John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  John had been no more aware than the other Beatles of Brian’s turbulent parallel life, his excessive drinking and pill taking, his addiction to gambling, and the disastrous sexual liaisons that had even caused him to miss their last-ever stage performance in San Francisco—a lapse for which he excoriated himself ever afterward. “I didn’t watch him deteriorate,” John would later admit. “There was a period of about two years before he died when we didn’t hardly see anything of him…. I felt guilty because I was closer to him earlier, and then for two years I was having my own internal problems…and I [had] no idea of the kind of life he was living…. I introduced Brian to pills—which gives me a guilt association with his death—to make him talk, to find out what he was like…. [He used to have] hellish tempers and fits and lock-outs and he’d vanish for days…the whole business would stop because he’d been on sleeping pills for days on end and wouldn’t be awake…or beaten up by some docker in the Old Kent Road.”

  The first serious warning sign came early that summer, when Brian checked into the Priory clinic in Putney in a desperate—and, it would prove, fruitless—attempt to get clean. The news came as a great shock to John, and brought out all the “grace” that the perceptive Derek Taylor saw in him. A vast floral bouquet was dispatched to the Priory for Brian with a handwritten card saying, “You know I love you…I really mean that, John.” When Brian read it, he burst into tears.

  The Brian problem was thrust aside in late August, however, when John met the Indian mystic known as Maharishi (“Great Seer”) Mahesh Yogi. George Harrison’s wife, Pattie, had lately joined the Maharishi’s worldwide “Spiritual Regeneration movement,” and she told George that this most celebrated of all Hindu holy men was to address a meeting of his London disciples in the unlikely surroundings of the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane. George in turn passed the word to his fellow band members. “Everybody going to the Maharishi was like everyone ending up with moustaches on Sergeant Pepper,” Neil Aspinall recalled. “A lot of it was follow-the-leader, whoever the leader was at the time.”

  Tiny in stature with lank shoulder-length hair, a parti-colored, forked beard, and a giggly falsetto voice, the Maharishi might have stepped straight out of John’s Quarry Bank cartoon book. What he preached that day at the Hilton to the caftaned and beaded Beatles was much the same Buddhist wisdom they had been absorbing and regurgitating since “Tomorrow Never Knows.” But this was mysticism in a tabloid form, instantly appealing to young earthly gods for whom real self-denial was unthinkable and whose powers of concentration on anything outside music were virtually nonexistent. The Maharishi’s route to spiritual regeneration involved no special training, no memorizing of complex prayers or incantations, and next to no personal inconvenience. To attain the state of inner joy and repose he described—to rise above mundane pressures and anxieties to a state of “pure awareness”—it was necessary to meditate for only half an hour each day.

  Despite hundreds of trips, LSD had never quite lived up to John’s expectations as a relief from the toils of everyday superstardom. Nonetheless, he still clung to his belief in a single “secret” or “answer” that would simultaneously explain the universe and put him at ease inside his own skin. And suddenly on this random afternoon in Park Lane, a comical little Indian yogi seemed to offer it. Quarry Bank classmates of yore would hardly have known the respectful floral-shirted pupil, seated as close to his teacher as possible and raptly drinking in every word.

  The other Beatles—who all, to some extent, shared John’s malady—were equally captivated by the Maharishi’s promise of bliss without effort. After this one short encounter, in true William and the Outlaws style, all four signed up to the Spiritual Regeneration movement, which obligated its members to tithe one week’s wages and act as transcendental meditation teachers and proselytizers. They further agreed to study at the Maharishi’s ashram, or retreat, in the Himalayas and, as an introduction, to join his ten-day Spiritual Guides course, due to begin that very weekend at a teacher-training college in Bangor. Next day, they traveled to north Wales in the holy man’s retinue, accompanied by Pattie, Jane Asher, Maureen Starkey, Mick Jagger, and Marianne Faithfull. In Beatle terms, it was an act of almost Buddhist asceticism to exchange their usual black-windowed limousines for an ordinary, dingy British Rail train from Paddington; as John remarked, it felt “like going somewhere without your trousers.” Cynthia Lennon had also been asked along but, in the melee of press and fans, was left behind in tears on the platform. Far from feeling threatened by the new guru, Brian had wished them well—indeed, had promised to try to join them later in the course.

