John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  There seemed to be nothing that could distract his attention from Yoko, but, late one afternoon just before Apple’s move to Savile Row, something did. Yoko happened to be otherwise occupied, and John was at 75 Wigmore Street, discussing with Derek Taylor how to fill the next few hours, when a telephone call came through from the Mayfair Hotel. Brigitte Bardot was in town and would love to meet the Beatles or any individual one who might be available. John and Taylor each took a “sparkle” of acid, just enough to make the world shimmer hilariously, then went over to the Mayfair Hotel in John’s Rolls.

  But, as he had already found with Elvis, meeting an idol seldom lives up to the dream—or, in this case, wet dream. The Bardot of 1968 was no longer the bewitching “sex kitten” of ten years before. The ponytail had been replaced by an unkempt blonde mane, the dew-fresh face had coarsened, the once-mischievous eyes were thickly outlined in black. With her, even more disappointingly, were two male companions who took turns in acting as her translator.

  The encounter grew increasingly sticky, with John seated guru-style on the floor, dragging on endless Gitanes, while Derek Taylor and Bardot’s two minders struggled to keep the flow of pleasantries alive. Bardot proposed going out to dinner, but John declined to move, and he and Taylor were left alone in the suite. When Bardot’s party returned some hours later, they found their guests still there, rendered oblivious to passing time by the usual chemical means. Taylor was vaguely aware of John singing a song for Bardot, then soon afterward passed out on her bed. So all those group wanks at the sound of her name turned out to have been as exciting as it got.

  With the move to Savile Row came the first casualty in Apple’s commercial Garden of Eden. Seven months after its bravura launch and massive media send-off, the Apple boutique in Baker Street had conspicuously failed to become another Biba, Bus Stop, or I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. By July, losses had reached such a level that the only option (other than recruiting hated “men in suits” from the mainstream retail trade to halt the endemic shoplifting) was to close it. In the spirit of Apple’s “Western Communism,” it was decided to give away the entire stock. Derek Taylor counseled against such an ignominious end, but in vain. “I was running the office at the time,” John remembered. “Paul had called me up one day and said, ‘I’m going away. You take over.’ It was as stupid as that.”

  On the eve of the closeout, July 30, the Beatles and their partners and favored cronies went through the boutique helping themselves to the choicest items. “It was great…like robbing,” John said, even though he’d robbed nobody but himself. Next day, print and television greedily recorded the frantic public scrimmage for what was left, with flower children fighting fiercely over the same Buddhist tract on brotherly love and cabbies leaving their motors running while they gathered armfuls of embroidered cushions or tore kaftans from racks. It was left to Paul, that consummate PR man, to suggest that the Beatles had not so much lost a fortune as withdrawn in the nick of time from an activity far beneath them; they were, he said, “tired of being shopkeepers.”

  The boutique balls-up vanished from memory on August 11, when the first fruits of the Apple record label were simultaneously released. In addition to a new Beatles single, these comprised Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days,” produced by Paul; the Black Dyke Mills Band’s “Thingumybob,” written (for a TV series) by Paul; and Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea,” written and produced by George. The four disks came packaged together in a shiny black presentation box, emphasizing the Beatles’ kinship with their protégés, and the democratic all-inclusiveness of the target audience was made clear from the start. On release day, boxes were hand-delivered to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother at Clarence House, Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, at 10 Downing Street.

  At the time, it struck no one as odd, to say the least, that four musicians ranked as Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire should send their sovereign, not to mention her mother and sister and chief minister, a song entitled “Revolution.” This was not, however, the version of John’s song that he’d taken forty hours to record in June. Neither George Martin nor the other Beatles had been happy with that long, chaotic, Yoko-assisted performance, thinking its tempo too slow and the distortion on John’s lead guitar too extreme. In July, therefore, he had cut a new, shorter, and obviously more commercial version. On this one, his intro was a two-note electric scrawl, echoing a childhood radio favorite, Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance.” The six-minute playout of screams with Yoko disappeared, and the ambiguous final message crystallized into “Count me in.” But even in this form, Revolution was deemed fit only for the sliced-apple B-side of the Beatles first release on their own label, the whole-fruit A-side going to Paul’s “Hey Jude.”

