John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Brian’s flat in Falkner Street had provided only a temporary answer to the Cynthia problem. After a couple of late-night scares from oddballs wandering in off the street, with John away and only little Dot Rhone to protect her, Cyn felt too nervous to continue living there. Showing the Stanley family’s famous solidarity yet again, John’s Aunt Mimi invited him to bring Cyn back to live at Mendips, where she could enjoy a peaceful and secure environment until the baby was born.

  To minimize friction this time around, Mimi divided the house into two halves. John and Cynthia had the whole ground floor, enjoying sole use of the kitchen, morning room and drawing room, and sleeping in the former rear dining room. Mimi retreated upstairs, sleeping in the old student lodgers’ room and cooking scratch meals on a Baby Belling stove in John’s boyhood room above the front porch. The house’s single bathroom also had to double as her makeshift scullery.

  John’s return to Mendips in his new persona of famous pop star caused excitement throughout the extended family circle that had helped to raise him. His cousin Michael Cadwallader remembers his distributing copies of the Please Please Me album as proudly as he used to hand round his cartoon strips and handwritten magazines. One early, impressive sign of his new wealth was taking Cynthia off to Paris for a delayed honeymoon: they stayed at the luxurious George V Hotel—a place destined to recur in Beatles history—went shopping, and met up with Astrid Kirchherr for a boozy evening out that ended with all three of them passed out in bed together.

  John was also quick to repay Mimi at least some of what she had spent on him. He paid off the balance of the mortgage on the house and bought a showy three-piece suite for the drawing room and numerous other luxuries and domestic gadgets, whether needed or not. Thanks to the guitar that she used to declare would never earn him a living, Mimi now knew financial security for the first time in her adult life. No more would that diamond engagement ring have to be pledged with the pawnbroker in Smithdown Road.

  But the cost of having John at home again was Mimi’s cherished peace and privacy. Local Beatles fans quickly divined his new address and took up permanent station in clumps of two and three, like industrial pickets, outside the front gate. In the whole of Mendips’s quiet mock-Tudor life, even during the war years, its back door had never needed to be locked. Now, if Mimi left it ajar for even a minute, she would find her kitchen ransacked of plates and crockery by the house’s souvenir-hungry besiegers.

  Unlike modern first-time mothers, Cynthia attended no prenatal classes and received no preparation of any kind for giving birth and what lay beyond. And John on his fleeting visits home was either too buoyed up with excitement or dead with fatigue to worry about how she was feeling physically or how anxious or bewildered might be her state of mind. Even in pregnancy, he expected her to keep up the image he liked, for the odd moments when he might like to see it. Once while he was away on the road, a failure of communication at the hairdresser’s led to Cyn’s Bardot-length hair receiving a severe crop. When John came home and saw it, he refused to speak to her for two days.

  With the Beatles as a foundation, Brian Epstein now began assembling a roster of Liverpool talent whose success rate would make the Larry Parnes stable of old seem broken-winded. In March, his second signing, Gerry and the Pacemakers, reached number one with “How Do You Do It?”—the sure-fire hit that the Beatles had so ungratefully rejected. In May, a third NEMS acquisition, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, reached number two with “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”—a ballad showing John and Paul at their cutest, which George had sung through heavy winter catarrh on the Please Please Me album.

  The Beatles did not object to this diversification of their manager’s energies or resent their fellow Merseysiders’ success. It was John, in fact, who urged Brian to sign up the Big Three, the city’s hardest rock combo, featuring his friend John Gustafson on bass. He was also friendly and encouraging to Priscilla (“Cilla”) White, a sometime coat-check attendant at the Cavern, who sang with various bands around town, displaying a vocal power that could almost shatter glass. The Beatles backed Cilla—“Cyril,” as John called her—at a first, unsuccessful audition for Brian at the Majestic ballroom in Birkenhead. Nine months later, after hearing her sing jazz rather than R&B, he put her under contract as Cilla Black, so creating one of the best-loved personalities in British show business.

