by Ray Connolly
She is a total exhibitionist and retells vividly a well-worn story about how she barged into a restaurant in what was virtually a see-through this and that. ‘A man said “It can’t be a girl. It must be a boy.” So I just sat down and lifted up my shirt above my breasts and just looked at him. He didn’t say a word.’
As she talks she either smokes or chews — her jaws being in a perpetual chomp-chomp motion. Now and again she belches purposely and then says ‘Pardon.’
Why do you steal from shops? I ask, half as a joke. ‘Well, I’m not a kleptomaniac. I do it intentionally, but not very frequently. I do it because I don’t believe in clothing — it makes me itch …’ and to demonstrate she rakes at her thighs with her nails. ‘I believe in clothing only because it makes people who don’t have nice bodies look better. But it bugs the hell out of me to have to pay for clothing.
‘The only thing I pinched was this pocket book I got from a place in Beauchamp Place. I don’t know why I pinched it then, but I can tell you I’m glad I pinched it. It cost five guineas and when I went to meet the photographer from Life today I saw that it was coming apart. If I’d paid for it I would have had a fit. Luckily I didn’t pay for it, and luckily I didn’t get caught.’
She suddenly produces a diary. ‘I write in it every night,’ she says. ‘Here’s a bit about God. “Helmut filming … me reading a fantastic book — The Holy Bible by God — very good … met this great guy who designs for Dior …”’
She was turned down for a part in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (Charlotte Rampling got it) but this week she was to do a screen test for Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun and Sister Moon, the story of St Francis of Assisi (‘Franco wants me to go to his dentist to get my teeth straightened — but I like them the way they are’) and then there’s the possibility of playing Lolita in a new Broadway production. She doesn’t appear particularly nervous. For nineteen, Patti D’Arbanville has had a full life …
POSTSCRIPT I’ve always had half a feeling I might have missed something on the evening this interview took place. After the photographs were taken Patti D’Arbanville suggested I go back to the flat with her, Maria (the girl with the footballs shoved up her jumper) and Ben Ekland. Like an idiot I didn’t go. It was already about ten o’clock and I made an excuse about having work to do and left … A few months later Bernardo Bertolucci met Maria, and being quicker off the mark than I was, put her into a film alongside Marlon Brando called Last Tango in Paris. Patti meanwhile has appeared in films in Europe and America, the best known being David Hamilton’s soft-focus, soft-porn Bilitis …
December 1970
John Lennon
I was the dreamweaver
but now I’m reborn.
I was the Walrus, but
now I’m John
And so dear friends you
just have to carry on
The dream is over.
For eight years John has been our favourite performing flea. With the Beatles he submerged his identity and performed cartwheels of compromise on the merry-go-round of madness that he, and they, and we created.
With Yoko the flea became a crutch for the world’s social lepers — freaks flocked to him and sadder cases believed he could help them where conventional methods were unable or unwilling.
‘Love and peace,’ said John as a turmoil of his, and our, making engulfed him. ‘Love and peace.’
The pace was a fraught, lunatic 100,000 miles an hour when last spring he and Yoko dropped out of sight, and set to work on a six-month long course of psychotherapy in California. In September they re-emerged and made straight for the recording studios. John had not been idle during therapy, and the traumas of his experiences became the mirror from which to draw enough songs for a new album.
Lennon was back and doing the things he knew best. Tomorrow that album is released — a brilliant, untitled viewpoint on John Lennon as he now sees himself: not as the Walrus, not as the Beatle, not as the world’s guru, not as that performing flea — just the working-class hero, aged thirty.
‘I was saying “peace” everywhere and getting none myself,’ he says.
The Lennons’ home is an estate near Ascot where doves perch look-out on a high terrace: seventy hilly acres of heath, groves, woods, massive and exotic oriental trees protected by the local council, donkeys, gardens, lodges, an artifically created lake with a bed of rubber lining to keep the water from running away, and a splendid white, spacious, perfectly proportioned house where workmen look like being busy for ever, and where John and Yoko entertain in either the kitchen or a large, all-purpose room, in which the television and stereo speakers stand sentinel on the bed.
They have few visitors (it will be a long time before the friendship wall is covered in writing) and very few friends. They get an enormous buzz out of showing one around their home — the acres of cream furry carpet from Communist China, the bath which looks like a giant’s saucer set into the bathroom floor, the completely equipped recording studios, darkroom, offices. In future their records will be made at home and the musicians will be able to stay with them. They can be virtually a completely self-subsistent cottage industry, equipped for a technical seige.
For visiting the gardens they have a little electric buggy and supplies of army and RAF greatcoats — with the insignia pulled off. They like to spend an hour or so in the garden every day.
‘I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am,’ says John, allowing himself a moment of whimsical satisfaction.
Yet his new album is in no way the work of an eccentric millionaire. It is a painfully self-aware statement about himself. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a bloody variety show,’ he says. And he hasn’t.
There are eleven songs, all of them deeply personal — songs about his mother, about God, and about his upbringing. On one track, ‘Working Class Hero’, he uses what would once have been considered a dreaded four-letter word because it was the only way he could say exactly what he meant.