  John had not only lost pole position on arguably the Beatles’ most important singles release since “Love Me Do”; he had lost it to a song about his private life, and one that—albeit very obliquely—criticized his behavior. For “Hey Jude” had started out as “Hey Jules,” Paul’s consoling message to the five-year-old son who had been left behind at Kenwood, apparently without a backward glance. Though the name had since changed to the more Hardyesque and gender-ambiguous “Jude” and the lyric evolved into a conventional love song, Paul’s original, good-hearted intention still colored every line: to comfort and reassure and cheer up Julian and, in however small a way, “make it better.”

  As John saw it, “Hey Jude” was all about his relationship with Yoko, and Paul’s feelings about being superseded as his creative other half. “‘Ah, it’s me,’ I said when Paul first played it,’ he would recall. “If you think about it, Yoko’s just come into the picture…. The words ‘go out and get her’…Subconsciously he was saying ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ But on a conscious level he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel inside him was saying ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.” Whatever its subtext, John recognized the song’s potential as a crowd-pleaser, even if its length of more than seven minutes (possibly in a competitive spirit with the ten minutes of “Revolution 1”) might be daunting to many radio deejays of that time. In its initial tryouts, one verse still had an unwritten line, which Paul filled in with “The movement you need is on your shoulder.” At John’s urging, the words stayed on the finished track.

  Two television appearances with David Frost in the space of a couple of weeks gave notice where his priorities now lay. On August 24, Frost was granted the first interview with Yoko and John together, on condition that it dealt with his new artistic consciousness, not his private life. When Frost announced them, the two loped onto the set hand in hand, in matching all-black outfits, like latter-day Quarry Bank truants. The encounter included a demonstration of Yoko’s Hammer a Nail In exhibit, with volunteers from the studio audience, and finally Frost himself, hammering their own nail into a board and describing the emotions they felt—in every case, less than overwhelming. There was also a clip from Smile, the filmed close-up of John’s barely moving face. “The thing is, there’s no such thing as sculpture or art,” he explained. “We’re all art, art is just a tag…. Sculpture is anything you care to name. This is sculpture, us sitting here, this is a happening, we are here, this is art.”

  In New Musical Express, the Alley Cat’s back-page column called his performance “boring”—the first time that word had ever been used of him. Even the Beatles’ official fan magazine reported dismay and disgruntlement among its readers. “I only wish John would stick to things he’s good at,” was a typical reaction.” I don’t mean just music because I think his writing is brilliant…. There’s no meaning to the things he’s doing with Yoko Ono. A film of someone smiling isn’t art. Nor can we appreciate knocking nails into a slab of wood. Well, I ask you, surely John is losing his touch if he really thinks we ought to be praising him for that!”

  Then on September 8, Frost’s program was used to lau
nch “Hey Jude” on its way to an eventual three-million sale. It was, in effect, the Beatles’ first live performance since August 1966, filmed in front of a three-hundred-strong audience with an introduction by Frost to make it seem like part of his regular show. “The world’s greatest tea-room orchestra,” as their host announced them, played sitting down, with Paul at an upright piano and John and George together on his left. John contributed almost nothing to the opening badinage with Frost, and barely seemed to be either singing or playing. From the emollient opening chords to the final, extended sing-along chorus, Paul buttonholed the camera with his shiny hair, red velvet coat, and commiserating brown eyes.

  If “Hey Jude” was a return to lovability for the Beatles, “Revolution” awoke the gladdest expectations in those whose hatred of the system did not include pop music and for whom John, Paul, George, and Ringo still ranked alongside Lenin and Mao. Young revolutionaries across two continents expected John to declare solidarity with them; instead, the message was “Count me out.” The song had barely gone on sale when the ugliest conflagration yet erupted in Chicago. Encouraged by the city’s corrupt mayor, Richard Daley, police went on the rampage, beating up demonstrators in full view of TV cameras, even turning their fury on innocent delegates to the Democratic Party convention. For apparently copping out when it came to the crunch, John was denounced as a “traitor” to the counterculture and, by implication, a tool of its deadliest foes. The militant soul singer Nina Simone recorded an answer to “Revolution,” urging him to “clean” his mind.

