John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Throughout, he is portrayed as an unremitting thorn in Norm’s side, even though he does nothing much worse than put on funny voices. One exchange between the roadies seems more a comment on his real-life dealings with Brian:

  NORM: This is a battle of nerves between John and me.

  SHAKE: John hasn’t got any.

  NORM: Sometimes I think he enjoys seeing me suffer.

  The film ends with Norm hustling the Beatles on to their next gig and John protesting that they’re being pushed too hard. The script’s final line is Norm’s rejoinder: “Now there’s only one thing I’ve got to say to you, Lennon…you’re a swine.” The word is used with a twinkle of affection; even so, it’s hard to imagine any modern pop star vehicle ending on such a note Until its final production stage, the film was to have been called Beatlemania. Then Ringo happened to describe a recent bout of burning the candle at both ends as “a hard day’s night” (a phrase actually coined by John some months earlier in a piece of comic writing named “Sad Michael.”) So the obvious teen-flicky Beatlemania became the subtle, allusive, faintly Goon-flavored A Hard Day’s Night. Although John and Paul had already turned out more music than the film needed, they now also had to concoct a song of the same name to play over its opening credits. The two shut themselves away, and within twenty-four hours had come up with the goods.

  When John went to Abbey Road for the recording session, he was accompanied by the Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave. During the taxi ride, he showed her the lyrics, which he’d written out on a fan’s birthday card to his son, Julian. The opening verse ran, “…when I get home to you, I find my tiredness is though…” Cleave, in her privileged role as surrogate Richmal Crompton, suggested that the last four words were too clunky. There and then, John changed them to “I find the things that you do…” In the studio later, she was amazed by how quickly the track took shape. “John and Paul just seemed to hum at one another with their guitars, and it was done.”

  Commentators who suggested (and maybe hoped) that the American triumph would be a short-lived fluke were quickly silenced. “Can’t Buy Me Love”—a Paul-weighted song with a crucial George Martin edit—sold two million copies in the United States in its first week, earning a Gold Record even before release and becoming the first British single at number one simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Here was no play-safe retread of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” but a determinedly left-field production with its retro jive beat and alternately furious and fainting harmonies, the incantatory “yeah” abolished in favor of a defiant “No, no, no…NO!”

  Publicity in both markets was boosted by a loud but not lethal burst of controversy: did the reference to “buying” love mean prostitutes? In fact, it was Lennonesque wordplay of a kind even the most nonverbal fans were starting to recognize; dropping the word money from the title made it less a trite truism, more like a Liverpudlian endearment, “me love” as in “me darling” or “me duck.” To top the American charts, “Can’t Buy Me Love” had to leapfrog four other still-active Beatles singles—“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout.” By early April, they had created a seemingly impenetrable blockage at numbers one, two, three, four, and five.

  John’s distinctive way with words had always been part of the collective Beatle charm, though until now limited to seemingly artless malapropisms. On March 19, the four took a break from filming to be honored as Show Business Personalities of the Year (still no rock culture even dawning!) by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Their awards were presented by the opposition Labour Party’s new leader Harold Wilson, who happened also to be MP for the Merseyside constituency of Huyton. The Variety Club’s presiding official was known as Chief Barker—a “barker” being fairground parlance for front-of-tent showman. Confusing Mr. Wilson with this personage, and thinking of Barker and Dobson sweets (a superior brand his Aunt Mimi had always favored), John called Britain’s soon-to-be prime minister “Mr. Dobson.” The awards themselves were heart-shaped plaques. “Thanks for the purple hearts,” John said as the recipients went through their naughty-but-nice-boys act at the microphone. His audience tittered indulgently, unsure whether he meant the American military decoration or the pep pill.

  While interviewing him in late 1963, the American author Michael Braun had picked up some of the nonsense writing he still compulsively turned out in spare moments between composing, recording, and performing. Braun’s publishers were the old established house of Jonathan Cape, at that time being shaken up by a new young editorial director named Tom Maschler. When Braun happened to show him a selection of John’s output, Maschler instantly spotted a potential literary chart topper.

