John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  So Mimi prepared to leave Mendips for the longest time since John’s babyhood, deputing her two nephews, Michael and David, to move in during her absence and look after the garden and the cats. During her meticulous packing, she found time to write to thirteen-year-old Jane Wirgman in Surrey, returning the copy of In His Own Write that Jane had sent her, hoping to get it autographed by John.

  I will not see him until I join him at the airport for the Australian-New Zealand tour. [The Beatles] have one night in Hong-Kong, but I have to go on. He’s afraid I may be nervous if there is a crowd there. He’s right too!

  You will get the book signed by John later.

  You’re very nice, too—Mimi Smith

  The atmosphere was still nearer a Royal tour than a rock one. At Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport, the Beatles crossed the tarmac ringed by colonial police in peaked caps and shorts and later performed to an audience entirely made up of British military personnel and their families. Wherever crowds of Chinese onlookers closed in on Mimi, a path was instantly cleared for her with cries of “John Mama! John Mama!” Landing at Sydney’s Mascot Airport in an almost monsoon-strength rainstorm, they found they were scheduled to parade around the airport on a flatbed truck, with only short capes and flimsy umbrellas for protection—which, amazingly, they did. The lashing rain made all the dye run out of their capes and soak through the garments beneath so that when each undressed later, his skin was mottled royal blue.

  Ringo rejoined the lineup in Melbourne, and Mimi parted company from it to visit her Stanley relatives in New Zealand. “I was bewildered by the unexpected deluge of photographers, reporters, flash-bulbs etcetera,” she would later write to Jane Wirgman. “I’m Sure the reporters thought I was a half-wit. I didn’t let anyone know I was with them. I had left them (thankfully) in Australia & arrived alone in N.Z., expecting only the family to meet me.”

  A Hard Day’s Night received its premiere at the London Pavilion cinema on July 6, before a VIP audience including John’s Royal targets “Princess Margarine” and “Bony Armstrove,” aka Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. As he exchanged receiving-line banter with the princess, his face wore an expression only describable as Washington embassy-it-is. Nonetheless, the trendy Royals were so charmed that they could hardly be persuaded to leave the after-show party and go on to their next engagement.

  The film won ecstatic reviews in the United Kingdom and, later, when it opened across America. Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice dubbed it “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,” though most reviewers found more obvious parallels in Mack Sennett’s silent-screen Keystone Cops and, of course, the Marx Brothers. Some months afterward, Richard Lester bumped into Groucho Marx, the brothers’ cigar-chewing wise guy—so presumably John’s counterpart—and found him less than flattered by this comparison. “At least,” he grouched, “you could tell us apart.”

  On July 10, the film also had a special charity premiere in Liverpool, combined with a civic reception for its stars. Despite having carried their home city’s name into the stratosphere, all four were uneasy about this homecoming-in-state—specifically about their welcome, or lack of it, from all the fans they’d left behind. Through various channels, they’d heard they were “finished” at the Cavern club, which, for John in particular, took some of the shine even off having played Carnegie Hall. But Liverpool knows how to do crazy enthusiasm as well as cool antagonism. On their drive into town from Speke Airport, cheering crowds lined every roadside. Among the welcoming delegation was Bob Wooler, the Cavern deejay John had beaten up at Paul’s twenty-first birthday party for insinuating he’d had an affair with Brian. “Hello, Bob,” John greeted him. “Has anyone given you a black eye lately?”

  At the Town Hall, the Beatles were presented with ceremonial keys to the city by the lord mayor, then made an appearance on the balcony overlooking Castle Street to wave at the multitudes below. Framed among beaming dignitaries in fur-trimmed robes and chains of office, John could not resist adding a few Nazi-style salutes. Once again, a bit of potentially catastrophic devilment seemed to go over everyone’s heads. For Brian, in any case, that day’s main problem had nothing to do with John. Someone among the crowd was found to be circulating leaflets with a paternity claim against Paul. Working feverishly to trace and neutralize this saboteur, Brian and his PR team had no time to worry about the odd, reckless Lennon Sieg Heil.

