John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Thus no expense was spared to make John’s new home a showpiece rivaling any of the millionaire hideaways round about. Brian’s interior designer, Ken Partridge, was hired to sweep away Kenwood’s old-fashioned décor and provide its already-immaculate grounds with new adornments, including a Hollywood-size swimming pool. Given carte blanche by John, Partridge knocked down walls, inserted new staircases, laid vistas of black carpet—bruiseable by the lightest footfall—and put in a state-of-the-art kitchen so complicated that the supplier had to send someone from London to teach Cynthia how to use it. John had barely glanced at Partridge’s original plans and now took violent exception to much of what had been done. Further large sums were spent in undoing and replacing the designer’s handiwork—for example, exchanging his hard red-leather couches (which Ringo Starr inherited) for softer velvet ones.

  Despite John’s far-from-constant presence there, the house was always preeminently a reflection of his character and ever-changing taste. At ground-floor level, the main room was a den—dens being as much a feature of twentieth-century British suburbia as morning rooms—containing his books, two Stuart Sutcliffe paintings, and an impressive desk where he planned to sit and write like any great author from literature. Another room had three Scalextric miniature racecar sets combined into one vast layout; another had slot machines, table football games, and a jukebox of rock-’n’-roll classics. In the attic was a music room filled with his guitars, pianos, and tape recorders. A Mellotron organ which proved too difficult to manhandle up the final narrow stairs, stood on a half landing below.

  The latest craze was for Victoriana and Edwardiana: brass bedsteads, flowered chamberpots, fringed lamps, enamel signs for Oxo or R. White’s lemonade, sepia photographs, and mementoes of the Boer War and World War I, which had been familiar fixtures in the childhood of John’s generation but now suddenly assumed a delicious quaintness and irony. Kenwood rapidly filled up with such “fun” objects, each representing a brief, costly burst of enthusiasm on John’s part—a huge altar crucifix rescued from some condemned church, a Victorian family Bible, a suit of armor named “Sidney,” a gorilla costume, which he liked to say was the only thing in his gigantic wardrobe that really fitted him. In the book-lined front hall hung a Great War recruiting poster, with Lord Kitchener pointing a stern forefinger above the famous slogan “Your Country Needs YOU.” John positioned it so that anyone approaching the front door was greeted by Kitchener’s baleful, mustachioed stare through an adjacent window.

  Amid the rather impersonal tailor-made luxury were unmistakable reminders of the smaller mock-Tudor house, and the region, that had nurtured him. If careless of all his other impulse-bought possessions, he arranged his books in meticulous order: Swift, Tennyson, Huxley, Orwell, the well-thumbed red cloth bindings of Richmal Crompton’s William stories. Half a dozen cats—including one named Mimi—padded around the designer rooms, making messes on the pristine black carpet and tearing at the costly fabrics with their claws. Domestic life, such as it was, centered on a small sunroom opening onto the garden, rather like Mendips’s old morning room.

  While the servants’ bells at Mendips had been merely a relic of past times, Kenwood required a staff of at least three to maintain it properly, including a full-time chauffeur to take John to concerts and up to London for his recording sessions. Though still unqualified to drive, he’d lost no time in buying himself a black Rolls-Royce Phantom V, equipped with a cocktail cabinet, television set, and telephone, its windows darkened to prevent curious fans from peering inside. After the Rolls came a Radford Mini Cooper, a customized and souped-up version of the ubiquitous Mini Minor that had originally been created for Peter Sellers. In February 1965, John passed his driving test, an event that made headline news across the nation. Within hours, every luxury car dealership in the Weybridge area, hoping for his business, jammed the road outside Kenwood’s security gates with Maseratis, Aston Martins, and Jaguar XK-E’s. John strolled out to inspect this gleaming smorgasbord, eventually selecting a £2,000 light blue Ferrari.

  A woman named Dot Jarlett, who had worked for the house’s previous owners, agreed to stay on with an expanded role as housekeeper, child-minder, and companion for Cynthia. But the quest for further domestic help initially met nothing but problems. A married couple hired to act respectively as chauffeur and cook quickly caused domestic chaos: the man ogled anything in skirts, his wife squabbled with Dot, and their daughter, on the rebound from a broken marriage, moved into the staff flat with them.

