John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  While shooting the Bottoms film, Yoko was interviewed by Hunter Davies, the Beatles’ authorized biographer. It made a perfect item for Davies’s tongue-in-cheek Atticus column in the Sunday Times—a weird Japanese woman seeking to elevate the fundamental feature of British low humor into high art. The headline was “Oh No, Ono,” and an accompanying photograph brought out all the contrast between Yoko’s funeral-black clothes and unsmiling face and the earthy eroticism of her subject matter.

  Yoko knew about the Beatles, of course, but, fixated on her own art as she was, took no interest in their music and had no idea of John’s creative powers. To her at the outset, he was just “an attractive guy” whose vast celebrity came from a world alien to her and who, ethnically, culturally, temperamentally, above all aesthetically, seemed her total opposite. Then one day in a London bookshop she was checking the O section for her poetry collection, Grapefruit, and in the adjacent L section found John Lennon: In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Flipping through the pages, she noticed a random sentence, “I sat belonely” and then a picture of an ugly woman whose naked body was covered with flies. As it happened, a similar image haunted Yoko’s mind as a possible film idea. “The book showed me John’s soul,” she would later write. “A witty, funny and relentlessly romantic spirit with a taste for the grotesque.”

  In John’s case, the revelation had come much sooner. From his earliest adolescence, an equivalent fantasy to sex-kitten Brigitte Bardot had been “a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheekboned artist.” Originally his ideal had been the deep-voiced, guitar-playing Juliette Greco, reputed descendant of the painter El Greco; then, on a Beatles-tour stopover in India, the vision changed to that of “a dark-eyed Oriental.”

  Most fascinatingly of all, Yoko was a “real” artist, the first with whom John had had any serious dealings since Stu Sutcliffe’s death. In her tiny frame were all the audacity and imperviousness to criticism and mockery that Stu had possessed—and that he himself so much longed to. He would later describe her as “the only woman I’d ever met who was my equal in every way imaginable. My better actually. Although I’d had numerous interesting affairs in my previous incarnation, I’d never met anyone worth breaking up a happily married state of boredom for. Escape, at last! Someone to leave home for. Somewhere to go. I’d waited an eternity. Since I was extraordinarily shy (especially around beautiful women) my daydreams necessitated that she be aggressive enough to save me i.e., ‘take me away from all this.’”

  In that time before cell phones, e-mails, texting, and faxes, the only way they could surreptitiously keep in touch was by mail. When Yoko organized a thirteen-day dance festival that was to take place entirely “in the mind,” she sent John the same enigmatic instructions that its other participants received. “Cards kept coming through the door, saying ‘Breathe’ or ‘Dance’ or ‘Watch the lights until dawn,’” he remembered, “and they’d upset me or make me happy, depending how I felt.”

  One morning, Yoko awoke at her flat in Hanover Gate Mansions to find that Cox had not returned home the previous night. The melancholy sight of their half-slept-in double bed inspired her to create what would later become known as an installation—an entire room consisting of half a bed, half a table, half a chair, half a cup, half a saucer, etc. This went on display at the tiny Lisson Gallery in North London on October 11, entitled The Half a Wind Show. John provided financial backing for the project, although Yoko, atypically, was at first reluctant to seek his sponsorship. “I realised he was a sensitive artist,” she says. “I felt bad about hitting on him for money, so I said ‘Why don’t you put something in, too?’” John suggested adding bottles in which the missing other halves of the exhibits were allegedly corked up. “I thought that was great,” Yoko says. “That’s when I knew we were totally on the same wavelength.”

  His name was to have appeared on the poster alongside hers, but at the last minute he was overcome by fears of the gossip and press speculation this might unleash. Instead, in tune with the theme of missing other halves, the show was credited to “Yoko and Me.” To prevent the slightest whisper reaching his official other half, John did not even view it in situ.

