John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  “John sits there, still not saying anything, and eventually this editor grudgingly says ‘OK, I’ll put a bit in the paper about you, just something small.’ Then as we all get up to go, John manages to catch the overhanging lip of the guy’s desk with his thighs and lift it right up, so that everything on the top slides off. It’s all one beautiful, smooth moment, he wrecks the guy’s desk, reaches over and shakes his hand, then turns to me and says ‘Let’s fuckin’ get out of here.’”

  Two months on from that hasty, halfhearted ceremony at Mount Pleasant Register Office, the reality of John’s hugely altered station in life had barely even begun to sink in. The recording of “Love Me Do,” the Little Richard experience, and the ever-increasing workload imposed by Brian had left little time to consider his new responsibilities as a husband and father-to-be. “I did feel embarrassed, walking around married,” he would later admit. “It felt like walking round with odd socks on or your flies open.”

  As Mrs. John Lennon, apart from the £10 ring on her finger, Cynthia’s life had not changed to any significant degree. John was still off playing with the Beatles almost every day and every night, in places farther and farther afield. Cynthia stayed on at Brian’s flat in Falkner Street, coped alone with her pregnancy, and accepted her topsy-turvy role: not a secret mistress, as in all the canons of romantic fiction, but a secret wife.

  She maintained such an obediently low profile that even most of her friends and former teachers at the nearby art college never realized she was there. A few doors along, at number 58, lived June Furlong, the model who still ruled the college life-drawing classes with a rod of iron. “One day when I got home from work, I was told that a fellow called Lennon had called round to ask me to a party,” June remembers. “He left me a few other invitations, to parties or to Ye Cracke, but I was always too busy with my classes, so I never did see the place Brian had lent him.” Sighting John in the city center one day, she was surprised at how opulent he now looked. “He was in the Kardomah in Whitechapel, wearing a new and very expensive-looking purple sweater. ‘That’s a lady’s sweater, John,’ I told him. He pulled back the neck and showed me the label, to prove that it came from Watson Prickard, the most expensive men’s shop in Liverpool.”

  Little of this new affluence seemed to have rubbed off on Cyn. Her old college friend Ann Mason recalls bumping into her one day in Mount Street and finding a worried, distracted young woman, very different from the serenissima of their Lettering class. “Cynthia told me that she and John owed some money in income tax, and that Brian was sorting it all out. She also said she only had a single £1 note in her purse at that moment, and she was terrified that John would find out about it and take it.”

  On John’s visits home, most of Cyn’s time was spent in washing and ironing his stage wardrobe, cooking and caring for him in a never-attainable wish to match his Aunt Mimi, and keeping up the bachelor-boy masquerade to the point of absurdity. Even when he first brought Ringo to meet her, he did not mention that she was his wife or that she was pregnant.

  Mostly she was by herself in Brian’s elegant pad, lonely and bored by day, and at night often terrified out of her wits. The house’s front door stood permanently open, and shady characters were always wandering through the communal hall that Cyn had to cross to go from the living room to her bedroom. If that were not enough, her pregnancy became increasingly troublesome; during one of John’s trips away, she began to suffer bleeding and was told by her doctor to stay in bed or run serious risk of a miscarriage. Too weak and nervous to keep crossing the hall to the bathroom, she stayed in her bedroom for three days with “a bucket by the bed and a kettle [as] my only facilities.”

  A solution clearly had to be found that would not entail John’s staying home for a single minute longer than he did already. It emerged in the petite form of Dot Rhone, Paul McCartney’s former steady, who had accompanied Cynthia to Hamburg and occupied the next bedsit to hers in Garmoyle Road. Dot had special cause to sympathize with Cyn’s predicament: toward the end of her relationship with Paul, she too had fallen pregnant, and the pair had been saved from a similar shotgun wedding only when Dot miscarried at three months.

  Directly below Brian’s flat was a small basement apartment, currently unoccupied. The obliging Dot agreed to move in there so that in any future medical emergencies, Cyn would not be all alone. Despite worries over her pregnancy, Dot recalls, Cyn’s wifely duty to John came before all else. “Once, when she went to her brother Tony’s for the weekend, she asked me if I’d look after John. He came in very late, a bit drunk, and we had a long talk. He told me that if some other woman that he really fancied came along, he’d leave Cynthia just like that. Nothing in the world was ever going to stop him doing what he wanted to do. He did make a pass at me, too. I just said, ‘John, we’ve been friends too long for anything like this.’”

