Charm was, indeed, the most notable deficiency in these later years. Despite his own late burst of chart success, he began to come across like some old curmudgeon in a chimney-corner, voicing detestation of new musical styles like rap and Britpop and affecting not to listen to anything recorded later than about 1976. He even spat some venom at Oasis, a band who made their adoration of the Beatles clear in almost every note they played. True, they released a track whose title unwittingly copied his Wonderwall album—but he, of all people, might have understood about that. Liam Gallagher, their volatile front man, became incensed enough by George’s negative comments to vow to beat him up if ever they should meet.
Though private and publicity-shy he never became a recluse in the Howard Hughes mold, as would later be alleged. He followed Formula 1 racing and also became an obsessive fan of the 1940s musical entertainer George Formby, who used to sing in a squeaky northern accent, playing a ukulele. George took his own Formby-style ukulele with him wherever he went and frequently attended conventions of Formby soundalikes, though he always shunned equivalent gatherings of Beatles fans. “He was rubbish on the ukulele,” remembers Mal Jefferson, an old school friend and fellow Merseybeat musician who occasionally met him at George Formby conventions. “I saw him play once, and then get slaughtered by a nine-year-old lad.
“Afterward, I offered to buy his uke off him and, to my amazement, he agreed. ‘But I paid two grand for it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get back what I paid. I need every penny at the moment. I’ve just lost forty million with HandMade Films.’ As a joke, I wrote him out a check for £2001—but George said, ‘Thanks very much’ and stuffed it into his pocket.”
At the time of the Anthology came a brief period of rejuvenation, when he took to combing his hair back in the same Teddy-boy style that used to get him into such trouble at Liverpool Institute. But as time passed, he looked increasingly scruffy and unkempt in his old parkas and shapeless gardening hats. Despite his public reconciliation with his former Beatles colleagues, his bitterness toward Paul continued to fester. In a BBC Radio 2 interview during the late nineties he was heard griping about how “Paul McCartney ruined me as a guitarist,” still apparently unable to recognize the inestimable luck of having lived and worked alongside such provocative talent.
He remained a devotee of Transcendental Meditation and, despite all John’s mockeries and fulminations, had never turned against Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Despite losing the Beatles as figureheads, TM and the Maharishi had prospered in Britain; they now owned Mentmore House, the former country seat of the Rosebery family, where they were rumored to teach their followers to fly in rooms with shock-absorbing mattresses nailed around the walls. They had also produced a political wing, the Natural Law Party, that fielded a huge array of parliamentary candidates in the 1992 general election. They hoped that George himself might run, thereby guaranteeing at least one NLP MP in parliament. He declined, but showed his support by giving his first-ever solo concert in the U.K. and donating its proceeds to their election campaign.
His greatest asset proved to be his marriage to Olivia, not a rock star’s cipher wife but a woman of character and compassion, who became deeply involved in charity work to help orphans in Romania. Though George no longer engaged in casual affairs, as he had when he was with Patti, Olivia still found life with him anything but a bed of roses. The rockiest moment occurred when a Los Angeles prostitute known only as Tiffany identified him as one of her clients, alleging that while a sexual service was performed for him, he was playing his ukulele and singing a George Formby song. But Olivia stood by him, becoming—in one insider’s words—“the bedrock of his existence.” Together they proved model parents, raising their son Dhani in comparative normality—and totally out of the media spotlight. Despite his ambivalence toward “the material world,” George acquired several properties overseas, including estates in Maui and the West Indies, and traveled by private Gulfstream jet.
In 1997, while gardening at Friar Park, he noticed a lump had appeared in his neck. Its cause was found to be a cancerous tumor in his throat, the result—as he himself acknowledged—of a lifetime’s heavy smoking. After an operation at the Margaret Hospital in Windsor followed by a course of radiation therapy at Royal Marsden in London, he was pronounced to have made a complete recovery. He himself told the media he was completely fit again and had taken to heart this warning never to smoke again.
On December 30, 1999, the “devil’s best friend” he had feared for so long finally called on him. It was, indeed, an eerily exact replay of the December night seventeen years before when Mark David Chapman had murdered John Lennon. A similarly deranged Beatles fan, thirty-four-year-old Michael Abrams, broke into Friar Park, believing himself to be on “a mission from God” to murder George. His intended victim later recounted how his first instinct on coming unexpectedly face-to-face with Abrams was to shout his old sixties peace mantra, “Hare Krishna!” As the two grappled at the foot of the main staircase, Abrams stabbed George four times in the body with a knife. “I felt my chest deflate and the flow of blood to my mouth,” George said later. “I truly thought I was dying.”
So he certainly would have done but for his wife, Olivia, who, like an avenging angel, laid into Abrams with a poker and the base of a lamp while her husband lay bleeding and helpless on the ground. Her later testimony would uncannily recall Yoko’s description of the “horrible confused” look in John’s eyes after Chapman had pumped five shots into him. Olivia was likewise to remember how, as George lay bleeding among his meditation cushions, “he was very pale and… staring at me in a really bizarre manner.” The struggle continued until police arrived and overpowered Abrams. “I should have got the bastard better,” muttered the intruder as he was led away.
The Apple office, through Neil Aspinall, initially played down the seriousness of the incident. Not until Abrams’s trial at Oxford Crown Court eleven months later was its full horror revealed. Olivia appeared as a witness, though George, still seemingly traumatized by his ordeal, was allowed to give evidence by written statement. After Abrams had been sentenced to be detained indefinitely in a secure psychiatric unit, a statement was read on George’s behalf by his son, Dhani, now twenty-two and an almost exact replica of his father at the same age.
The attack inevitably deepened George’s paranoia over personal privacy, to the point where he seriously considered leaving Britain altogether and settling in either America or the West Indies. Security at Friar Park was immediately strengthened, with guard dogs and, it was rumored, ex-paramilitary bodyguards added to the existing razor-wire fence, electronic front gates, and video surveillance system that had failed to stop Abrams from entering the house. His stable-door security mania even extended to the police officers who had rescued him from Abrams. Police Constable Matt Morgans, who had cradled him in his arms until medical help arrived, later gave an interview to the local newspaper, the Henley Standard. George was so incensed by the interview that he threatened an official complaint against his rescuer.
According to George’s Henley neighbor, Sir John Mortimer, there was a sick aftermath to the episode—one which revealed how far Britain had traveled as a society from the loving, sunny sixties. A car full of people drove past Friar Park’s gates, loudly cheering because George had been attacked. Other anonymous sickos sent flowers to his would-be killer in the hospital.
In March 2001, a routine checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, revealed cancerous cells in one of his lungs. He underwent surgery and was said by his doctors to have made “an excellent recovery.” He himself assured the media, in his familiar mordant way, that he had “no plans to die.” But he seems to have realized already that the writing was on the wall. Most of that following summer was spent in Switzerland, at a villa near Lugano’s San Giovanni clinic, where he was receiving treatment from the world-famous oncologist Professor Franco Cavalli. Partnered by his son Dhani, he wrote and recorded a new song, “Horse to the Water,” for inclusi
on on an R&B album also featuring Jools Holland, Van Morrison, and Sting. With typical graveyard humor, he copyrighted the song to “Rip 2001 Ltd.” “He never felt sorry for himself,” Dhani was to recall. “We took the view ‘be here now’ and made the most of our time. He used to say, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to finish all these songs.’ I’d say, ‘Well, not if you do it first. Get off your arse and finish them.’”
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 alb
um 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.