John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  When the four reached Chicago, it was obvious that Brian’s statement had not nearly quelled the outcry and that something would have to come from John personally. Their itinerary was to take them through several of the states where divine retribution was being called down on their heads and their music cast onto heretics’ pyres. The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, an organization normally dedicated to murdering and terrorizing black people, had appointed itself the avenger of outraged Christianity throughout the South. There was a real possibility of some attack on John, or the group as a whole. If the situation did not improve, Brian told associates, he would call off the tour here and now.

  A meeting took place among John, Brian, and the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow, in Brian’s suite at the Astor Towers Hotel. Remembering John’s defiance after the Bob Wooler–bashing episode four years earlier, Barrow might have expected him to dig his heels in and refuse to take back a single word. Instead, he was distraught to think he might have ruined the tour, and desperate to make any amends he could. “He actually put his head in his hands and sobbed. He was saying ‘I’ll do anything…whatever you say. How am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I’ve said?’”

  Later, supported by his fellow Beatles, he faced the media assembled like some latter-day Spanish Inquisition in Barrow’s suite a couple of floors below. With the stress of the situation, his face seemed to have become thinner, the contours of his nose sharper, his Beatle cut somehow alien, like a borrowed hat. Other stars in such a situation would have read from a brief statement, answered a couple of questions, and left as quickly as possible. John, however, stayed on the firing line until everyone who wished to had taken a shot at him. His replies turned into an extended monologue, which soon went far beyond what he had been coached to say, and, on the whole, hit as many right buttons as his original quote had wrong ones: “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ or anti-religion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we were greater or better…not comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever…I happened to be talking to a friend and I used the word ‘Beatles’ as a remote thing—‘Beatles’ like other people see us. I said they are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus, and I said it in that way, which was the wrong way, yap yap….”

  Now and again, the Star Chamber dissolved into laughter as touches of the old free-range John showed through. “If I’d said, ‘Television is more popular than Jesus,’ I might have got away with it,” he remarked at one point, an observation both witty and true. “…My views are from what I’ve read or observed of Christianity, and what it was, and what it has been and what it could be. I’m just saying it seems to be shrinking and losing context…. People think I’m anti-religion, but I’m not. I’m a most religious fellow…” The media wanted ritual penance, and this was made with a sincerity that could not be doubted: “I’m sorry I opened my mouth.”

  With the qualified forgiveness of America’s press, Brian decided that the tour should go ahead after all. But out in Middle America, where crosses clustered as thickly as TV antennae, the transgression was not so easily wiped away At every stop, the screams that greeted the Beatles were now leavened with anger and reproach. The waving placards bore messages like BEATLES GO HOME and JESUS DIED FOR YOU, TOO, JOHN LENNON (with the occasional, apostate LENNON SAVES). Former besotted listeners to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” publicly broke or stamped on their copies, and devoted readers of John Lennon: In His Own Write tore the book into shreds. Hardened as the Beatles were to mass dysfunctionality, one image was to haunt them all: that of a little boy, running beside their escape bus until his legs gave out, his cries inaudible, his face a picture of bewildered betrayal.

  At some venues, following Manila’s example, police cover was withdrawn without explanation. Despite the high security surrounding the Beatles’ interperformance flights—arrivals far away from terminal buildings where marksmen might lurk; departures, where possible, under cover of night—several bullet holes were later found in the aircraft’s fuselage. In some places, there was even trading in the “rights” to mass Beatle record smashing or burning, which were usually acquired by supermarkets as attractions to be staged in their parking lots.

  On August 19, the tour reached Memphis, a place that once would have excited John as Elvis Presley’s hometown but now harbored nameless perils as the very heart of the Bible Belt. “It’s John they want—send him out first,” joked someone on the plane as crowds of banner-waving zealots came into view below. John gloomily concurred: “You might just as well paint a target on me.”