  For one Beatle, at least, the moment of numbing shock from a clear blue sky was all too horribly familiar. It had already happened three times to John—when his Uncle George suffered a fatal hemorrhage on the stairs at Mendips, when his mother had stepped in front of a speeding car in Menlove Avenue, and when Stu Sutcliffe’s brain had seemed to detonate in Hamburg. As with those previous losses of incalculably important people, his initial reaction, he admitted, was not weeping but laughter, “a sort of hysterical tee-hee-hee, I’m glad it’s not me….” And once again, grief and disbelief were tempered by something like reproach that he should be thus abandoned yet again. “I’ve had a lot of people die on me,” he said in one interview, as if their deaths had been almost a dereliction of duty.

  Fortuitously, the Maharishi was on hand to soften the raw anguish with comforting Eastern homilies about the pettiness of earthly existence and the liberating power of death. John received this counseling eagerly, later passing it on to the media with a fervor that left no doubt about his absolute conversion. “…Meditation gives you confidence enough to withstand something like this, even after the short amount we’ve had,” he told reporters. “You don’t get upset when a young kid becomes a teenager or a teenager becomes an adult or when an adult gets old. Well, Brian is just passing into the next phase. His spirit is still around and always will be.”

  After returning from Bangor, all four Beatles went together to Brian’s house in Chapel Street, Belgravia, to offer condolences to his mother, who recently had also lost her husband of thirty-four years. “Come to India with us and meditate,” John, not very realistically, suggested. Glad of any diversion, Queenie Epstein asked what meditation involved.

  “Well, you just think of something,” John said. “Like a carrot…” Mrs. Epstein could not help smiling. “When I think of a carrot, I think of tomorrow’s lunch,” she replied.

  The four did not attend Brian’s funeral for fear of the media orgy it would provoke. Afterward, they had a meeting with Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and Brian’s closest lieutenant, Peter Brown, to discuss where they went from here. Brown remembers how, stricken by the loss of his best friend as well as employer, he found it hard to sit around and talk cold-blooded business strategy. “After a few minutes, John came to me and put his arms around me and asked in the gentlest of voices if I was all right. He knew that the two people most emotionally affected by Brian’s death were him and me, and only he understood how totally devastated I was by Brian’s death because he felt the same way, too.” John’s special bond with Brian, says Brown, came from “sharing and seeing in each other complicated personalities which were often unhappy and frequently frustrated. They, perhaps as no others, understood each other.”

  There was no obvious candidate to take Brian’s place, at least where the Beatles were concerned, which was all that interested the world’s media. Robert Stigwood, his recently acquired partner in NEMS, initially looked like his heir apparent, but was roundly rejected by all four Beatles and left the company with a sizable chunk of its talent, including the Bee Gees, soon afterward. The helm at NEMS was taken over by Brian’s younger brother, Clive, a decent, well-meaning man, but devoid of Brian’s imagination and flair. Brown, Aspinall, Alistair Taylor, and the other key figures in Brian’s original Liverpool team were all loyal, dedicated, and practiced at Beatle maintenance, but none felt qualified to step into
his shoes. For the first time since Brian had walked into that Cavern club lunchtime session in 1961, the Beatles were on their own.

  “It’s up to us now, to sort out the way we and Brian wanted things to go,” John said with apparent self-assurance. “He gave us the strength to do what we did, and the same urge is still alive. We have no idea of whether we’ll get a new manager. We’ve always been in control of what we’re doing and we’ll have to do what we have to now….”

  Years later, he would admit: “I knew we were in trouble then. I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve fuckin’ had it now.’”

  The loss of this nearest to a father figure in John’s life had the effect of turning his thoughts back to his real father. Six days after Brian’s death, perhaps from a sense that life was too short to bear grudges, he wrote to Freddie Lennon, suggesting they should meet and promising to get in touch again “before a month has passed.” At a loss for a suitable mode of address, he began with every one he could think of, even the Latin tag his educated aunts had taught him as a toddler: “Dear Alf Fred Dad Pater whatever…” The note ended with a plea not to talk to the press. (“I don’t want Mimi cracking up!”) On the back of the envelope, he scribbled a half-playful, half-embarrassed “Guess who.”

