John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  In October 1964, a general election had brought the Labour Party under Harold Wilson back to office after thirteen years of Conservative rule. As prime minister, Wilson did not promise to be much fun. Although only forty-nine, the youngest British premier since Rosebery, he seemed a good ten years older with his silver hair, stern cherub face, and flat, prim Yorkshire vowels. In stark contrast to the tweedy aristos who had preceded him, he wore a rubberized Gannex raincoat, holidayed no farther abroad than the Scilly Isles, and smothered his food in proletarian HP Sauce. His aura was that of some cold, practical efficiency expert dedicated to sweeping away the complacent inertia of Toryism and creating a modern, “dynamic” and “purposive” nation, as he ringingly expressed it, “forged in the white heat of the technological revolution.”

  But Wilson’s John Blunt exterior was deceptive. While in public he drank bitter beer and smoked a homely briar pipe, his private preference was for brandy and cigars. Under the seeming high-minded asceticism lay a fascination with show business glamour and an insatiable hunger for personal publicity not seen at 10 Downing Street since the days of Winston Churchill.

  The true tone of the Wilson era was set on June 11, 1965, with publication of the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Though billed as the sovereign’s personal choice, the recipients are nominated by the prime minister’s office and traditionally receive automatic Royal assent. The Beatles were each to receive the MBE: membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Those selected for any honor first receive a letter asking if they are willing to accept it (which some are not). The Beatles’ letters came in brown official envelopes, outwardly indistinguishable from banal missives like income tax demands or—until a few years previously—conscription into the army. When John’s envelope arrived, he later said, he thought he was being “called up” [for military service] and so “chucked it in with the fanmail.”

  It was the first time such recognition had ever been given to anyone under the age of twenty-five, let alone to rowdy pop musicians. Although the media were generally enthusiastic (SHE LOVES THEM YEAH YEAH YEAH! ran one banner headline, as if it were all the Queen’s idea), many among the older generation bewailed the cheapening and vulgarization of the honors system, little guessing how much further that process still could, and would, go. Several existing MBE-holders returned their decorations in protest at being bracketed, as one put it, with “a gang of nincompoops. The four recipients themselves were at first equally dubious, unsure whether they wanted to be sucked into the Establishment quite so far. “We all met, and agreed it was daft,” John would remember. ‘What do you think?’ we all said. ‘Let’s not.’ Then it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play. We’d nothing to lose, except that part of you which said you didn’t believe in it.”

  Following the success of In His Own Write, John had contracted with Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape to produce a sequel for publication the following year. Having now used up all his student and Mersey Beat material, he had to start this second book from scratch, which gave the project an unpleasant flavor of school homework. To limber up, he began reading Chaucer, Edward Lear, and his other supposed stylistic influences, even making a stab at James Joyce’s nonsense epic, Finnegans Wake. “It was great, and I dug it and felt as though [Joyce] was an old friend,” he reported. “But I couldn’t make it right through the book.”

  Cape duly received a further batch of prose, verse, and black-and-white illustrations, mostly wrought amid the splendor of his Kenwood den. However painfully extracted, the material this time was both more ambitious and funnier, with noticeably less schoolboyish harping on physical disability or race. “The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield,” featuring the great detective “Shamrock Wolmbs,” caught the authentic tone of a Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story as well as turning “Elementary my dear Watson” into “Ellafitzgerald, my dear Whopper” and “recuperated” into “minicoopered.” “Cassandle” was a well-observed parody of the Daily Mirror’s columnist W. F. Connor, aka Cassandra, even down to the line drawing of Connor that headed his column. A poem, “The Wumberlog (or The Magic Dog),” evidently inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” ran to seven printed pages.

  There was a topical commentary on the “General Erection,” in which “Harrassed Wilsod” had defeated “Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom” (Sir Alec Douglas-Home, pronounced “Hume”) and the “Torchies” (Torchy the Battery Boy was a children’s television character) “by a very small marjorie.” No great faith in the new prime minister was evident, despite his generosity with MBEs: “We must not forget to put the clocks back when we all get bombed, Harold….” The book was called A Spaniard in the Works after another of its prose offerings, the story of Barcelover-born car mechanic Jesus El Pifco (a foretaste of larger sacrilege to come). The cover picture showed John in a cape and wide-brimmed Spanish hat, somewhat resembling the trademark for Sandeman’s Port. Lest the pun in the title should not be clear enough, his right hand flourished a large spanner.