  One day while Brian was down from London on a visit, he strolled past the house next to Kenwood as its chauffeur, a six-foot-four former Welsh Guardsman named Les Anthony, was washing a vintage Rolls-Royce in the front driveway. Impressed by Anthony’s dapperness and bodyguard proportions, Brian asked if he would consider leaving his present employer to enter John Lennon’s service. Thirty-two-year-old Anthony jumped at the chance, especially upon viewing the selection of cars he would get to drive. “John’s Rolls was all black—even the wheels,” he remembers. “The only bit of chrome on it was the radiator. He told me he’d wanted that to be black as well, but the Rolls people wouldn’t do it. And his Mini-Cooper had so many gadgets inside, I had to take the arm-rests out before I could sit at its wheel.”

  Despite having somehow scraped through his test, John was a hopelessly bad driver: too myopic to read traffic signs until they were almost on top of him, too vague to follow the simplest route, however many times previously traveled, too impractical to deal with or even recognize the smallest mechanical problem. The result was that, for £36 per week (John was never a munificent employer), Les Anthony found himself on more or less permanent call, to the detriment of his private life and ultimately his marriage. Whatever the time of day or night, he was always in parade-ground order, including black-braided chauffeur’s cap, and addressed John punctiliously as “Mr. Lennon.”

  Two other Beatles also now had need of some domestic seclusion and, prompted by Brian and the accountants, followed John into Stockbroker Land. In February 1965, Ringo married his pregnant girlfriend, a Liverpool hairdresser named Maureen Cox. After staying a few months at Ringo’s Montagu Square flat, they too arrived on the St. George’s Hill estate, settling in a low-rise mock-Tudor extravaganza named Sunny Heights, just a few hundred yards from Kenwood. George, who had recently begun living with his soon-to-be wife Pattie Boyd (they would marry in January 1966), bought a luxury bungalow on the Claremont Estate in nearby Esher. Brian himself wanted the castellated house next door to John but, understandably—having already been robbed of their chauffeur—the owners refused to sell. Only Paul McCartney, the quartet’s last remaining bachelor, stayed on in central London.

  But if the three migrant Beatles had hoped to escape fan-madness in suburbia, they were quickly disillusioned. Renovation work was still in progress at Kenwood when the first girls were discovered on the grounds, gathering twigs and blades of grass as souvenirs. John fans had a complex message to send him: they were not the sort of mindless hysterics he would mock and despise; they also read books, looked at art, and resisted conformity; and they understood about his marriage, sympathized with Cynthia, and took an interest in Julian. They did more than worship him, they appreciated him. All of which was a tall order to get across in the few seconds when a black-windowed, black-wheeled Rolls swept past.

  George’s and Ringo’s arrival in John’s neighborhood was more than just a neat corralling measure on Brian’s part. Despite weeks and months of suffocating proximity on tour, the three knew no better company than one other during their time off. For John, having Ringo just down the road and George a ten-minute drive away was rather like his Outlaws being close at hand long ago in Woolton. “John really loved Ringo,” Maureen Cleave remembers. “And he often said how much he loved George, which was a slightly unusual thing for a man to come out with in that era.” He tended to socialize much less with Paul; theirs was always first and foremost a professional relationship. When new material neede
d to be written, Paul would come down from London by appointment, usually driving himself in his Aston Martin. One day when he happened to use a chauffeur, the man complained en route that he’d recently been obliged to work “eight days a week.” When Paul reached Kenwood, he repeated this phrase to John, who instantly came up with the line “Ooh, I need your love, babe”; so another song was born.

  Paul recalls working methods that had changed little since their truant afternoons in his Forthlin Road living room. “John would get up when I arrived, I’d have a cup of tea and a bowl of cornflakes with him and we’d go up to a little room, get our guitars out and kick things around. It would come very quickly, and in two or three hours time I’d leave.” They seldom bothered to tape a song-in-progress, keeping up the old rule that if both could remember it next day, it worked.

