Naturally there were dissenters—retired army colonels in the shires who lamented that a world war had been fought and won for this; boys’ schools that outlawed Beatle cuts on pain of expulsion; left-wing intellectuals who contributed essays called “The Menace of Beatledom” to rarified weekly reviews. But the mass-circulation press had entered into an unspoken covenant to print nothing negative about them. Besides, whatever the controversy, it tended to evaporate in the face of the Beatles’ own personal qualities: their innocent high spirits, their enthusiasm, their honesty, their modesty, the unfailing quick wit that never overstepped the bounds of politeness. You can see them working almost telepathically together in a primitive video clip, as yet another middle-aged, plummy-voiced inquisitor thrusts a microphone toward Ringo and poses the same old question: just why are they called the Beatles?
RINGO: John knows, and he’ll tell yer…now.
JOHN: Erm, well it’s just a name, isn’t it? Like “shoe.”
PAUL: There you are, we could have been called the Shoes for all you know…
What we now know as pop “culture” was still years in the future. The setting for the Beatles first fame was the red plush darkness of theaters and cinemas that still offered their customers live “variety” in addition to films. As much as rockers, they were minstrels that John’s namesake grandfather would have recognized, albeit white-faced and electrified. One of the earliest marks of their success was a Beatles Christmas Show staged by Brian Epstein at the Finsbury Park Astoria cinema, in which they performed spoof Victorian comedy sketches besides rolling out their hits. A television appearance with Morecambe and Wise on December 3 had them in striped blazers and straw boaters, joining the comedy duo for a rendition of “On Moonlight Bay.” Before becoming the world’s most adored rock band, they were Britain’s last great music hall turn.
While his shows rocked the roof and his songs burned up the charts, John’s domestic arrangements remained as makeshift as ever. Though he now spent the greater part of each week in London, his wife and son were still up on Merseyside, officially nonexistent and leading a life as different from his as chalk from Camembert.
The situation had, indeed, become so riven with female politics that John preferred to emulate other retiring menfolk in his family and keep out of it as much as possible. At Mendips, tensions between Cynthia and her mother downstairs and Aunt Mimi upstairs had finally become too much for everyone concerned; Cyn and Lilian had removed baby Julian to their home territory of Hoylake, leaving Mimi in peace and order once again with her Coalport china and her cats.
By now in Fleet Street, a story that had not raised a flicker of interest six months earlier loomed large on every popular paper’s news list. Cynthia and her mother had scarcely regained possession of their old home when they were doorstepped by journalists seeking to discover if the love object of a million British schoolgirls really had gambled his future by taking a wife. The Express finally managed to corner Cyn and put the challenge directly; though she admitted nothing, there was corroboration enough for the banner headline BEATLE JOHN IS MARRIED.
To soften this supposed devastating blow to the Beatles’ core audience, John formally owned up via a “life story” in Mirabelle magazine on October 12. Though clearly ghostwritten, it was stronger stuff than the usual teen-mag pap, leading off with the “awful tragedy” of losing his mother “before my fourteenth birthday” (it had been before his eighteenth), paying tribute to Mimi for raising him, and painting a fond picture of “her frilly curtains and her apple tree.” Cynthia was slipped in anonymously, between Hamburg and Ringo joining the group.
I think by the way Paul’s eyes kept flashing he too liked the German girls but me, I had different ideas. My girl was at home in Liverpool…A little while later we were married. I love her. As I’m away such a lot, she lives with Aunt Mimi. I’d like to tell you more about her but I’ve this old-fashioned idea that marriage is a private thing, too precious to be discussed publicly. So forgive me and understand.
For months it had been obvious that all the Beatles needed to settle permanently in London, to be as close as possible to Brian’s transplanted NEMS Enterprises office, George Martin, Abbey Road, the BBC, the beckoning world of filmmaking, and the jumping-off point for overseas ventures soon to come. With Cynthia’s Hoylake cover blown, there was no reason for John to delay the move any longer, much as he might have preferred to. His life in the metropolis would have to become a family man’s.
