I was George
Best's first love but now I'm a shaven headed Buddhist
nun
8 SEPTEMBER 2015,
Emily, Mirror
Buddhist nun Ani Rinchen used to be pretty blonde model called
Jackie Glass who caught the eye of legendary footballer and
lothario George Best
When George
Best asked for
her number, she replied that there was no point. He played for
Manchester Utd and she lived in London. But that didn’t
put George off,
and Buddhist nun Ani Rinchen shakes her shaven head with laughter
as she tells me: “Of course I gave it in the end – he was a
charismatic man.”
In another life – and I hear Buddhists have a few –
she was a mini-skirted blonde model called Jackie Glass. She became
the first serious girlfriend of football’s first pin-up. And not
only did she play it cool at the start, she was the one who dumped
him, refusing to take him back when he begged.
“We were together for a year properly and then
another year off and on. I was his first love,” she
says.
But then he was unfaithful and she read about in the
papers.
“He said it didn’t mean anything and tried to get
back with me. I was tempted, but I couldn’t see things would
change,” she says. “We loved each other but our lifestyles were
different. I didn’t want to be a footballer’s wife.”
Now 67, Ani Rinchen (her Buddhist name means
“precious”) is celibate, lives alone, meditates daily, wears plain
red robes and no make-up.
But I can still make out a thread between the serene
woman sipping elderflower cordial and the Sixties society girl
wearing Mary Quant.
Her face often breaks into the same angular smile.
And she’s tough. You have to be tough to follow her solitary path.
And you had to be tough to date George Best at the height of his
fame.
“Girls threw themselves at him. We couldn’t walk
down the street,” she says. “Even going to the cinema he had to
wait until everyone went in. It became such a bind. You would sit
in your flat, or go to another person’s, or go to a restaurant if
you knew the people there.”
Then there was the drinking. George was making
£2,000 a week when the national average was £23, but he never had
to pay for the conveyor belt of alcohol that appeared before
him.
“That was the root of the problem,” she recalls. “I
have no idea what we got through. But I found it boring sitting in
a dark bar drinking. I’d have preferred to go dancing.
“He didn’t court the adulation. But he didn’t have
protection around him so he was vulnerable. And he was headstrong –
not easy to guide. I tried to help but I was a bit reckless, too,
at that age.” She adds: “He wasn’t happy. After the European Cup
Final win in 1968 it all went a bit flat. He played well by
anyone’s standards except his own.”
As Jackie, she grew up in a middle-class Manchester
family and began modelling at 16, moving to London as her career
took off.
She went to Morocco for a shoot and stayed for a
while, improving her A-level French so much that she offered to
translate a screenplay into English for friend-of-a-friend Gerard
Brach, a scriptwriter who worked with director Roman Polanski. She
and Brach collaborated on the screenplay to Secret World, a 1969
movie starring Jacqueline Bissett.
She found herself in the very heart of swinging
London, at parties with photographer David Bailey and his French
actress wife Catherine Deneuve.
“I read somewhere that the Swinging Sixties only
applied to about 100 people in London – I suppose it applied to
me!”
She went to film premieres with the Beatles and
Paris with “crazy” Polanski.
“He stopped at a traffic light in Paris and jumped out, bashed his
head against it, and got back in streaming blood!” she says. “He’d
been trying to show us how most of the traffic lights there were
made of rubber!”
But she was back in Manchester, at a nightclub with
a male friend, when George made his approach.
“This guy asked my friend could he dance with me,”
she recalls. “He looked familiar and I realised it was George Best.
I just remember thinking he was old-fashioned for asking! I know
now George never danced, so it was quite extraordinary. He got
self-conscious because everyone looked at him.
“He said ‘Can I have your number?’ I said
there was no point because I lived in London. Then he asked me to
the opening of his boutique the next day. He didn’t try to kiss me
– he was a well-behaved man.”
So she went, and gave him her number. By the time
she got back to London he’d left a message.
“He said he was coming the next day. I met him at
the station but he said he had training in the morning and had to
get back.
“I said, ‘What did you come for then?’ He said he
was hoping I’d go back with him. He’d come down to get me! So I got
back on the train he’d just got off.”
So began their whirlwind romance.
“I remember going to Polanski’s wedding to
Sharon Tate. Warren Beatty was there, Jane Birkin, Mia Farrow. But
George and I only had eyes for each other. We didn’t stay very
long!”
But his fame, drinking and womanising made a future
together impossible. “I didn’t see it as glamorous – it was
constraining,” Ani Rinchen explains.
After the split they never got in touch again. She
had her daughter Rosie with “a tree surgeon, the polar opposite of
Best” and when that relationship ended she took Rosie travelling,
settling in Bali, running a textiles business, and taking an
interest in Buddhism.
Back in the UK when Rosie was 12, she heard the
Dalai Lama speak and was “spellbound”. So when Rosie left home she
went to live in a Buddhist monastery and inside a year, in 1994,
was ordained as a nun.
At first she feared a dour life with no
distractions. “I had this idea I wouldn’t be able to have a laugh,”
she says. “But I had become bored with parties, people drinking a
lot and talking rubbish.
“I cut my long blonde hair off. I could feel the air
on my head. It was liberating.
“I was giving up all the things that weren’t good
for me – I didn’t tell my daughter until afterwards!” Now Ani
Rinchen manages a Tibetan Buddhist meditation centre in
Edinburgh.
“I still like to have a joke – I’m a down-to-earth
person,” she grins. “But I have simplified my life – I have inner
peace.”
She was on a retreat to Holy Island, off the
Northumberland coast in 2005 when she heard George had
died.
“It was very sad,” she says. “We had a little
ceremony and said prayers.
“I think he got too far away from his true self. We
can become so focused outwards, we never look inside. Buddhism
brings you back to yourself.
“I could have gone down the path with George. I was
a young, pretty girl. I knew a lot of people but I didn’t feel I
had a lot of friends. I’m so much happier now.”
She adds: “Someone told me George had been reading a
book by the Dalai Lama near the end. Perhaps he was coming round to
it. Maybe next life...”