John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The opening lines (“I am he / As you are he / As you are me…”) seem so quintessentially Lewis Carroll that one checks the dictionary of quotations to see if they figure alongside “Will you walk a little faster…,” “Tweedledum and Tweedledee…,” and “You are old, Father William…” Carroll is there, too, in the juxtaposition of “policemen” with “pigs” and “flying.” (One of the Walrus’s philosophical musings is “whether pigs have wings.”) A Carroll-saturated childhood is there, too, in the varying riff from “Three Blind Mice” (“see how they run”…“see how they fly”); in the memory of 1950s school food and the immemorial playground chant of everything disgusting (“Yellow-matter custard / dripping from a dead dog’s eye.”) John’s own current lifestyle is there, too, drenched in the same contempt as everything else, from “sitting in an English garden” to “singing Hare Krishna” and even “Lucy in the sky”: no longer a riverbank goddess but an inciter of urban mayhem.

  The forces of censorship are challenged with “stupid bloody Tuesday,” “pornographic priestess,” and (God save us) “you let your knickers down.” The “expert texperts,” agog for hidden meaning, get “sitting on a cornflake,” “corporation T-shirt,” “crabalocker fish-wife,” “elementary penguin,” and “semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower,” with a recurrent lapse into pure baby-talk (“Goo-goo G’Joob”) lest they be in any doubt that “the joker laughs at you.” Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the other insistent refrain through this aria of fury and derision is “I’m crying.”

  George Martin provided a wonderful score of sawing, grinding, bottom-register cellos, like sarcasm made melody, in which further insults, irony, and smut were hidden below the waterline. The Mike Sammes Singers, radio’s coziest middle-of-the-road vocal group, were hired for the play-out chorus of “Oompah-oompah, stick it up your jumper!” and “Everybody’s got one!” The multilayered sound effects even included a snatch of Shakespeare’s King Lear lifted from a BBC Third Programme performance starring Sir John Gielgud (the scene where Oswald is fatally stabbed and cries, “Oh, untimely death!”).

  It was clearly a song far beyond the powers of any four-piece rock group, so that is how the Beatles perform it in Magical Mystery Tour—first in their familiar stage formation, with flower-power shirts and beads replacing round-collar mohair suits; then cavorting in walrus costumes of the crudest pantomime variety. John himself ends up with his head bound in white linen like the denizen of some eighteenth-century Bedlam as his fellow inmates dance the conga behind him, linked together by what looks like an outsize surgical bandage. Pop video would never get wilder or weirder than this.

  The Beatles’ 1967 Christmas single had Paul’s cheerily unverbal “Hello Goodbye” for an A-side with “I Am the Walrus” relegated to the flip. The BBC instantly banned the song from radio play, citing the “knickers” reference from the wide choice available, but still went ahead with prime-time transmission of the film as planned. It had been shot in color, but at this time the overwhelming majority of UK television viewers still received only black and white. The effect was thus of a home movie, with all the self-indulgence as well as ineptitude that implies. Its mistakes seemed to loom larger than CinemaScope while the good things vanished into murky gray haze. During the psychedelic “Clouds” scene, for instance—one of the few well-thought-out and effective blends of magic with the everyday—the nation’s screens seemed to go completely blank.

  By long tradition, there is no hard news in Britain over the Christmas holiday; the papers therefore fell on Magical Mystery Tour like starving wolves, and word of the Beatles’ first flop beamed across a surprised and deeply offended world. The accompanying album reflected no such disappointment, however, selling a million copies in America and five hundred thousand in Britain.

  As 1968 dawned on this sour, recriminatory note, it was Freddie Lennon’s domestic situation rather than his son’s that stubbornly continued to hold center stage. Right after Christmas, momentarily dismayed by the prospect of becoming Freddie’s wife, not to mention acquiring a Beatle as a stepson, Pauline Jones returned home to her mother and made a conscientious effort to live the life expected of a nineteen-year-old. But her feelings for Freddie proved irresistible. At the end of January, she moved into his flat in Kew and soon afterward became pregnant. To keep this news out of the media as long as possible, John agreed to provide Freddie with new accommodation in a locale unknown to any Fleet Street newshound. He and Pauline were therefore resettled in a one-bedroom flat in Brighton, fifty miles to the south.

