The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  Ringo, who needed much less out of life than it already seemed to have handed him on a silver platter, felt no unrest that autumn. He tinkered with his expensive toys and his cars and enjoyed the London nightlife. Maureen, his loving and dedicated wife, waited up for him no matter how late he came home, always with a hot meal if he was hungry. By winter she was happily pregnant with their second child.

  2

  Of all the Beatles, John Lennon suffered the most from the abrupt separation. He felt some relief from the pressure, but most of all he felt lost. “It seems like the end,” he said later. “No more touring. Life without the Beatles ... it’s like there’s a black space in the future.” He considered leaving the Beatles altogether at that point and striking out on his own, but he depended on Paul too much, if not musically, for spirit and industry. “What will I end up doing?” he wondered. “Where will I wind up when it stops? Las Vegas?”

  Life with Cynthia in Kenwood was stultifying. She cooked dinner for him every night and brought it to him in the sunroom, where they watched TV as they ate, changing the channels every few minutes, not speaking. A chilling portrait of them was drawn in Hunter Davies’ authorized biography of the Beatles:John then opened the large sliding window and sat on a step to get some fresh air, looking down upon the pool. Round and round the surface of the pool went the automatic filter, like a space ship which had just landed. Julian came out and went down to the pool. He threw some oars in, then got them out again and came back to the house. Cynthia cleaned up.

  Terry Doran arrived and was greeted warmly by all, including Julian, who sat on his knee.

  “Do you want your dad to put you to bed?” said Cyn, smiling at John, who grinned back. “Or do you want Terry?” Julian said he wanted Terry. But she picked Julian up herself and put him to bed.

  “Are you going to roll us a few, then?” said John to Terry. Terry said yes. John got up and brought out a tin toolbox, which he opened for Terry. Inside was some tobacco wrapped in silver tinfoil plus some cigarette papers. Terry rolled a couple of cigarettes, which they smoked, sharing them.

  This was during the pot-taking period. John was keeping it in a toolbox as he’d decided to hide it in the garden in case the police came. He had a box, but hadn’t gotten around to digging a hole.

  Cyn came back. The television was still on. They all sat and watched it, still changing programs all the time, until about midnight, when Cyn made some cocoa. Terry left and John and Cyn went to bed. John said he was going to read a paperback book someone had given them. Cyn said oh, she wanted to read that first.26

  Although John was deluged with offers for his individual services, he did nothing. He was begged to write books, movie scores, to supply lyrics, to write plays for the National Theatre, to execute drawings for an art exhibit, to design greeting cards. Not knowing “what the hell to do all day,” he took a small role in the Richard Lester antiwar movie, How I Won the War. John felt comfortable working with Lester again, since Lester knew the extent of his acting talents, and the locations, a brief stop in Germany and then two months in Almeria, Spain, sounded interesting. John took Cynthia with him, along with Neil Aspinall and a suitcase full of drugs. In Germany they cut John’s famed Beatles locks into an army crew cut, a daring and symbolic break with tradition. He also dispensed with his contact lenses for the first time since he became famous, replacing them with oval, wire-framed, army-issue spectacles from the first World War. The glasses became as much of his trademark as his Beatles haircut had been, and around the world, “granny glasses” became the rage.

  In Almeria, a coastal town on the southeastern tip of Spain, they rented a palatial villa in the mountains with co-star Michael Crawford and his wife. Although Ringo and Maureen came for a visit as a diversion, the month and a half in Almeria turned out to be a lesson in boredom for John. Most of his time was spent sitting in a canvas chair in a dressing trailer or waiting in the hot sun in his army uniform for the next shot to begin. It was far worse than any Beatles movie, where he was the star. His role of Musketeer Gripweed turned out to be small and uninteresting. Though he garnered fair reviews, the most fun he had making the movie was playing a death scene after being shot. When he and Cynthia watched a screening of the movie, she broke down and cried hysterically. She told John it was exactly the way he would look when he died.