  British publication was on June 24, coincidentally just after a Beatles European tour that had included shows in two Spanish bullrings. To promote the book, John made the rounds of highbrow arts programs, both radio and television, often reading extracts as well as answering questions. He admitted that A Spaniard in the Works had been hard work of a very different kind from touring, songwriting, and recording. “I could only loosen up to it with a bottle of Johnnie Walker…. We [the Beatles] are disciplined but we don’t feel as though we are. I don’t mind being disciplined and not realising it.” Had he plans to try writing at greater length, say in a novel? “The Sherlock Holmes seemed like a novel to me, but it turned out to be six pages…. I couldn’t do it, you know. I get fed up. And I wrote so many characters in it, I forgot who they were.”

  Help! opened in British cinemas with a Royal charity premiere on July 29 at the London Pavilion, attended by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. John’s Aunt Mimi was also there, and later sent a report to Jane Wirgman that showed her as capable of “rattling their jewellery” as her nephew:

  So you liked ‘Help’. Well I didn’t, although the Colour was very good. I went to the Premiere & it was like a mad house at the Show. I Sat immediately behind P. Margaret, & when the Beatles came in I was panic Stricken, almost anyway. The girls in top balcony yelled & leaned over the edge & only for an attendant—one of them was nearly over. Everybody, it seemed, in the film world & a lot of Stage Stars too, were selling programmes, & Some of the most outlandish dresses and hair dos—all there to be Seen, not to See the film. It was for Charity, So did good. At the dinner at the Dorchester later also Some Funny Sights, but John was in great form & our table was in an uproar and Jane Asher is really a delightful girl. One thing I’ll always remember was the Sight of a woman, 80 if she was a day, yellow wig on, low cut dress, face a mask under heavy makeup, mass of wrinkles, doing the rumba & up for every dance & whats more a good dancer. I thought at first She was a ‘Comic Turn’, & could not take my eyes off her. Ah Well, funny people these days to be Seen—and John Says I’m funny looking, So there you are.

  Both the single and the album went straight to the top of their respective charts, the pattern being repeated in America with the same predictable double-click when the film opened there a month later. John had scarcely concluded his trip around literary London—which this time, significantly, did not include a Foyle’s lunch—when he was swept away on a second Beatles tour of North America, the last the four would make without their hearts either in their boots or their mouths.

  Brian had been crafting the itinerary since the previous February, choosing just ten venues for his boys’ two-week journey, each a nationally or regionally celebrated arena or sports stadium with the highest standards in spectator comfort and security and a sound system of proven quality. The opening one, on Sunday August 15, was to be the most memorable of all: the newly opened William A. Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, home of the New Yo
rk Mets baseball team.

  The original plan had been for the Beatles to arrive by helicopter, touching down on the baseball diamond in front of the specially built stage. However, for safety reasons they had to land on the roof of the adjacent World’s Fair Building, then travel the remaining hundred yards inside a Wells Fargo armored truck. It was still a heart-stopping moment as they dipped low over Shea’s pristine blue, white, and orange bowl, and the capacity crowd of 55,600 roared up a greeting, mingled with skyward camera flashes like wartime anti-aircraft flak. Brian’s copromoter, Sid Bernstein, remembers a phrase John used to him, which, in the clamorous urban twilight, had an almost biblical ring: “It’s the top of the mountain, Sid…the top of the mountain.”

  The four that day unveiled a striking new stage look: pale fawn jackets with epaulets and brass buttons fastening to the neck like British Army tunics from the Boer War period. Each in addition sported the official badge of a Wells Fargo agent, earned by their brief journey in the company’s security truck. And, as the film of the performance shows, they had their best time onstage together since Hamburg. “It was the high point of a vintage year,” remembers NEMS’s chief press officer, Tony Barrow, who accompanied the tour. “Real wealth had started to come through to them, their music was advancing by leaps and bounds, they were enjoying themselves beyond belief. They’d come up playing in places like the Liverpool Cavern where the audience was so close, you could reach out and take a half-smoked ciggie from a girl in the front row. At Shea Stadium, even though the front row looked miles away, they managed to create that same feeling of intimacy.”

