Wednesday, September 16, 1964 THERE WAS a swarm of people jammed around the bandstand in the dimly-lit motel lounge in Key West. The bar manager elbowed his way in and tried to make himself heard over the hard, steady beat of the drums; then, gesturing hopelessly, he came back to the bar and addressed himself to the kid with the mop of black hair falling down over his forehead.       "It's after four," the barman said. "I'm trying to tell them they can't play here after 4 o'clock in the morning."     "I know," Paul McCartney said, idly fingering the collar of his open shirt. "They have to stop at four. It's the Florida law. I heard that."     Then he turned around to pick up his Scotch and Coke (mixed, of all things) and see what that breathless, giddy airline hostess was mumbling about. So the barman, sensing that the Beatle with that misleading choirboy look wasn't really interested in helping him enforce the state's curfew, went over to the three policemen stationed at the glass sliding doors facing the pool.     There was an agitated conversation and then the three cops waded through the mass to the bandstand.     Coffee Butler, who had come over to the motel from the Bamboo Room downtown, was on the second chorus of "Blueberry Hill" when the law arrived. He managed to make it to the end ("Yes, you were my thrill on Blueberry Hill") before he stood up from the piano and said, "Time to split, fellas--these cats mean it."     So George Harrison, plainly unhappy, put down the borrowed guitar and Ringo Starr squeezed out from behind the drums and they came off the stand. "What a drag," Ringo said, and there was sadness in those piercing blue gray eyes.   *       *       * RINGO STARR, WHOSE NAME IS RICHARD STARKEY, CAME TO that hotel lounge in Key West on the longest journey of all the Beatles. Alone among them, his life was a drag much of the time from the day he was born, on July 7, 1940, until a very short time ago. He had the hardest time among the Blitz babies who drifted together in their teens and borrowed our Rock and Roll beat and became Britain's most warmly-acclaimed export item.     An only child, Ringo came from a house without a bath (where Elsie and Harry Starkey, by choice, still live) on a poor, cobbled street in Dingle, outside of Liverpool. He remembers being alone a lot; his mother had to work as a barmaid or tend counter in a fruit shop because his father couldn't make much as a housepainter.     And he remembers something more frightful: hospital rooms, so many hospital rooms. He was in hospitals nearly all the time between the ages of 6-1/2 to 12 and again, briefly, at 14. He remembers doctors and nurses hovering around him in operating rooms, so many operating rooms. It started with a burst appendix and peritonitis. Then it was a mass of broken pelvic bones, suffered when he stepped out of a hospital bed after a year on his back. Then it was pleurisy.     "Really," he told me last Friday on the Beatles' flight from Jacksonville to their Boston date, "I lost count of the operations in those three years after I fell down getting off the bed--12 to 15, I suppose. I know three times they told me mother I'd be dead, but here I am. Maybe that's why I'm not a particularly wild fellow."     And, very likely, that's why there are faint streaks of gray in the brown hairdo that flops around so wildly when Ringo pounds out that big beat behind the guitars and the lyrics--almost always about young love--which are universally drowned by the shrill screams of the Beatle fans.   *       *       * THE LIVERPOOL DRUMMER BOY, A FRAGILE BUT WIRY 5 FEET 7, now coming into his own as a favorite of the Beatlemania legions everywhere arrived at his present wealth and eminence by a more roundabout route than the others because he had to go out and find a job in the days when they were toiling harder over their guitars than their grammar school courses.     While John Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison were pretty well pointed towards some kind of career in music (isn't that what it is?) from the start, all on their own, Ringo quit school before he was 14 and went to work as an engineers' apprentice. It sounds impressive, but his labors for H. (he says, "haitch") Hunt & Sons on playground and swimming pool projects earned him only $15 a week. He also did a turn once as a ship's waiter on the run between London and Wales, and once, he says, he had an idea that he might become a hairdresser (there's a thought).     Elsie Starkey, a cheerful, gray-haired woman, doesn't buy any of that nonsense. "He's always had a passion for drums," she says. "Ever since I can remember he's been tapping on things. He made his own set of drums from old tin cans--until we took the hint and bought him his first drums one Christmas. He really loved them and used to play them for hours in his room. The neighbors didn't like it, of course, but they're good neighbors. That's one of the reasons I don't want to move."     