  Among the guests at the civic reception, and in the Odeon cinema audience later, were most of the extended family in which he had grown up: his Aunts Harrie and Nanny and Uncle Norman, his cousin Stanley, and his young cousins Michael and David and half sisters Julia and Jackie. “Trouble was that John had been his usual disorganised self admin-wise, and we stood around, not really knowing what was going on,” his cousin Michael says. “I remember him saying from the Odeon stage, ‘Where was my family?’” The Beatles returned to London immediately after the film, so that was all his relatives would see of him.

  Mimi, however, missed the occasion. She was still in New Zealand, enjoying a reunion with her Stanley kinfolk, which eventually lasted almost all summer. “She only came home when she did because some man out there had started to show an interest in her,” Michael says. “She wasn’t having any of that.”

  Waiting for her at Mendips were the usual piles of fan mail for John, of which only one, with a Kingston-on-Thames postmark, demanded a reply:

  251/29 October 64

  Dear Jane

  I quickly recognised your writing—thousands of letters waiting here. Oh dear!

  I arrived home about two weeks ago, but have since been up to Edinburgh and Glasgow to see John, as I haven’t seen him since Wellington, New Zealand.

  I gather [the Beatles] are to be in pantomime Christmas time. I may go up, or sooner, to see them. However, he will be home on 8 November. I’ll see what’s what.

  …You will simply love boarding school. I know—you see….

  Lovely big party travelling out [on tour] with the boys, and what do you think! I sat behind the Pilot when we landed at Darwin, 2 AM, and I really think Pilots are the ‘tops’.

  Enjoy the Show, what an excitable little girl you are.

  love Mimi

  Traveling rock shows were, of course, nothing new in America. But the Beatles’ return there in August, to remedy the coitus interruptus of February, imposed unprecedented new demands on what had been a relatively straightforward process. The result was the first-ever rock tour as we now understand the term, a blueprint for the thousands more that were to come but also unique in its combination of excess and innocence. Five weeks later, when it was all over, even John could not summon up a snide or cynical word. “It’s been fantastic,” he told radio reporter Larry Kane. “We’ll probably never do another tour like it…it could never be the same.”

  No previous mobile spectacle of any kind, other than political, had ever aspired to so vast a catchment area. In thirty-four days, the Beatles appeared in twenty-four cities, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Vancouver, British Columbia, traveling 22,441 miles, an average of over 600 per day. In every city, they performed at the principal arena, including the famous Hollywood Bowl, to audiences of between twelve thousand and thirty-five thousand. Gone, too, were the snub-nosed silver buses and overloaded station wagons in which troubadours had always been accustomed to wander the continent. This four and their retinue traveled in a private Lockheed Electra jet aircraft hired by Brian for a staggering $37,000. As much as a sensible practical measure, it was a piece of calculated symbolism on his part, taking his boys off the tour bus forever and putting them into the cloud-borne company of presidents and potentates.

  In a farewell nod to package-tour tradition, they had a supporting bill of American acts: the Righteous Brothers, the Bill Black Combo, the Exciters, and singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon. And their own stage show was still the one they had been giving at British theaters, a rerun of their chart hits, plus the odd album track, lasting only thirty minutes.

 
This was Beatlemania in a jumbo-size cup, its every manifestation a hundred times more extreme than the European variety. Here young girls were not content to sit and scream in their seats, but rushed the stage to hug a Beatle for a desperate few seconds before being batted away by security men, or threw themselves like lemmings from high balconies. Here they did not pursue Beatle-bearing vehicles pathetically on foot, but in their own cars, turning almost every overland journey into a demented drag race. Here they did not merely congregate hysterically outside hotels, but found their way inside and up to the Beatles’ quarters, often by means that would not have disgraced Houdini. Even the confectionary love tokens with which they bombarded their idols had a new, aggressive edge. Rather than soft, sugar-coated British jelly babies, these were hard-shelled American jelly beans that volleyed out of every auditorium like arrows at Agincourt and stung like buckshot. Many other types of adoring missile also had to be dodged, such as lighters, whole cartons of cigarettes, even shoes.