  Before their two shows at the Mid South Coliseum, a hulking young Ku Klux Klansman, minus his ceremonial tall hood, excoriated the Beatles on local television for claiming they were “more better than Jesus Christ,” reminded viewers of the Klan’s reputation as “a terror organization,” and menacingly promised “surprises” when they went onstage later that day. So many people lined the streets to the Coliseum, and so many convenient windows for rifle muzzles yawned above, that the Beatles’ limousines were sent ahead empty as decoys while they themselves rode to the venue in a Greyhound bus, crouched double on its floor. Before the afternoon show, there was a bomb scare; demonstrators were reportedly being bused in by the Klan and records being ceremonially burned in oil drums.

  At the second show, the four had been performing only a few minutes when a firecracker exploded near them with the shallow “snap-snap-snap” of a real-life revolver. Tony Barrow still remembers the horror of that moment. “Every one of us [the tour entourage] and the other three Beatles looked at John, half-expecting to see the guy sinking down.”

  Shea Stadium, New York, on August 26 was nothing like the sweltered triumph it had been a year earlier; eleven thousand seats had remained unsold, prompting reports that “the bloom has gone off the Beatles.” At their Manhattan press conference, all four were said to be looking “pale and tired,” so very different from the wisecracking charmers who had wowed the city in 1964. Hungry for further headlines, some questioners tried to lure them into commenting on the Vietnam War. But they refused to be drawn beyond a collective murmur of “We don’t like war. War is wrong.” Paul said it would be better for them to express their views back in Britain, because “there, people listen a bit more. In America, they hold everything against you.” “You’ll have to answer for that tomorrow,” John told him, only half joking

  He himself was asked why he thought his words had created such a national furor. “There are more people in America, so there are more bigots also,” he replied, then took care to add, “Not everyone in America is bigoted.” Circumspect as he strove to be, the Henry VIII lip refused to stay totally buttoned. On a lighter note, someone asked Paul what had been the inspiration behind Eleanor Rigby. Before he could answer, John chipped in: “Two queers.”

  The tour’s final stop could not have been a more appropriate staging post between what they had been and what they were about to become. On August 29, they reached San Francisco to appear at its Candlestick Park baseball stadium. Ringo Starr later remembered “a lot of talk” before the show about “how it all had to end” and John’s firm declaration that “he’d had enough.” There was no formal announcement of their decision (as there never would be) and not even the savviest among the U.S. Beatle press corps at Candlestick Park realized the significance of the moment. Despite their boredom and exhaustion, they could not say this covert farewell without a pang of nostalgia. Each of them had a camera surreptitiously parked atop an amplifier. Toward the end of the performance, Ringo left his drums, and all four turned their backs to the audience and photographed the stage and its furniture like school graduates taking nostalgic snapshots of a once-hated classroom.

  The British media had equally little clue about the milestone that had passed—and, in any case, were still overwhelmingly concerned with John’s American crucifixion. To fellow Brits, at lea
st, irony could be employed to temper the iron in his soul. Fielding questions back in London, he adopted the resigned air of one whose slightest word was likely to trigger more worldwide religious controversy. Had he not been afraid that criticizing America over Vietnam, however obliquely, might stir up even more trouble over there? “You can’t keep quiet about everything that’s going on in the world,” John replied, “unless you’re a monk…Sorry, monks,” he added hastily, as though picturing saffron-robed holy men all over the Himalayas rising up in protest. “I didn’t mean it….”

  As much as he had grown to hate touring, the prospect of life without it initially filled him with something near panic. “I couldn’t deal with not being onstage,” he was to remember. “[For] the first time I thought, ‘My God, what do you do if this isn’t continually going on. What else is there?’”

  Touring might have crushed his spirits and stultified his creativity, but it had also had its advantages. These years on the Beatlemania treadmill had spared him almost all the more tedious obligations of growing from adolescence into manhood and becoming a husband and father. But on another, typically contradictory level, they had also given a stem of duty and responsibility to his existence: when he donned his stage suit, it was in the spirit of a soldier going “over the top” with his comrades. For all the frustrations of the road, there was much that he realized he would miss: the laughs, the Just William japes, the sense of uniquely kindred spirits taking on the whole world. Outside the Beatles, he could not imagine ever finding such companionship again.