  It had been eighteen months since Freddie’s dip into the world of celebrity and his last, acrimonious meeting with John. He had made no money from his short career as a pop singer and only very little from selling his story to the newspapers. When Fleet Street lost interest in him, he had returned to his old life as an itinerant hotel worker, resigned to having no further contact with the son he had so mortally offended and to living among dirty pots and scummy water for the rest of his days.

  But at the age of fifty-four, after decades without a female of any significance in his life, an astounding thing had happened to Freddie. Christmas of 1966 found him employed on his accustomed bottom rung at a hotel named the Toby Jug in Tolworth, Surrey. Here he met an eighteen-year-old Exeter University student named Pauline Jones, who had a vacation job in the hotel kitchen. His recent disappointments had not quenched Freddie’s ebullient humor or his habit of singing lustily as he worked. Thanks to his recent exposure to pop culture, moreover, he now kitchen-portered in an eye-catching getup of red trousers, a yellow T-shirt, and a leather waistcoat.

  It was never a question of guileful older man hypnotizing impressionable teenager; for all his other foibles, Freddie was no lecher and, to begin with, could neither understand nor believe his appeal to an intelligent and pretty young woman thirty-four years his junior. Only after long confusion and misgivings did he come round to Pauline’s view that the Grand Canyon of an age gap between them did not matter. They began a romance initially consisting of long talks, with the occasional chaste kiss, in the Toby Jug’s kitchen between meal services. Underlining that innocence, Freddie nicknamed Pauline “Polly” after his mother, the redoubtable Grandma Lennon whom John had visited so seldom at her spotless home in Copperfield Street, Toxteth.

  The odds against any more serious relationship at first seemed insuperable. Pauline’s widowed mother, understandably, was horrified to discover what was going on, and forbade her to see Freddie again. She returned to her studies in Exeter, but at term’s end rushed back to the Toby Jug, where Freddie went down on one knee and proposed to her in the kitchen. Neither of them, however, dared take it seriously. When Pauline went back to Exeter, Freddie followed, hoping to find scullion’s work on the university campus. He was unsuccessful, and ended up sleeping rough, first in a college chapel, then in an empty train in a railway siding.

  As a last attempt to please her mother and follow convention, Pauline took a job as a children’s tutor in Paris; Freddie, meanwhile, drifted back to Surrey, finding work again at the Greyhound pub in Hampton, just a couple of miles from Weybridge. Pauline’s tutoring post did not work out, and, lonely and confused, she went into a Parisian church to pray for divine guidance. As she knelt there, a voice seemed to whisper the age-old proverb amor vincit omnia: love conquers all. With all her money gone, she threw herself on the mercy of the British Consulate, which subsidized her passage back to Britain, and Freddie.

  Throughout all these rootless years, Charlie Lennon, Freddie’s younger brother, had never wavered as his ally and defender. As an eyewitness of Julia’s misadventures—he had helped track down the Welsh artilleryman who made her pregnant—Charlie was outraged by the press stories about Freddie’s alleged desertion of her and six-year-old John. The last straw was reading of Freddie’s visit to Kenwood in 1966, which had ended with John slamming the door in his face. Charlie therefore sat down and wrote a long letter to the nephew he had not seen in more than twenty years, and who probably would not even recognize him now if they were to meet. In it he explained that Freddie’s “desertion” had simply been that of a merchant sailor in wartime (which it had, even if magnified by bad judgment and accident-proneness) and that Julia had been the one to stray, first with the Welsh gunner, Taffy Williams, then with Bobby Dykins.

  Amazingly enough, Charlie’s letter found its way to John, and was couched in terms convincing enough to make him question the version of events his Aunt Mimi had drummed into him since toddlerhood. Soon afterward, Brian Epstein died and, with atypical good timing, Freddie himself sent John a short, sincere note of sympathy. The result was the half-embarrassed, half-hopeful letter addressed to “Dear Dad, Alf, Fred, Pater, whatever…”

  About a month later, Freddie received written instructions from Brian Epstein’s office to be outside the Post Office in Kingston-on-Thames at a certain date and time. There he was met by John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, who handed him an envelope full of money, then put him into the back of the psychedelic Rolls and drove him to Kenwood.

