John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The Royal Variety Show, seemingly the Beatles’ highest point to date, was for John the most distasteful bout of knuckling under yet forced on him. His perfectly pitched “rattle-yer-jewellery” line to the assembled Royals and bigwigs, in his own mind, represented only cowardice and compromise. “I was fantastically nervous,” he would recall, “but I wanted to rebel a bit and that was the best I could do.” In fact, he had been tormenting Brian with a threat to say “rattle yer fuckin’ jewellery.” On the old video recording, as the delighted applause ripples out, you see him almost pull one of his “spassie” faces, then obviously think better of it. Significantly, although the Beatles were approached every subsequent year until almost the decade’s end, they never appeared in another Royal Variety Show.

  For the most part, as their former press officer Tony Barrow recalls, John gritted his teeth and did whatever PR stuff was necessary, putting the good of the group as a whole before his own feelings. The good nature and impulsive kindliness of which he was capable could sometimes rescue the dodgiest PR stunt, as when Boyfriend magazine’s readers were offered a “date” with the Beatles as a competition prize. It was meant to be at a secret rendezvous, the Old Vienna restaurant in Bond Street, but inevitably the word got out and the place was besieged by screaming fans. “John turned up very late, with soaking wet hair and obviously in a foul mood,” Boyfriend’s Maureen O’Grady remembers. “But once he saw the rather scared little girls who were supposed to have ‘won’ him, he couldn’t have been nicer.”

  As always, the danger-zone loomed when he had one too many of the exotic new drinks, the fine wines, vintage Cognacs, Scottish malts, and Russian vodkas pressed on him everywhere he went. As always, just one or two hits turned friendly, kindly, generally reasonable John into moody, bellicose, and cruel John, oblivious of how much noise he made, whom he insulted, or how innocent and defenseless might be the victim of his cat-o’-nine-tails tongue. “When we came home late at night, there was always a girl waiting for John who was a bit disabled,” Sonny Freeman remembers. “If he was drunk, he’d just tell her to piss off. I’d say, ‘John, be nice. You could at least give her an autograph.’ He’d say, ‘But I’ve given her twenty-five already.’”

  There was also the thoughtlessly malicious John that the Australian entertainer Rolf Harris encountered as emcee of the first Beatles Christmas Show. “Before they came on, I did my Australian routine, telling the audience different Aussie words and explaining what they meant,” Harris remembers. “One night while I was on, John was standing in the wings, and had somehow got hold of a live mike. With everything I said, his voice would come booming over the PA: ‘Is that right, Rolf?…Are you sure about that, Rolf?’ It fair knocked me through a loop. As soon as I came off, the Beatles went on, so I had to wait to the end of their show to have it out with John but I was still so mad, I was spitting chips. I said, ‘Look, if you want to fuck up your own act, that’s your prerogative, but don’t fuck up mine.’ John just turned on the charm: ‘Ooh, look…Rolfie’s lost his rag….’ Being angry with him was like trying to punch away a raincloud.”

  If the pressures on John were colossal and unremitting, no newly minted young megastar could have had—and none since has had—a better support structure. Brian was not only unique as a manager in integrity, conscientiousness, imagination, and good taste; he also collected around him people for whom running Britain’s biggest-ever musical money-spinner was not a business (as their uniformly modest salaries proved) but a vocation.

  The prime example was their record producer, George Martin, by a long way the greatest altruist and—other than Brian—the most all-round gentleman in pop music history. From his initial position of absolute power at Abbey Road Studios, there were any number of ways in which Martin could have exploited the Beatles. Other producers with far less input into the music would have claimed a share of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting credit and thus a third of the royalties, or sneaked B-sides written by themselves onto the reverse of each chart-busting A-side, or (with Brian’s other main Liverpool acts also on board) sought personal glory for having invented the Mersey Sound. Instead, Martin remained a background figure who selflessly devoted his musical skills to nurturing and developing John and Paul’s unschooled talent, pruning and shaping the rough material they brought him, translating their ideas into reality, turning the precious ore into perfectly cut diamonds.