  September also brought publication of The Beatles, the authorized biography by Hunter Davies. During the book’s preparation, Brian Epstein had died, the Beatles had discovered and discarded the Maharishi, Apple had begun, and John had gone off with Yoko: in the whole realm of nonfiction there was no hotter topic, and Davies had it all to himself.

  For its time, the book seemed extraordinarily frank and open, especially about the Beatles’ childhoods and their early days in Hamburg. The lengthy interviews with each one were also unprecedentedly candid, John’s most of all, as he owned up to his failure at school and college and his belief that he was just “conning” the fans who regarded him as an oracle. However, the text had been thoroughly vetted in proof by the Beatles, their chief minders, and respective families. Brian’s homosexuality was not mentioned, beyond a sly reference to him as a “gay bachelor”—gay still generally meaning “lighthearted”—nor was there any hint of his fixation on John and John’s often brutal treatment of him. The book’s deadline meant that Yoko was absent from the narrative, which ended with John still at Kenwood, swapping apparently empathetic banter with Cynthia.

  Another thread in the continuing story which remained unpursued was that leading to Freddie Lennon and his pregnant twenty-year-old fiancée at their tiny flat in Brighton. Here, Freddie and Pauline Jones had hoped for the peace and seclusion to enjoy a relationship in its way as controversial as John and Yoko’s. Pauline’s widowed mother remained implacably opposed to the match, and determined to end it by any possible means. When maternal appeals, reproaches, and threats to Pauline proved useless, Mrs. Jones began legal proceedings to have her declared a ward of court, so making Freddie liable to criminal prosecution if the threatened marriage went ahead.

  The resultant stress affected Pauline so severely that she suffered a miscarriage, and on the day of the court hearing she was still too weak to attend. To the surprise of both sides, the judge refused Mrs. Jones’s application, ruling only that Pauline could not marry Freddie until she was twenty-one.

  Throughout all this, John remained one of their very few allies. After Pauline’s miscarriage—which happened while he was still nominally with Cynthia and Julian—he sent a sympathetic handwritten note from Kenwood, giving a new private telephone number but making no other reference to his own domestic situation. In a short time, Pauline became pregnant again. With the ban on their marriage still in force, she and Freddie decided to follow countless other star-crossed English lovers and elope to Scotland, beyond the jurisdiction of English courts. John not only knew about the plan in advance but paid their traveling expenses and sent a note wishing them good luck. They duly took a train to Edinburgh, where they married by civil ceremony on Pauline’s twentieth birthday. John continued to be generous, buying a house in Brighton to replace their rented flatlet and making over the deeds to Freddie.

  No Beatles fan awaited their authorized biography more eagerly than Freddie Lennon. After what he had told Hunter Davies a year previously, he was expecting the full story of John’s early childhood to be finally on record. Freddie did not hope to be painted as an ideal husband or father, but he expected credit, at least, for having tried to preserve his relationship with John’s mother, Julia, despite her twofold adultery. Above all, John would see enshrined in print that his father had not willingly abandoned him, but turned him over to Julia in what then seemed his best interests. Taken with the fact that by now John also had a forsaken son on his conscience, Freddie believed this would create new understanding between them.

  The book began by outlining each Beatle’s childhood in order of precedence, which meant its opening passage was devoted to “Fred” Lennon. A detailed account was given of Freddie’s education at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Hospital, his wooing of Julia, his career as a ship’s steward, and the wartime “lost weekend” that took him away from his family to wander around America and North Africa for eighteen months. But there was no mention of Julia’s having become pregnant by another man while Freddie was at sea, nor of her later extramarital relationship and two children with Bobby Dykins.