  Yoko, meanwhile, had more or less decided to continue her career in Paris. Yet she found her thoughts continually turning back to John, his clumsy seduction attempt, and her dismissive response. “I kept thinking, not ‘I really fucked up’ because I didn’t know the word ‘fuck,’ but ‘I really messed up.’ Because, always being in the public eye, he couldn’t have done it any other way, we couldn’t have had a regular date. So I realised I must be falling in love with this guy.”

  Among the admirers her work attracted in Paris was Ornette Coleman, the great American saxophonist and exponent of classically influenced “free jazz.” It happened that Coleman was about to visit London to appear at the Royal Albert Hall, and he suggested that Yoko should join him onstage there. So she returned to London, resolved not to say no if John asked a second time, however he might ask it. When she tried to open the front door of her flat at Hanover Gate Mansions, it was blocked by a deluge of letters on the hall mat. All of them were from John, who had never realized she was out of the country. The single postcard she’d sent him had obviously not penetrated the protective screen. “I said to him later, ‘When you wrote me all those letters, weren’t you worried I’d run to a newspaper or something? You’re a married man.’ He said, ‘I used to write long letters like that to Stu Sutcliffe.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I’m a replacement for Stu, am I? He was a guy and I’m a woman….’ I thought that was a little bit strange.”

  In February, the Beatles finally kept their six-month-old promise to study transcendental meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in India. The emergence of a new object of worship in John’s life during that time had not dimmed his enthusiasm for the Maharishi and determination to make the group standard-bearers for TM. “This is how we plan to use our power now—they’ve always called us leaders of youth, and we believe that this is a good way to give a lead,” he said. “The whole world will know what we mean, and all the people who are worried about youth and drugs and all that scene—all those people with the short back and sides—they can all come along and dig it, too.”

  True to his word, he took everyone he could round up to meet the Maharishi, including his actor friend and playwriting partner, Victor Spinetti. To Spinetti’s surprise, the “giggling guru” lampooned by Fleet Street proved insightful, even witty. “A woman in the audience stood up and asked, ‘Tell me, your Highness, how do you teach children the process of Transcendental Meditation?’ ‘My dear lady,’ the Maharishi said, ‘They invented it.’”

  Since the previous August, many other pop and show-business figures had followed the Beatles into the Maharishi’s flock. As a result, they were to lead a virtual celebrity package-tour out to India, also including the folksinger Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and the young American film actress Mia Farrow (fresh from shooting the scary Rosemary’s Baby with Roman Polanski in a strange old Manhattan apartment building named the Dakota). Since the pilgrimage included wives and girlfriends, John had no choice but to take Cynthia. She had, in fact, embraced the Maharishi’s teachings as wholeheartedly as had Pattie Harrison, viewing them as a means to get John off drugs and restore some peace and stability to their marriage. What she did not know was that John had also invited Yoko to join the party under the guise of a celebrity fellow-traveler. Yoko was game enough, and even attended a preliminary briefing in London. But when John raised the idea with the others, he met such resistance that he lost his nerve and had to tell her
he’d been unable to swing it.

  He, George, and their wives flew to Delhi on February 15, followed by Ringo, Maureen, Paul, and Jane Asher four days later. In their absence, the Beatles’ nonmeditative public had been provided with a new single, “Lady Madonna”—an oddly Catholic note to strike at such a moment—written by Paul and borrowing the “See how they run” motif from “I Am the Walrus.” But where John had used it to evoke blind-mice panic, Paul was simply referring to a sluttish earth mother’s laddered tights.