To save on hotel expenses, Brian had rented his boys a mews flat in Green Street, Mayfair, a few doors from the elegant block where he himself was about to take up residence. This was, however, just a crash pad, suitable only for the two most undemanding and unattached Beatles, George and Ringo. After a brief, discontented stay there, Paul found an alternative address providing both an almost impregnable refuge from fans and a quantum leap up the social ladder. The father of his girlfriend, Jane Asher, was a consultant psychiatrist whose home as well as office was a Regency house in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. Here Paul now lived as a nonpaying guest, sharing the top floor with Jane’s brother, Peter. Her mother, an accomplished musician who’d once given oboe lessons to George Martin, also made the basement available for Lennon-McCartney songwriting. Strange to think of those early London-era tracks gestating in the street where Robert Browning wooed Elizabeth Barrett, set about by brass plaques for expensive dentists and urologists.
John, by contrast, ended up in busy, noisy, tourist-and student-ridden South Kensington. He owed the choice to Robert Freeman, the young photographer who (with an obvious debt to Astrid Kirchherr) had created the half-shadow group head shot for the cover of With the Beatles. Freeman lived in Emperor’s Gate, one of the warren of faded grand Victorian terraces between Hyde Park and Cromwell Road. During a house-hunting visit to London by John and Cynthia in late 1963, he mentioned that the flat above his was vacant. The pair viewed it and, despite several all-too-obvious drawbacks, took it immediately.
The accommodation would now be termed a duplex but in those days was called a maisonette: two floors at the top of a porticoed house, accessible only by winding communal stairs. The bedroom overlooked the West London Air Terminal; at the rear lay an open stretch of Underground line, with noisy trains passing constantly in both directions.
Socially, however, the location could hardly have been better. As an in-demand photographer—an occupation fast acquiring some of the glamour of pop stardom—Bob Freeman knew everyone who was anyone around town, from Peter Cook to the editor of the Sunday Times’s color magazine, Mark Boxer. Freeman’s wife, Sonny, was a model, with impish looks and a rangy physique that perfectly set off the new “fun” fashions of young designers like Mary Quant. In 1964, photographed by her husband in a man’s blue denim shirt, she would become one of the first images in the groundbreakingly erotic Pirelli calendar. Sonny had been born in Berlin but, growing up in Britain in postwar years, preferred to say she was Norwegian. The Freemans’ apartment, it so happened, was mostly paneled in wood.
Bob and Sonny Freeman gave John and Cynthia their first entrée to new London clubs, nothing like the brown leather mausoleums of Pall Mall and St James’s, whose entry requirement was not to be an earl or an archbishop, but young, famous, and fashionable. The four went out together almost every night, joining the small coterie of actors, fashion models, painters, and photographers who were changing the word in from a preposition to an adjective.
Above the Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square, was the Ad Lib, the first club to cater specifically to moneyed young pop stars, with a resident disc jockey and a sound track of hard-core R&B. One night, the in-crowd included John’s boyhood heroes the Everly Brothers and his Dovedale Primary schoolmate Jimmy Tarbuck, now exploiting the nation’s infatuation with Scouse humor to brilliant effect as a stand-up comedian. With an echo of his old Teddy Boy truculence, Tarbuck told John to “bow down and worship” Don and Phil Everly as the inspiration for the Beatles’ vocal ha
rmonies. “Yeah,” John readily agreed. “I love the Ev’s.”
Sonny Freeman remembers John as “very cheeky but very impressionable….” One of the things that impressed him a lot was that Bob had been to Cambridge University. John seemed almost envious of that. He loved to discuss books and films and art, and I realised that under the clowning and joking he was really quite deep.” Often after a night’s clubbing he still wouldn’t be tired, but happily sat up until dawn in the Freemans’ wood-paneled apartment, talking to his beautiful faux-Norwegian neighbor “about things like life and death, the way you always do when you’re young.”