  John was later to call Davies’s book “a whitewash,” claiming that his Aunt Mimi had insisted “the truth bits about me mother and that” should be cut, and he had “copped out” and agreed. Mimi did indeed receive a set of proofs, to which she reacted so explosively that John wrote to Davies, asking him to go and see her and calm her down. (“Do yer duty, lad,” the note ended.) But in a postscript to later editions of the book, Davies wrote that what upset Mimi were references to schoolboy rebelliousness and swear words. To appease her, Davies inserted the not inaccurate statement that after she took John over from Julia, he had been “as happy as the day is long.”

  Not until 2006, with the publication of Davies’s memoir The Beatles, Football and Me, was a little more light shed, albeit unwittingly. The section on the biography contained a hitherto unrecorded background detail: that John had vetoed a passage “about a Welsh boyfriend of his mum’s.” This, surely, was none other than Taffy Williams, the soldier by whom Julia became pregnant and whose baby girl was given up for adoption despite Freddie’s offer to take her in. With the near-sacred memory of Julia that John cherished, he might well have felt squeamish about having the episode made public. Or perhaps he was simply doing Mimi’s bidding, or anticipating it. At all events, a story to his father’s indisputable credit remained untold.

  After five troubled months, work on the Beatles’ next album finally seemed to be nearing completion. As it had evolved, it was less the product of a band than of individual talents, still umbilically joined by name but frequently hostile and—perhaps even worse—apathetic toward what their colleagues were doing. During the strung-out recording process, different Beatles at various times were absent from the studio, sometimes even from the country—an unthinkable situation in the Sgt. Pepper or Revolver era. Previously, George Martin had been able to watch brilliance beget brilliance from a single control room; now he often found himself shuttling between John, Paul, and George, at work on separate tracks in three different studios.

  It had quickly become clear that having Yoko with him at Abbey Road was no mere passing fad of John’s and that here, as everywhere else, he now regarded her as his muse. “The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” he would recall. “Because they were upset over the Yoko thing and the fact that I was again becoming as creative and dominating as I was in the early days, after lying fallow
for a couple of years [sic] it upset the applecart…. Everyone seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love.”

  Nor did the revolution end with Yoko’s presence at John’s side for every minute of every session, throughout every related conference, conversation, tryout and playback, and every meal-, tea-, coffee-, telephone-, and cigarette-break, often with Kyoko playing on the sidelines. Even when he went to the toilet, Yoko went, too—proof enough to incredulous onlookers of how deep she had her hooks into him. According to Yoko, it was one more manifestation of John’s jealousy and insecurity. “People said I followed him to the men’s room, but he made me go with him. He thought that if he left me alone with the other Beatles even for a minute, I might go off with one of them.”

  Most unbelievably, at the end of a take, it was to Yoko rather than Paul or George Martin that he first turned for comment. And, being Yoko, she did not hesitate to give it. “John always said to me, ‘If you notice anything, just whisper.’ And I did notice a lot because in classical music where I was trained, you learn how to listen to all the instruments. So I’d say something like, ‘The bass is not right,’ but I didn’t say it out loud. John was almost flaunting it, actually. He’d say, ‘OK, Yoko, what rhymes with this?’ and then say to the other three, ‘It’s fucking convenient to have her, right?’”

  It says much for the affection in which he was held, and their tradition of loyalty and tolerance, that the other three did not simply lay down their instruments and walk out. Paul, true to character, tried diplomacy, which John later saw as underhandedness, accusing him of “gently coming up to Yoko and saying, ‘Why don’t you keep in the background a little more?’ It was all going on behind my back….” Ringo Starr was frankly baffled but, as always, managed to strike the right note with John when he confessed as much. “I used to ask [him], ‘What’s this about?’” Ringo later recalled. “He told me straight: ‘Well, when you go home to Maureen and tell her how your day was, it takes you two lines, “Oh, we had a good day in the studio.” Well, we know exactly what’s going on….’ I was fine after that, and relaxed a lot around Yoko.”