  To Julian, John continued to be a mysterious, uninvolved figure who usually came home at dawn, slept until late each afternoon, then spent his time mostly stretched on a sofa in the sunroom, alternately looking at newspapers and the ever-murmuring television screen, in the condition Cyn defined to herself as “present but absent.” “What day is it?” he once asked Maureen Cleave, quite seriously, when she telephoned.

  He tended to enjoy Kenwood the most when fellow Beatles and members of their inner circle were visiting, or when he could show the place off to members of his family. He was an especially thoughtful and genial host to the younger generation he had grown up with—his Edinburgh-based cousin, Stanley Parkes, his half sisters, Julia and Jackie, his Aunt Nanny’s son, Michael, his Aunt Harrie’s son, David. Julia and Jackie were taken shopping in London by Cyn and saw a Beatles concert at the Finsbury Park Astoria, traveling up with John in the Rolls. Michael and David, who arrived together, were taken to the Beatles Christmas Show and an evening preview of the Boat Show at Olympia, and sent off to buy new gear at the trendy clothes boutiques of Carnaby Street. Roaming around Kenwood during their stay, the boys found one of John’s guitars and begun plunking out some of his early Beatles hits on it. John heard them, and good-humoredly came to join in.

  A frequent house guest from the beginning was Pete Shotton, John’s old partner in crime at Quarry Bank High School. Pete’s career in the Liverpool Police had not lasted, and he’d become part owner of a small café near Penny Lane named the Old Dutch. When this proved less than a rip-roaring success, John sought various ways of helping out. On one trip home to Liverpool, he made Pete accept his entire—unopened—Beatle wage-packet of £50 in crisp, blue £5 notes. At another point, a plan was mooted to make the ex–beat bobby and greasy spoon proprietor Brian Epstein’s personal assistant.

  In 1965, John lent Pete £20,000 to buy a small supermarket in the Hampshire seaside resort of Hayling Island. The new venture being just two hour’s drive from Weybridge, Pete could drop around almost as easily as he used to from Vale Road to Menlove Avenue. For John it was the best possible respite from Beatledom to hang out with such a familiar old mate, playing with the one-arm bandits and Scalextric cars, and recalling their boyhood exploits as Shennon and Lotton. To Cynthia, Pete’s stays seemed overlong but, as usual, she said nothing.

  Robert and Sonny Freeman would occasionally come for the day, bringing their son, Dean, to play or swim in the pool with Julian. John’s affair with Sonny had still apparently not been discovered by their respective spouses; otherwise, such family occasions would hardly have been possible. Freeman remained a crucial member of the Beatles’ backup team, photographing their album covers and designing the graphics for their forthcoming second film, none of this compatible with being an outraged, cuckolded husband. Though the Freemans’ marriage did break up shortly afterward, Sonny is adamant that John was not a factor. As for Cyn, even in the second and more recriminatory of her two autobiographies, published in 2005, she would voice only the vaguest, uncorroborated suspicion that he might have been involved with Sonny.

  She had received a confession, however—in code decipherable to everyone but herself. In January 1965, she and John went on a winter sports holiday to Switzerland, accompanied by George Martin and Judy Lockhart-Smith. “It was Brian who suggested that Judy and I should go with them,” Martin remembers. “I suppose he thought we were decent, respectable people who could be trusted.” The trip was low-key—with, surprisingly, no press intrusion: the four stayed at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, spending all day on the ski slopes and quiet nights drinking hot chocolate and playing Monopoly. John had brought along a guitar and, during one such cozy après ski interlude, began strumming and singing a new song he was working on. “I remember hearing the words, and not believing my ears,” Martin says. “They went ‘I once had a girl / Or should I say / She once had me….’ He was owning up to having had an affair, obviously not very long previously. And Cyn was sitting a few feet away, not understanding any of it.”

  Cynthia’s chief ally was her widowed mother, Lilian, a woman who for John personified every mother-in-law joke ever told by his favorite northern comedians, and then some. “He couldn’t stand her,” his cousin Michael Cadwallader remembers. “Neither could Mimi.” Despite John’s success, Lilian remained as convinced her daughter had thrown herself away on him as Mimi was that he’d thrown himself away on Cynthia. Voluble and pugnacious herself, she was horrified by the conditions Cyn accepted so uncomplainingly as his wife. After the move to Surrey, she left Hoylake and arrived at Kenwood ostensibly to help Cynthia with Julian, implicitly to keep her son-in-law in line.