In fact, Sonny had no reason to be secretive about her German birth. During the war, her father had been the stoutly anti-Hitler Mayor of Breslau, and had paid for his courage with his life. “One night I told the story to John, how my father had been shot dead by a Nazi gauleiter. During the same conversation, I remember John saying he didn’t think he was going to live very long—that he had a premonition he’d be shot, too.”
There were also outings to restaurants, if not with Brian then with George Martin and his secretary, soon to be wife, Judy Lockhart-Smith, whose top-drawer accent was a source of endless delight to John. The urbane Martin tried to break down some of his northern gastronomic prejudices, urging him at least to try more exotic menu items and see if he liked them. One such evening brought his first, suspicious encounter with sugar snap peas, the miniature variety you eat in their pods. “I’ll try them,” he told Martin, “but put them over there…not near the food.”
Being rich was as yet only a vague sensation in comparison with the daily, oppressive reality of being famous. Like all the Beatles, John still had no clear idea of how much he had earned, was earning, or might be expected to earn from the huge gross income accruing to the Beatles in performance fees, record royalties, and the labyrinth of merchandising deals set up by Brian for everything from Beatle jackets to Beatle-themed cupcakes, not to mention the separate royalties John divided with Paul as sole suppliers of material to Northern Songs. All his major living expenses were taken care of by Brian’s office, from which—somewhat recalling pocket-money days with Aunt Mimi—he received £50 in cash per week. Like the hero of Mark Twain’s story “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note,” he discovered the strange truth that the richer one becomes the less obligation there seems to pay for anything. Clubs he visited pressed free drinks on him, restaurants automatically waived bills, guitar makers sent him their choicest new models simply for the glory of his patronage.
He bought himself presents all the time, seldom looking twice at them at the point of sale, let alone afterward, usually directing that the bill—if there was one—be sent to that comforting, auntlike entity, “the office.” Like royalty, he had no need to carry money and, as a result, had no sense of rolling in it. “I never see more than £100 [about £1,000 today],” he told one interviewer. “I never use money because I’m always being taken around.”
Some evenings he preferred to forsake the in-crowd for more traditional celebrities whom he’d met through Sunday Night at the London Palladium and the Royal Variety Show, and continued to meet simply by hanging out with his manager. Though now the dominant force in British teen culture, Brian saw himself essentially as a West End impresario in the tradition of Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont. His headquarters were in Argyll Street, right next door to the Palladium Theatre, and his support team included London’s top show-business lawyer, David Jacobs. Since Jacobs was of the supersmooth legal breed whose clients become personal friends, this put John into the same social circle as Liberace, Judy Garland, Eartha Kitt, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Chief among such older showbiz pals was Alma Cogan, a singer who had topped Britain’s pre-rock-’n’-roll hit parade, billed as the Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice. (At art college, John loved to parody her 1958 single, “Sugartime,” accompanied by his worst village-idiot grimaces.) Though the hits were long gone, she remained a vibrant and popular figure, living with her mother in Kensington High Street and keeping more or less permanent open house for fellow entertainers in a flat stuffed with kitsch red glassware and Spanish flamenco dolls. All the Beatles loved these soirees with Sara Sequin, as John nicknamed her, when they would hobnob with the likes of Lionel Bart and Bruce Forsyth, be served tea and dainty sandwiches by her mother, and often end the night with an old-fashioned party game like charades.
Though most male suitors were kept firmly at arm’s length, Alma’s younger sister, Sandra, now says that John and “Sara Sequin” had a passionate affair—mostly conducted at West End hotels, where they would register under aliases like “Mr and Mrs Winston”—and that Cyn never found out about it. To complicate matters, Brian also developed an infatuation with Alma, to the point of wavering back toward heterosexuality; he took her to Liverpool to meet his parents and talked openly of marrying her and “settling down.” That would have spelled a very different future for him and possibly John also; however, nothing came of the idea, and Alma was to die from cancer in 1966, aged thirty-four.