It is a precise and economic album, and every word is used with care and thought. There are no lazy moments. It is a devastating, disturbing, autobiographical insight into the mind of one of the greatest hero figures of our time.
‘It’s just what came out of my mouth when I tried to write songs,’ he explains. ‘I was doing therapy and going through my life and so I wrote about the most important things that happened in my life. I’m writing this now because it’s the way I feel. I used to say I wouldn’t be singing “She Loves You” when I was thirty, but I didn’t know I’d be singing about my mother.’
This interview took place generally over three separate visits to Ascot, but mainly one night after dinner when John and Yoko sat on their bed and went through a more normal question-and-answers bit for my sake.
They’re both plumper than they used to be — John being as heavy as he was in Help! although it hardly shows with Yoko — and I thought I detected a noticeably more aggressive attitude.
‘No,’ says John. ‘It’s just that I get carried away a bit when I can talk to someone. We don’t talk to many people. And I’m very excited with the record coming out and everything.’
The record is about him. ‘It’s my insight into myself,’ he says. Anxious not to discuss too much the therapy they underwent, knowing well that the world is full of those who would be only too happy to say ‘He’s off again — he’s found something else,’ he readily admits that it was in the framework of therapy that the record was conceived.
‘It just made me see all the pain and torture I’d go through on stage before an audience which demanded so much of me. You go up there like Aunt Sally to have things thrown at you and it’s torture, yet it’s always idiots like me who do it.
‘How often do you think we enjoyed a show when we were touring? Perhaps one show in thirty. It was a nightmare. I was just a performing flea for a group of people. I know it was of my own choice, but that’s the game. It’s like being a child and performing for your parents all the time.
And that’s what everything’s like.
‘We all start off with this appalling need for love. Why have I made this record? For money? For prestige? Fun? It’s bloody hard work making a record. It took six months to write these songs. It’s no game. It’s bloody tough. At first I was dying to get on with it, but after we’d done one track I just thought “Christ, I wish I’d never started”. I mean you can get very tired. That’s how Yoko and I help each other. She keeps me up when I go down and vice versa.’
Despite the intensity of their involvement with each other they are rarely (in front of me, at any rate) that serious. It is rather the reverse, in fact, as John gently chides Yoko, poking fun at her and enjoying a joking, teasing relationship.
‘It was Yoko that changed me,’ he scoffs. ‘She forced me to become avant garde and take me clothes off when all I wanted was to become Tom Jones. And now look at me. Did you know that avant garde is French for bullshit?’
Yoko, for her part plays bashfully along, ignoring his down to earth swipes at her middle-class and artistic background. ‘At fifteen I wanted to be a fantastic opera singer and go to La Scala,’ she says. ‘My range was very wide and I would have liked to have been a coloratura soprano.’
‘She also wanted to be a nightclub singer,’ says John deadpan.
‘Well yes, that was a secret ambition. Also I wanted to become an actress.’
Yoko, too, has an album released tomorrow, on which she, like John, is accompanied by a basic rock and roll formula — Ringo Starr on drums, Klaus Voorman on bass and Lennon himself on guitar. Again she illustrates that weird ability of extended high voltage screaming which we’ve heard on earlier records, but now it’s augmented by a jam session. They’re both very proud of the recording.
‘I’m such an optimist,’ says Yoko, ‘that I always think that everyone can understand me when I scream because everyone has been a baby and known what screaming is all about. But when I find I’m not communicating I always feel unfairly treated. I did the screaming before I met John and also on the album is a recording I made with Ornette Coleman on trumpet which was a rehearsal I did for a show at the Albert Hall in 1968. When I first met John I went to a session and I thought how dull it was that they always played the same beat, but after a while I began to like it…’
‘We’ve only got to play four bars now and she grabs the microphone and she’s off … aaaggghhh.’ John goes into a loud wail. ‘Take her anywhere and she’ll do her number for you.’
Aren’t they ever lonely? ‘How can I be lonely when I’m with Yoko night and day? I mean I’m lonely in the universal sense. When I’ve got toothache I’m alone, but we have no outside desires. We are the best things we can give each other. I’m not striving for anything now. I am what I am in whatever circumstances.
‘I never did have many friends. The Beatles were my friends, but they were also the people I worked with. We were friends, but then the function ended and that was the problem, and the friendship had nothing to live on except the memory. But I’m still friendly with George and Ringo. It’s funny I never discuss the Beatles much unless someone asks me. It seems so far away like school or college, because the whole thing died in my head long before all the rumpus started.’
They follow the press cuttings on themselves with hawklike attention and are amazingly sensitive to adverse criticism. John is edgy and anxious that his new record will be received well critically. The excellent notices Paul and George got for their records have made it all the more important.
He knows his album, with its slight obscenities, its cynicisms, its rejection of religious beliefs and the use of drugs will be controversial, but he’s grown used to it. Constantly amazed by what he thinks to be the madness carried on in connection with his name, (‘D’you know there’s some fellow in New York saying he’s selling a hair-coat of mine — when it’s been here in the cupboard for the last two years — it’s amazing’) he never dodges a confrontation.