  In contrast with the huge retinues of modern bands, the Beatles traveled with just two roadies—then more formally known as road managers. The loyal, overburdened Neil Aspinall had now been joined in the task by Mal Evans, a Liverpool Post Office engineer and part-time bouncer at the Cavern club. Between them “Nell” and gentle giant Mal took care of everything a small army would nowadays be deployed to do in getting the Beatles to gigs, through the crowds, and on and off stage: they drove the vans, humped the equipment, liaised with house managements, supervised security, checked the (rudimentary) sound and lighting, set the stages, brought in food, drink, and whatever else their charges required, and, most crucially, policed the backstage areas and dressing rooms. Friends but not equals, servitors but never servile, Neil and Mal would stay with the Beatles as long as there was any kind of road to be managed; they were the little bit of down-to-earth Liverpool the four carried with them to inconceivable summits, trusties where no one else could be trusted, a breath of sanity and normality even where the madness seemed most overwhelming.

  But the most vital defensive resource they had was their own friendship. Whereas extreme fame tends to blow rock bands apart, it only welded the Beatles more tightly together. There were disagreements, even fights, but, at this stage, no politics; as with D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, or William, Ginger, Henry, and Douglas, it was “all for one and one for all.” Eyewitnesses recall moments when they would close ranks against some overintrusive journalist or guest VIP, all with never an impolite word spoken or a slackening of their friendly, charming Beatleness. A signal would be sent to one of the road managers—usually blunt-spoken Neil—and the offender would be shown the door with all four moptops seemingly mortified to see him go.

  After years of sharing bedrooms—and often beds—they had the innocent physical intimacy of puppies sprawled over each other in a basket. Paul McCartney recalls how on one nighttime van journey northward in freezing fog, with Mal Evans at the wheel, a stone shattered the windscreen. Mal simply punched a hole through the broken glass and pressed on at about three miles per hour through the fog with only the curb to guide him. The sole defense the four Beatles had against the resultant icy wind was a bottle of whiskey. Finally, the cold became so bad that they lay on top of each other in a vertical pile, warming themselves with their own collective body heat. When the one on top was nearly frozen, he would change places with somebody lower in the pile.

  When the four performed badly onstage or in the recording studio, rather than recriminate against one another, they would turn on their roadies, blaming some, usually nonexistent, fault in the lighting, sound, or equipment. “That was what I called Road Manager’s Syndrome,” Neil Aspinall said. “Soaking up the aggravation and not answering back was part of our job.” New to the business as Mal was, he committed some serious blunders, including losing John’s precious Gibson Jumbo acoustic guitar at Finsbury Park Astoria. “An outsider watching John sometimes mightn’t have thought he was the most likeable person,” Aspinall conceded. “But I’d say to them, ‘Could you get up on a stage and do what he did?’ And if he blew up over something, he’d always apologise. It might take him two years, but he’d do it.”

  As Beatlemania grew, another kind of backstage duty became increasingly common. Audiences generally included groups from local children’s hospitals and institutions, many of them severely disabled, who would be placed in the front rows directly in the Beatles’ sight line. Often, too, they would be expected to meet and greet teenagers or children in wheelchairs who heartbreakingly incarnated John’s “spassie” act. “N
o one used to ask if it was all right beforehand,” Neil remembered. “When we got to the theatre, the dressing room would be full of wheelchairs.” It was perhaps not too great a price to pay for their own abundant health and wealth—though their fellow NEMS artiste Cilla Black recalls one occasion, at least, when their good nature was abused in the most cynical way. “At the Christmas Show, I saw people using children in wheelchairs just as a trick to get in to see them.”

  Aghast at becoming some peripatetic Lourdes shrine, the other three sought refuge in John’s unrepentant mockery and mimicry of “cripples.” The word became code for anybody who outstayed their welcome: one of the Beatles had only to say “Cripples, Neil” for the dressing room to be cleared forthwith.