The closely guarded secret of John’s new London address did not last long. Within only days of his arrival in Emperor’s Gate, a permanent picket of girls had formed outside the Grecian portico of number 13. No matter what time John and Cynthia went out or came home, the same chorus of squeals and thicket of autograph books would be there to greet them. Downstairs, the house’s only other tenants, Bob and Sonny Freeman, acted as unwilling concierges, answering dozens of rings on the doorbell each day or expelling unauthorized intruders from the communal hallway. Unfortunately for Sonny, she had blonde hair similar to Cynthia’s and a small son, Dean, who was the same age as Julian. Often when she took Dean into nearby Hyde Park, she would find herself followed and Dean’s stroller mobbed in mistake for that of the Beatle baby.
In these days, celebrities were not dogged night and day by scandal-ranking press columnists and paparazzi even in London, never mind outside. As the virtually open affair with Alma Cogan demonstrated, John could philander as much as he liked, secure in the knowledge that it would never get back to Cyn. On the road, his conquests included Maureen Kennedy, lead singer with the Vernons Girls, a sexy song-and-dance troupe originally formed by Vernons Football Pools in Liverpool. “While John was onstage, Mo would make me stand in the wings and hold her hand while she watched him,” fellow Vernons Girl Frances Lea remembers. “When he sang “This Boy” in that slow, smoochy way, her nails used to dig into my palm until it hurt.”
On a tour of the Channel Isles, just before Beatlemania broke in earnest, he ran into an interesting old acquaintance, the poet and erstwhile paperback writer Royston Ellis. According to Ellis, he, John, and a female third party ended up bed together for a sexual romp featuring black oilskins and polythene bags, so planting the seed—as it were—of a song destined to emerge five years later. More prosaically, the poet offered a remedy for an infestation of crab lice John had picked up in the unhygienic toilets of theater backstages and cheap hotels.
Not all his amours were so tactfully far-flung. He also began a casual affair with Sonny Freeman, which Cynthia never suspected even though they were all living in the same house—one that would remain secret even after Sonny’s Norwegian connection and her wood-paneled flat had been transmogrified into a classic Beatles track.
Those whom Fate decides to make rich and famous discover sooner or later it is not the storybook happy ending they had always thought but merely a threshold to unimagined new problems, pressures, and dissatisfactions. And for John, once he had all the recognition he could ever seek, all the sex he could ever desire, all the expensive food and drink he could ever consume, all the shiny new guitars he could ever play, and all the many-colored, vari-collared shirts he could ever wear, the promised land was quicker than usual to reveal its drawbacks.
Being greeted by wilder acclaim than any other musical performer in history every time he stepped onstage might appear the ultimate artistic satisfaction. Initially, as any other twenty-thr
ee-year-old would, John found the mayhem of Beatles concerts exhilarating and the antics of the fans hilarious. But after a while, the sheer mindlessness of it all—the moronic perverseness of people claiming to love his music, lining up for hours to hear it, then drowning it in shrieks—turned his amusement to bafflement, frustration, and finally anger. It so happened that, for the very first time since he took the stage at the Woolton fete, he was seeing his audience without the help of glasses. Back in April, on the Roy Orbison tour, an Orbison band member named Bobby Goldsboro (later a successful singer-songwriter) had introduced him to the modern ophthalmic marvel of contact lenses.
Though he mostly kept up his blank marble-effigy look, there were moments when he showed his opinion of his fans’ intelligence level in the way his former Quarry Bank classmates and fellow art students knew so well. Amazingly, no one among the thousands present was offended, indeed no one even seemed to notice when, in place of the regulation bow, he responded with a toothless village-idiot leer, stomping one leg on the stage as if it were malformed and clapping his hands with both sets of fingers curled into “spassie” claws.
Backstage, too, there were ordeals that had never existed when the Beatles were straightforward teenage idols. The most wearisome part of every show for John was the procession of local dignitaries and VIPs Brian would usher into the dressing room beforehand or afterward. No matter how overbearing, condescending, or plain ridiculous their behavior, he always had to be Beatlishly charming and polite. “It was awful—all that business was awful,” he would remember. “One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent…. I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee; it just happens bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand; the people you hated when you were ten.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 37