  The emergence of so many hitmakers and would-be hitmakers from the same faraway and hitherto obscure city opened Fleet Street’s eyes to pop music as a source of news at long last. Stories began appearing with increasing frequency about what was dubbed the Mersey Sound or Liverpop. The accent that so many southbound entertainers over the years had tried to purge from their voices became the last word in new northern chic. All at once, it seemed, the country couldn’t get enough Scouse.

  Mimi would later recall her astonishment one night at seeing John on television, speaking in the thick, lugubrious “wacker” accent she had managed to keep at bay throughout his boyhood. “I was shocked to hear him. When he came home, I said, ‘John, what’s all this about, what’s happened to your voice?’” His reply was to parody the broadest Toxteth or Dingle dialect—which pronounces this as “dis,” them as “dem,” and there as “dere”—both as a tease to Mimi and a reassurance that what she’d seen was quite deliberate and calculated. “‘It’s all dis-dem-dere, Mimi, dis-dem-dere,’” he said. And he’d do a little dance, a kind of Fagin act, rubbing his hands, and laugh and go “‘Money, money, money.’”

  “Ask anyone who knew him then…he didn’t really talk like that. I brought him up properly, not to talk like a ruffian. But John knew enough about the music world to put it all on. The fools believed he was really like that. The fools!”

  There are few trickier tasks than finding a follow-up to a hit single, especially one as explosively original as “Please Please Me.” The Beatles knew it might have been just a lucky shot they would be unable to repeat, and were all too aware of what must follow. Parlophone would halfheartedly underwrite a couple more attempts, then give up; like hundreds before them and thousands since, they would sink into the painful obscurity of one-hit wonders.

  Their follow-up, “From Me to You,” therefore repeated its predecessor’s winning formula of Lennon harmonica and toppling falsetto, though with a more leisurely John-led harmony—an almost childlike “la-la-la da-da dum-dum-dum”—and a subtler, minor-chorded middle eight. Despite the sharp drop in power and risky foray into subtlety, it reached number one within two weeks of its release on April 11. The Beatles by this time had joined their second Arthur Howes national package tour, this one costarring two imported American heartthrobs, Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. As on the Helen Shapiro show a month earlier, the headliners found it progressively more of a struggle to keep their audiences’ attention.

  It was only after this second hit that the names of the individual Beatles became generally known. And, in those days, their names had the same novelty value as everything else about them. After the creaky artifice of pop-star pseudonyms—the Billys and Dickies, the Storms and Wildes and Furies—“John Lennon” and “Paul McCartney” had a refreshing candor. “George Harrison” indeed was almost too frank in its evocation of some cloth-capped war veteran playing dominoes in a pub with sawdust on its floor. Only “Ringo Starr” added a traditional touch of Yank-worshipping fantasy.

  Now, too, came growing awareness that, as well as being bold enough to perform under their real names, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs, both for their own group and other artistes with whom they contested the charts. In addition to Billy J. Kramer’s hit with “Do You Want to Know a Secret? the Please Please Me album inspired two further cover versions. Duffy Power, from the Larry Parnes stable, released a bluesy version of “I Saw Her Standing There,” and Kenny Lynch recorded “Misery,” which had originally been written for Helen Shapiro. For John, Lynch’s soulful treatment was marred by the presence of Bert Weedon, doyen of British session guitarists—even thoug
h Weedon’s “Play in a Day” tuition book had once been his bible. “I saw the Beatles up in Dick James’s office, when he was presenting them with a set of cuff links each for ‘Please Please Me,’” Lynch remembers. “John said to me ‘What’d you want to have Bert Weedon on the session for? I would have played if you’d asked me.’”

  On April 8, at Liverpool’s Sefton General Hospital, Cynthia Lennon gave birth to an eight-pound boy. The delivery was a tricky one, as the umbilical cord was found to be partially wrapped around the baby’s neck. John was still on the road with Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, and did not manage to get to the hospital until a week later. By this time, local Beatles fans had received seismic intelligence of the event and were staking out the front entrance, so he had to be smuggled through a service door in disguise. Unfortunately, Cynthia had been given a room with a glass partition looking on to the main maternity ward. John’s reunion with his exhausted and still pain-racked young wife and first meeting with his newborn son thus took place before a grinning audience of patients and nurses.