  Rather than over the boozy lunch with which publishers traditionally woo prospective authors, he met John at a convention of the Beatles’ Southern Area Fan Club. The Beatles stood behind a metal grill while the fans lined up to pass autograph books and gifts through an aperture at the bottom. John was amazed that anyone, other than his old Mersey Beat mates, would want to publish his work. At the same time, he made Maschler feel rather foolish, as the publisher has recalled, “for taking his frivolity seriously.” A contract was drawn up through Brian Epstein, whom Maschler expected to demand some impossibly vast advance against royalties; instead, the sum agreed was just £10,000.

  The backlog of poems, parodies, and playlets in John’s possession did not constitute enough for even the slimmest hardback book. He therefore had to buckle down to a new, unavoidable kind of homework as well as do more concentrated drawing than he had since leaving art college. Maschler acted as his editor, making regular trips to the Lennons’ flat in Emperor’s Gate. Though the place, in his recollection, always seemed “full of noisy children,” John took the consultations seriously and always found a quiet corner where they could work. One day, Maschler brought a new book on Cape’s list by the cartoonist Mel Calman, hoping that John might supply a quote for its jacket. John’s only comment was, “Why don’t you suggest he takes up the guitar?”

  They finally settled on thirty-one pieces, illustrated by the same octopoid grotesques that had once populated Quarry Bank school’s “Daily Howl.” Through the blizzards of Goonery could be discerned pastiches of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (“Gruddly pod, the train seemed to say…We’re off on our holidays….”) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (featuring “Long John Saliver” and “Blind Jew”), even fragments of Bible-study inculcated by St. Peter’s Sunday School (“Yea, though I walk through the valet of thy shadowy hut I will feel no Norman….”)

  Favorite targets cropped up everywhere and, in that pre-PC era, remained free of editorial blue penciling—Partly Dave, who “leapt off a bus like a burning spastic”; Eric, who “lost his job teaching spastics to dance”; Michael, who was “debb and duff and could not speeg”; the “coloured man,” who “danced by, eating a banana or somebody”; Little Bobby, whose “very fist was jopped off and he got a birthday hook.” There was even a description of a drug trip, still in the voice of an objective satirist: “All of a southern, I notice boils and girks sitting in hubbered lumps, smoking Hernia, taking Odeon and going very high. Somewhere 4ft high but he had Indian hump which he grew in his sleep….”

  John drew up a list of possible titles, among them The Transistor Negro; Left Hand, Left Hand (a play on Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand, which he was probably the only pop musician to have read); and Stop One and Buy Me (ice cream carts in his boyhood used to carry the invitation Stop Me and Buy One). In the end, Maschler opted for the more straightforward John Lennon: In His Own Write. The book was produced in an elegant pocket hardcover format, designed by Robert Freeman, its dark blue cover showing John in his trademark cap. Paul McCartney contributed a foreword, affectionately recounting how he had first met the author, “drunk” at St. Peter’s Church fete.

  The book was a simultaneous popular and critical triumph, selling out its first printing of fifty thousa
nd copies on publication day, March 23, and spurring even the most highbrow reviewers to Beatlemania of their own. As a writer, John was compared with Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and James Joyce, and as an illustrator, with James Thurber and Paul Klee. The Times Literary Supplement, a separate publication from the daily Times and normally even stuffier, said In His Own Write was “worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and of the British imagination.” In America, where it was published by another prestigious house, Simon & Schuster, equally high-flown comparisons gushed forth. Tom Wolfe, writing in Book World, called John a “genius savage” like Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Brendan Behan and, later in the same article, a “genius of the lower crust.”

  As with song lyrics later, John firmly resisted all attempts to find classical literary influences or cerebral subtexts in his stories and verses, even where they were most obviously present. But he could not hide his pleasure at so resounding an independent achievement. “There’s a wonderful feeling about doing something successfully other than singing,” he admitted. “Up to now [the Beatles] have done everything together, and this is all my own work.”

