Personal Life and Death
In 1961 and 1962, Aspinall had become good friends with Best and subsequently rented a room in the house where Best lived with his parents. During one of the extended business trips of Best's father, the 19-year-old Aspinall became romantically involved with Pete Best's mother, Mona Best, who was 17 years his senior. As a result, during this period, Aspinall fathered a child by Mona: Vincent "Roag" Best. Roag Best was born in late July 1962, and just three weeks later, on 16 August 1962, Best was dismissed from the Beatles.
On 30 August 1968, Aspinall married Suzy Ornstein at the Chelsea Register office, London, with Magic Alex as best man. McCartney, Starr and his wife attended, and were also at a surprise party held later in the King's Road, London. Suzy Aspinall is the daughter of Bud Ornstein, the late chief executive of United Artists Pictures (UK). Aspinall had met her during 1964/1965 when her father was the United Artists representative overseeing the production of the first two Beatles' films: A Hard Day's Night and Help!. They went on to have four children: daughters Gayla, Dhara, Mandy and son Julian. As well as his work for Apple Corps, Aspinall and his wife were the sole directors of their own Standby Films Ltd. company, which is run from their home in Twickenham, London. In 1999, Standby Films released a film about Jimi Hendrix, called Hendrix: Band of Gypsys.
Aspinall died of lung cancer in New York City in 2008. His funeral was at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Twickenham. Stella McCartney, Yoko Ono, Barbara Bach (wife of Starr), George Martin, Pete Best, and Pete Townshend attended the funeral, with Townshend playing Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" as a tribute. The private service was followed by Aspinall's burial at Teddington Cemetery. Aspinall left a sum of nearly £7 million in his will in a trust, with the income going to Suzy, his wife of 40 years. After her death it will be inherited by his five children: Roag, Gayla, Dhara, Julian, and Mandy Aspinall.
Read more about this topic: Neil Aspinall
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal, life and/or death:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Life is not an easy matter.... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one’s life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“‘Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes,—thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)