Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr

Author:Michael Seth Starr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2015-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Ringo’s friendship with Peter Sellers dated back to the mid-1960s, but they grew close during the filming of The Magic Christian, which got underway at Twickenham Studios in early February, several days after The Beatles wrapped the Let It Be project. Ringo had read Terry Southern’s book and said all it took to get the movie made was a knock on Sellers’ door. The deal was made after a flurry of phone calls.

Sellers, born in 1925 in Portsmouth into a traveling show business family, was fifteen years older than Ringo. Like Ringo, Sellers was also a drummer, having started his career playing for dance bands throughout England before and after World War II. (Sellers served in the RAF and was a member, from 1943–45, of Ralph Reader’s Gang Show unit, which entertained the troops.) In the 1950s, Ringo, like many British teenagers of the time (including his fellow Beatles), was entranced by Sellers’s funny voices on The Goon Show, the anarchic, loony, trailblazing BBC radio comedy also starring Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. (Original “Goon” Michael Bentine left the show early in its run.)

Ringo’s friendship with Sellers paid other dividends. In 1968, after three years at Sunny Heights, Ringo and Maureen were looking to move into a new place. Sellers, in the process of divorcing Britt Ekland, told Ringo he was in the market to sell his huge estate in Elstead, Surrey, which was called Brookfield. The fifteenth-century oak-beamed Brookfield estate was on several acres, had its own private lake, walled gardens and barns, a gym, sauna, and private movie theater. Ringo jumped at the opportunity. Sellers had just pumped £50,000 into renovating Brookfield, but told Ringo he’d sell it to him for £70,000. John Lennon, meanwhile, also wanted the house—located twenty-five miles outside of London—and offered Sellers £150,000. But Sellers kept his promise. Ringo, Maureen, and the kids moved into Brookfield in November 1968.

Ken Mansfield described the sumptuous estate,

You’d pull up to the front of Brookfield and there are these big steps and two giant lions on each side. It’s like walking up into the Four Seasons Hotel. You go in the big front door and [there is] the staircase and all that, and to the left there’s this giant den on the wing of the left side of the house with a big fireplace in there; they stuck a TV in the fireplace and the crib was over in one corner and Maureen’s sewing stuff was in another corner and Ringo had his drums set up in another part of the room. It’s almost like, here they were, they had this big mansion but they were just simple people, like a family living in a one-room place.

The Magic Christian marked the second time Ringo was working on a movie written by Terry Southern, though Candy, shot the year before, had yet to premiere when production began on The Magic Christian. Southern was adapting The Magic Christian from his 1959 satiric novel of the same name; also contributing to

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