  By the time John and Cynthia returned to London, it was late autumn and the long holiday season was already underway, the perfect backdrop for John’s unrest. There seemed to be a never-ending round of cocktail parties, crowded Chelsea “happenings,” psychedelic club openings, or literary parties in basement Hampstead flats. That fall was also the beginning of his heavy experimentation with psychedelics. Swinging London was just as much about acid as it was about anything else that year. Acid was the perfect drug for the moment; it gave the already shimmering world just the right effervescence. Naturally, John went overboard and took acid almost every day—by his own admission he experienced thousands of trips. He became convinced that through acid he would find the key, the answer. Acid was a tool through which problems could be solved. This was when John added his mortar and pestle to the sunroom shelf, with its compound of various drugs that were either purchased or given to him as gifts. Drugs were laid on John wherever he went, like laurel wreaths thrown in his path, for to say that you had turned on John Lennon was a badge of honor.

  At night he would roam the city in his chauffeur-driven SS Mini Cooper, with its black-tinted windows so no one could see in, taking along with him one or another of the many nonessential employees of the Beatles organization, usually Terry Doran. For many people it was difficult to fathom that the twenty-six-year-old man so stoned and unhappy in the backseat of the Mini Cooper had that autumn appeared solo on the cover of Look magazine in America as one of the prominent leaders of the “youth generation.”

  John gravitated not so much to the fast crowd in Chelsea as he did the struggling Bohemian artists, a fringe element always in pursuit of the next buck, the next lay, and the next drug. Somewhere in the ever-changing crowd he was introduced to John Dunbar, the twenty-four-year-old owner of the Indica Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery in Mason’s Yard. Small, attractive, and shrewd, Dunbar had once been married to Marianne Faithfull, the sexy, blond, somnambulistic singer who was now famous as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. To make the circle even smaller, Peter Asher, Jane’s younger brother, who had by now become a major pop star in his own right, had invested in the Indica Gallery, and Dunbar had been a childhood friend of the Asher family. In fact, unknown to Jane, Paul had once “dated” one of Dunbar’s and Faithfull’s babysitters.

  Dunbar was a Cambridge graduate who had hitchhiked across America in 1964 and had returned to London to open the Indica as a sort of salon for underground artists to meet and display their wares, artistic or otherwise. John liked Dunbar’s glib and easy banter and was eager to meet more of Dunbar’s circle. For a time Allen Ginsberg lived in a flat next door to the gallery, and Roman Polanski, who was a good customer, often appeared in the middle of the night to purchase whatever the gallery was selling from the many passing vendors.

  One of the vendors was John Alexis Mardas, a thin, twenty-one-year-old Greek youngster with sandy brown hair. The son of a Greek military officer who had just come to power in the recent junta, Alex, as he was called, spoke heavily accented English at breakneck speed, although his tongue tripped over every syllable. His accent, however, was no impediment to his gift for gab. He billed himself as a world traveler and electronics genius just passing through London on a holiday, although his real story was decidedly less glamorous. Admitted to England on a limited student visa, he claimed that his passport had been stolen from his luggage and had subsequently expired. When he reported this dilemma to the Greek Embassy, an attaché accused him of having sold the passport. In the interim, to feed himself, Alex took an illegal job as a television repairman in the basement of a TV repair service called Olympic Television. About this time, John
Dunbar, through his ever-widening circle, got to know Alex and decided his knowledge of electricity and electronics could be put to good use. Kinetic art and sculpture were all the rage, and a young artist named Takis had recently made a fortune with a show comprised of kinetic light sculptures. Dunbar suggested that Alex go into business with him, and Dunbar became his “agent.” Alex’s first project was a box filled with flashing lights, covered in a transparent membrane. They called it a “psychedelic light box”—a brand-new idea at the time—and sold it to the Rolling Stones, who immediately added it to their act. Brian Jones, the Stones’ doomed, baby-faced lead guitarist, took a special liking to Alex. It was through Brian Jones that Alex was introduced to the Beatles, first John, then George.

