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.