Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  John chose Alf. He was sitting on Alf’s lap; he’d just spent the happiest weeks of his life with his father, and what Alf was offering, speculative though it truly was, probably seemed more enticing than anything he had experienced with his mother. Judy asked again; and when John repeated his choice, she got up and said good-bye. She joined Dykins at the gate and headed up the street. Having left it to a confused five-year-old to decide his own fate, Judy was content to walk off with another man and abandon her child completely—to let him travel halfway around the world, perhaps never to see him again.

  Within seconds, panicking, John ran out of the house after Judy. What five-year-old could watch his mother, even a careless mother like Judy, walk away forever and not call her back? He ran after her. And this time it was Alf who turned away. He didn’t try to stop the boy. He’d shown the kid a good time, showered him with treats and toys, and John didn’t want to go with him. That was that. Alf didn’t change his plans and stay in England to be near his son. He went off to New Zealand with Hall and continued to travel as he had before. His own mother had abandoned him when he was young—it was clearly acceptable to walk away from your children and leave them to other people to raise. He’d given the boy a chance to have a father, and the boy had chosen against him; and for Alf, that was decisive. That night at his pub, he recalled, he sang Al Jolson’s number, “My Little Pal,” as “My Little John,” with tears in his eyes. But he never made another attempt to contact John until his son had become famous, when Alf approached him—eighteen years later—on the set of A Hard Day’s Night.38

  This Blackpool trauma ricocheted one last time back in Liverpool. Mimi may have deputized Judy to go to Blackpool and retrieve John, but she still felt as though John belonged to her. She hated that Judy had moved in with another man while she was still legally married to Alf and raising his son. Even if this suited Judy—what about the child? It was as if Judy didn’t give a hang about the Stanleys’ hard-won reputation. Mimi decided to claim her nephew even if it meant wrenching him from his mother. Surely, a home with both a father and a mother figure would be preferable to a broken home with an illegal, live-in stepfather. Even before the Blackpool trip, hadn’t John run away (at least once that we know of) to demonstrate his discomfort with Judy’s new boyfriend?

  Mimi alerted Liverpool Social Services, telling them that her sister was an “unfit mother.” Although a social worker visited the Newcastle Road apartment twice during that summer of 1946, it wasn’t until the second visit that John’s lack of a bed seemed to register with the officials. When Social Services insisted that she find an alternative situation for the boy or they would be forced to take him from her, Judy handed off her son to Mimi for the last time. For Judy, giving John to Mimi was both an abdication of parenthood and a surrender to Mimi’s driving will—and one Dykins favored, with his natural desire for a family of his own.39

  Mimi Smith had good reason to be concerned about John’s home life, but her motives mixed simple compassion with self-interest, creating a second complicated layer of possession and competition for John as he turned six years old that October of 1946. The questions a child wrestles with at this age of psychological development—Where do I belong? Who will take care of me? Where can I feel safe?—were hardwired as confusion into John’s young mind. Born into a failing marriage between a heedless girl-about-town and a perpetually absent seafaring father, John Lennon began his life rootless. Shuttled from dwelling to dwelling, handed off repeatedly to a possessive aunt or to one of his uncles, he was relocated more than half a dozen times before he was five. Despite his troublemaking at school, many adults who met John at the time describe him as a charming, cheerful little boy. Several people besides Mimi Smith offered to adopt him, including his uncle Sydney and Billy Hall’s parents. Nonetheless, he was, in a fundamental and obvious way, unclaimed.

  Lennon was installed in his familiar bedroom in Mendips the autumn of 1946, and for years afterward he saw his mother only sporadically. Mimi Smith later said that at first John wanted to know where his mother was, but she dodged his questions. “I didn’t want to tell him any details,” she said. “How could I? He was so happy. It would have been wrong to say your father’s no good and your mother’s found someone else.”40 Although Lennon himself never described the Blackpool episode in any of his interviews or writings, he did report on its aftermath. “I soon forgot my father,” he said. “It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I never realized that all the time she was living no more than five or ten miles away. Mimi never told me. She said she was a long, long way away.”41

  In quick order, Judy and Dykins moved out of the tiny Newcastle Road apartment into a larger one in Allerton, where they raised two girls of their own, Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline, two years later, but the couple never married. This apartment, at 1 Blomfield Road in a council-estate development called Spring Wood, was across the Allerton Golf Course from Mendips, not far from the newer council houses where a family named McCartney would soon settle.

