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...”