  Both Beatles, by now wary of loquacious strangers with grand designs, were completely taken up with Alex’s charms. He was a fascinating companion. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of an endless variety of subjects. For George he spun stories and lectures on India, mysticism, and religion. For John he was full of ideas for magic inventions, incredible things he had figured out how to make: air colored with light, artificial laser suns that would hang in the night sky, a force field that would keep fans away, and wallpaper that was actually a paper-thin stereo speaker. One day, when Alex brought John a plastic box filled with Christmas tree lights that did nothing but blink on and off randomly until the battery ran down and the thing blinked itself to death, John was thrilled. It was the best gift an LSD freak could want. In thanks, John elevated him to the royal circle as the Beatles’ court sorcerer and dubbed him “Magic Alex.” John also solved Alex’s work and immigration problems with a phone call to me. I was asked to make arrangements through an attorney for Alex’s legal immigration to Great Britain.

  Magic Alex made Cynthia Lennon’s skin crawl the moment she met him. He radiated trouble to her. It wasn’t that she disbelieved the fantastic promises of inventions, it was his possessiveness of John. No one could know better what a fierce competitor he was for John’s attention. Although it was decidedly not sexual, Alex courted John like any female power-and-stardom groupie she had ever observed at work around the Beatles. He became John’s unshakeable, constant companion. He was always polite and considerate to Cynthia, but she nevertheless watched carefully for the day Alex might try to stab her in the back.

  3

  On November 9 I could no longer put off the worried phone calls from our English tour promoter, Arthur Howes, about booking future Beatles’ concerts. Brian, who couldn’t bear to admit the truth, finally called Howes and told him that the Beatles would no longer accept any bookings. Within the hour word leaked out to the press, and the office was deluged with calls. It was reported in most papers the next day that the Beatles intended to exist solely as recording artists. No entertainment act had ever attempted this before, and the implication of many of the articles was that that was the first step in their long-expected demise.

  While Brian and I were on the phone with various reporters, assuring them that the Beatles were far from having broken up, John Dunbar was on the phone with John Lennon, who was crumpled on the curved sofa on the sunporch at Kenwood. He had been up for three consecutive days, tripping on LSD, and he had not washed or shaved in seventy-two hours. Dunbar wanted John to come to a private preview that night of a show opening at the Indica. Dunbar’s description of the show sounded very sexual to John, vaguely like an orgy. There were to be all these beautiful young people lying around in a big bag or something. The exhibit was titled “Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono.” John agreed to go.

  Later that evening, at about ten o’clock, John arrived at the Indica in his chauffeur-driven Mini. Dunbar met him at the door of the gallery and took him around to see the exhibit. It was unlike anything John had ever seen before. The displays were so simple and arbitrary that it seemed some sort of put-on. There was an ordinary apple on a pedestal with a £200 price tag on it. John assumed one paid £200 for the privilege of watching the apple decompose. There was also a stepladder with a spyglass attached to the top step with a chain. If you climbed the ladder and looked at a circled spot on the ceiling, you could read the word “Yes” printed in a tiny scrawl. And there was a board with several nails hammered partially into it, with a note that said, “Hammer A Nail In.”

  Dunbar led John downstairs to the basement to see the live part of the exhibition. Several long-haired young men and women were sitting around the floor, darning the rips in a large canvas bag. Dunbar went across the room to get the artist. “Go and say hello to the millionaire,” Dunbar whispered pointedly to her, and presently a remarkable figure appeared before John.

  She was a tiny Japanese woman, less than five feet tall, dressed in black pants and a tatty black sweater. She had a very pale, grim-looking face, set off by two thick columns of black hair that streamed over her breasts nearly to her waist. Her name was Yoko Ono.

  “Where’s the orgy?” John asked her, slightly disappointed that nothing sexual was happening. Wordlessly, she handed John a card. On it was printed the word “breathe.” “You mean like this?” John said, and panted. The small Japanese woman seemed unimpressed.