  Chapter 2

  Something to Hide

  There’s no more misleading Lennon myth than the one spun from his 1970 song “Working Class Hero,” which every self-respecting Liverpudlian renounces as a sham. “He was solidly middle-class,” they’ll tell you proudly, as if Lennon’s ironic broadside insults all the hard work that town did after the war to give him a proper upbringing. Widely misheard as an ode to the rewards of hard work, a homage to the mean streets of Merseyside, the song dissects class pretensions and the stigma of being labeled “common.” Lennon wrote it for his Beatle “divorce” album, Plastic Ono Band (1970), and he repeats the line “A working class hero is something to be.” But his voice drops to sardonic resignation on its rejoinder: “If you want to be a hero well just follow me.”

  A working-class hero would be something to be, but he’s not one of them. Rather than a paean to the moral superiority of a hard-earned work ethic, the song spins an emphatic, unsentimental rejoinder to such cant. Of all the lingering fictions surrounding Lennon’s persona as his myth enters history, this one deserves the strongest riposte. A suburban kid who had become one of the world’s most famous men by the time he was twenty-three, Lennon used “Working Class Hero” to push back at the idea that hard work brings honor to a man, that it’s the key to success and self-respect, and a form of heroism in and of itself. In the song, he turns that cliché into a curse, the irony bent by experience: “There’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill.” Like the sugarcoated agnosticism of “Imagine,” Lennon’s most famously misinterpreted song, “Working Class Hero” undermines the very truism it purports to celebrate. Liverpudlians scoff at the idea of Lennon’s rough-and-tumble childhood, especially when compared to the other three Beatles’. And Lennon played both sides of this line.

  Raised by his auntie in Woolton, in a semidetached house eight miles in from the docks, he became infatuated with rock ’n’ roll poetry the way Andy Warhol was drawn to advertising. Lennon was easily the most privileged of the four Beatles, but he strove hard to hide it beneath his contempt for class hypocrisy.

  The Woolton house in which Lennon grew up with the Smiths was named Mendips after the Mendip Hills, a stretch of low-rolling curves in the comfortably middle-class region between Bristol and Wells in Somerset, southeast of the Bristol Channel.1 Joined to a row of “comfortable” dwellings, similar to an American duplex or side-by-side two-family, Mendips overlooked Menlove Avenue, a main thoroughfare through Woolton Village. Menlove Avenue branched off a main avenue, Ullet Road, after Penny Lane, and curved around Calderstones Park and the Allerton Golf Course. A semidetached house was a big step up from the thousands of attached council row houses—state housing projects—that snaked through the dockworkers’ neighborhoods. While not as luxurious as the single-family homes just up the Church Road near St. Peter’s,
Mendips was built of solid red sandstone from the local quarry and was regarded as an upper-middle-class dwelling. During John’s childhood, the mayor of Woolton, in fact, lived next door.2

  Woolton and its adjacent suburbs attracted the professional classes—doctors, lawyers, politicians—as well as prosperous retailers like the Epstein family, who lived in nearby Childwall and whose youngest son, Brian, would play a critical role in Lennon’s future. The prouder Woolton residents even claimed their own dialect, far removed from the docker’s Scouse, an Anglo-Saxon variant that resembled the better accents of South Lancashire and Cheshire.

  Although built in 1933, Mendips possessed a certain old-world charm, including a small portico between the front porch and front hall made of glass brick. On the right side of a central hallway, a brick fireplace dominated the front room, which had leaded glass windows. On the left of the front hall, stairs led to two bedrooms. In the back of the house, a small sitting room, used as a dining space, abutted a kitchen with broad terraced windows, both of which looked out on Mimi Smith’s prized side garden. The garden, the house’s “proper” front hallway and vestibule, the fireplace lined with books, the cozy sitting room—all were middle-class accoutrements. John’s small bedroom on the second floor faced the house’s sole bathroom, or “water closet,” which had a pull-chain toilet and tiny bath. None of the other Beatles had indoor toilets; all three lived in neighborhoods that relied on unheated outhouses. Compared to the houses in most dockside neighborhoods, such as the Dingle, where Ringo’s family lived, Mendips seemed vast.

