by Bob Spitz
A confluence of events, however, placed Mimi’s dream just out of reach. In the spring of 1932, when she was twenty-six years old, a short but powerfully built dairy farmer named George Smith, who lived just opposite the hospital and delivered raw milk there each morning, began courting Mimi with a vengeance. His efforts were made difficult by Mimi’s frustrating indifference and her eagle-eyed father, who treated all of his daughters’ suitors as adversaries. “Grandfather made it impossible for Mimi and George,” according to Stanley Parkes, Mimi’s nephew, who remembered watching his aunt with keen, admiring eyes. Night after night, he observed the young couple sitting in the back room at Newcastle Road, “under constant chaperone: my grandfather and grandmother always in the next room.” At a ridiculously early hour, old George Stanley would barge into the parlor, shouting, “That’s long enough! Away you go—home!” making it impossible for the relationship to develop. The courtship dragged on this way for almost seven years until, finally, George Smith delivered an ultimatum along with the milk. “Look here! I’ve had enough of you! Either marry me, or nothing at all!”
The marriage of such a headstrong young career woman to a relatively commonplace and unassuming man might have had more of a disruptive effect on the Stanley family were it not for another, more upheaving union among the close-knit sisters. Six months earlier, on December 3, 1938, Julia, George Stanley’s favorite and most high-spirited daughter, stunned her father when she arrived home after a date with a longtime boyfriend and announced, “There! I’ve married him,” waving a license as proof. It was only reluctantly, after her father threatened Julia with expulsion if she cohabited with a lover, that she proposed to—and married—the dapper young man with a “perfect profile” and nimble spirit named Freddie Lennon.
[II]
If John Lennon romanticized the memory of his mother, he took an altogether opposite view of his father. Freddie Lennon remained a vague shadow figure, an outcast, throughout John’s life and, except for two brief appearances, had no direct influence on his son’s upbringing. Aside from the resentment that lingered as a result of this circumstance, John’s knowledge of his father grew fainter with every year. “I soon forgot my father,” he told Hunter Davies in 1968. “It was like he was dead.”
The Stanleys did a good job helping to put Freddie Lennon to rest. “They wanted nothing to do with him from the start,” said his niece Leila Harvey. Julia’s father considered him below their station, “certainly not middle class,” and Mimi later said that “we knew he would be no use to anyone, certainly not our Julia.”
Though not genteel by any stretch of the imagination, Freddie was “very intelligent… a clever boy,” no doubt the consequence of long years spent surviving by his wits. The son of Jack Lennon, a refined British minstrel who died in 1919 when Freddie was seven, he and an elder brother, Charles, had landed in the Bluecoat Hospital, a prestigious Liverpool orphanage around the corner from Newcastle Road that prided itself on the impressive, independent-minded education provided to its young charges. There, amid a class that competed feverishly for top academic honors, Freddie earned a reputation for being happy-go-lucky. “Anywhere Freddie turned up always meant fun was about to start,” said a relative. “He couldn’t resist having a good time.” There wasn’t a room he couldn’t light up with a witty remark or well-timed rejoinder. Repartee came naturally to him, carried off with such endearing joie de vivre that friends assumed he would ultimately capitalize on his personality. But he was never able to put it all together. Too frivolous to master a vocation, he bounced from office job to odd job, cadging money off friends or his eldest brother, Sydney, who worked long hours hemming pants in a tailor shop on Ranelagh Place. He spent endless nights attending any one of the city’s two dozen vaudeville houses, where he was on a first-name basis with the pretty, long-legged usherettes who paraded along the aisles. At the Trocadero, a converted cinema on Camden Road, he’d often caught sight of its most beautiful attendant, a head-turner with high cheekbones and an engaging smile framed by cascading auburn hair, but he’d never actually spoken to Julia Stanley.