  From the moment the four entered the national spotlight, there had been awareness of John as a pungent character in his own right. As early as June 1963, he was invited to appear without the others on Juke Box Jury, a BBC television show where a celebrity panel voted new single releases a hit or a miss. To transport him from BBC Television Centre in London to that night’s Beatles show in Wales, Brian spent £100 to charter a helicopter, even though the gig paid only £250. Much to the viewers’ delight, John voted every record a miss, saying of Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise” that the King was “like Bing Crosby now.”

  He also stood out from his fellow moptops by starting to sport a black leather peaked cap reminiscent of male headgear in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Though other young Britons already possessed such caps, and thousands more now rushed to buy them, John wore his in a distinctive way, slightly tipped back with a faint but discernible revolutionary air—Lennon half wanting to be Lenin.

  His media interviews at this time often suggest someone trying—usually in vain—to show he has a mind with more on it than guitar chords, screaming girls, and new shirts. Unlike the decorous, diplomatic Paul, he would answer any question that was put to him, so long as it was sincere, with a directness his interlocutors seldom expected or knew what to make of. “…I don’t suppose I think much about the future. I don’t really give a damn. Though now we’ve made it, it would be a pity to get bombed [he means the hydrogen bomb]. It’s selfish but I don’t care too much about humanity—I’m an escapist. Everyone’s always drumming on about the future, but I’m not letting it interfere with my laughs…. I get spasms of being intellectual. I read a bit about politics but I don’t think I’d vote for anyone. No message from any of those phoney politicians is coming through to me.”

  Attached to the Beatles in late ’63 and early ’64 was Michael Braun, a young American who would later turn their life on the road into arguably the first piece of serious pop journalism. A surprising feature of Braun’s account is how much of John and Paul’s offstage chat concerns avant-garde French cinema. John continually throws out puns on his childhood radio and film favorites, like a motor that can’t be switched off: “One more ciggy, then I’m gonna hit the sack; ‘hit the sack’ being an American thing we got off Gary Coople as he struggled along with a clock in High Goons…. You can sack Rome or you can sack cloth or you can sacrilege or saxophone, if you like, or saccharine….”

  To Braun he confesses how “unnerved” he feels now that his cousin Stanley Parkes—the boyhood hero from whom he inherited that wonderful Dinky car collection—feels obliged to treat him “like royalty.” He is even willing to discuss his father, usually a no-go area to his closest friends, let alone the media. Braun remarks that it can be a handicap to have a famous father, but John demurs: “I could have stood a famous father rather more than the ignoble Alf, actually.” The dirt-digging News of the World has discovered how his father walked out of his life all those years ago, and claims to have traced a friend of Alf’s—by implication, a prelude to unearthing Alf himself. “I don’t want to think about it,” John says. “I don’t feel as if I owe him anything. He never helped me. I got here by myself, and this [playing music] is the longest I’ve ever done anything, except being at school.”

  That Christmas, the Beatles sent a thank-you to their British fans via a flimsy plastic disk, recorded at Abbey Road, with tinkling sleigh bells, nonsense carols, and a spoken message from each in turn. Paul’s was a model of appreciativeness, wide-eyed wonderment, and tact; even while asking concertgoers to desist from throwing jelly babies (unpleasant missiles to receive continuously in the face), he stressed that he wasn’t denigrating their generosity and that the Beatles still loved jelly babies, along with other kiddy sweets like chocolate drops and Dolly Mixture. John read the words that had been written for him in an ironical monotone: “Our biggest thrill of the year well I suppose it was being top of the bill at the London Palladium….” At any risk of sounding too obsequious, he broke into parody Jewishness or Goon German. Here was someone taking all possible pains to distance himself from Dolly Mixture.

  His favorite journalist, out of a very small field, was Maureen Cleave, pop columnist for the London Evening Standard, who had first interviewed him in Liverpool just before the Helen Shapiro tour. Cleave was a quintessential product of new London—a diminutive young woman whose chic outfits and Mary Quant bob contrasted with a precise, almost schoolmistressy manner. She was not particularly a pop music fan (not even owning a record player until the Standard bought her one), but covered it as an objective outsider, in sardonically grown-up prose that had never been used on it before.