  The baby was named John Charles Julian, after his father, his maternal grandfather, and, indirectly, John’s mother, Julia. In fact, he was always to be known as Julian. Yet again showing supportiveness far beyond any ordinary manager, and heedless of religious complications, Brian Epstein immediately volunteered himself as godfather.

  John was as entranced and excited as any other young father by the tiny edition of himself he held in his arms that day. On his visits home, he liked to have baby Julian put into his arms, fresh from the bath, smelling of milk, new blanket, and talcum powder. He also liked to boast that Julian would not be brought up to be good-mannered, like him and his cousins Mike and David, but would be “a free spirit.” However, the practicalities of parenthood had little appeal for him. When Cynthia changed a nappy, he had to leave the room; otherwise, he warned, he would vomit.

  Cyn had hoped Julian’s arrival would create more of a bond between Mimi and her during John’s absences. Alas, Mimi’s baby-caring days were now too remote for her to feel much empathy with her great-nephew—especially when he revealed a pair of lungs almost powerful enough to rattle the Royal Worcester on its shelves. To make matters still more tense, Cyn’s mother, Lilian, was home from Canada for good, and naturally wanted to spend as much time as possible with Julian and her. Mimi and Lilian had not met since their row at the Powells’ house three years earlier, and showed little more enthusiasm for each other now—but Lilian could not be denied access to Mendips and her grandson whenever she chose. Family visitors grew accustomed to finding them in the front lounge and Mimi in her first-floor bedsit, muttering about the “two fat, lazy lumps downstairs, quaffing bottles of Guinness.”

  Despite all the witnesses both inside and outside Sefton General, not a word about Julian’s birth reached the ears of a single journalist, national or local. Round-the-clock monitoring by Brian and Tony Barrow ensured that John gave nothing away. And, once back on the road with Paul, George, and Ringo, he seemed to Boyfriend magazine’s Maureen O’Grady as much “a free agent” as ever.

  On April 21, the Beatles appeared as a special attraction in the New Musical Express’s annual poll-winners’ concert at Wembley Empire Pool, for the first time actually sharing a stage with John’s particular bêtes-noires, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Before starting their third all-Britain tour in four months, there was time for a short holiday. Paul and George went to stay with their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann at his family’s vacation home in Tenerife. And John provoked amazement—and speculation that continues to this day—by going off to Spain alone with Brian Epstein.

  Their ten-day trip has passed into legend as the point when Brian finally came clean about his alleged homosexual passion for John—and when John may fleetingly have reciprocated it. Whether or not one accepts that interpretation, the whole episode was bizarre in the extreme. Whatever Brian’s private feelings, it was an inexplicable step out of his normally shy and decorous character, especially at a moment when John’s first duty was so obviously to Cynthia and their newborn son—Brian’s godchild. And John himself clearly needed little persuading, despite the furor it was bound to cause. “Cynthia [had had] a baby and the holiday was planned, but I wasn’t going to break the holiday for a baby,” he would recall. “I just thought what a bastard I was, and went.”

  But some believe he had a quite different agenda—notably Bill Harry, Mersey Beat’s founder-editor, who knew both John and Brian well at this time. According to Harry, Brian felt that to maximize the Beatles’ teen appeal, Paul would have to be given the greater prominence onstage. “He wanted to change them from John’s group into Paul’s group. So he took John away to Spain so that they could have some privacy while he explained the whole thing to him.” Paul McCartney, too, has come to believe the holiday had a political rather than sexual motive, but one dictated more by John than Brian. “John was a smart cookie. Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress on Mr. Epstein who was boss of the group…. He wanted Brian to know whom he should listen to.”