  Soon afterward, he finally plucked up courage to take their relationship to a different level. But the clumsy way he did so almost ended it for good. As Yoko recalls, she was invited to Abbey Road Studios during a Beatles recording session—at this point, a disinterested onlooker in the space reserved for privileged guests. When John joined her, he remarked that she looked tired and asked if she’d like to “lie down.” One of the Beatles’ entourage then drove the two of them to a nearby flat and, without preamble, began folding out a sofa into a bed. It was clearly established procedure for John’s conquests, and the fastidious Yoko was deeply offended. “Maybe he thought we were two adults, we didn’t have to pretend. But it seemed so crude; I rejected it. Probably I was a snob—something I got from my upbringing. The minute a guy came on to me in a way I didn’t like, I would just shut the door on him.”

  A few days later, she was invited to show her Bottoms film at an arts festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. Thinking she had blown the relationship with John, she decided to go without even mentioning it to him. After the Knokke festival, she traveled to Paris to explore possibilities of showing her work there. “I thought I would never go back to London.”

  There was still room in John’s mind for other new commitments and partnerships. That autumn, still unaware that Yoko had left Britain, he began working with the actor Victor Spinetti on a stage adaptation of John Lennon: In His Own Write. An ebullient Welsh-Italian, Spinetti had contributed a memorable cameo to A Hard Day’s Night, as the paranoid TV producer, and was popular with all the Beatles for his abounding energy and good humor. “Don’t waste it on Vic,” John would tell anyone who offered Spinetti a joint. “He’s permanently stoned on fuckin’ life.”

  With Vic, John made none of the homophobic cracks he used to with poor Brian; on the contrary, he seemed to find the actor’s cozy campness reassuring and, when introduced to Spinetti’s partner, Graham, was charm personified. “He knew all the grace-notes,” recalls Spinetti in an echo of Derek Taylor. “When he met Graham, he was wearing dark glasses. Graham said, ‘I bet you’ve got the most beautiful eyes, but it’s impossible to see them under those fucking glasses.’ John carefully took them off, then leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.”

  John had offered Spinetti the role of courier on the Magical Mystery Tour bus, candidly admitting over the telephone that “there’s no fookin’ script.” Spinetti had prior work commitments when the journey was to take place, but agreed to film a separate vignette as a nonsense-spouting army sergeant major, a character he’d originally played in Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! “PS, got any uppers?’ were John’s parting words on the phone.

  Shortly afterward, Spinetti received another, more surprising Lennon-related call. It was from Kenneth Tynan, formerly the Observer’s brilliant drama critic, the first man ever to say the word fuck on British television, and now dramaturge, or literary manager, for the newly constituted National Theatre. The National planned to stage an adaptation of John Lennon: In His Own Write at its then home, the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo Road. Would Spinetti care to direct it?

  The adaptation was by a respected black American dramatist, Adrienne Kennedy, and had initially been intended for Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre. When problems developed there, Tynan had snapped the play up for the adventurous, often controversial program that he and the National’s supremo, Laurence Olivier, were developing together. Olivier, Britain’s greatest twentieth-century actor, was enthusiastically behind the project and personally recommended Spinetti as its director. However, Kennedy’s script, drawn from both In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, simply turned John’s prose-squibs and poems into dialogue, as had already been done in a limited way on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s television show.

  Spine
tti decided to make it more directly autobiographical—“a story of personal growth”—and persuaded John to collaborate with him on writing a new version. They worked mainly at Spinetti’s flat in Manchester Street, just a stone’s throw from the soon-to-be Apple boutique in Baker Street. “John was wonderful to work with,” Spinetti says. “He was totally focused, no big-star airs and graces and, oh my God, so quick. He’d ad-lib something in a second and it would work beautifully.” Feeling a need to go “somewhere warm” as a relief from chilly, autumnal London, he spirited away his collaborator—and Cynthia, much to her surprise—for a flying visit to Morocco.

  The new treatment centered on a character named Me—the same half-coy entity as had figured on Yoko’s Half a Wind poster—who was discovered in a bedroom just like John’s boyhood one at Mendips. Me’s life then followed the same early milestones as John’s, from being “bored when I believe the Nasties were still booming us, led by Madolf Heatlump,” through school, cinemagoing, and tedious church sermons (quoting “St Alf, chapter 8, verse 5.”) Along the way came walk-on appearances by the great detective Shamrock Wolmbes, Bobby “who got a birthday hook,” and Deaf Ted, Danoota, and Me. Three years after original publication, there was still no objection to Deaf Ted, “cripples,” or lines like “Well, Mr Wabooba…may I call you Wog?”