  The other three found no difficulty in occupying their newfound liberty and leisure. Paul composed the score for a new British film, The Family Way (which later won a Novello Award) and continued his assiduous self-education in classical music and the theatre. He remained deeply involved with the avant-garde crowd around the Indica gallery and, in late 1966, provided financial backing for London’s first underground newspaper, the International Times, of which the Indica’s Barry Miles was a cofounder. George immersed himself in Eastern music and religion, visited India and conversed with gurus and swamis, as well as continuing to study the sitar under its master, Ravi Shankar. Ringo welcomed the chance to spend more time with Maureen, who shortly afterward became pregnant with their second child. Only John, the Beatle credited with the most individual potential—that acknowledged “genius of the lower crust”—had nothing in prospect but Weybridge, Cynthia, and Julian.

  Comedy was one obvious area of development, the more so thanks to his firm friendship with Peter Cook. The foursome of Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller, with their stage show (and Parlophone album) Beyond the Fringe, had rewritten British comedy as completely as their Liverpool label mates later rewrote British pop. Since then, the lanky, languorous Cook had achieved stardom in his own right, opening London’s first satirical nightclub, the Establishment, acquiring a controlling interest in Private Eye magazine, and creating a comic immortal to rival Hancock or Bluebottle in the sublimely banal park-bench philosopher, E. L. Wisty (though all the time, his secret ambition was to be a second Elvis).

  In 1965, Cook and Dudley Moore had begun a new television comedy series on BBC2 entitled Not Only…But Also. The first episode featured a corduroy-dark, turtlenecked John, reciting passages from In His Own Write, assisted by Norman Rossington, who had played roadie Norm in A Hard Day’s Night. As the closing credits rolled, John performed a spontaneous dance across the screen, which Cook and Moore reproduced at the end of every subsequent show. He enjoyed the experience so much that when a later episode was being rehearsed, he turned up uninvited and volunteered to take part again.

  He and Cynthia were occasional dinner guests at Cook’s Georgian house in Hampstead, joining a circle that included the actors Peter O’Toole and Tom Courtenay, the designer Mary Quant, the poet and Private Eye columnist Christopher Logue, and the journalist Bernard Levin. Cook’s then wife, Wendy, was a celebrated hostess who thought nothing of serving her guests a whole roast boar. Here, at least, literary high society caused John no fits of inarticulateness. The evening would develop into a contest between Cook and him to top each other in lunatic free association. “They both had the same gift for ad-libbing,” Wendy Cook remembers. “I wish I could remember some of their riffs, but all that comes back is being helpless with laughter—and that amazing nose of John’s, the way he pushed his hair out of his eyes, and all the tension in his shoulders.”

  It was Richard Lester, director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, who suggested a way for him to fill the post-touring void. Lester had lately been offered Hollywood’s version of Catch 22, Joseph Heller’s magisterial comic novel of the Second World War. Instead, he opted to direct a smaller, quirkier British production on the same subject called How I Won the War, based on a novel by Patrick Ryan and scripted by Charles Wood, the cowriter of Help! On the strength of John’s performance in the two Beatles films, Lester offered him the supporting role of a British serviceman, Private Gripweed. The part was a purely dramatic one, with no singing onscreen or involvement in the sound track. Shooting on location was to begin in late October, first in Hamburg, then in Almería in southern Spain. Stirred by the challenge, and to postpone “going home to the wife” as long as possible, he instantly accepted.