  John did not return home from the recording studio until late that night, but from the outset it was clear that his attitude to Freddie had totally changed. He enfolded him in one of the hugs that now came so easily, calling him Dad rather than Alf, Fred, Pater, or “whatever,” and saying they must both put the past behind them. Furthermore, in his abrupt way, he had decided this newly dubbed Dad must join the family circle forthwith. A gobsmacked Freddie was told he would spend that night in the guest room, then tomorrow the Rolls would collect his possessions from the Greyhound, and he would move in permanently.

  So Freddie took up residence at Kenwood, occupying the former servants’ flat at the top of the house, where John and Cynthia had camped out during its overlong refurbishment. If he had thought that living with John meant spending more time with John, however, he was soon disillusioned. For the most part, he found himself playing his new role of paterfamilias to an audience comprising only Cyn and his grandson, Julian—who, it transpired, had rather liked his ill-fated single, “That’s My Life.” Father and son did manage one heart-to-heart, in which Freddie reiterated that he had not wanted to walk out of John’s life that day in 1946, and at long last felt himself believed. He felt secure enough even to chide John for having accepted an MBE, which, to an old Liverpool leftie like himself, signified kowtowing unforgivably to the Establishment.

  Cushy as his new billet was, Freddie found himself missing the bustle, variety and, above all, companionship of bar and kitchen work. With Julian at school and Cynthia pursuing an increasingly independent social life, he found himself alone for long periods—to such a gregarious, exhibitionistic soul, a refined form of torture. Les, the chauffeur, and Dot Jarlett, the housekeeper, both regarded him with unconcealed disdain. He could not drive and didn’t like to ask Les or Dot to run him anywhere in one of the expensive cars on hand. When he tried walking to the nearest pub, a mile away, he got lost among the estate’s private roads and driveways, and attracted suspicious stares from John’s neighbors. As he would later recall, it began to feel as if John were keeping him shut away “like a mad relative in the attic.”

  An unlikely ally m
aterialized in Cynthia’s mother, Lilian Powell, who had remained a regular visitor to Kenwood despite John’s pointed provision of quarters for her elsewhere. Finding Freddie moping dejectedly around the house one day, Mrs. Powell declared in her forthright way that he looked “like a hen in a coop,” and should ask John to set him up in a place of his own where he could enjoy some independence. John proved amenable, and Freddie was provided with a flat in nearby Kew, plus a television set, some sheets and blankets, and £10 per week, paid via the Beatles’ accountants and calculated as the equivalent of his earnings as a kitchen porter. Only after leaving Kenwood and moving into his new home did he hear from a third party that John had been upset by his decision to leave.

  The revelation that Freddie had a nineteen-year-old girlfriend, whom he was apparently set on marrying, caused John none of the shock and furious disapproval it was creating elsewhere. On the contrary, he was hugely tickled by his father’s late-flowering romance and intrigued that it seemed as much a surprise to Freddie as everyone else. Since returning from Paris, Pauline Jones was back living with her mother, under strict orders to stay away from Freddie but sneaking off to him whenever she could. Curious to meet someone who could fall for a penniless, fifty-four-year-old washer-up, John invited her to spend a weekend at Kenwood, offering her the attic quarters just vacated by Freddie.

  For most nineteen-year-olds in this era, staying at John Lennon’s house would have been a prize beyond the dreams of Boyfriend or Mirabelle magazine. Pauline, however, was resolutely unawed. Her chief impression of John was his “atrocious” table manners, though on the plus side, he seemed to accept the validity of her feelings for his father and to see no reason why they should not marry if that was what they both truly wanted. Pauline’s grown-up air so impressed Cynthia that during the weekend she offered her a job as nanny to five-year-old Julian. John was initially dubious, but warmed to the idea when Cyn pointed out that they also needed someone to deal with the incessant telephone calls and the piles of fan mail that silted up the house. So, while Freddie remained in his new quarters at Kew, Pauline took over Kenwood’s servants’ flat.