It wasn’t until a chance meeting in Sefton Park, where he and a friend had gone one midsummer afternoon to pick up girls, that Freddie and Julia struck up a fast acquaintance. Their encounter, as Freddie related it, read like a romantic-comedy script. He was strolling jauntily along a cobblestone path, dressed in a black bowler and fingering a cigarette holder, when he came upon “this little waif” perched on a wrought-iron bench. “As I walked past her, she said, ‘You look silly,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘You look lovely!’ and I sat down beside her.” Casting him a playful sidelong glance, Julia insisted he remove his “silly hat,” so, with impeccable timing, Freddie promptly flung it into the lake. It was the perfect gesture to win an invitation to go dancing and, ultimately, her heart. Julia had long been attracted to the kind of slapstick sensibility that Freddie Lennon personified. Like Freddie, “she would get a joke out of anything,” recalled an adoring nephew. “If the house was burning down around Judy, she’d come out laughing and smiling—she’d make a joke of it.”
Of all the Stanley sisters—all “real beauties… real stunners,” according to a relative—only Julia knew how to exploit her precious asset. Instead of turning up her chin when a stranger gave her the once-over, Julia would flash a broad smile and wink knowingly at him. Men ogled her as often as they passed her. Only five foot two in high heels, with a full figure and large brown eyes that seemed to float in her face, Julia had an obvious, provocative beauty that exaggerated her appeal. “Judy was very feminine, she was beautiful,” explained her niece, “… never untidy. You never saw her with her hair undone. She went to bed with makeup on so that she’d look beautiful in the morning.”
But all the makeup in the world couldn’t attract the right kind of man. From the time she stepped out from her family’s grasp, Julia Stanley kept company with a succession of good-looking rascals with fast come-on lines and even faster escapes. Night after night, humming with energy, she made the rounds of local dance halls and breezy clubs, where the rootless crowd of dockers, soldiers, waiters, laborers, and after-hours sharks congregated. A spry dancer with a carefree sensuality, Julia found herself in great demand as a partner in the stylish jitterbug competitions that lasted into the early hours of morning. She could tell a joke as hard and bawdy as any man, which won her no shortage of admirers. And she sang—“with a voice like Vera Lynn,” it was said—at the drop of a hat.
At first glance, Freddie and Julia seemed like an improbable pair, but from the moment they met they were inseparable. Both tireless dreamers, they spent long days walking around Liverpool, hatching improbable schemes. They would open a shop, a pub, a café, a club where they’d take turns performing, Julia cracking one-liners, Freddie singing and playing the banjo. He had a pretty good voice, a husky tenor, and no shortage of charisma. The legendary Satchmo was a favorite, and Freddie had Jolson down cold, with all the gesticulations. Given the chance, he could rattle off crowd-pleasers all night. Given the chance. But Julia’s father not only disapproved of the marriage but demanded some sign of the couple’s self-support. Despite Freddie’s extravagant plans to perform, which earned his father-in-law’s indignation, there was nothing concrete. Instead of working, he spent his afternoons taking Julia’s young nephew, Stanley, for walks in the park: talking, thinking, dreaming, worrying.
Finally, Freddie escaped the dilemma by the route chosen most often by Liverpool men: he put to sea. He signed on to a ship headed toward the Mediterranean, working as a merchant navy steward. On board a succession of ocean liners, traveling between the Greek Islands, North Africa, and the West Indies, Freddie gained security, first as a bellboy and later as a headwaiter. He became a crew favorite because of his personable nature. Freddie was “a real charmer,” Julia told Mimi, “a people pleaser,” who never forgot a name or a passenger’s favorite song. People remembered seeing him weave among tables, “with a smile that sparkled in
a room.” But seafaring, though pleasant, was an erratic interlude. Relatives recalled seeing Freddie back in Liverpool a few months after his first voyage, hoping without any real prospects to sail on another steamer. In the meantime, Freddie moved in with Julia’s family, allegedly at George Stanley’s behest, living off the fumes of his last paycheck. Calling himself by some stretch of imagination a “ship’s entertainer,” he auditioned for local theater managers, but without any luck. Julia urged Freddie to get something more solid, if only to appease her irascible father, but the situation became more dire by January 1940, at which time it was discovered that Julia had become pregnant.