  It was, in fact, a defining moment for British theatre. In a few months there was to be an end to the age-old official censorship, wielded by a bizarre Royal functionary called the Lord Chamberlain, which forbade any overt reference to sex onstage. In preparation for this great day, the subversive Tynan was assembling a revue to be entitled Oh! Calcutta! (a pun on the French Oh, quel cul tu as, “Oh, what an ass you’ve got”) in which every former sexual no-go area was to be visited. At one of Tynan’s famously starry parties, John happened to mention the boyhood group masturbation sessions when his schoolmates would stimulate each other by groaning names like “Brigitte Bardot,” and he would spoil the mood by calling out “Frank Sinatra!” Tynan instantly proposed he should write it as a sketch for Oh! Calcutta! with the provisional title “Liverpool Wank.” He even provided a written synopsis of sorts: “You know the idea, four fellows wanking—giving each other images—it should be ad-libbed anyway—they should even really wank, which would be great.”

  The Lennon-Spinetti script, entitled Scene Three, Act One, was accepted by the National Theatre and quickly went into rehearsal with Ronald Pickup as Me, a fifteen-person cast, and a sound tape specially recorded by George Martin at Abbey Road. Its writing credit was shared with Adrienne Kennedy, who had originally developed the project, but when subsequently published (in hardcover) by Jonathan Cape, its overall title was The Lennon Play. It received a single Sunday-night performance at the Old Vic early in December, when the reception was so positive that Tynan and Olivier agreed to give it a longer run early the following year.

  The hour-long Magical Mystery Tour film had meanwhile been snapped up by BBC television and was to receive its world premiere on Boxing Day, December 26, in a prime-time evening slot guaranteeing a viewership rivaled only by the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast. In advance of this presumed triumphant follow-up to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles threw a fancy-dress ball at London’s brand-new Royal Lancaster Hotel. Harking back to the first fancy dress he’d ever worn, John went as a Teddy Boy in velvet-collared drape jacket, drainpipe trousers, and brothel-creeper shoes, his once Beatle-fluffy hair greased and swept back in a duck’s arse as it used to be in his teens. Cynthia went as an early Victorian lady in a crinolined ball gown, George Martin as the Duke of Edinburgh in a full-dress admiral’s uniform, and Pattie Harrison as an Eastern belly dancer in not very much at all.

  The occasion marked John’s first public appearance with his father—and also with the nineteen-year-old whom Freddie intended to make his stepmother. Freddie decided to go as a garbage collector, allowing John to incarnate the Lonnie Donegan song “My Old Man’s a Dustman.” Pauline went as a schoolgirl, in the tunic she’d worn for real only a couple of years previously. The tunic was with some clothes she had left behind at Kenwood and on the eve of the ball she came over from Freddie’s rent-free flat in Kew to pick it up. John happened to be at home and, to her surprise, was friendlier than at any time when she had been his employee and boarder. As they chatted in the kitchen, Pauline reiterated that she truly loved Freddie and was determined to marry him. John seemed to have no personal objection but warned of the consequences she and Freddie would have to face: the prurient stares, pointing fingers, and sniggers behind their backs. He could have been describing the very scenario that lay ahead for himself.

  For Cynthia, the fancy-dress ball was a night of knuckle-whitening humiliation. John had always made a thing of fancying Pattie Harrison, but tonight her diaphanous Eastern houri’s costume caused friendly joshing to harden into something more. He danced with Pattie time after time while Cynthia, in her Quality Street crinolines, sat neglected and miserable. This finally proved too much for her good friend Lulu, who was decked out as the child star Shirley Temple, complete with outsize lollipop. Onlookers were treated to the sight of superstar Teddy Boy receiving a spirited telling-off from ringletted Thirties moppet for being so mean to his wife.

  Afterward, John, Cyn, Freddie, and Pauline went on to a club with Lulu and Maurice Gibb, of the Bee Gees, whom Lulu was going out with; then the four were driven home together in the psychedelic Rolls. During the journey, John fell asleep; his head slipped down into Freddie’s lap and Freddie began stroking his hair. For a few minutes, it was as if the years, with their cargo of blame and guilt, had rolled away: Steward Alf and his “Little Pal” were once again as close as when they’d run away to Blackpool together, supposedly en route for New Zealand. Then the car stopped in Kew to let Freddie and Pauline out, and the spell was broken, never to be recaptured.

