Debt Ringo owes ex-wife he never stopped loving

Beatle's grief as she dies from leukaemia

It was the love that would not die. Neither divorce nor their 19 years apart could keep Ringo Starr from the death-bed of his childhood sweetheart and ex-wife Maureen. Their marriage was played out amid screaming fans. Their divorce was acted out in public.

But there was only silence for the final, intimate scenes between them, as Ringo held Maureen's hand and whispered over and over: "I love you".

"She took a part of Ringo with her when she died last week," says a close friend. "There was so much of Ringo that he had lost over the years, which only Maureen held in her heart."

Maureen Cox was one of the few remaining people who could remember the innocent lad from Liverpool before fame clenched him in it's jaws, chewed him up and spat him out a recovering alcoholic and drug user - and one of the few who could keep his feet on the ground.

"She was almost Ringo's last link with his own past," said the friend. "He lost track of who he really was years ago - but Maureen never did."

In recent months, Ringo found himself repeatedly drawn to Maureen's side as she faught leukaemia.

The former Beatles drummer even urged their son Zak, aged 29, to donate his bone marrow for a transplant which could have saved Maureen's life. Tragically, complications from that surgery only hastened her death at a hospital in Seattle, Washington, far from her home in Beverly Hills, California.

When Maureen met Ringo, she was a 15-year-old trainee hairdresser living in a council flat; Richard Starkey was the replacement drummer for an up-and-coming local band playing at the Cavern Club.

She was 18 when they wed in London in 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, and Maureen quickly learned to become the perfect Beatle wife - hidden in the background, where female fans could happily forget she existed. "I might have been killed otherwise," she recalled. !The other girls were not friendly at all. They wanted to stab me in the back."

Maureen learned to put her own life in the background for the Baetles and finally allowed herself to be put in the background of her own marriage.

"She was just along for the ride," said the friend. "But what a ride it was."

For 10 turbulent years they held their marriage together, while Maureen sat back and watched her husband's clothes torn off by adoring mobs, and saw him hailed around the globe like visiting royalty.

She also watched Ringo grow bored ith fame, tired with parties, and escaping in drink and drugs. He went froma maladroit mophead to a sneering superstar.

Yet only she could bring an occasionally egocentric Ringo crashing down to earth with a few well-chosen words plucked from the depths of the Mersey Tunnel.

When the Beatles broke up in 1969, she stayed with him as his career limped along, then faltered and died. he enjoyed moderate success with albums Ringo and Goodnight Vienna, and singles including Photograph, It Don't Come Easy and Back Off Boogaloo, but his career soon nosedived.

"After Goodnight Vienna toe albums started to go downhill and I went with them, " Ringo confessed. "I wasn't taking any interest anymore. I was just going through the motions and the albums failed. My career went out the window and I went with it.

Ringo threw himself into booze and braods, finally being caight by Maureen in the arms of American model Nancy Lee Andrews, in 1974.

He had forseen the possibility of divorce, and even accepted it as the day's fashionable rite of passage. "I'm a today person," he said. "Divorce is the way of things today."

Maureen actually filed for divorce, but later confessed she had never wanted the split, and had filed only at the urging of friends after Ringo's extra-marital affair.

They divorced in 1975, but there was a greater sacrifice. "Ringo never lost that place in his heart for Maureen," said one friend. "He'd only lost the person who fell in love with her."

"Of course she was no saint, but Maureen never forgot that she was once that trainee hairdresser at the Cavern." And more importantly she was the mother of Ringo's sons, Zak, Jason, aged 26, and 23 year old daughter Lee.

Cut loose from his moorings, Ringo went on to marry German actress Barbara Bach, the former Bond girl he met on the set of Caveman in 1981, and nearly drowned their marriage in drink and drugs.

The drummer endured a personal hell before finall deciding on drug and alcohol rehabilitation in 1989.

"For a long while I just couldn't stop," he recalled. "I'd lost the power to have a couple of drinks. I didn't understand just having one glass of wine. It was a case of bottle after bottle for me.

"As for drugs, I used to be an advocate of Don't Say No." There were bar-room brawls, black-outs, recoveries, relapses, lost weekends, and rows with Bach. "The I had a second of clarity through the pain and bewilderment," he recalled, before checking himself into a clinic.

"That was when Ringo realised what he'd lost and left behind," said the friend. "He looked back and realised that he'd lost something good in his marriage with Maureen - and saw that he could easily have lost what he had with Barbara too."

But Ringo finally realised the debt he owed to Maureen, how she had been his anchor through years of craziness that few other human beings have experianced. "Relationships with the other Beatles weren't all they could have been, so Maureen was one of Ringo's few links with his own past - with the real Richard Starkey."

Maureen also recovered from the split to put the pieces of her own life back together. In 1989 she wed club tyoon Isaac Tigrett, who co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe chain and recieved £60 million for selling his stake in it six years ago.

She had remained friends with many in the music industry, and their Monte Carlo wedding was attended by several stars, as well as former Beatles wife Cynthia Lennon.

While celebrity marriages notoriously end in acrimony, if not bloodshed, Maureen and Ringo made a break with tradition by remaining close.

When Ring had problems relating to Zak, he turned to Maureen for guidance. When Ringo finally sobered up, he turned to Maureen for support. And when she fell ill, Ringo could not turn his back.

"Ringo regularly visited her in hospital." said Maureen's childhood friend Margaret Trafford. "he could not have been more caring."

After Maureen underwent her bone marow transplant, Ringo breathed a sigh of relief, said friends. He had no way of knowing that complications from the operation would plunge his ex-wife into illness and sudden death.

"Ringo is devastated by Maureen's death," said the friend. "He couldn't be more upset."

A lifetime ago and a continent away, they met as Ringo chanted: "She loves you yeah yeah yeah." Thirty years later, those words may still be ringing in Ringo's ears - with a deeper resonance than ever before.