him to this day. I always think of him as a cowboy.
His house is spacious and comfortable and much admired by the other Beatles. It has been furnished in soft dark colors with the help of a man called Ronnie Oke; the main bathroom, sunken everything, is the envy of all who visit it. This has little steps up and down, sumptously carpeted, and a sunken bath. Ringo says it’s no easy matter getting in and out of the sunken bath without breaking your leg. Their bedroom is very handsome with wicker bed head and wicker cupboards. The sitting room is vast; it can seat about 30 people in considerable comfort. There is Ringo’s brass-bound desk with sign saying Big Daddy, sent by a thoughtful American when Zak was born.
There are shelves full of trophies, neatly arranged: gold disks; a piece of fossilized wood from the Libyan Desert, millions of years old; books (one shelf for science fiction, another for the Asprey leather-bound); a miniature cannon. "A present off of my wife," said Ringo grandly. "She’s always buying me presents." There is a perfectly horrible small brown stuffed puppy dog standing on a carpet in a glass case - a present from John. "I think it’s nice," said Ringo.
He has pikestaffs and guns and the holster Elvis gave him, knives in sheaths; one he tells me belonged to the last queen of Madagascar, and lots of science fiction. "I would love," said Ringo who is subject to flights of fancy, "to see a spaceship land in my garden. That would get us all sorted out," he said grimly, "fighting over atom bombs and doing nothing about famine and that." The roof of the house is stuck all over with television aerials that enable him to get four channels. "Might as well get everything that’s going," he said. "I get all my knowledge from TV."
His household rises between 12 and four in the afternoon. He has a slightly better sense of time than the others in that he can tell you what day of the week he did things. "I bought this house on a Monday," he will say, though he is less prepared to tell you the week, month or year.
His favorite room in the house is undoubtledly the pub. I have never actually seen one in a private house before. What he likes doing best is sitting in his bar on a high stool. "I’ve always wanted a pub, from movies I think. What I like would be for about 15 of my friends to pop in here without being asked, without me being here even." Ringo has called his the Flying Cow and it has many authentic touches such as antlers, horns, a till, a little sink, whiskey bottles upside down with tot measures, sporting prints. It really has everything but Ringo wishes it were a real pub. "I would love to have a real pub in my house," he said. "My mother was a barmaid once."
Mrs. George Harrison (Pattie) came through on the telephone in the pub. John arrived with his son Julian, both dressed in black. Maureen pointed out that it was the Addams Family on television. We ate an excellent dinner cooked by one of the workman finishing off the house. As I said, things turn up for Ringo.
Richard Starkey is an only child and his mother still thinks the light shines out of his eyes. They lived with his stepfather in Liverpool. She used to have a house in Admiral Grove, in a rough poor part of the city; Ringo used to bring his drum kit home on the bus, unload it and carry it home bit by bit. "We had two up, two down, a john in the yard and no bathroom," he said. "We had great times there, great parties. It was rough but I never regretted living there. I couldn’t park my cars outside so I bought them a bungalow with a garage." (Ringo’s cars, the Rolls Royce, the Facel Vega, the two minis, are all maroon.) He goes to stay about twice a year, has just been up to have the baby christened. They have a nice bit of garden," he said.
He missed five of his 10 years schooling through illness. He regrets this. "I’m not thick," he said, "it’s just that I’m not educated. People can use words and I won’t know what they mean. I say ME instead of MY - the sun shines out of MY eyes. Odd things like that I would like to correct. I can read anything but I can’t spell - anyway, I never write anything these days."
Work poor, poor, very poor, read his old school reports from St. Silas’s junior school; but the boy himself, they wrote, was honest, cheerful and willing. He keeps the documents from his early life in a plastic folder: the photographs of himself as a Teddy Boy in his drape and blue crepe-soled shoes with chains on them; himself as a beatnik with a beard; his dole card dated 1962.
He reads a bit, watches television, and thinks a good deal. He feels strongly about a number of things but is hard put to remember what they are.
He would like to meet Paul Newman.
If the bomb is to be dropped he wants to know where so that he can go and stand there.
He doesn’t mind being small. "If I were taller," he said darkly, "I might go around hitting people."
He thinks the upper classes are much improved. "Don’t you think so?" he said. "Much less piggy and interbred. I’ve seen their old portraits and they look just like pigs. Now they’re spreading out a bit - to Australia and that."
He is angry when the British don’t think Britain is best. "Dragging it down," he said, "drives me mad."
He deplores the lack of encouragement given to British athletes. "I can’t think why anybody does anything for Britain now," he said.
He was enraged by a recent television program that showed what British things the nation had failed to exploit, for instance penicillin.
He used to have a splendid plan for when he was Prime Minister: he wanted everyone’s house joined to the houses of their friends by underground tubes. He even started digging his own tube in Admiral Grove.
When it was midnight they decided to go to London to a nightclub. Maureen went to get ready. Ringo loves clubs; to him they are a pub substitute. "I wish I had a club in my house," he said enthusiastically. "Of course that’s the great thing about being married - you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man - as it were," he said. In some strange way Ringo has the balance of his life worked out.
It was Brian Epstein who rightly pointed out that visiting Ringo at home was a happy experience. "It makes you feel secure," he said, "just looking at the two of them."
END
Maureen Cleave's interview with John can be found at The Rutlemania Articles Archive
Maureen Cleave's interview with George can be found in the files section of the Something About Pattie Boyd Group
[many thanks to Lynn Mayes who typed this out and added it to my Maureen Starr Tribute Group at Yahoo]