  Although hostile to John, Lilian did not mind partaking in the fruits of his success. Still antiques mad, she toured local salerooms, spending his money on “finds” for the house that later received only a dubious welcome. A couple of times each month, Les Anthony would drive her in the Rolls back to Hoylake, where she still kept up her old home, sometimes accompanied by Cynthia and Julian, sometimes in queenly majesty on her own. Even John’s purchase of a house for her in Esher, for which he also paid the upkeep, plus a weekly allowance of £30 (the same as Mimi received), did not greatly lessen her vigilant presence at Kenwood. A family visitor recalls her “flopped on a couch, stuffing glacé fruits into her mouth,” while John—with uncharacteristic gloomy resignation—“passed through without comment.”

  The person on whom he most wanted to spend his wealth, however, had little taste for luxury or high living—and, indeed, responded to most of his attempts with stern lectures on the virtues of frugality. “John was so naïve with money, all his life,” Mimi would recall. “He just never had any idea of its worth, probably because he never had to work hard for it like some people. He was a soft touch. He would listen to a sob-story and then just give his money away to some hanger-on who had spun him a yarn.

  “He was always trying to make me buy new clothes or things for the house when he became famous, but I’d tell him, ‘No, I’m not the kind who goes out spending for spending’s sake.’ John once insisted on buying me a fur coat from Harrods. I didn’t want it. I told him so. When I went on tour with [the Beatles] to New Zealand, I did buy myself a new coat, but then I wore it for the next fifteen years. I looked after my clothes. John could never understand that.”

  Mimi was now nearing sixty, and, though she remained as energetic and self-reliant as ever, the strain of living alone at Mendips, under round-the-clock pressure from Beatles fans, was beginning to tell. “John was always nagging on at me to move,” she would remember. “I think he was worried about me living there on my own. I had a dizzy spell one day and fainted after I had to answer the phone…it was always ringing…there would be girls wanting to speak to John, asking if he was in. And if I went out for five minutes and left the back door open, there wouldn’t be a single cup or spoon left in the kitchen when I came back.”

  In fact, Mimi accepted that her life in Woolton had become untenable and, as it happened, knew roughly where she would like to establish a new home. She had always fancied living beside the sea, preferably in one of the genteel South Coast holiday resorts which, by good lu
ck, all lay within easy reach of Weybridge. But for several months, no location, let alone property, could be found that suited her exacting tastes. On March 3, 1965, she mentioned the search in passing to her thirteen-year-old correspondent, Jane Wirgman, who had written for some signed Beatles photographs for her sister Liz and herself.

  Dear Jane

  So nice to hear from you. I didn’t answer before because I wouldn’t like your parents to think you were too interested in the Beatles at the expense of the all-important School work.

  However, I was in the Beatles’ Press Office the other day & got a few photographs. So I’m sending two of each, one for Liz. (My sister’s name is Liz.) You may already have the smaller one. They look ‘Horrors’ to me, but you may like them…

  I was in Bexhill [Sussex] the other day, looking at some houses, one ‘The Moorings’ which was lovely, but I didn’t want to live at Bexhill.

  So in about three weeks I’m going to have a look around Hove, Worthing etc.

  I was staying with John for a few days before he went away.

  He wants me to live nearer to him but—He Can’t Come and See me until he does Something with that ‘Mop’ and I Mean it.

  He said he would have it cut on the [film] Set. I asked him if he was trying to look like a Yorkshire Terrier. Now Jane—you must agree. Those ‘Mops’ are getting out of hand.

  I’m So Cold, I can hardly write…

  All the best to Liz and yourself.

  Mimi.

  The following month, she had second thoughts about Bexhill, as she confided to Jane in a letter that began as another lamentation about John’s hair, and went on to include several revealing family vignettes:

  Yes, I saw the Beatles on Lucky Stars. John’s cousin David was here, otherwise, if not reminded, I always forget. But not David.