Nancy Lee Andrews,Ringo Starr’s former girlfriend

Ringo Starr’s former girlfriend shares
her life with the music legend

Nancy Lee Andrews and Richard Starkey, better known as The Beatles’ Ringo Starr, were stuck at New York City’s Plaza Hotel during a snowstorm in the winter of 1976-77, thinking what to title his next album and what image they wanted it to project.

Andrews noted this was Starr’s fourth album since the solo singer, songwriter and drummer broke away from the Fab Four in 1970. He lit up as a lightbulb went off in his mind.

“He said, ‘Ringo the 4th.’ The idea really made sense, him being from England and their royal history,” Andrews says in a phone interview from her home in Nashville, Tenn. “Then he said, ‘I want to go medieval.’”

The couple then visited a prop house in Manhattan where they found all the chain mail, swords and shields a medievalist could desire. Though Andrews suggested her mentor, Milton Greene, to shoot the cover, Starr insisted she do it. Returning to the Plaza, Starr dressed in a velvet jacket he already owned, and a photo shoot — sitting on a wastepaper basket topped by a pillow in an 8-foot-by-8-foot closet — was born.

This was one of the many adventures and opportunities Andrews had with the former Beatle in the 1970s during the six years she was his girlfriend. Their time together is chronicled through photographs in the 2008 coffee table book titled, A Dose of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Andrews was born in Jersey City, N.J., to George Annucci, an Italian Catholic, and Martha Andrews, an Alabama Baptist of Cherokee descent. The school years were spent attending St. Aden’s Catholic School and attending plays and movies in New York City. The summers were spent in Alabama.

“It was sort of like fried chicken and spaghetti,” she quips. “When you take the Southern culture and the Italian culture, they’re so close when it comes to home … Family comes first.”

Andrews grew up in a multigenerational home, a couple of apartments on the third story of an apartment building over a butcher shop and a bakery, with her parents, her late brother, James Annucci, her grandmother and other family members. “It was very colorful and very loud,” she says.

Her days were spent studying ballet and learning the domestic duties — cooking, cleaning and sewing — her mother and grandmother were certain Andrews would need one day when she became someone’s wife. “To this day, I crochet,” she says.

When she was 5, however, Andrews’ parents divorced. Her mother remarried and gave birth to two more daughters.

In seventh grade, Andrews’ world changed forever. Her mother died at age 31. Hoping the domestic skills she’d learned would be persuasive, Andrews begged her stepfather to keep the family together. But he took her half-sisters, then 3 and 4 years old, and went to live with his mother.

Andrews and her brother were shipped to Wetumpka, Ala., about 14 miles north of Montgomery, to live with her mother’s sister. Andrews attended Wetumpka High School, where she was a cheerleader and served on student council.

Expecting to attend New York University in the fall, Andrews headed northward the summer following graduation from high school to work. The 5-foot, 8-inch beauty was hired almost immediately by the Sutton Agency and later moved to the world-renowned Eileen Ford Agency.

“I just started making ridiculous money. It was like, ‘Heck, I don’t need to go to college. I’m making more money than my father,” she says.

After a hard day in front of the camera, Andrews and her model friends often went out on the town, attending plays and musicals, and checking out the music scene at the Fillmore East, the old Village Theatre. Bypassing the long lines, they were let in through the back door. That’s where they became acquainted with The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead.

And that’s where she met her first love, Carl Radle, bass player for music greats like Muddy Waters, Art Garfunkel and Rita Coolidge. Eventually, however, Andrews decided she could not deal with his addictive nature. The couple parted.

During this period, Andrews went from being in front of the camera to behind it. She started recording moments with her friends and acquaintances, including Bill Graham, Leon Russell and George Harrison.

“I got to be a recorder. I got to be in control of the moments I wanted to capture. I wanted to control the look of it, the light of it, the composition,” she says.

In 1974, Andrews attended a birthday party for a former Beatles roadie in Santa Monica. She was offered a place at a poker table next to Starr. The attraction was immediate.

“He was so attentive. He was in the moment with me,” she says. “He had an amazing sense of family, which is what I grew up with.”

Andrews says most celebrities rarely are as they appear to be in the media. The most surprising thing most people don’t realize about Starr, she says, is his intellectualism. An avid reader, he always carried a book, enjoying anything from Somerset Maugham to science fiction.

“He watched the news like crazy, always staying up on the latest events in the world,” she says. “He was always a little beyond when it came to technology, especially where music is concerned.”

But what attracted her also attracted other women, many of whom had grown up in the ’60s when The British Invasion occurred. Many backstage didn’t care that Starr obviously had a girlfriend, Andrews says.

“They would just elbow me out of the way like I was a curtain in the way. I just became a little ninja and pushed back,” she says. “Ringo loved that I was overt like that.”

Andrews’ world was one of airline tickets, she says, as she traveled the world with Starr to England, Monte Carlo and Morocco as worked and vacationed.

But the domesticity she’d learned as a child stuck. With few exceptions, she cooked their meals. And she says she was happy to care for Starr’s three children from his first marriage to Maureen Cox.

The relationship with Starr ended when he became involved with Barbara Bach in 1980 during the filming of Caveman.

In 1991, Andrews met Eddie Barnes, a Princeton-educated musician/businessman, whom she married a couple of years later. “It’s funny,” she says, laughing. “You run away from your roots, and 18 years later, you’re sitting here with a man from New Jersey.”

Confronted by graffiti on the palm trees of their upscale Los Angeles neighborhood, the couple elected to move inland to escape the crime and earthquakes. The visited Santa Fe and Phoenix but settled on Nashville, about 100 miles from Andrews’ grandmother who returned to Alabama.

Andrews, who likes to listen to Bessie Smith, Bruce Springsteen and the occasional classical music, rarely listens intentionally to The Beatles or Starr’s solo music. She laughs as she describes how she can’t escape it. Sometime during the course of almost every day, she’s confronted with it shopping at a department store, taking an elevator or visiting a doctor’s office. Occasionally, a friend will play a Beatles piece on a guitar for her, and once, someone dropped off a CD of Beatles music played on a ukelele.

A couple of years ago, Andrews was approached by Dalton Watson Fine Books to compile A Dose of Rock ‘n’ Roll, capturing the time she spent with Starr and the many people she met while dating him, including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Dolly Parton.

“It was extremely cathartic,” says Andrews, who adds the publishers hope to persuade her compile a sequel, Another Dose of Rock n Roll, from the thousands of photos that remain.

Shortly after the book’s release, Starr played the Wild Horse in Nashville, Tenn. Andrews contacted his lawyer and arrange to leave a book for the musician at the venue. Starr never contacted her to thank her or to comment on it, but Andrews says she heard through others that he was pleased with it.

“What can the man say? It’s like this wonderful, romantic homage to our time together.”

by Rebecca R. Bibbs