At a bar in London, Ringo Starr struck up a conversation with a future girlfriend, Stephanie La Motta. The pair hit it off, and soon they were traveling together. They didn’t date for long — they were swept up into a whirlwind of travel and dancing together, but La Motta said there was a lot she liked about Starr. She said that he was always polite and considerate.
Ringo Starr met a girlfriend at a bar in London
Starr was in a London bar when he ran into La Motta, the daughter of middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. He spotted her across the room and asked the owner of the bar to invite her over.
“I said if he wants to have a drink with me, he can come over and ask me himself,” she said, per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “And then he came over and he kind of apologized and said, ‘Would you like to have a drink with me?’ and I said ‘Okay.’ We started talking and having a nice conversation. He is a very nice, cordial, well-mannered person.”
When the bar closed, Starr and La Motta found another location and, the following morning, decided to go to Vienna together. From there, they went to Vienna, then Athens.
“He kept telling me he was ‘in like’ with me,” La Motta said. “Which I thought was cute, you know? I mean, I was just a kid. It was one big drunken blur. I was keeping up with him.”
Ringo Starr’s girlfriend said he remained well-mannered when he was drinking
La Motta shared what she liked most about Starr during their whirlwind relationship.
“The thing I liked most about him was that first night we were together at the Dorchester, there were two big beds in the room and he said, ‘This is your bed and this is my bed, only if you want it to be,’” she said. “I said, ‘Yes, I want it to be.’”
She said that Starr was always considerate and conscientious, even when he’d been drinking.
“And then another night, when we got to the Bristol Hotel in Vienna, we were in bed, lying down, and he turned away on his side and he said to me, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. That’s so rude,’” she said. “I mean, who would ever think to say that? Even if he was drunk he was very conscious about things like that.”
He decided to get sober in the 1980s
Starr and his second wife, Barbara Bach, went to rehab together in 1988. Since then, he has dedicated himself to a balanced diet and an active lifestyle.
“It gets really lonely, you know?” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “It’s just really cold and lonely. It’s a miserable disease, in the end. There’s a crowd of you, and it’s lonely. Because that’s all you’re doing is getting f***ed, you know? But I haven’t been that lonely since.”
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