  On this occasion John made some of the linking announcements, Boer War tunic gaping open at the neck, his hair sweat-glued to his forehead, his words progressively less coherent: “We’d like to do a slow song now…It’s also off Beatles Six [a U.S. album] or something…I don’t know what it’s off…I haven’t got it….” Toward the end of the eleven-song set, he exchanged his guitar for the Vox Continental organ he had used on “I’m Down,” the burlesque-depressed B-side to “Help!” Feeling “naked” without the Rickenbacker, he launched into a wild parody of Jerry Lee Lewis, dragging one finger cacophonously up and down the keys, playing with his elbow, even his foot. “John cracked up on that show,” Ringo would remember. “[He] just went mad. Not mentally ill…just got crazy.”

  There was something else waiting at the top of the mountain. Twelve days after Shea Stadium—ten years after first hearing him and coming properly alive as a result—John met Elvis.

  It was, of course, not quite the same Elvis whom that transfigured fourteen-year-old had force-fed his protesting aunt “for breakfast, dinner and tea” in 1956. Now thirty years old, Presley had abandoned not only rock ’n’ roll but live performances of any kind, instead turning out a series of increasingly bland and forgettable Hollywood movies, otherwise leading a sequestered existence at his Graceland mansion with the troupe of hangers-on and ex–service buddies known as the Memphis Mafia. Though he still had occasional chart hits, they were middle-of-the-road pop, devoid of his old sneering sexual magic. In America, he was as embarrassing a symbol of a craze-gone-by as bobby socks or the hula hoop; in Britain, even his most loyal fans had given up hope that he’d ever return to form.

  Nor was it a given that the former King would wish to meet the young British invaders who had stolen his crown. The good luck telegram that so thrilled the Beatles before their second Ed Sullivan Show had, in fact, been sent as a PR gesture by Presley’s wily manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Initially, Presley had been baffled by their music and repulsed by their hair and clothes, complaining with old-fashioned Southern puritanism that they looked like “a bunch of faggots.”

  There had been talk of a summit meeting during the Beatles’ main 1964 American tour, but schedules on both sides had proved too hectic; in the end, only Paul had spoken briefly to Presley by telephone from Atlantic City. This year, when the Beatles reached Los Angeles, the King also happened to be in town, fresh from filming on location in Hawaii. Fortuitously, too, Brian had scheduled some free time before the shows at Balboa Stadium in San Diego and the Hollywood Bowl. After intense negotiations with Colonel Parker, brokered by the New Musical Express journalist Chris Hutchins, the meeting was set for the evening of August 27.

  Despite the Beatles’ ascendancy, there was no question as to who was the monarch and who the supplicants: they went to Elvis, driving from their rented mansion in Benedict Canyon to his in Perugia Way, Beverly Hills, accompanied by Brian, Tony Barrow, and roadies Neil and Mal. Secrecy was meant to be absolute, but Parker had tipped off a local radio station in advance. Consequently, a flotilla of press cars followed in hot pursuit, and dozens of screaming non-Presley fans were waiting outside the King’s gate. Racked with pre-audience nerves, the four had taken advantage of their thirty-minute journey to “have a laugh,” and so tumbled out of their limo giggling and uncoordinated, as though in some extra sequence from Help!

  Presley received them seated on a sofa, watching television with the sound turned down—exactly as John always did—and thumbing softly at a bass guitar plugged into a live amp. Such was the Beatles’ emotion that they registered only odd details of this modern Versailles: the Sun King’s brilliant red shirt; a jukebox playing “Mohair Sam” by Charlie Rich; the fact that Elvis did not have to rise nor even lean forward to adjust his TV set, but possessed a revolutionary handheld device that enabled him to do so without stirring on his throne.