  How I Won the War is as much of its time as Help! or A Hard Day’s Night, and cherished by many as an almost equivalent Sixties classic. Set in the North African campaign, it concerns a squad of British “musketeers” who are given the surreally daft assignment of establishing a cricket pitch behind enemy lines. In the mode of current British screen hits like Tom Jones and Alfie, the characters talk directly to camera as well as among themselves. When a musketeer gets killed, his place is taken by a soldier from World War I, a mute figure like a living statue in head-to-foot orange, green, or red. The photography alternates between color and black and white and is intercut with real footage of World War II events such as the D-Day landings. The overall effect is somewhere between Oh What a Lovely War and The Goon Show.

  John was later said to have been attracted by the film’s antiwar message, but actually this element is so slight as to be almost invisible. The Second World War everyone agreed then, as now, had been a necessary and just one. Britain’s peacetime army had seen no significant overseas military action since the Suez crisis, and the Northern Ireland conflict was still three years ahead. Nor does Charles Wood’s caricature of the military mind—witless subalterns, shrieking NCOs, generals exchanging bubblegum cards—stir the faintest resonance of current events in Vietnam. It is a Pop Art send-up of war films rather than war itself, still reflecting the myopic afterglow in which Nazi officers clicked their heels and played the game, and nobody mentioned the death camps.

  Preparing for the role of Private Gripweed allowed John to cast off his Beatle look, forever as it would prove. His bangs disappeared, exposing his forehead to view for the first time in six years. Rather than a regulation military short back and sides, his hair was given a floppy Byronesque style that no enlisted man would ever have been permitted. Breaking the taboo that stretched back to early childhood, he also had to wear glasses. Ironically, these were the very same National Health type, with circular wire frames, that he’d rejected so vehemently as an eight-year-old.

  The thought of being on location abroad, without the other Beatles to support him, was at first a daunting one. He worried, too, that his fellow cast members would look down on him for not being a real actor. So the loyal Neil Aspinall volunteered to go with him and stay on hand for the whole six weeks of the Spanish shoot.

  The experience proved thoroughly pleasant for them both. Lester’s cast of stalwart British character actors, like Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy, neither despised nor patronized John but respected the seriousness with which he took his role, his willingness to learn, and total lack of big-star airs and graces. He formed a particular friendship with Roy Kinnear, who had been in Help!, and Lee Montague, a misleadingly pugnacious-looking
forty-year-old cast as the musketeers’ sergeant major. In breaks between filming, John, Kinnear, and Montague would stand on the bridge over a nearby stream and play the game of Pooh Sticks immortalized in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. “You dropped a stick into the water so the current would carry it under the bridge,” Montague remembers. “And the stick that came out first on the other side was the winner. John loved Pooh Sticks. Later he gave me one of his books, inscribed ‘To my favorite uncle.’”

  The film’s nominal star was Michael Crawford, playing the dimwit squad commander, Lieutenant Goodbody, whom Gripweed serves as orderly. Crawford had brought his wife, Gaby, on location with him, and of an evening, the two would often drop in at the flat John shared with Neil for a drink or to play Monopoly. The Crawfords liked the flat so much that John offered to exchange it for their large rented villa, which had the—for him—irresistible attraction of a table-tennis table in its front hall. Soon after this accommodation swap, an NEMS emissary arrived from London, bringing John a large box of chocolates with hashish carefully packed among them. “When we tried to open the box, the lid flew off,” Neil remembered. “All the hash fell into the shagpile carpet. We lost almost the whole lot.”

  A few days into the shoot, John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, turned up with his matte black Rolls Phantom V, recently equipped with further luxury accoutrements, including a fold-down bed and a set of external stereo loudspeakers. To maximize the shock value of these, John had supplemented his in-car record collection with “The Colonel Bogey March,” Peter Sellers’s parody of a party political broadcast, and assorted farmyard sound effects. There was also a microphone with which he could make his own broadcasts at shattering volume. One night in London, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was seated in a parked limo when he heard himself challenged by what he took to be a police bullhorn. Hopeless druggie that he was, the moment almost brought on cardiac arrest. But it was only John, pulling his leg.