Even when his wife Pattie discovered him with his mistress, in a bedroom at their home, former Beatle George Harrison denied he was having an affair — with his best friend Ringo’s wife.
Pattie’s suspicions had been growing since she returned to their Berkshire mansion, Friar Park, from a short visit to her mother in Devon. Photos of Maureen Starkey, the mother of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr’s three children, revealed she’d been staying in Pattie’s absence… and was flaunting a necklace that was a present from George.
Maureen began dropping round at the Harrisons’ 20-bedroom house late at night, on the pretext of ‘listening to George in the studio’. Her own home with Ringo, Tittenhurst Park (bought from John Lennon), was 20 miles away.
She would still be there the next morning without the least sign of shame or apology. ‘Her attitude was very much that she had the right to spend the night with George if she felt like it,’ Pattie recalls.
Then, as Christmas 1973 approached, the affair moved to daytime: George disappeared with Maureen into the house’s upper regions while musicians were waiting to begin work with him in his recording studio. ‘I thought: ‘This is being deliberately rubbed in my face,’ Pattie says. ‘He and Maureen want me to know this is happening.’
Pushed beyond endurance at last, she hammered on the bedroom door. George opened it — to reveal Maureen on a mattress on the floor. Yet he still would not admit any guilt.
‘Oh, she’s a bit tired,’ he explained. ‘She’s having a rest.’
A French or Italian wife at this point might have resorted to a loaded revolver.
Pattie’s milder English response was to attack Maureen with a brace of water pistols. From Friar Park’s tallest spire flew a flag with the symbol for ‘Om’, signifying that meditation was practised within.
Pattie remembered that in a cupboard downstairs there was another flag, left over from a fancy dress party: a pirate skull-and-crossbones. With the help of two sympathetic studio engineers, she hauled down the Om and ran up the Jolly Roger.
The next time she saw Ringo, at a party, Pattie tried to tell him what was going on. He flew into a rage — something no one had seen before — and refused to listen.
But next evening, George and Pattie had supper with Ringo and Maureen at Tittenhurst Park, seated around the long kitchen table. With his famous disregard for conversational subtleties, George told Ringo: ‘I’m in love with your wife.’
An absolute silence fell. Ringo stared at his former bandmate. At last, he said: ‘Better you than someone we don’t know.’
This was an absolute betrayal of an unwritten Beatle rule: you don’t sleep with another Beatle’s wife. Lennon described the episode as ‘virtual incest’. Yet the Starrs went ahead with a New Year’s party at Tittenhurst as planned and the Harrisons were invited. As they were about to leave for it, Pattie realised she’d forgotten something, dashed inside to fetch it and through the window saw the car’s tail lights disappear into the night.
George, at his most brutally dismissive, had gone without her.
She had to drive herself to Tittenhurst through thick fog that reduced traffic to a crawl.