  The critiques that flooded in from every intellectual compass point even included one in Hansard, the daily official record of parliamentary debates. In the House of Commons, Charles Curran, Conservative MP for Uxbridge, read out three verses of “Deaf Ted, Danoota and Me” in support of an attack on current standards in state education. The author, Curran acknowledged, had “a feeling for words and storytelling” but was in “a state of pathetic near-literacy” comparable to H. G. Wells’s Mr. Polly. The Conservative member for Blackpool, Norman Miscampbell (his real name, not a John coinage), responded with a fellow northwesterner’s loyalty: “It is unfair to say that Lennon of the Beatles was not well educated. I cannot say which, but three of the four went to grammar school, and as a group are highly intelligent, highly articulate and highly engaging.”

  As might be expected, John’s new status as a published author impressed his literary-minded Aunt Mimi more than all the Beatles’ musical triumphs put together, even if the book in question did consist of drawings and poems like those she once used to fling into the dustbin. Mimi herself was never interviewed by the Beatle-media and only very rarely photographed: such was her nature that she seldom spoke of John’s extraordinary rise to anyone outside her immediate family circle. One remarkable exception was a thirteen-year-old John fan named Jane Wirgman, from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, who in April 1964 discovered Mimi’s address and decided to write to her. “I knew that, with all the thousands of girls around John, there wasn’t a chance that he’d never notice me,” Jane says now. “But I thought that maybe it might happen somehow if I made friends with his aunt.”

  Wisely, she enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope with her letter, and, despite the drifts of fan mail always piling up at Mendips, Mimi did reply. It was to be the start of a correspondence extending over the next two years, in which Mimi expressed her pride in John to an unknown Surrey schoolgirl as she never would or could have to his face. Her letters, written in a neat, sloping hand, are pure Mimi: brisk yet friendly, humorous, and occasionally even a little auntlike toward her young correspondent; full of the glamour and luxury John has given her, yet complaining as much as ever about his hair and clothes; still achingly missing him from her life, yet ready to start another of their ding-dong rows whenever they make contact.

  19 April, 1964

  Dear Jane

  Thanks for your letter. I saw [the Beatles] on TV Saturday night & by now I gather you like John!! They are all nice, but of course John’s my boy. Didn’t he look great (and the others) with their straw hats?

  No, I don’t think you are a Silly or Sentimental Ole Slob.

  Remember, if you girls hadn’t liked them, well…where would they be? and they do appreciate that fact.

  He has always been funny at home to, and the latest thing is that he’s been calling me—“Me Old Aunty.’ Wait till I see him. Here’s Ringo’s address…

  The next letter from Mendips contained a surprise enclosure—a Hofner guitar string, which John had bought for his Club 40, still coiled in its packet.

  Dear Jane

  Looking through John’s old rubbish, his room was always full of things all boys seem to collect, I found this old string. It has been here for years. I think he uses more expensive ones these days, but this one belongs to his Art College days. I thought you might like it…

  When In His Own Write was published, Jane sent a copy to Mimi with a request for John to autograph it. Back came the reply:

  Thanks for letter, Jane.

  John’s in Scotland at the moment. I’ll try to get the book signed, but as you know, I don’t see so much of him. Anyway, I’m glad you are happy with it. He tells me he may do another one later in the year.

  By the way, he promised me one and I am patiently waiting, although I have read it, & laughed.

  All the best

  Mimi Smith

  To set the seal on literary London’s acclaim, John was invited to be guest of honor at a Foyle’s lunch on June 18. These gatherings, sponsored by the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest bookshop,” were held at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and previously had been graced by authors such as Winston Churchill, Charles Chaplin, and Noel Coward, all of whom repaid the honor with a gracious and witty postprandial speech. For the John Lennon event, six hundred people bought tickets and the head table was carefully planted with sympathetic-minded celebrities, among them the violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, the designer Mary Quant, the Daily Express cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the composer Lionel Bart, the comedian Arthur Askey, and the ex-Goon Harry Secombe, as well as John’s, and Brian’s, great friend Alma Cogan.