  They wandered around the exhibit together, Dunbar speaking for the two of them. When John asked if he could hammer a nail into one of the boards, Yoko said no. The exhibit didn’t officially open until the next day, and she didn’t want it tampered with. Dunbar was embarrassed. “Let him hammer a nail in. Who knows, he might buy it,” he encouraged. After a short conference with Dunbar, Yoko agreed to allow John to hammer a nail in—for five shillings.

  John was both irked and amused. He’d take her up on her game. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings, and I’ll hammer in an imaginary nail.”

  Yoko Ono finally smiled.

  Yoko Ono—her name means “Ocean Child”—was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1934, the eldest daughter of a prominent banker and a cold, aristocratic mother. Her mother’s socially conscious family, the Yasudas, were, according to Yoko, the Japanese equivalents of the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers, and they resented her mother’s marriage to her bourgeois father. Yoko herself was never very close to her father, who moved to San Francisco to head a branch of the Yokohama Speci-Bank before she was born. She didn’t really get to know him until she and her mother joined him in San Francisco in 1936. The Onos lived in San Francisco and New York for four years, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made the family less than welcome in America, and they were sent back to their native country, a matter of no small bitterness to them.

  Back in Japan, Yoko and her younger brother and sister moved to a farmhouse her mother had rented in the countryside for their safety away from the wartime cities, but when they arrived at the farmhouse it turned out to be just a shack, with no food or supplies. Yoko’s mother went back to Tokyo, leaving her children with the servants, who soon abandoned them, penniless. Yoko was forced to forage for food and clothing for herself and her siblings until after the war, when she was reunited with her parents.

  In 1951, the war over and all forgiven, Yoko’s father was named president of the New York branch of his bank, now renamed the Bank of Tokyo, and the family once again moved to New York, this time to a large house in Scarsdale. Yoko attended three years of college at Sarah Lawrence as a philosophy major before getting bored with the regimentation of school and dropping out. When she was twenty-three, much to her parents’ distress, she eloped with a penniless Japanese composer and pianist named Toschi Ichiyananagi, and her mother promptly cut her off without a penny. It was years before they spoke again.

  She stayed married to Ichiyananagi for seven years, living in various cheap apartments in the West Eighties near Riverside Drive. Now an aspiring avant-garde musician and artist herself, her husband encouraged her into composing with him. Trying to gain a foothold in the fast-moving, competitive art world as an avant-garde artist was not easy. For a while she fell in with musicians John Cage and La Monte Young. Her f
irst displayed art was created to be burned or stomped on. In 1960 she had her first show at a small Madison Avenue gallery owned by George Macunias. Macunias was one of the inventors of a live event he called “Fluxus,” the forerunner of the popular “happenings.” Yoko’s show at his gallery was comprised of conceptual art pieces designed with her trademark brand of ironic humor. One of the pieces was called an “eternal time clock,” which was a clock with only a second hand encased in a plastic bubble. The ticking could only be heard through a stethoscope attached to the sculpture. She also presented a stage piece at Carnegie Recital Hall in which as part of the performance performers were strapped together back-to-back and instructed to walk across the stage without making any noise. At another “concert” held at the Village Gate, microphones were hidden in the toilets so the patrons could be heard urinating and flushing on stage.

  Try as she might to be different, Yoko was soon swallowed up by the harshly competitive art world. In 1961 she joined her husband in Tokyo, where she staged musical dance programs. “I got terrible reviews,” Yoko remembers. “The conservative elements—men artists and critics—decided to boycott me. The press wrote snide remarks all over the place. I just felt terrible.” When a Tokyo critic accused her of plagiarizing her ideas, she tried to kill herself. “As a teenager I was always trying to cut my wrists or take pills,” she said. “And later... I was always feeling frustrated as an artist. I felt I was not being accepted by society, work-wise.”