The war arrived early on Liverpool’s front doorstep. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed in the initial air strikes that pounded the city; families would wake to find their streets “just gone,” especially blocks in and around the Penny Lane area, where the heavy artillery, the ten-pound whistling bombs aimed at the docks, had drifted. Menlove Avenue, where Mimi and George had bought a handsome semi-detached house, suffered tremendous damage. “There were fifty-six people blown to pieces in an air raid shelter not fifty yards from Mary’s house,” according to a relative, who remembered watching emergency service patrols “just burying over” the charred site. Mimi constantly grappled with a rash of incendiary bombs, those big, phosphorous flares, which fell regularly in her garden, throwing blankets over them and stamping them out.
During a succession of brutal air raids in early October 1940, the entire Stanley clan gathered nightly at Newcastle Road, determined to support one another through the terrifying uncertainty. Julia, who was almost two weeks overdue, had been ordered to hospital by her doctor, where she languished in a second-floor ward at Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. The days were long and boring, the nights even worse, a result of having the lights extinguished to avoid detection from the air. It might have helped pass the time if Julia had Freddie by her side—he would have made her laugh in that loopy, screwball way of his—but Freddie was gone, having shipped out on a troop transport earlier that month, doing his part for the war effort.
The first week in October brought an escalation of the bombing, according to newspaper accounts, wave after wave of German sorties strafing the south docks and downtown district. Still, when Mimi called the hospital on October 9, shortly after nightfall, and was told that “Mrs. Lennon has just had a boy,” nothing—neither curfew nor bomb nor German technology—was going to stop her from gazing at her new nephew. Later, Mimi gave an intrepid, if somewhat suspect, account of her crosstown sprint: “I was dodging in doorways between running as fast as my legs would carry me.” In the distance she could hear the thunderous echo of bombs pounding the countryside. “There was shrapnel falling and gunfire,” she recalled, “and when there was a little lull I ran into the hospital ward and there was this beautiful little baby.”
John Winston Lennon was a beautiful little baby, indeed. He was named after his talented grandfather in the hope that he could fulfill the Lennon legacy for stardom. (Julia offered the middle name in honor of his country’s awe-inspiring leader, Winston Churchill.) His eyes were perfectly matched brown crescents set above a feminine, almost bow-shaped mouth, a pointed little nose, and the soft, dimpled chin of his father. He had his mother’s fair complexion, which, later in life, made him look a shade or two paler in contrast to the other Beatles.
For the first few years of his life, Julia threw herself into motherhood, devoting all her efforts to raising her son. Freddie reappeared every now and again, but it was only for a day or two and then he was off once more, on some woolly seaborne adventure. At least money was no longer an issue: Freddie provided for his family, sending a regular check for their support, and as long as Julia and John lived at Newcastle Road, there wasn’t much that lay beyond their needs.
In 1945 Julia’s mother died, leaving her father, who had become “frail and old,” under her uncertain care. “Mary would, on occasion, come over and help out,” remembered a nephew, “but she was out working as a nurse,” which left the burden of responsibility in Julia’s hands. With John demanding more attention, balancing these obligations became too much for her. Julia, by her very nature, was a social creature. She needed distraction, laughs, excitement. And a fellow—“she would have always had a fellow, Judy.” This had always been part of Julia’s makeup, something that couldn’t be denied, not even when it came to a young boy. Any sensitive child would pick up the signals, and John, who was especially perceptive, interpreted his mother’s frustrations as being his fault. Reminiscences about his childhood were always filled with unconsolable guilt. It was the rejection he remembered most, the feeling that he was in the way, a source of Julia’s unhappiness and Freddie’s absenteeism. “The worst pain is that of not being wanted,” John confessed, “of realizing your parents do not need you in the way you need them.”
Julia’s longing for conviviality was heightened by Liverpool’s bustling nightlife, which raged almost as fiercely as the war. The city jumped to the tempo of big bands along with the guys and dolls who followed them. At the center of this scene were the all-night dance halls, where the revelry never stopped. Soldiers and civilians, wary of an uncertain future, collected under the low-slung rafters, determined to let off some steam before the full impact of the war hit.
