The Beatles Monthly Book, #226, February 1995
RINGO MOURNS MAUREEN
by News Editor: Andy Davis
Ringo Starr was reported to have been "devastated" by the death of his ex-wife Maureen Cox Tigrett, who died on 30th December 1994 in America, after complications following a bone marrow transplant. Maureen, who lived in Beverly Hills, California, had been suffering from leukaemia for some time, and was being treated with chemotherapy at an unnamed hosptial in Seattle, Washington. As her condition worsened towards the end of the year, doctors advised her that a transplant was the only option left open to them. The donor was Zak, Ringo and Maureen’s eldest son, but the operation was not a success.
Ringo first met sixteen-year-old Maureen Cox, in 1962, when she was an assistant hairdresser at the Ashley Du Pre salon in Liverpool. Ringo had only recently joined the Beatles and, so the story goes, Maureen and a friend chased after him as he was getting out of his car and asked him for his autograph. Maureen wrote down his number plate in an exersise book - and she remembered the number until her death. Ringo later bumped into Maureen at the Cavern and asked her to dance. They were married three years later in a surprise midweek ceremony (to avoid crowds of screaming schoolgirls!) on 11th February 1965, at Caxton Hall Registry Office in London.
After a ten-year marriage, they divorced on 17th July 1975, with Ringo granting Maureen a reported £500,000 settlement. Despite their differences, the two apparently remained close, even after their respective second marriages - Ringo’s to actress Barbara Bach in 1981, and Maureen to Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain, in 1989. According to Maureen’s childhood friend, Margaret Trafford, Ringo regularly visited Maureen in hospital throughout the duration of her illness and "could not have been more caring".
Another close friend revealed the depth of feeling between the couple when she said, "Maureen took a part of Ringo with her when she died. There is so much of Ringo that he he has lost over the years, which only she held in her heart". Maureen Tigrett is survived by her three children from her marriage to Ringo - Zak, aged 29, Jason, 26 (sic), and 23 (sic)-year-old daughter, Lee - and a daughter by Isaac Tigrett, Augusta, who was born in 1988 (sic).
[many thanks to Lynn Mayes who typed this out and added it to my Maureen Starr Tribute Group at Yahoo]