  Whereas British fans had commemorated the Beatles merely in corduroy jackets or plastic guitars, America demanded more potent souvenirs, and American entrepreneurism hastened to meet the demand. After they checked out of one Midwestern hotel, all the bed linen they had used was bought by two local businessmen for $750. The unlaundered sheets and pillowcases were then cut into three-inch squares and each square offered for sale at $10, accompanied by a legal affidavit that a portion of one or another Beatle truly had rested on it. Efforts were made to buy up residues of their shaving cream and bathwater; in New York, supermarkets reported a brisk trade in canned “Beatle breath.”

  The sums of money swirling in the Electra’s slipstream were sometimes too enormous to be taken quite seriously. At the start of the tour in San Francisco, Brian had been approached by a Kansas City businessman named Charles O. Finley, who offered an unheard-of $100,000 if the Beatles would give a single show in his home city over and above their existing schedule. Tempted though Brian was, he had to reply that there was no slot available in the entire five weeks. But Finley was not about to lose face with Kansas City: he kept coming back and upping his offer until it reached $150,000. Brian then put it to the Beatles as a possibility only if they sacrificed one of their few precious rest periods. John, speaking on the others’ behalf, replied they would do whatever Brian thought best. So the city they had hymned so many times in Liverpool and Hamburg got in on the act yet again.

  But Finley was to discover even that kind of money could not buy him love. To round off his triumph in Kansas City’s eyes, he also wanted the Beatles to play for an extra five minutes above their usual thirty. This time, unfortunately he was overconfident in the power of his wallet, breezing into their hotel suite in a shiny silk suit and addressing them presumptuously as “Boys.” Though Brian was in the room at the time, negotiations went on solely between Finley and John. Finley offered $5,000 for the extra five minutes; John merely shook his head. Finley kept raising the bonus by units of $5,000 until it reached $50,000, but still received the same dismissive turndown. Finally losing his temper, he called the Beatles “a bunch of boys” with a small b, and stormed out. Later, backstage at the Municipal Stadium, it became clear that for all Finley’s efforts on Kansas City’s behalf, the shows were rather less than a sellout. John grinned at him and said, “You shouldn’t have spent so much money on us, Chuck.”

  Despite the deep-pile red-carpet treatment they received, the Beatles were constantly aware of a society more dangerous and unpredictable than their own at that time, whose police carried rifles, even for the task of holding back teenage girls, and whose president had been gunned down before similarly welcoming crowds only ten months earlier. Bomb threats were made before two of their shows, one in Las Vegas, the second in Dallas, where nerves were already jittery enough. One reporter asked John if any of these serial queasy moments had scared him. He replied that being onstage with the others gave him a strange sense of invulnerability: “I feel safe as long as I’m plugged in. I don’t feel as though they’ll get me.”

  As their on-the-road PR man, the Beatles now had Derek Taylor, a thirty-three-year-old fellow Merseysider with the chiseled good looks and immaculate grooming of an Italian movie star. Hoylake-raised, a former Daily Express journalist, Taylor had ghostwritten Brian’s autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, then joined NEMS, initially as his personal assistant. By the Amsterdam visit, this had developed into handling press for Brian’s boys under the usual conditions of Brian watching critically over his shoulder, at one moment leaving everything to him, at the next bawling him out for overpresumptuousness.

  Taylor proved to be a perfect fit with the Beatles as well as an ideal intermediary with reporters, who until recently had been his colleagues. Though his greatest friendship within the group would be with George, he and John found an instant rapport, thanks to their shared love of words and fondness for the more obscure British music-hall comedians. Normally, the least likely person to observe a star’s better nature is his PR man. But it was to Derek Taylor that John most consistently showed the side of himself that had nothing to do with rock-’n’-roll image and everything to do with his upbringing by Aunt Mimi—the quality Taylor would later sum up as “grace.”

