Ringo Starr ‘Never Forgave’ a Beatles Assistant for a Bungled Rescue Mission

Ringo Starr rarely ever asked The Beatles' fixer to help him. When he finally did, the rescue mission did not go to plan.

Longtime Beatles associate Alistair Taylor said that Ringo Starr was the only member of the band who didn’t constantly ask him to fix his problems. The rest viewed Taylor as “Mr. Fixit,” and turned to him when they needed help with something. Crowley could only recall one time that Starr begged him for assistance. He admitted that his rescue mission didn’t go to plan.

Ringo Starr joked that he wouldn’t forgive Beatles assistant Alistair Taylor

While on vacation in Sardinia, Starr called Taylor and begged to get him off the island.

“I got a frantic phone call from him,” Taylor said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “And he said, ‘Look,’ he says, ‘it’s bloody awful. You know, I’ve got to get out of here. I’m coming back home.’”

Starr had already booked a flight to Paris for himself, his wife, Maureen, and their son, Zak, but he couldn’t find a way to get from Paris to London. Taylor planned to take a private jet to Paris to meet Starr, but could only procure a prop plane. When they landed in France, just shortly after Starr’s plane touched down, Taylor ran through the airport, struggling to find the Beatle.

“I was tearing up this blasted corridor,” he recalled. “No sign of Ritchie. No sign of anybody.”

Taylor said he searched for two hours with no luck. Finally, though, he found him sitting with his luggage. Taylor had passed him several times without noticing.

“And he was sitting, totally unnoticed, and we’d all walked past him,” he said. “He’d been there for two hours, sitting, surrounded by luggage, and nobody took the slightest bit of notice of him. And he never forgave me for that. He never forgave me. I mean, we joked about it, but he used to say, ‘Oh yeah, great. The only time I ring you —’ I was sick as a pig over it, because it was one of the rare occasions he ever asked me to do anything for him.”

To be fair to Taylor, though, Starr sat there for two hours without trying to look for anyone.

Alistair Taylor said Ringo Starr was the only Beatle who never asked him for anything

As Taylor mentioned, Starr practically never reached out to him for help. This didn’t mean he never needed assistance, though. Taylor would eventually find out about problems that Starr hadn’t wanted to bother him about.

“He was always apologetic, and he never bothered me,” Taylor recalled. “I’d find he’d done something. And I used to say to him, ‘Look, why on earth didn’t you ask me to fix that for you?’ ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to bother you.’”

Alistair Taylor revealed the Beatle he felt closest to

Taylor worked with The Beatles for years and had solid relationships with them. He said that another Beatles associate, Mal Evans, had a good answer whenever people asked him about his favorite Beatle.

“Somebody once asked Mal, who was his favorite Beatle?” Taylor recalled. “And he thought for a minute, and he said, ‘The one I was last with’”

Taylor thought this was a great answer, but his own was more specific.

“I thought it was a fabulous answer, it’s what I wish I had thought of,” he said. “But I was closest to Paul.”