Fire and Rain by David Browne

hashish, although he never knew for certain—Brower was doubly befuddled. Where was the Lennon that Brower and Yorke had met with a few months before—even the funny, animated man at the press conference for the festival in Toronto just before Christmas? “Fawcett said, ‘They love their hair,’” Brower recalled. “So cutting it was like embarking on this new path.” But what was that path, and where would it lead? No one, perhaps even Lennon, was sure at the moment.

    On January 25, Lennon and Ono finally returned to London; the next day, Ringo Starr left. By then, Starr had two comfortable homes: a house with a garden in Highgate, a hilly London suburb, and a centuries-old Tudor mansion in Elstead in county Surrey that he’d purchased in 1968 from his friend, actor Peter Sellers. With its oak-beamed rooms, wandering packs of ducks and geese, and separate movie theater, Brookfield House, as the Elstead home was called, was a welcome retreat from the pressure of Beatlemania.
    Still, Starr had to leave, even for a bit. As unappealing as the thought of inquisitive reporters was—he dreaded the inevitable questions about how the Beatles were getting along—he had a movie to promote and a career of his own to map out. With Maureen, his low-key wife of nearly five years, and Apple administrative director Peter Brown, he boarded a plane for Los Angeles.

    The oldest Beatle and the last to join, Starr had been a drowsy-eyed but amiable child growing up in Liverpool. To everyone around him, he still was. He’d been the first to say he was leaving: After a tense 1968 recording session, he stayed home and didn’t return for several days (when he was welcomed back with a drum kit enshrined in roses). They knew he would come back: More than the others, Starr was always happy with his job, so why change anything? According to one former Apple employee, Richard DiLello, Starr’s presence was especially welcome the day Lauren Bacall called and said she wanted to swing by with her daughter to meet a Beatle. Starr, the only Beatle available on short notice, charmed them so much that Bacall felt as if they were all in the offices. Starr’s interest in the business of the Beatles, while never as intense as McCartney’s, rose in the new decade: Now it was he, not McCartney, who was the most visible at 3 Savile Row and most passionate about the idea of the Beatles. As the four pulled away from each other, Starr steered closer to home base.
    The previous October, Starr had launched a project of his own, an album of standards from the pre-rock era—purposefully cornball but guileless songs like “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” and “Stardust,” with big-band arrangements courtesy of Quincy Jones and McCartney. “The idea of Ringo doing his own album made us all think, ‘Oh, really ?’” remembered Paul Watts, an EMI marketing executive at the time. Plenty of others, including Starr himself, didn’t see the project as more than a way to pass the time and record long-ago pop songs his mother would enjoy hearing him sing. Over the course of four months, with the Beatles on an extended hiatus of some sort, Starr worked on the album at his leisure.
    Since he’d been such a natural, unaffected screen presence in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! a career in acting became another way to pass the time between Beatle projects. He’d already played a Mexican gardener in 1968’s Candy , a warped sex comedy based on a novel coauthored by
Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and he’d just wrapped up a larger, costarring role in The Magic Christian, also based on a Southern novel, in which he was cast as the adopted son of a rich cynic (played by Sellers) who bribes unsuspecting people to do outrageous things for cash. The film had already opened in the U.K. to mixed reviews, but a U.S. premiere was set for