‘I’m always amazed when all the trouble starts,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think anyone would get upset over the cover of “Two Virgins” [where they both appeared nude] but they did. But I suppose that was because it was before Hair’
By comparison with the lengths to which theatre producers and film makers are prepared to go today, all of the Lennons’ excesses of a year or two ago seem very petty indeed.
Is he not worried that the outspokenness of his new song will upset his father? ‘If it does it’s too bad. What did he do for me? He didn’t turn up until I was famous. I should get upset. The first time I ever saw him he was on the front of the Daily Express washing dishes. He left me, I didn’t leave him. It says it in the song.
‘But you know it isn’t only about me. I hope a lot of the people will understand the lyrics also apply to everyone — to me specifically, but to everyone in general.’
John Lennon, the dreamweaver and the intoxicator of his age, gets up from the bed and wanders across to his record player. ‘D’you remember this one?’
Suddenly Fats Domino comes leaping out of the speakers and Lennon smiles: ‘I feel like I did when I was back in Liverpool. This was the first song my mother ever taught me to play.’
You made
Me cry
When you said
Goodbye.
POSTSCRIPT What doesn’t emerge from this piece is that John Lennon was always a witty and funny man. The object of the exercise at that time was to promote his new album and since he had only recently returned from his long course of psychotherapy he sounded more aggressive and whining than he really was. Tittenhurst Park wasn’t really the best place for him to live, and he left there (and England) a few months later and never came back. While he and Yoko were there, however, they allowed a group of peace-loving Hare Krishna freaks to live in one of the outbuildings. At first everything went well and the lodgers decorated their new home and ghosted around muttering ‘Hare Krishna’ and ‘Peace’ whenever they bumped into anyone. But then one day they disappeared. John had turned them out when they began to get on his nerves. ‘I couldn’t get any peace,’ he explained, with his great sheep’s grin.
March 1971
Michael Caine
Michael Caine can speak fluent French. I bet you didn’t know that. He’s also very good at German. Practically no one knows that either, but he’s quietly proud of the fact.
It’s an accomplishment of which no one considers him capable. Sometimes when he’s in a restaurant and he speaks to the waiter in French, the company he’s with just gape in stunned astonishment, because they just know that he ought not to be intelligent enough to have learned a foreign language.
‘And you know,’ he says, ‘I just have to go off into the gents and take a good look at myself in the mirror to see if I really look like the dumdum that seems to be my image. I mean it makes you wonder about yourself. Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.
‘I’ve never been given any credit as a craftsman, and my whole press image has always been rather frivolous. And, of course, there’s always been the crumpet thing about me.
‘Everyone always assumes that the parts I’ve played have been parts where I haven’t had to think about creating a character. Oh God, it annoys me to death to be written about as though I were the real village-idiot, a real, lazy, stupid, good-for-nothing, like one of those actors in the old days when it was said that the studio electrician used to put the sparkle in his eyes.
‘I suppose the press wanted a Cinderella story and I was it. But Cinderella was lucky.’
I’m being very lucky tonight. I’m gliding along in the polished cream leather back seat of Michael Caine’s metallic blue Rolls (he had it copied from one owned by a Texas millionaire) on the way back from Shepperton Film Studios to his Grosvenor Square apartment.
Caine’s chauffeur drives with a royal grace as though we are a couple of delicate eggs, and the jou
rney has a royal super-suspended elegance to it.
Now and then we pull gently to a halt at an unobliging red light, and Caine chuckles as he watches the cheaper family cars line up for the inevitable racing start.
‘It’s always like a Le Mans start when we’re in the Rolls. As soon as the lights go amber they all start pissing across the road grinding their gears to get away ahead of us. But we’re not speedy or flash. If I were flash I’d have the car number MC 1 but I just took what I was given. I like to think I was born cool.’
He is not flash. During the last fourteen weeks he’s been filming X, Y and Zee (Edna O’Brien’s formerly titled screenplay Zee and Co) with Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York. Whenever Elizabeth Taylor went on the set a caravan of four or five limousines made their way down to Shepperton — His, Hers, and presumably a couple more for the dogs and dogsbodies, I understand. The studio joke is that if only the Burtons’ retinue go to see the film it’ll make money.
Caine’s circle is more tightly knit. Basically it is Peter, friend and chauffeur for five years, and a nice bloke called Johnny Morris. Together they look like three first division footballers — not sharp or hippy or trendy, but honest and scrubbed, neat polo necked shirts and working-class smart, with undandified hair cuts and manicured nails.
If you didn’t know you wouldn’t necessarily guess which one was the star. There’s no air of unapproachability; just an easy chattiness.
‘What I like,’ says Caine, ‘is a very efficient organisation around me. My homes (he has a mill house at Windsor for the weekends) are full of gadgets to make things easier. There are an awful lot of pressures in this business so I surround myself with buffers. Johnny is my main buffer, he sort of manages everything for me — like an aide. Then there’s a secretary and all sorts of cleaners.’