Mourning John Lennon and Making Movies (1981)

 

Mourning John Lennon and Making Movies

By Bernard Drew

Gannett News Service

April 17, 1981

    When I asked for "Ringo Starr" at the desk at the Plaza Hotel, they said there was no such person registered. Luckily, his manager's name was listed, and he responded to my phone call by coming downstairs and escorting me up to a large suite where a security officer sat in front of the door. The suite was registered under "Richard Starkey", Ringo Starr's real name. The security precautions were begun after John Lennon's brutal murder in December. 

    Ringo came in to greet me. He has changed a great deal since he was the sassy, fun loving drummer of the pop quartet. Aside from the two memorable movies, the Beatles made A Hard Day's Night in 1964 and Help! a year later. Ringo went on to appear on his own and starred in The Magic Christian, That'll Be the Day, and the prehistoric comedy Caveman, which he co-starred with Barbara Bach.

     He and Bach have been living together since the film was made and have plans to marry. With a mustache, Ringle looks more handsome than he used to be and a lot more serious. He wears one beautiful earring.

     Over lunch, I asked him about his early movies and mentioned that Richard  Lester, who directed those first two Beatles movies, never again achieved the zest and fun he had in the beginning. "Well, Dick was excited too." Then Ringo explained, "Like us, he was fresh and new. In those days, we were just having a good time, having fun with everything. We were like four excited little boys. 

    "There was no undercurrent of seriousness. We had all come from Liverpool, where, despite our success, feelings there and in London were more restrained. Then we came to New York, and the media's carrying on was mind boggling. That's what caused the crowd screaming everywhere. It was almost, but not really, too much. 

    "We'd take an entire floor of a hotel we stayed at and had a different channel on the telly in each suite, and would run from one room to the other. We were together for eight years. I joined the other three in 1962, and we toured for the next four years. Then, by 1966, we decided to make some serious music. So we stopped touring and worked solely in the recording studios, and then it started falling apart. The four of us had been dedicated to one image, the Beatles, but we were getting older, channeling our own individual songs, Paul's songs, John's songs, George's songs; we weren't on the same track anymore. We were turning 30, so that by 1970, it was all over, and we went our separate ways."

     Ringo remained in England until 1975, making a few albums and playing roles in occasional films. He maintains residences in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles. Part of the year, he returns to England and visits his children, who live with their mother. 

    Barbara joined us, looking weary and sipping chicken soup, as she was suffering from the flu. "Barbara and I live mostly in Los Angeles now," Ringo stated, "with her two children from her former marriage to an Italian industrialist.

     "After 1975, I did an album a year and a couple of TV specials. Then for two years, I just took off," Ringo recalled. "I didn't want to work. I'd lost my direction and did nothing until Caveman came along."

     All this early success can present problems later on. Is that what happened to John Lennon, too? "Yes, I'm sure of it," Ringo said soberly. "What can I say about John? It was a terrible shock, and we miss him and think about him all the time. I lost a good friend, and the world lost a great artist. John had stopped working because he got tired of it. You reach a point when you don't want to do what you're doing just to do it. I know I had, and John wanted to raise Sean because he missed his older son, who was in England with his mother, and he just wanted the experience of raising a child.

     "I  still can't understand what happened and why," Ringo muttered about John's death. "You can understand a political assassination, bad as it is, but a rock and roll assassination is beyond me. There was no great motive behind it. It was all so dumb and meaningless. A guy came in and went, boom-boom. It makes no sense."