It was probably sometime in 1942 that Julia first ventured out dancing on her own, and thereafter she stepped out frequently, first alone, then later with two neighbors whose husbands were in the service. Freddie later claimed this peccadillo was his fault, the result of a remark in a letter he sent her. “I said to her, there’s a war on; go out and enjoy yourself, pet,” he recalled, never realizing the extent to which she’d take him up on it.
It was only a matter of time before Julia met another man, a Welsh soldier named Taffy Williams, who was stationed in a barracks at Mossley Hill. They hit all the pubs and dance halls that catered specially to soldiers, and Julia would often bring back from these outings a rare, precious treat—a chunk of chocolate or a sugar pastry—which she’d present to John the next morning during breakfast.
The relationship remained innocent, or at least innocent enough to escape scrutiny. Julia continued to receive regular correspondence from Freddie, which she’d read aloud to John, along with a check that underwrote her modest living expenses. John hung on every frivolous word his father wrote, then repackaged them for his cousins in the form of frothy seafaring adventures. To John, Freddie was a mysterious, romantic figure, a father of great consequence, away doing a man’s work.
But, in truth, Freddie Lennon was a screwup. He constantly signed on the “wrong type” of ship, sailing as a glorified bartender or with crews that functioned as modern-day pirates. After a typical mishap in New York, he set out on the Sammex in February 1944, bound for the Algerian port of Bône, where he was arrested and imprisoned for “broaching the cargo,” or more precisely, pilfering a bottle of contraband beer. Freddie subsequently disappeared for six months—undergoing adventures in the Dutch underground, from North Africa to Naples, he claimed—during which time his family assumed he’d deserted them.
Julia hardly needed convincing. She was living it up with Taffy Williams, and was pregnant with his child. Yet, however much she loved the soldier, she was unable—or simply unwilling—to marry him. For one thing, she was already married. And for another, there was John to worry about. Williams wasn’t prepared to take on a young boy along with Julia, and abandoning John was out of the question—at least for now.
Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, Freddie returned home, understandably despondent. For all of his superficiality, Freddie Lennon remained a proud man, proud enough to be wounded by an unfaithful wife. Julia treated her husband with disdain, regarding the awkward situation as if it were somehow Freddie’s fault. Her personality had always been jaunty and outgoing. Now it became harsh and brittle, her words unnecessarily cruel and venomous, her mood fluctuating between irrationality and deceit. “She
claimed that she was raped by a soldier,” according to Freddie’s brother Charles, who attempted to mediate for the couple. Ready to defend her honor, the Lennon brothers actually confronted Taffy Williams, just before Christmas 1945, but his account of the facts stood up. It was clear that Julia had been his lover for more than half a year. There was no point in pretending any longer. Freddie accepted that she was going to have another man’s baby and offered to stand by her side. But there was something broken about him now.
Broken—but not finished. Holding Freddie Lennon together was the welfare of his son, John. Responsibility was called for now, and responsibility was neither Freddie’s nor Julia’s strong suit. In fact, the Lennons had courted these very circumstances by putting their own selfish interests before those of their son. Freddie leaped into action by removing John to his brother Sydney’s house in the suburb of Maghull while Julia came to term. This may have been a practical, sober-minded decision, or it may have been designed to give him the opportunity to resolve his differences with Julia. It is impossible to say.
In any event, Freddie ran out of yardage. He offered to help raise the baby but was spurned. There was too much resentment, no trace of love left in Julia’s heart. Besides, “she was told quite categorically by the family that this child would have to be adopted,” recalled her niece. Julia’s long-suffering father, indignant, refused to allow her to remain in his house. As a result, Mimi helped move her to the Elmswood Nursing Home, in Mossley Hill, where, on June 19, 1945, a girl was born, named Victoria. “She was a beautiful baby,” recalled Julia’s sister Anne, “but we never knew who the father was.” The whole seamy affair was hushed up and was never discussed among the rest of the Stanley family. “We didn’t even know that she’d had [another] baby,” said Leila Harvey. Certainly, John wasn’t told anything about it, much less that he had a sister. (By all accounts, he never discovered her existence.) Without further delay, the baby was taken away from Julia and given to a Norwegian Salvation Army captain, who removed the newborn to Scandinavia, which was the last anyone ever heard of her.