Beatles (6 page)

Mimi was the only one who had left the Liverpool area, coming down to the South Coast to a new bungalow near Bournemouth. She too had found her life in Liverpool taken over by the fans, though she had always tried to be kind to them, searching round for some old object belonging to John to give them.

‘One day I at last couldn’t find anything. “Not even a button?” this girl said. Well, I’ve always had a phobia for cutting buttons off all clothes before throwing them out. So I got out my big button tin I’d had for years and gave her one. She threw her arms round me and kissed me. She said she’d never forget it. She later wrote and said she was wearing it on a gold chain round her neck and all the girls in her factory were jealous.’

This naturally led to all the other girls in the factory writing to Mimi for John’s buttons, and then fans everywhere, as the story got round. ‘I’ve sent buttons to every country in the world. America, Czechoslovakia, everywhere.’

In the end she was very upset by two fans who had broken into her house when she was ill in bed upstairs. She’d left the back door open for the doctor and when she heard noises down below, she thought it must be burglars. She crept downstairs, expecting to be attacked, and found two girls, stretched out on her brand new sofa, with a pile of used toffee papers all round them. She told them to go, furious that they had come in without asking, making her house a public property. They did at last leave, but on the way they stole her back door key. Mimi sat down and cried.

‘I was like that when the bread man arrived. He very kindly phoned his works and a man came and put a new lock and key on the door. It was the Scott’s bread man. One of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.’ It was not long after this that Mimi decided to leave Liverpool completely.

It’s interesting to think, all these years later, that many of those Beatle souvenirs are now turning up at Sotheby’s in London and being sold for a fortune, before going on to decorate the games room or the bar of some Japanese millionaire.

Mimi was very helpful to me, on my visits to her, though so many of her stories about John as a little boy seemed to clash with his own versions, given by John himself, and by his school friends.

In Mimi’s eyes, John had a perfect middle-class upbringing. Yes, he could be naughty now and again, but more on the lines
of Just William and his pranks, nothing nasty or horrible and certainly not criminal. She didn’t know where such tales came from. Her own stories were mainly about John’s early childhood, almost as if she had drawn a veil over most of the rest, determined to keep him young and sweet and innocent for ever, at least in her mind.

Even when she witnessed a triumphal Beatle concert in Liverpool at Christmas 1963, their first return after their number-one record success, her mind still went back to John’s early days. She was standing at the back, having refused to sit in a front-row seat.

‘It was at the Liverpool Empire. I was looking at John on the stage, but all I could see was him as a little boy. I always used to take him to the Empire at Christmas for his annual treat. I remember the time we’d seen
Puss in Boots
. It had been snowing and John’s Wellingtons were still on in the theatre. When Puss came on in his big boots, John stood up and shouted, “Mimi, he’s got his Wellington boots on! So have I.” His little voice was heard everywhere and everyone looked at him and smiled.

‘I was very proud of course to see him playing on the stage at the Empire. It was the first time I realized what an effect they had. There were mounted police to restrain the crowds. Bessie Braddock was standing with me at the back. It was very exciting.

‘But I couldn’t help thinking all the time, no, he’s not really a Beatle, he’s the little fellow who once sat upstairs with me and shouted “Mimi – he’s got his Wellington boots on.”’

It is true, if you look at the snapshots of John when he was very little – especially the polyphoto strip – he does look a very appealing, innocent little boy.

One of the problems about piecing together the Beatles’ early childhood life was the fact that there were two missing parents. Julia, John’s mother, was, of course, long dead, and so was Paul’s. I knew that Ringo’s real father, who had got divorced from his mother Elsie many years ago, was still alive. And I also suspected that Freddie Lennon, or ‘that Alfred’, as the Mimi side of the family always called him, was still around somewhere.
There had at least been no news of Freddie’s death. Throughout all of John’s school life, Mimi dreaded Alfred turning up one day. I contacted shipping companies and hotels where he was supposed to have worked as a washer-up and failed at first to get any news of him.

I had better luck tracking down Ringo’s father, also called Richard or Ritchie. In my first letter, I rather upset him by spelling his name wrong. Tut tut. I was never much good at spelling. I addressed him as Mr Starkie, instead of Mr Starkey. All Beatle fans know that. He reprimanded me in his reply, but said he was willing to talk to me.

He was living in Crewe, working partly as a window cleaner. He did not have a lot to tell me, but I very much admired how he had kept away from Ringo after the divorce, and even now, when his son was famous, he was not cashing in in any way and stoutly refused to contact Ringo or his former wife.

Apart from the parents, I also spent a lot of time in the Liverpool area, tracking down school friends, schoolmasters, people who played with them, at one time, in the Quarrymen.

I went to the Cavern, still going strong in 1967, though as a jazz club again, and saw people such as Bob Wooler and Alan Williams. I bought old copies of
Mersey Beat
and picked up as many old programmes and posters as I could.

John dug out and gave me an old programme for a bill they had been on, as a supporting group, with Little Richard. On the front of the programme, John had secured Little Richard’s autograph, as any ordinary fan might do, plus his address in the USA, in case John might visit America one day. At that time, it seemed a very remote possibility.

The Liverpool interview that stands out in my mind was with Pete Best. He was the drummer sacked by the Beatles on 16 August 1962 (see
Chapter 17
). By 1967, he had got married and was working in a bakery and he had failed to answer all the letters and messages I had sent him. In the end, I managed to see his mother, Mo Best, who did so much to help the Beatles in their
early stages by letting them perform at the little club she had opened, the Casbah.