  21

  THERE’S A GOOD LITTLE GURU

  To tell you the truth, I was hoping he might slip me the Answer.

  Few films have ever received a more universally venomous initial reception than Magical Mystery Tour. Certainly it marked a watershed: before it, everything went right for the Beatles, creatively speaking; afterward, almost nothing did. From first to last it could be held up as a textbook example of how not to make a movie. But for modern audiences, who have grown up with pop video and the unstructured comedy style of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it is very far from the “blatant rubbish” that one outraged 1967 reviewer called it.

  The irony is that it should have been made as an antidote to Help! and A Hard Day’s Night, in which John had felt “like an extra”—for on the Magical Mystery Tour the Beatles are little more than that. The only one with lines to speak on the actual coach trip is Ringo, playing the nephew of the “fat lady,” Jessie Robbins. John is spasmodically visible among the other passengers, wearing a high-crowned black hat with two long feathers, which gives him somewhat the look of a Native American medicine man. The Beatles’ ensemble dialogue is limited to a studio-filmed sequence in which they appear as long-robed, conical-hatted wizards in a laboratory, looking down on the coach’s progress like deities from Olympus in a Ray Harryhausen B movie. John adds the homey touch of a coffee mug to his wizard’s outfit and speaks in a tone of surprising campness. He also provides a fragmentary voice-over commentary, a device that lends the story some cohesion and also suggests that, had he lived, his speaking voice might have become as beloved across the English-speaking world as his singing one.

  The oddest touch is the inclusion of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band’s three leading lights, Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes, and “Legs” Larry Smith, all giant-size extroverts, hogging limelight that seems to have been ceded to them without a murmur. The only real Lennon moment comes where the ill-matched lovers, Buster and Jessie, go to a restaurant. John is their waiter, with slicked-back hair and a small mustache, looking much as Freddie Lennon must have done in the first-class saloons of prewar cruise ships, as he dumps mounds
of spaghetti onto their plates with a shovel. The whole sequence had come to him in a dream—or a nightmare, perhaps—of ladling out flavorless stodge to an indifferent public (never mind turning into his father).

  But the film is essentially a vehicle for Beatles music, which certainly reaches Sgt. Pepper standard and several times goes a step higher. As a serial pop video, a tour through three rapidly emerging solo talents, it has all the magic which that effortful bus trip somehow missed. There is Paul singing “The Fool on the Hill,” an almost “Yesterday”-size future standard, on a Provençal mountainside, all big brown eyes and turned-up overcoat collar. There is George, seated cross-legged in incense-heavy twilight, intoning “Blue Jay Way” as if it is a new mantra from the Maharishi rather than a street in Hollywood. There are the four Beatles in identical white tailcoats descending a curved staircase painstakingly in step—as they would soon cease to be—for another McCartney vaudeville number, “Your Mother Should Know.” And, vindicating the whole enterprise on its own, there is John’s “I Am the Walrus.”

  Like “A Day in the Life,” this runner-up for the title of his masterpiece came from two unconnected and seemingly unconnectable sources. At Kenwood one day, the distant sound of a police-car siren stoked up his anger over the recent persecutions of good friends like Mick and Keith and the boys at International Times. On another occasion, Pete Shotton happened to mention that at their old school, Quarry Bank, senior English students were now made to dissect and analyze the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” just as they themselves once had analyzed the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley.

  The result was a string of random images, fulminating against the repressive forces of law and order, with a sideswipe at credulous souls who pored over his words as if they were Holy Writ. By the time he had finished, the lyric was almost a miniature Oh! Calcutta! in the number of taboos it sought to shatter. But the habit of role-playing was still a hard one to break. For his first anti-Establishment rant, John therefore chose an alter ego from his favorite poem in Lewis Carroll’s Alice oeuvre, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” “Later…I realised the Walrus was the bad guy in the story and the Carpenter was the good guy,” he would remember. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’ve picked the wrong guy.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it: I Am the Carpenter?”