  A small party of journalists, British and American, rode on the Beatles’ plane, filing daily reports from the campaign trail. They included thirty-five-year-old Art Schreiber, a senior correspondent for the Westinghouse Broadcasting System, whose usual beat was politics and national affairs. Schreiber initially wondered how to get a handle on this very different subject matter; then in a conversation with John, he happened to mention that he enjoyed playing Monopoly. At this, John’s sardonic cool melted into schoolboyish enthusiasm. “I’ve got a board!” he said.

  So, while the rest of the Beatles’ party whiled away in-flight hours with their usual poker game, John and Art Schreiber would play Monopoly, sometimes joined by George Harrison. “George would hardly say a word for the whole game,” Shreiber remembers. “But John always got really involved and excited. He always stood up to throw the dice. And if he got Park Place and Boardwalk, he’d be triumphant. He didn’t care if he lost the game so long as he had those two properties. We played so late sometimes that I’d doze off to sleep. Then I’d feel a dig in my ribs and hear John’s voice: ‘Come on, Art…it’s your move.’”

  Schreiber’s past assignments had included covering John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and state funeral; he came to Beatlemania directly from reporting on the civil-rights campaign and its inspirational leader, Dr. Martin Luther King. Though his role was to ask questions of John, he found that more often John would quiz him about the domestic and foreign problems that currently darkened America’s horizons: the vicious attacks on Dr. King’s peaceful rallies and marches, and the increasing scope of U.S. military involvement in a far-off, little-known Asian country called Vietnam. “What really surprised me was what a helluva lot John already knew about this country,” Schreiber remembers. “The thing he couldn’t understand was the violence…the murder of Kennedy, the police brutality against innocent marchers in the South, the guns he saw being carried everywhere. I could see the soul of an activist building up in him.”

  The mass hurling of jelly confectionary was not all that America’s Beatlemaniacs had picked up from Britain’s. Children and young people in wheelchairs filled the front rows at every performance, and afterward were brought to the Beatles’ dressing rooms as if to some healing holy shrine. Here, too, they were often ruthlessly exploited, serving merely as a passport through security for able-bodied Beatle hunters. But somehow in America, the degree of physical and mental affliction seemed more terrible, the exploitation more grotesque. “Most of those poor kids were in such a bad way, they wouldn’t have known who the hell the Beatles were,” Art Schreiber says. “John hated going through that, but it had nothing to do with callousness or indifference. ‘What do I say to them?’ he’d often ask me afterwards—and the guy was really despairing.”
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br />   There were, of course, some things these embedded tour correspondents could not report if they wished to keep their seats on the plane. They could say nothing about the provision of sex for all the Beatles, which was carried out with a practicality General Hooker would have approved, sometimes drawing on the oceans of all-too-eager fans, sometimes using the higher-class call girls to be found in each stopover city. Still less could they mention the offers of sexual favors they themselves routinely received from females desperate for any introduction to a Beatle. Rather like servants in an Edwardian country house, they hovered in the background, seeing and hearing everything yet prevented by their terms of employment from telling it to anyone but one another.

  Realizing what a charmed life they led, the four Beatles scarcely bothered to maintain their public image in front of these omnipresent media butlers and footmen. “These things are left out, about what bastards we were,” John remembered. “Fucking big bastards, that’s what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth. We’re the Caesars. Who’s going to knock us when there’s a million pounds to be made, all the hand-outs, the bribery, the police and the hype?”

  There were also incessant diplomatic duties, either as standard-bearers for Britain or trophies of Capitol Records, to which he submitted with the same resignation as the other three. After their Hollywood Bowl show on August 23, they had to attend a charity cocktail party organized by Capitol’s president, Alan Livingstone, for which leading Hollywood stars had clamored to buy tickets at several hundred dollars each. Faces that John had once ogled on the screen at the Woolton picture house now stood reverently in line to meet him, among them Edward G. Robinson, Jack Palance, Hugh O’Brien, Shelley Winters, Dean Martin, and Jack Lemmon. Even so, he quickly became bored by the whole affair, commenting later that it was “natural for us to play and sing but…unnatural to sit on a stool and shake hands” and that he’d expected Hollywood to be “more fun.”