Mrs. Starkey is the one who's responsible for Ringo's nickname, because the ring kick started with one she bought him when he was 16, but she still calls him Richard. Ringo, in turn, calls her Elsie, as he always has, and he will always be grateful for those drums.     The store-bought drums--Ringo was banging on a bass fashioned out of an old tea chest when they arrived--date back a scant five years, but it was then that Ringo "stopped hanging around street corners every night" and decided to play for money. It took nerve since he hadn't learned to read drum music ("whenever I hear another drummer, I know I'm no good," he has said), but he did find work.     He remembers one of those first dates--with an outfit called the Darktown Skiffles:     "It was in one of the clubs (the "u" comes out like a double "oo" when a Liverpool boy says it) and I got all of 10 shillings an hour--say a dollar-fifty in your money. I remember I went home and said to me dad, 'See, I make more money than you do now.'     "I keep saying that today. I say, 'You can give it up now, dad,' and he goes on painting houses. But then I suppose it's good that a man should be independent. It's the same with the house, in a way. I wanna buy them a house but they won't move away from their friends and me aunties. They say they don't want to start all over again, making new friends, in some other place."   *       *       * RINGO FIRST SAW THE BEATLES IN ONE OF THOSE AIRLESS, sweaty, smoke-filled cellar clubs but didn't really get to know them until he went to Hamburg on a date with Rory Storme and the Hurricanes in the winter of 1960.     "They were in the Kaiserkeller," he says, "and I would drop in to see them and maybe have a beer, or we would eat together. Then later, back in Liverpool, Pete Best went down sick and they asked me to sit in. I did that four times, but it wasn't until 1962, in August, that Brian Epstein phoned and asked me would I like to join the Beatles and I said yes. They were the biggest thing in Liverpool then, you know."     There's something Ringo left out there. When the other Beatles said they wanted him in place of the handsome Best, who had all the girls swooning in the path of his high-heeled boots, this was how the highly-polished, impeccably-attired Epstein reacted: "He's not marvelous to look at, but you can have him if you want him."     Ringo, on the somber side in his manner and appearance, but perhaps the happiest and best-adjusted of the Beatles and at times the friskiest (don't ever tangle with him in a pillow fight on an airplane), can discuss a crack like Epstein's without the faintest show of resentment.     "I don't get upset over it," he says. "I don't care when people talk about my big nose--maybe if all the Beatles looked alike we wouldn't have made it. And it doesn't bother me when they talk about me coming from a poor district. You live with it. I never thought about it. I always had a suit and a pair of shoes and look how lovely (it comes out "loovly") everything is now. It knocks me out it's so lovely."   *       *       * THERE ARE, OF COURSE SOME THINGS RINGO IS NOT HAPPY about, listed here in no particular order:     American women. "They have too much to say here," he says. "They boss a man around. I'll have no woman bossing me around." Ringo has a girl back home, a fetching 17-year-old hairdresser (no joke) named Maureen Cox, but she may be giving too many orders, too. Ringo says she is not his bride-to-be, just his secretary-to-be.     American food. He says the only good meal he ever had on these shores was the Southern fried chicken whipped up in Key West by Mrs. Jernice Reid, whose daughter Brenda is in the Rock and Roll singing group traveling as one of the Beatles' warm-up acts and named, needlessly, The Exciters.     Psychiatrists have even read an Elvis Presley sex bit into the Beatles act. "It's such a lot  of rubbish," Ringo says. "The only thing we shake are our hands."     Reporters who ask unintelligent questions. "One of them said to John, 'Is it true you're going to write a book?' and here his book is one of the biggest sellers since the Bible." (Ringo himself has just read bits of the strange mixture called "John Lennon In His Own Write"; he likes science fiction better.)     Finally, he doesn't like being pursued by autograph hunters when he sets out, as he might do in London in a sort of private place like the Ad Lib Club, to put away a bit of Scotch.     "I would like to be unknown," Ringo says. "With the money." ____ TOMORROW: John Lennon.