  Rishikesh is situated two hundred miles north of Delhi on the banks of the River Ganges, looking toward the snow-flecked Himalayas. A little apart from the town stood the ashram where the Beatles were scheduled to spend three months. John later remembered it as “a sort of recluse holiday camp…. It was like being up a mountain, but it was in the foothills hanging over the Ganges, with baboons stealing your breakfast and everybody flowing round in robes…. It was a nice scene. Nice and secure, and everyone was always smiling.” Living conditions, though simple, were far from Spartan: the students lived in substantial stone bungalows equipped with hot water and Western plumbing, and the all-vegetarian food—the best kind in any part of India—was appetizing and plentiful. Nor was their guru too insistent that they led lives of absolute purity. In addition to the squads of servants with which India provides every foreign visitor, they were allowed their own personal retinue. Roadie Mal Evans lived with them at the ashram, his main job buying and cooking eggs for Ringo, whose delicate stomach could not stand spicy food. A constant stream of telephone calls and cables kept them in touch with their parallel existence as heads of the ever-growing and diversifying Apple organization. Neil Aspinall flew out and spent a week with them while another trusted aide, Tony Bramwell, was based in Delhi to receive and forward letters from home, the week’s music-trade papers (for news of “Lady Madonna”), and any significant new record releases by their rivals. Even “behind the wire,” as they soon learned, a handful of two-rupee notes bought extra home comforts, from chocolate bars and camera film to booze and hash.

  For all the Beatles, it was an enforced slowdown from the lunatic pace that had not let up since their departure from Liverpool to Hamburg seven years earlier. Day after day, there was literally nothing to do but sit and think. At first, the effect on John was anything but tranquilizing. No matter how he tried to make his mind a blank, ideas for lyrics and chord changes kept scribbling themselves across it. “I couldn’t sleep and I was hallucinating like crazy—having dreams where you could smell,” he would remember. “The funny thing about the camp was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth. In ‘Yer Blues,’ when I wrote ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I wasn’t kidding. That’s how I felt…up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal.”

  The songs never stopped coming—some of his very best, so he later thought—but their misery quotient dropped sharply as the gentle, reassuring daily routine and the gorgeous weather of northern India’s winter began to take effect. The former hypercritical group leader became content to be just one of a crowd, walking to and from meals and seminars along dappled paths or sitting and strumming guitars with Paul and George in the balmy sunshine. There was even mind-space to think about his fellow students and their own problems in adjusting from the outer to the inner world. Mia Farrow’s young sister, Prudence, for example, became so obsessed with meditating that she refused to emerge from her bungalow at all for several days. It was John who eventually coaxed her forth by writing her a song, “Dear Prudence,” the most charming of entreaties to come out and play, which he and Paul then sang together under her window.

  Amid the droning mantras, orange garlands, and tinkly bells, he remained irrepressibly John. If any long-distance press lens managed to get him in shot, he would obligingly wave, pull a grotesque face, or do a little dance. At his instigation, the four Beatles held a daily contest to see who could meditate longest. Even his reverence for his spiritual teacher could occasionally slip. Leaving the Maharishi’s presence one day, he patted his head, like a whiskery domestic pet, and said, “There’s a good little guru.”

  A young Canadian backpacker named Paul Salzman, to his astonishment, became part of the Beatles’ circle and was allowed to take color photographs of them, which the press outside the gate would have killed for. These show a white-clad John with several days’ growth of beard, invariably looking happy and relaxed. In many he is holding hands with Cynthia, whose Indian clothes and simpler hairstyle give her a new beauty and serenity. To begin with, they shared a bungalow equipped with a four-poster bed, but after a few days, John insisted on moving into separate quarters so that he could better concentrate on his meditation. Even so, Cyn felt convinced their marriage was entering a new phase of companionship and mutual tolerance.