  John later recalled the weirdness of meeting someone whose face was almost as familiar to him as his own, but who was nonetheless a stranger, a million miles away even when shaking hands. “At first we couldn’t make him out. I asked him if he was preparing any ideas for his next film and he drawled: ‘Ah sure am. Ah play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way, and ah sing a few songs.’ We all looked at one another. Finally Presley and Colonel Parker laughed and explained the only time they departed from that formula—for Wild in the Country—they lost money. He was just Elvis, you know?…He seemed normal to us, and we were asking about his making movies and not doing any personal appearances or TV…. He was great: just as I expected him.”

  Things warmed up still more when guitars were produced for John and Paul, and they reprised some of the Elvis songs they once used to smuggle into the Cavern’s all-skiffle program, while the true, honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood, in-this-room Elvis smiled indulgently and thumbed his bass, and the body servants of both factions hovered bonhomiously near. Later came games of pool and roulette, and a fleeting sight of Priscilla Beaulieu, the doll-like teenage beauty in training to become Presley’s wife. As the visitors left, seen off personally by their host, John turned and shouted “Long live the King!”

  Subsequently, plans were discussed for Elvis to return the compliment and visit the Beatles at their Benedict Canyon hideaway. It never happened, even though an advance guard of Memphis Mafiosi came to check out the house. While they were doing so, John asked one of them, Jerry Schilling, to convey a further message of appreciation: “Tell [Elvis] if it hadn’t been for him, I would have been nothing.”

  After the twin peaks of Shea Stadium and meeting Elvis, the remaining tour dates—each a display of industrial-strength Beatlemania in its own right—inevitably seemed rather a letdown. Resilient though the Beatles were (and no young men could possibly have led such a life without enjoying A1 health), all four, in their different ways, were starting to feel the strain. John in particular, at a moment that should have seen his self-esteem at its zenith, was overcome by the same inexplicable depression and loneliness that had permeated Help! Five thousand miles from Kenwood, under the balmy California sun, he suddenly began to reflect on his shortcomings as a family man and especially as a father; how, in the whirlwind of the previous three years, he had missed out on almost all Julian’s steps from baby to little boy. These feelings were poured out in a surprisingly emotional, contrite letter to Cynthia, saying how much he missed Julian and r
egretted “those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit while he’s in the room with me…. I really want him to know me and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much….”

  So from the King to the Queen: on October 29, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBEs at the sovereign’s hands, causing larger crowds outside her London home than any since her coronation day. Normally, the sequel to each Royal investiture is the recipients’ emergence into the palace yard, showing off their decorations with their proud families. As if to underline the Beatles’ status as pet aliens—nowhere more so than here—they arrived without any family members in support. Even Cynthia and Julian could not publicly share John’s triumph but had to be content with watching TV news reports at home in Weybridge.

  Despite his skepticism, John found himself impressed by “Buck House’s” glittering grandeur and swept along by the pomp and protocol of the investiture ceremony. The Royal moment, when it came, had much the same unreal quality as beholding Elvis. “[The Queen] said something like ‘ooh ah blah blah’ we didn’t quite understand. She’s much nicer than she is in the photos…I must have looked shattered. She said to me, ‘Have you been working hard lately?’ I couldn’t think what we’d been doing, so I said, ‘No, we’ve been having a holiday.’ We’d been recording, but I couldn’t remember that.” After the ceremony, the Beatles signed autographs for their fellow awardees, then posed for the press with their decorations: four modest little medals in presentation boxes. John afterward gave his to Aunt Mimi, pinning it on her in a parody of the palace ceremony because, he said, she deserved it far more than he did.

  Years later, he would say that, to calm their preinvestiture jitters and express a little covert defiance of those officious Royal stewards and chamberlains, the four managed to escape to a palace washroom for a few minutes and there sneak a few puffs of marijuana. But according to Paul McCartney, they had a laugh only in the literal sense. “I remember that smoking was not allowed generally and we went sneaking off to the bog, as we called it, for a ciggie and giggled a lot at the sheer cheek of us smoking a ciggie in Buckingham Palace. I don’t think it was a joint.”