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Ringo had bought his very own mock-Tudor residence on the same swish estate a year after John bought Kenwood. He then hired a building company to undertake extensive renovations. These soon got out of control. Thinking to reduce costs, and hoping for a sound investment to fall back on when the famous bubble burst, Ringo then bought the building company. But he was no businessman: he bought the property for £37,000, spent a further £53,000 on it, and then sold it four years later for £47,000. Neither did his new building company ever get off the ground. When asked what went wrong, he replied, ‘No one wanted to buy the houses we put up.’

But it was all good fun while it lasted, and John and Cynthia would pop by whenever they needed cheering up, which was most of the time. Unlike Kenwood, which rapidly became a museum for exhausted enthusiasms, Sunny Heights1 was, as its name suggests, a fun palace, its jollity undimmed by angst or self-pity. As well as adding a whole new wing, a workroom and a home cinema, Ringo installed his own pub, the Flying Cow, in the front room, complete with mirrored walls, sporting prints and a psychedelic light show. He relished playing mine host from behind the bar, pulling the beer taps and pressing the buttons on the fully operational till. The Flying Cow also boasted a dartboard, and a pool table specially flown over from America. ‘It was always party time at the Starkeys’,’ recalled Cynthia. ‘Ringo was gregarious and fun-loving, a clown and a joker with an infectious laugh. Together, he and Maureen made an irresistible double act, both extrovert and uninhibited.’

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Sunny Heights was, in many ways, more lavish and luxurious than Kenwood. Finding John’s five televisions a little meagre, Ringo installed a television and two telephones in every single room. For some reason he hated seams, so he ordered a chocolate-brown Wilton carpet to be woven in one huge stretch for the main living room. But he was soon to discover that there is no clear correlation between luxury and happiness, and that, more often than not, the one is a substitute for the other. Drawing Ringo’s portrait on a spare wall, the caricaturist Gerald Scarfe2 noticed that many of the rooms in Sunny Heights were completely empty: ‘I thought coming from a two-up-two-down house he didn’t know what to do with them.’ When Ray Connolly visited Ringo there in March 1968, he found him bewildered by choice. ‘I’ve got a friend in Liverpool called Roy,’ Ringo told him. ‘You know, he’s a joiner, and he’s only got about thirty records, but he gets so much pleasure from them. Yet I’ve got a cupboard here with about five hundred LPs, and when I want to play one I have to close the cupboard again because I don’t know which one to put on any more … I suppose I get bored like anyone else, but instead of having three hours a night, I have all day to get bored in. Even this house was a toy. In Liverpool, I’d always lived in a four-roomed house and the height of my ambitions was a semi in Aigburth. Sometimes I feel like I’d like to stop being famous and get back to where I was in Liverpool. There don’t seem to be so many worries in that sort of life, although I thought there were at the time. But I had to come here to realise that they counted for very little’.

1 The original owner of the house had called it ‘Haleakala’, the name of the massive volcano that forms the larger part of the Hawaiian island of Maui. ‘Haleakala’ means ‘House of the Sun’, so when a Mr Pope bought the property in 1948 and changed its name to ‘Sunny Heights’, he wasn’t being quite as radical as it might appear. So now you know.

2 Later to marry Jane Asher.