  The American notion of “suburb” has far more expanse and roominess—ranch houses, broad lawns. Woolton houses were pitched much closer together, but the neighborhood was quiet and safe. The town also hosted plenty of undeveloped land that kids explored on foot and by bicycle, including the hilly area around St. Peter’s Church and cemetery called Woolton Hills; the grounds of the Strawberry Field Salvation Army home for problem children; and the playing fields surrounding the Quarry Bank High School on Harthill Road, which John would later attend. While Lennon was growing up, the Allerton golf course literally spilled across Menlove Avenue just beyond his front gate; he could spy the pond from his living-room window.

  John moved into Mendips permanently in July or August of 1946, and his aunt took charge. His life became more stable psychologically—he didn’t need to adapt to the moods and personality of a different adult every few months. He could let himself become attached to the household’s pets—two cats, Tich and Tim, and a mutt named Sally whom he adored. “Mimi was a cat lover,” schoolmate Len Garry remembers. “She loved her cats more than she loved kids, that’s for sure. She was a frightening woman. She wasn’t homely—she was more like a headmistress, librarian-type person. And you were frightened to knock on that Mendips front door.”3

  John eventually added a fourth animal to the brood, Sam, a stray cat that he brought home one evening. He also played regularly with his cousins, the children of Judy’s other three sisters. Elizabeth, the second of the five Stanley girls, had married a man named Charles Parkes, who died during the war. Their son, Stanley Parkes, was seven years John’s senior and looked out for his younger cousin, holding his hand when they went to the park. John was also close to his cousin Leila,4 three years older than John and later the widow of an Egyptian named Ali Hafez. Stanley remembers the three of them playing outside at Mendips while their mothers visited:

  Little Leila, John and myself would go to Mimi’s and play in the garden there and then go round to Aunt Harriet’s cottage which was half of Uncle George’s farm. Mimi owned half of the farmhouse, which was known as The Cottage to us, and we’d sit there and we’d play records—all kinds of records. Harriet had one of the old-fashioned wind-up HMV gramophones and she had a vast collection of records and we’d spend hours playing them.5

  Stanley called Mimi “strict but all right”:

  She had an orchard in the back of her garden with apple trees and pear trees and she would bake lovely apple pies for us and we’d have picnics. She had a garden shed in the back garden and as I say, being strict, she was very strict on our table manners, but she said “Alright you can go and eat out in the garden shed.” To us it was a great adventure going out into this shed, and just to be naughty we would eat with our hands with no knives and forks. Just devilment you know.

  In the summers, Mimi sent John up to Edinburgh, where his aunt Elizabeth, called “Mater,” had settled with Bertie Sutherland, a dentist, who became Stanley’s stepfather. Elizabeth and Bertie took in all the Stanley cousins during the summer, including Leila and, later, Judy’s two daughters with Dykins, Julia and Jacqui, Lennon’s half sisters. Early on, Stanley played the big brother:

  When I first moved up to Scotland, I would go down to bring John up because Mary [Mimi] wouldn’t let him go anywhere unchaperoned, but as he grew a little bit older she did relent and let him come up on the bus. . . . I’d meet him off the bus at Edinburgh bus depot and take him to my parents’ home at Murrayfield in Edinburgh. He’d stay there a week or so and then off we’d go up to the Sutherland family croft up in Durness in Sutherland at Cape Wrath, which is the most fartherly north west tip of Scotland.

  Although John benefited from Mimi’s steadiness, her predictable schedules and reliable husband, he’d also landed in the home of a domineering, anxious woman who could not have been more different from his mother. To those who knew them both, John’s character resembled Judy’s—his moods swung between cocky and funny to pensive and remote. Many describe a level gaze and a self-possession unusual for a boy. He had a penchant for practical jokes and theatrical gestures, and enjoyed shocking his peers. His cousin Stanley recounted: “Leila had a lovely little doll’s pram and one time she was walking round the garden with this doll’s pram and John and I climbed up on the top of this garden shed and John said ‘Watch this!’ and he jumped off the shed clean through the bottom of Leila’s pram! She was mortified over that.”

