Ringo Starr Didn’t Know About John Lennon’s Marriage Because They Worried He Couldn’t Keep a Secret

Ringo Starr joined The Beatles in 1962, several years into John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison’s musical collaboration. While he fit in with them well, he was still initially an outsider. This meant that he wasn’t always in on information the other Beatles had. When Lennon got married, for example, Starr had no idea.

Ringo Starr did not initially know that John Lennon was married

In 1962, Lennon married his longtime girlfriend, Cynthia, when he learned she was pregnant. They tried to keep their union and child a secret from the public. They also kept the secret from Starr.

“George and I started out sharing an apartment in Green Street, Park Lane,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “£45 a week it cost — a fortune! John was living with Cynthia.”

This was when they informed Starr that they were married. According to him, they worried he’d accidentally leak the news.

“That’s when they finally told me they were married — they’d kept it a secret in case I told somebody,” he said. “They didn’t really trust me, you know. Just joking!”

In fairness to Starr, though, the other Beatles knew little about the wedding. 

“I don’t remember much about John’s wedding,” Harrison said. “It took place in August 1962. He just went in some office in Liverpool one afternoon, and in the evening we got in Brian [Epstein’s] car, went to the gig (we actually did a gig that night) and it was, ‘Well, we got married.’ It wasn’t hushed up, it just wasn’t mentioned to the press. There was no wedding — it was a five-minute thing in a Registry Office. It was different in those days. No time to lose.”

John Lennon’s wife said her first meeting with Ringo Starr was uncomfortable

While the other Beatles had known Cynthia since long before fame, Starr didn’t meet her until after she’d married Lennon. She admitted that their first meeting was rather uncomfortable.

“Unfortunately, we got off on the wrong foot,” she wrote in her 2005 book John. “I invited him to stay for supper and served up curry. I didn’t know that after a lot of childhood illness he couldn’t eat spicy food. He refused it and was very offhand, virtually ignoring me as he chatted to John.” 

Her first impression did not color her relationship with Starr, though. She grew to see him as a good friend.

“I discovered that he was one of the most kind-hearted, easy-going, and good-natured men alive,” she wrote. “Even before I came to like him I knew he was right for the group.”

Ringo Starr was the second Beatle to tie the knot

Lennon and Cynthia married in 1962. Three years later, Starr became the second Beatle to tie the knot. As with the Lennons, Starr’s bride-to-be, Maureen Cox, discovered she was pregnant. One month later, she and Starr married in London.

Unlike Lennon’s wedding though, Starr’s bandmates attended the ceremony.