  Maureen Cleave was the first to observe that John had “an upper lip that is brutal in a devastating way,” and to find his cast of mouth and “the long pointed nose he peered down like an eagle” (mainly thanks to nearsightedness) reminiscent of Britain’s famously humorous and cruel monarch, Henry VIII. Though knowing nothing about his childhood and background, she instantly saw the connection with Richmal Crompton’s William; that, for all their exotic Liverpudliana, he and his fellow Beatles were essentially William and the Outlaws, meeting an unpredictable, unreasonable adult world head-on and doing their best to make sense of it. For John, Cleave’s astringent style awoke echoes of Richmal Crompton’s own; he even told her she was like “that woman who wrote William.”

  She quickly realized that, with an interviewer he liked—especially one associated with his most cherished author—there were no boundaries to what John would discuss, no limits to what he would say, and no question of anything being “off the record,” much as he might later wish it had been. She even got to see his flat in Emperor’s Gate, a place usually off-limits to press. “He showed me an Elvis Presley album that had Stu Sutcliffe’s name on it, with his own name written over the top, I remember, he kept looking at Elvis’s picture on the cover and saying, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ He said he’d felt disloyal to Elvis when he started liking Little Richard but because Little Richard was black, that made it all right.”

  Six months earlier, while the Beatles were still purely a teenage obsession, Brian had been approached by a twenty-nine-year-old Russian émigré entrepreneur and filmmaker named Giorgio Gomelsky with a plan to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about them. Gomelsky also ran a blues club, the Crawdaddy, in Richmond, Surrey, whose star attraction was a group he informally managed called the Rolling—sometimes Rollin’—Stones. Though nothing came of his documentary idea, the Beatles liked the sound of Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy Club and agreed to drop by there and catch the Rolling Stones one spring Sunday night after taping Thank Your Lucky Stars at ABC-TV’s studios in nearby Teddington.

  The Stones at this point were very much like the Beatles eighteen months earlier: a group with a fanatical following at a tiny venue—in their case the back room of a pub called the Station Hotel—but without management of sufficient vision or resources to take them any higher. The differences were that (still with pianist Ian Stewart) they numbered six, not four; that they played Chicago and Delta-style blues unpolluted by any pop influences; and that their vocalist, a London School of Economics student then known as Mike Jagger, audaciously faced his audience without the bluesman’s traditional prop of a guitar.
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  The Beatles loved what they saw in Surrey and, big shots though they were by comparison, instantly chummed up with Jagger and the other two principal Stones, rhythm guitarist Keith Richard and lead guitarist–harmonica player Brian Jones. A week later, when the Beatles appeared in the BBC’s Great Pop Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, the Stones received front-row tickets, hung out with them backstage, even lent Mal and Neil a hand in carrying their equipment. Brian Jones, who had founded and named the group, was then its most magnetic figure, an oversexed blond leprechaun with command of an extraordinary range of instruments, from guitar and bluesman’s “harp” to saxophone, flute, and marimba. Watching Jones play blues harmonica at the Crawdaddy not only thrilled John; it also, typically, made him feel his own gold-spinning performances on the instrument to have been amateurish, even somehow fraudulent, by comparison. “You really play that thing, don’t you?” he said to Jones almost wistfully. “…I just blow and suck.”

  By late 1963, the Stones had found their visionary manager in NEMS Enterprises’ former PR man, nineteen-year-old Andrew Loog Oldham, and had been signed to the Decca label by the very same A&R executive who turned the Beatles down. After making little impact with their debut single, Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” they reached number thirteen with a Lennon-McCartney song, “I Want to Be Your Man,” written for the With the Beatles album, which the composers obligingly turned over to them on learning that they were stuck for a follow-up. As a result, the Stones left purist R&B to become the Beatles’ main rivals in the pop charts, and Jagger and Richard were motivated to form their own songwriting partnership, ultimately with huge success.