Ringo Starr in the Afternoon

Ringo Starr leans forward. “How’re you doing, Johnny?” he says, addressing the tape recorder as if it were a medium to another world. Then he straightens up and loudly exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke that floats toward the cathedral ceiling. “He’s watching over us, you know.”

The omnipresent specter of John Lennon notwithstanding, it’s a bright, warm afternoon in Beverly Hills at the house Ringo calls home during the 161 days he’s allotted by the Department of Immigration to live in the United States (he splits the rest of his time between London and Monte Carlo). He shares the twelve-room, two-story house — an eclectic concoction that manages to compromise the austerity of a vaulted, neo-Gothic mansion with the coziness of a gingerbread cottage — with his fiance, actress Barbara Bach, and her two children. Although the house is rented, complete with decor, there are a few personal touches. Strings of Christmas lights still encircle the front door. The room overlooking the backyard swimming pool is crammed with oversize stuffed animals, a piano, stereo equipment, various percussive instruments and a set of drums. The Buffets and Picassos covering the walls of the front living room belong to the absentee owner; Ringo’s only addition to the artwork sits on the baroque mantelpiece over the fireplace — an enlarged color snapshot of Ringo lounging with his leg around Barbara’s neck. Dramatic, high beamed ceilings and a massive hand-carved, pewlike settee are bathed in amber sunlight streaming in from a courtyard filled with oranges fallen from overladen trees.

Ringo sits cross-legged on the floor, elbow propped on a coffee table. He takes long sips of brandy and chain-smokes Marlboros. Dark glasses mask bloodshot eyes — souvenirs from an all-night session in the recording studio. Even with gray streaks in his hair and beard, forty-year-old Ringo Starr still resembles the sad-eyed clown of the Beatles. Three fingers and one ear are studded with the rings that earned him his nickname, and he mugs and lobs quips with the same irreverent energy that turned Beatles press conferences into vaudevillian routines.

A scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about John Lennon’s tragic death lies on the coffee table, a sign that things have changed irrevocably. An occasional note of cynicism creeps in and out of Ringo’s conversation, and it occurs to me he seems almost stoic, considering the number of friends and associates he’s lost in recent years: Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager (1967); Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager (1976); Marc Bolan of T. Rex (1977); Keith Moon of the Who (1978); and, besides Lennon, Peter Sellers, Mae West and Bill Haley within the past year.

“Bill Haley was like my dad,” Ringo recalls. “When he came out, I was fourteen or fifteen, and he was probably about twenty-eight. But when you’re fourteen or fifteen, anyone at twenty-eight is like your dad.”

Ringo was on far more intimate terms with fellow drummer and drinking buddy Keith Moon. “My best friend was Keith,” he says, fiddling with his cigarette lighter. “Moonie was the madman….” Ringo looks away, shaking his head, obviously uncomfortable pursuing this journey any further. “It’s all a part of life, which makes absolutely no sense,” he says with a world-weary shrug.

As fatalistic as he sounds, Ringo is not exactly resigned to accepting these misfortunes with eulogies and regrets. A security guard is on duty around the clock at his L.A. home, and Lennon’s murder has brought out Ringo’s anger and impatience with a world where Beatlemania still lives — and kills. He refuses to view any Beatles-related entertainment as a tribute. “It’s all rip-off to me,” he says adamantly. “Like that show Beatlemania. They didn’t call it Kennedymania or any other mania did they? No! And I Want to Hold Your Hand. It always amazed me that Steven Spielberg got involved with that movie, though I know from one meeting with him that he was a Beatles freak.”

Ringo nearly spits out the last two words. Since Lennon’s murder, the star-struck celebrity hounds and fans once tolerated as a weird yet benign breed have lost their innocence for him.

“You know,” says Ringo, “a sixteen-year-old kid in the Miami airport said, ‘Well, at least the rumors that you’re [the Beatles] getting together will stop now.’ That blew me away! But the kid was right. I’m sorry that’s what it took. I mean, I never wanted it to go to that extreme for the rumors to stop. But of course, they probably never will. There’s already all this crap going down about us doing a memorial album for John. It’s like all that get-together stuff. It’s silly, you know? It used to drive us mad. Some smartass would spout out that he’s got this idea to get us together, and it would be international news. They’d fetch up the most extreme reasons. For the queen of England. Well, sorry about the queen! For the boat people. Sorry about the boat people! But it doesn’t matter how many times we deny it, it’ll still go on. Anyone who wants to be a little hero or make a small name for himself can say he’s getting us together, and he’ll get an hour-long show on TV. Even if there’s only one of us left, they’ll say he’s getting together with himself!”