Even though Ringo Starr was a member of the Beatles, his success hasn’t saved him from
the depressing side of life. In fact, he's had more than his fair share of tough times.
Here are some tragic details of this drummer's life.
All four of the Beatles famously hailed from Liverpool, one of England's largest cities
and home to large populations of working- and middle-class people. But while John Lennon,
Paul McCartney, and George Harrison all grew up in homes that were secure if not wealthy,
Starr's upbringing was a bit more economically unstable. As his childhood neighbor Marie
Maguire Crawford was quoted in The Beatles: A Biography,
"He was not a barefoot, ragged child, but like all of the families who lived in the
Dingle, he was part of an ongoing struggle to survive."
The Dingle was an especially depressed neighborhood, full of tiny, decrepit homes with poor ventilation.
The only place for kids to play was a local park, where all the coal smoke from area chimneys
hung thick in the air. Those circumstances were made all the more trying when Starr's
father abandoned the family when Ringo was only three years old.
During the Beatles' time together, there was a throughline of disrespect towards Ringo.
He was only allowed to sing lead on 11 songs and write two unassisted, and he didn't even
get to play on one of the group's earliest and biggest hits. Producer George Martin didn't
like the drumming that Starr turned in for "Love Me Do," so he brought in a session drummer
named Andy White to play drums on that track and the B-side "P.S. I Love You." Starr was
demoted to playing the tambourine and maracas.
Toward the end of the 1960s, the band life of the Beatles was famously contentious. It
got so bad in 1968 for Starr that he briefly left the band in the middle of recording The
White Album. As he described the situation,
"I felt I wasn't playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy,
and I was an outsider."
While Starr took his family on a vacation to Sardinia, the other Beatles recorded without
him. They took bits and pieces of work he'd previously recorded and some new drum work
by Paul McCartney to cobble together the rhythmic backing track for "Back in the U.S.S.R." When
Starr returned, his bandmates at least welcomed him back by covering his drum kit in flowers.
"Does John say, 'Hey Ringo, this is your song for the album, we hear your voice on this'?"
"Yeah, no, he says, 'You're doing that.' No, he never said it like that."
After the Beatles split up in 1970, all four members enjoyed solo success. For his part,
Starr had eight singles in a row that all reached the top ten in the U.S., including
the #1 hits "Photograph" and "You're Sixteen." The albums Ringo and Goodnight Vienna went
platinum and gold, respectively, but then the public seemingly grew tired of what he
was offering.
In 1976, Ringo's Rotogravure stalled at #28 on the U.S. charts, and the singles "A Dose
of Rock 'n' Roll" and "Hey! Baby!" tanked as well. The 1977 and 1978 albums Ringo the
4th and Bad Boy straight-up flopped, reaching just #162 and #129, respectively, on the Billboard
chart. After Starr left his label over a dispute, it took him three years to record and release
more music, with 1981's Stop and Smell the Roses. He enjoyed a modest comeback with the
#38 hit "Wrack My Brain," a song written by former bandmate George Harrison. But Stop
and Smell the Roses sold so poorly that RCA Records dropped Starr.
Starr met his first wife, Maureen Cox, at the Cavern Club, the venue where the Beatles
cut their teeth. The two of them wed in 1965, had three children together, and the marriage
weathered the storm of worldwide fame and attention but just barely and not, as it turned
out, for the long haul.
"Does that worry you that the fact that you know that you can't go anywhere with him?"
"Umm, no, not really, I just sort of enjoy myself."
Cox had a brief affair with George Harrison. After she and Starr grew apart in the mid-'70s,
Starr struck up a relationship with model Nancy Lee Andrews, leading to a divorce which
was finalized in 1975. According to John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, Cox was so devastated
that she attempted to take her own life by running a motorcycle into a wall. She survived,
but she endured a lengthy cosmetic surgery to correct her facial injuries.
Starr and Cox both remarried, but they reportedly remained cordial. They stayed so friendly,
in fact, that Starr was with his former wife when she passed away in December 1994. She
underwent a bone marrow transplant from their son Zak that was intended to treat leukemia.
Sadly, the procedure didn't completely improve her health, and she died from complications
of the surgery at age 47.
1970 was the year that the Beatles split up, but Ringo at least had something in his personal
life to celebrate that year, as his first daughter, and third child overall, was born.
Lee Starkey stayed out of the spotlight for decades, unlike some other famous Beatles
offspring. But then she made headlines in the fall of 1995 when she suddenly fell seriously
ill.
After collapsing and then being hospitalized in London, Lee Starkey was diagnosed with
a brain tumor. After having fluid drained from her skull, she was transferred to Brigham
and Women's Hospital in Boston, where a neurosurgeon performed an experimental four-hour operation
on her. The tumor was removed entirely, and she was quickly discharged. Her father was
reportedly by her bedside for the ordeal, and he stayed with her in Boston for six weeks
after, when she underwent eight-minute radiation treatments every day. In 2001, the tumor returned,
and Starkey had to endure more medical treatments, but she thankfully managed to survive those
as well.
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