  John initially expressed willingness to make the traditional speech, but as the day approached he became increasingly uneasy about it, even admitting “I durn’t” to a radio interviewer in his thickest fauxnaif Scouse. On the eve of the lunch, Brian telephoned Foyle’s to say that there would, after all, be no speech from John but that he, Brian, was more than happy to say a few words instead. Unfortunately, no one passed on Brian’s message to the organizers, and six hundred literati and celebs waited agog for Lennon witticisms à la Royal Variety Show. Instead, he got to his feet, mumbled, “Thank you, it’s been a pleasure,” then sat down. Once again, the media could not find it in their hearts to criticize him. Some reports helpfully reworded his mumble into a more Beatly “Thank you…you’ve got a lucky face.”

  He was not the only one currently bursting into print. Earlier that year, Brian had been asked to write his autobiography by Souvenir Press, a publisher somewhat lower in prestige than Jonathan Cape. Rather than foster authorial fellow feeling in John, it inspired a put-down that even then rocked bystanders, like George Martin, back on their heels. What should he call his life story, Brian wondered aloud one day. “Queer Jew,” replied John without missing a beat. Its eventual title, in oblique acknowledgment to the Cavern club, was A Cellarful of Noise. John referred to it, if at all, as A Cellarful of Boys.

  The second half of 1964 was to be spent mainly in satisfying the international Beatle hunger that the first half had created, with visits to Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and finally back to America. Since this time it was positively “no wives on tour,” John felt obliged to make amends to Cynthia in advance for his impending long absences. The two therefore arranged an Easter weekend break at the Dromoland Castle Hotel, a baronially grand establishment in Ireland’s County Clare. With them went George Harrison and his new date Pattie Boyd, a pretty blonde fashion model in the John-approved Bardot mold who had played one of the schoolgirls in A Hard Day’s Night. Despite elaborate security, the foursome were immediately tracked down by press photographers and after only one night decided to abandon their visit and return home. To avoid the cameras, Cynthia and Patti disguised themselves as hotel maids, then were smuggled off the pr
emises in an outsize laundry hamper.

  The world-circumnavigation was planned in two phases: Europe to Australasia in June, trans-America in August. On the eve of the first phase, seeming disaster struck when Ringo was hospitalized with acute tonsillitis. Few, if any, modern bands would consider making so important a trip across the globe without their regular drummer: in this case, despite some mutterings from George, a session player named Jimmy Nicol was hired on salary, put into a Beatle suit and bangs, and sent out on half a journey of a lifetime.

  In Amsterdam, the second stop, shrieking Dutch fans perched on top of high lampposts, even jumped into the canals to pursue the Beatles’ open-top launch. Europe’s most sexually liberal city after Hamburg also demonstrated how little they needed professional PR people to safeguard their wholesome public image. At the first opportunity, all four left their hotel and made a beeline for the red-light district, by repute second only to the Reeperbahn. “Just as we got there, the police rolled up,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “They literally tapped us on the shoulder and said, ‘Naughty Beatles, back to your hotel’ as if we were schoolboys. We said, ‘OK, fine.’ They took us to the hotel—then John and I went straight out again and back to the red-light district. When we came out again, it was dawn and all the people were on their way to work.”

  For the Hong Kong–Australasia leg, their entourage had an extra member: Aunt Mimi. It was entirely John’s idea, as Tony Barrow recalls, born of the same impulse that had catapulted Cynthia to New York: “He wanted the people closest to him to see how important he was.” Mimi needed little persuading because the trip would allow her to visit her relations in New Zealand—the ones she might have joined permanently but for John’s mother’s death. Aunts on tour might have been even less welcome to his companions than wives on tour. “But we all knew Mimi and how much she meant to John,” Aspinall said. “There was no problem.”