  John himself, while admitting to “a pretty intense relationship” with Brian during the ten days, claimed on the record to have been no more than a fascinated observer of his manager’s very different lifestyle under the forgiving Spanish sun. “I watched Brian picking up boys, and liked playing it a bit faggy. We used to sit in a cafe in Torremolinos looking at all the boys, and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one? Do you like this one?’ I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time, ‘I am experiencing this….’” One day, they unexpectedly ran into some visitants from a rather more wholesome summer holiday—Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who were making a record in nearby Sitges. “I turned around in a restaurant and saw Brian and John at a table on their own,” Richard remembers. “We had no idea what they were doing there.”

  John later allegedly told his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton that Brian had made advances to him and that, out of a mixture of curiosity and pity, he had briefly responded. It was, in fact, not the first time he’d made such a claim, even though the young men who for years had shared rooms and even beds with him—not to mention the young women who had done likewise—all felt sure there was not a gay molecule in his whole body. Often it was done merely to shock, as with Horst Fascher back in April 1962, when Brian had personally delivered the Beatles to Hamburg to open the Star-Club. “I heard there was an English guy drunk in the next-door bar, who I first thought must be a musician,” Fascher remembers. “But when I go in there, I find Brian Epstein sitting up at the bar, passed out cold with his head on the counter. So I go back into the Star-Club and tell John to come and help me get him out of there. When John comes into the place, he just picks up a half-empty glass of beer from the counter, pulls back Brian’s collar and pours the beer down his neck. I asked him if that was any way to be treating the Beatles’ new manager. ‘It’s OK,’ John said to me. ‘I already gave him one up the ass.’”

  Brian himself seems to have given his version of the episode to one person only. This was his close friend Peter Brown, then manager of NEMS’s Charlotte Street record store, later a crucial figure in the Beatles’ retinue. Four decades later, Brown prefers still to maintain discreet silence, beyond the general observation that “Brian had a tendency to prefer oral sex.” He disputes, however, that John accompanied Brian to Spain for political motives, to maintain his ascendancy within the Beatles. “It had nothing to do with advancement of career. John knew that he already had Brian as an ally; he knew that Brian liked him, was attracted to him and stimulated by his intellect. Anyway, I don’t believe John was that manipulative. And the idea of going along with it, and trying to take advantage of it, just wouldn’t have been Brian’s way.”

  Years later, John finally came clean about what had happened: not to anyone who’d been around at the time, but to the unshockable woman with whom he shared the last decade of his life. He said that one night during the trip, Brian had cast
aside shyness and scruples and finally come on to him, but that he’d replied, “If you feel like that, go out and find a hustler.” Afterward, he had deliberately fed Pete Shotton the myth of his brief surrender, so that everyone would believe his power over Brian to be absolute.

  On May 11, the Please Please Me album reached number one in Record Retailer magazine’s chart, where it was destined to stay for virtually the rest of the year. A week later, the Beatles set off on yet another UK package tour with an imported American star as its theoretical headliner. The names originally mooted for this increasingly thankless task had included Duane (“Mister Twangy Guitar”) Eddy, the Four Seasons, and—a particular idol of John’s—Ben E. King, the Drifters’ former lead singer. In the end, it was Roy Orbison, the Texan singer-songwriter whose suboperatic ballads had inspired John to write “Please Please Me.” Even Orbison’s giant voice, however, could not hold the audiences hungry for Beatles. After a few days, they were given his place at the top of the bill, an affront he took like a perfect gentleman. “You can’t measure success,” John would later reflect, “but…the moment I knew [Paul and I] were successful was when Roy Orbison asked if he could record two of our songs.”

  June saw the start of Pop Go the Beatles, a weekly radio show on the BBC Light Programme, transmitted live on Tuesdays at 5:00 p.m., the time-honored slot for Children’s Hour. Its theme song, performed by the Beatles themselves, was a burlesque version of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Between numbers came some crunching verbal collisions between John and a hapless announcer named the Lee Peters, known behind his back as “Pee Litres.”

  ANNOUNCER: Something you may not know is that the boys are responsible for their own arrangements. Tell me, John, how did you get on to this next one?

  JOHN (in comically thick Liverpudlian-Irish): Well, ye just git yer gitar and strrroom it like…ye know Mister…rrrock and rrroll loike…