I saw her in Hayman’s Green, in a big overgrown Victorian house, which at one time had the Casbah Club in the cellar. I knocked for 15 minutes, and was beginning to think the house was abandoned, before I was let in. The fact that I was working on an ‘authorized biography’ was in this case not exactly a help. She was still furious about the way her Pete had been treated and I worked hard to convince her that I was simply trying to get at the truth, to hear all sides. She said that she had passed on my messages to Peter, but he didn’t want to meet anyone to do with the Beatles. She eventually relaxed and took me through her meetings with the Beatles and the history of the Casbah, all of which I used in the book.

Unbeknown to me, Peter had arrived at the house while we were talking, to visit his mum. He was sitting alone in another room, and refused to come out and talk to me. I asked Mrs Best to send through her younger son Roag, to ask if he would talk to me, just to help me get the dates right of the Hamburg years. In the end, she said come on, I’ll take you in to see Pete, it’ll be all right. I spent a long time with him, although I used only part of his story in the book.

He stood up and smiled wearily, as if giving in, realizing that, thanks to his mother, he’d been found and trapped. He looked embarrassed and tired. He held his head self-consciously to one side, almost stooping. He seemed sad and a bit pathetic. He talked slowly and quietly. He was tired, having just come off shift work at the bakery. As he talked, there was obviously a great deal of pride left in him.

He went over the Hamburg and earlier days, brightening up as he told funny stories, such as John standing in the street in his Long John underpants.

‘I suppose I have got over a lot of it. It took a long time. I had so much press and publicity to live with. I did refuse many offers to sell my stories. I just didn’t want to. What good would it have done, apart from the money? It was all over, and that was that.

‘Twice I was really at the bottom, really low, and didn’t know what to do with life. My wife Kitty said step up, go back and have another go. Mo worked very hard. Mo always wanted me to be a success in show business. She took my side in everything, but it was really my fight.

‘When I left show business, it wasn’t so bad. I didn’t meet other groups who might say I was no good. It was difficult at first starting an ordinary job. Some people said I should have stuck to show business. At work they’d stare at me and say, what’s he doing here with us?

‘When I’m drinking in a pub, people still come up to me and say, aren’t you so and so, you were with the Beatles. They start on me, asking the usual things, labouring into me. They’re just sticking their noses in, which I don’t like, nobody would. I just try not to say anything.

‘I never felt hatred for them, even at the time. At first I did think they’d been a bit sneaky, going behind my back and all the time scheming to get rid of me and never telling me to my face what they had decided. I got over that after a while. I suppose I could see why they’d been sneaky.

‘What hurt me was that I knew they were going to be big. I could tell it. We all could. We were getting amazing crowds in Liverpool, everywhere we went. I knew I was going to miss all the fun of that.

‘I do try to think of any rows, but I can’t. I have recently remembered one little incident. About two months before it happened, I had heard some sort of rumour that I was going. I asked Brian. He said he hadn’t heard anything and he’d find out. He did look into it, but he said there was nothing. I was all right and not to worry.

‘I’ve thought about being too much of a conformist, perhaps that was it. Or not combing my hair down. That sort of thing might have been one of the causes.

‘I can’t take being thought of as not good enough, that’s what hurts. What is a good drummer? It’s just a matter of different styles, not a matter of being good. How can you measure someone being good? When we came back from Liverpool my style was in fashion. When they saw how good and successful we were, drummers in the other groups started copying my powerhouse style.

‘I know my mother thinks they were jealous of me, but I don’t think it was that. We had a group sound. It wasn’t just one person. My technique seemed to suit them for long enough, then it didn’t. So that was that. I’ll never know the real reasons.

‘Of course their public image wasn’t exactly real. They looked like angels at one stage, in their collarless suits, like choir boys. I knew they were far from angels. But they had to look like that, to conquer the mums and dads.

‘I always watch them being interviewed on TV. John seems much the same. They’ve matured a lot. They’re much shrewder. I can’t understand their interest in religion, though. That was the last thing I would have expected.’

He hadn’t seen or talked to the Beatles since the day he left them, apart from a fleeting few words with John not long after when he was playing with Lee Curtis’s group in the Cavern. John had always been closest to him of the Beatles.

‘I might accept help from them. If I sort of met them again and we got on and they said, off the cuff, here you are. But if they offered me X amount, just out of charity, then I’d say no.’

After I had interviewed Pete Best, and all the parents and old friends in Liverpool, I went back to see the Beatles in London and told them bits I had picked up on my travels. They were very interested to hear what had happened, except when the subject of Pete Best came up. They seemed to cut off, as if he had never touched their lives. They showed little reaction when I said he was now slicing bread for £18 a week, though Paul did make a face. John asked a few more questions, but then forgot about it, and they all went back to the song they were recording.

I suppose it reminded them that they had been rather sneaky in the handling of Pete Best’s sacking, never telling him to his face, knowing that but for the grace of God, or Brian Epstein,
circumstances might have been different and they too could have ended up slicing bread for £18 a week.

Later on, at John’s home, I did get John to admit that they could have treated Peter rather better. ‘We were cowards,’ said John.

I was impressed by Pete for never telling his story. He could quite easily have exposed the reality of life in Hamburg, and their rather scandalous behaviour. By that time, he had nothing to lose. The Beatles might well have done so, as in those years Brian Epstein was still trying to make the most of their lovable image. Eventually, of course, John himself told the truth, or even more than the truth, about dressing-room life, and so pre-empted any of Pete’s revelations.