  All the time, he was receiving postcards from Yoko, which his guardians now had strict orders not to deflect. They were sent to Tony Bramwell in Delhi, who forwarded them to Rishikesh in plain brown envelopes so that Cynthia would suspect nothing. Often they consisted of a single thought, in Yoko’s tiny, arty script: “Watch for me—I’m a cloud in the sky.” John’s Rishikesh songs in lighter vein included one called “India, India,” anomalously written as a calypso, in which he talked of “the girl I left behind me.” During a heart-to-heart with Paul Salzman, the young Canadian mentioned having recently been dumped by a long-standing girlfriend. John’s response indicated just how intently he was watching for that cloud. “Love can be tough,” he said. “But then you get another chance, don’t you?”

  What kept him in Rishikesh for these eons beyond his normal attention span was not meditation or beauty or peace or the glorious weather. From the Maharishi, he hoped finally to receive the “secret” or “answer,” that magic key to understanding both the universe and his own place in it that acid had not provided. It annoyed him that others among the Maharishi’s flock already seemed to have been granted this revelation, yet refused to share it. Pattie Harrison, for instance, returned from an early TM meeting to report, “They give you a word, but I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” John had been the first to write, “Say the word and you’ll be free.” Now everyone seemed to be conspiring to hide it from him. “What sort of scene is this, if you keep secrets from your friends?” he asked Pattie, much offended.

  Yet time passed, and still the Maharishi uttered only vague, benign generalities. Finally John decided that if hanging on to his every word did not produce the spiritual jackpot, then guile would have to be employed instead. One day, a helicopter landed at the ashram, lent by one of TM’s wealthy Indian supporters to fly the Maharishi to Delhi for a meeting. The Beatles’ party were offered a quick joyride with their guru, which for space reasons must be limited to one person. John took it, as if by right. “I asked him later, ‘Why were you so keen to get up with the Maharishi?’” Paul would remember. “To tell you the truth,” John said, “I was hoping he might slip me the Answer.”

  Ringo abandoned the course after two weeks, unable to stomach the food, and returned to Britain with Maureen amid general goodwill from the others for having given it a whirl. Paul left with Jane and Neil Aspinall two weeks later, but intimated he might come back for more at a later stage. In his place came Magic Alex Mardas, reportedly with plans for a telecommunications system to beam the Maharishi’s message around the world in the tracks of “All You Need Is Love.”

  By the fifth week, John and George still showed no signs of flagging. John sent Ringo a postcard with a message for Dot, the Kenwood housekeeper, to have his videotape machine ready for his return, but gave no indication this might be sooner than scheduled. “We’ve got about two LPs worth of songs now,” he wrote Ringo. “So get yer drums out….”

  Despite their elevated spiritual state, the Rishikesh disciples were as prone as any small, self-contained community to rumor and gossip. Besides, under an unwritten but immutable law, the Maharishi’s ti
me as a Beatle fad was starting to run out. A story began circulating that, although purportedly a lifelong celibate, he had made sexual overtures to a young woman known to all the celebrity inner circle, a former nurse from California. Although famous Indian holy men would later be exposed as lechers—some on an epic scale—this was the only such accusation ever made against the Maharishi, nor was there ever a scrap of real evidence to support it.

  But John’s mood had now changed completely: he still had not received the Answer and was becoming increasingly preoccupied by that “cloud in the sky.” The obvious gusto with which the Maharishi organized constant photo ops made him feel his “good little guru” was a little too interested in celebrity and money. Those rumors of sexual impropriety were a perfect excuse to cut the visit short, especially when even George showed signs of going off the Maharishi and decided to leave for a trip through southern India.

  Without the usual retainers on hand to do their dirty work, the two had no choice but to lead a deputation to the Maharishi’s bungalow, where John bluntly announced their decision. “I said, ‘We’re leaving,’” he remembered. “[The Maharishi] said, ‘Why?’ [I said], ‘Well, if you’re so cosmic, you should know why.’ Because all his right-hand men were always intimating that he did miracles…. He said, ‘I don’t know why, you must tell me.’ And I just kept saying, ‘You ought to know.’ And he gave me a look like ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard.’”