  Where Mimi was authoritarian, her husband, George Smith, was soft-spoken and affectionate, and universally beloved. “George was a gentle giant,” recalls Julia Dykins Baird in the first of her two memoirs, John Lennon, My Brother. “Six foot tall with a mound of silver hair, who often hit the door frame when he walked into a room. He was the most kind, pleasant, and unaggressive man with not a cross word to say.”6 Even before John moved in with them, George would sit the little boy on his lap in the evening and read through all the Liverpool Echo headlines with him. “Syllable by syllable,” Mimi remembered, “George would work at him till he got it right. John couldn’t spell at that age, of course, but he could get down what he wanted. My husband went through all the headlines in the newspaper with John every night.”7

  While Smith, with his brother, inherited his family’s dairy, he struggled with a problem that had already marked Lennon’s life: he was a drinker—not a violent or a sloppy drunk, but one who was sufficiently handicapped by his drinking that he couldn’t keep his business thriving. Cynthia Powell Lennon later reported Mimi complaining about his “gambling,” and Mimi often took student boarders to make ends meet.8 To accommodate this arrangement, Mimi slept in the sitting room off the kitchen, turning the front living room into the only shared common room.

  At one point, a group of George’s friends from the neighborhood—his pub crowd—gave him a half-grandfather clock with “George Toogood Smith” inscribed on its face, which was actually his christened name. This clock stood on the mantel in the sitting room off the kitchen at Mendips throughout John’s childhood, a reminder of Mimi’s ideal man, the kind she had chosen to marry. The men in Mimi’s house needed to be better than just good—they needed to be too good. And the pressure to be “too good” took its toll, on George and, over time, on John, too.

  In the fall of 1946, Mimi enrolled John in the Dovedale Primary School in Allerton. To get there, Lennon took a three-mile bus ride down the main Menlove thoroughfare with a change at Penny Lane (with Mimi trailing
him from behind), or walked through the vast stretch of Calderstones Park—or sometimes a combination of the two routes, depending on the season. The headmaster there, a man named Bond, told Mimi: “There’s no need to worry about him. He’s sharp as a needle. But he won’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”9 The school uniforms put John in a tie, black blazer, a badge with a dove, and gray shorts. Lennon’s classmates remember his tie constantly askew and his shirt deliberately untucked.

  Comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, one of his Dovedale classmates, says of Lennon at the time, “He wasn’t easily missed at school—he wasn’t the sort of kid to stand in corners, studiously reading his books. Oh no, he had a load of energy even then. . . . If there was a playground fight, he’d be involved in it.”10 At the end of Lennon’s first year at Dovedale, Fred Bolt, one of his teachers, took several students for a brief summer jaunt to the Isle of Man, off the coast of Britain in the Irish Sea. A photo survives of Lennon and Tarbuck and a group of boys horsing around in the surf at Port Erin, near the isle’s ferry dock. John and Jimmy dominate the picture: Jimmy’s fists are clenched, his right arm pulled up as if threatening a punch, his face seized by a prankster’s grin. He looks ready to pounce on the photographer. To his left, Lennon wears a question mark. Mimi had trimmed his hair close on the sides, and his left hand is extended downward instead of up in the air like Jimmy’s. Of the eight boys, John alone is not laughing, an early and rare instance of a camera catching a fleeting vulnerability.

  When John was eight, Mimi enrolled him in the Sunday school at St. Peter’s, the local Anglican church, where John sang in the choir. Two friends from his neighborhood, Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Walley, remember Lennon teaching them to palm pennies from the St. Peter’s collection plate so that they could buy bubble gum. Vaughan and Walley lived nearby on Vale Road, which ran parallel to Menlove Avenue, one street behind. Also at church school were Rod Davis, a future Quarryman, and Barbara Baker, one of John’s earliest girlfriends.