  While he was traveling with the Beatles, swamped by eager girls and virtually under oath to hide his wedding ring, monogamy could not be expected to have much of a hold. But closer to home, even on his very doorstep, it was no different. Marriage had not ended his affair with Patricia Inder: they still regularly spent nights together when Cyn did not know he was back in Liverpool, or thought him to be burning midnight oil over some new song with Paul. “I wasn’t happy about it,” Patricia says. “I’d say, ‘How can you be doing this, with a wife at home and a baby on the way?’ John always said, ‘A man needs more than one woman in his life.’” True to his word, he was also simultaneously having an affair with a girl named Ida Holley, who lived near Princes Park, appearing with her quite openly at Liverpool nightspots like Allan Williams’s Blue Angel club.

  It seemed the worst possible timing that right after the release of “Love Me Do,” the Beatles had to return to Hamburg for a two-week stint at the Star-Club, from November 1 to 14. Despite the huge change in their circumstances since January, Brian would not renege on this or the remaining part of the block booking he had made with Horst Fascher. John in particular viewed it as a bore and an imposition, forgetting that without Hamburg he might still be playing for pennies at Aintree Institute. “We hated going back,” he would recall. “Brian made us…fulfil the contract. If we’d had our way, we’d have copped out on the engagement because we didn’t feel we owed them fuck-all.”

  According to close associates, including Joe Flannery and Peter Brown, Brian ordered ten thousand copies of “Love Me Do,” roughly ten times the quantity he could possibly have sold through NEMS, to guarantee its entry into the Top 20. John, however, always insisted the song had succeeded on its own merits, through that magic element, word of mouth, and its chart history tends to support him. A week after its release, Record Retailer magazine showed it at only number forty-nine. From there it made a slow and erratic ascent through the thirties and twenties, gaining a few places, dropping a couple, then creeping up again. Far more crucial than any bulk order from Brian had been Tony Calder’s insistence that free promotional copies be circulated to the country’s two main ballroom chains, Mecca and Top Rank, both of which featured the earliest form of disco. Radio and TV might not have been playing “Love Me Do,” but the teenagers were dancing to it.

  By the time the Beatles returned home on November 15, the single was indisputably on its way, receiving greater promotional efforts from EMI, getting more radio plays and press mentions, being treated more and more as a pop rather than comedy single, and eventually peaking at number seventeen (albeit only in the chronically unreliable Record Retailer chart). Awaiting them were invitations to give performances both on national BBC radio and Radio Luxembourg, and also on three regional television programs with a combined broadcast area representing a good fifth of the whole country.

  Mythology has it that Brian toned down and conventionalized the Beatles’ appearance. But in truth, the quartet with which he presented Britain’s TV viewers in late 1962 looked almost possessed of a sartorial death wish. Their stage suits, now pale rather than dark gray, had the Cardin-
style round collars that Stu Sutcliffe had been so derided for in Hamburg. John’s, Paul’s and George’s rather straggly, irregular “French” hairstyles had been barbered into identical, eye-fringing mops, and a fourth one issued ready-made to Ringo Starr. They were, in short, young males who in every essential visual detail resembled rather mature and out-of-date females. It was a moot point which was more foolhardy: the concealment of their foreheads or of their ties.

  Equally outlandish was the air of democracy: no Cliff Richard–inspired lead singer, no obvious star, no one to decide on the instant that one liked or hated. Attention tended to settle first on Paul McCartney, at far left, playing the left-handed Hofner violin-shaped bass that was as much a novelty as his hair and suit, and already showing a gift for buttonholing the camera with his big puppy-dog eyes. George at this stage was no more than a bulb of hair and a thin, knobby guitar; Ringo, a background bulb of hair and a clatter. Rather like one of the panoramic cameras used for photographing Quarry Bank School, the eye tended to move in an arc, reaching John last of all, alone on the right.

  Despite his transformed appearance, the stance was still that of lead Quarryman: feet planted apart, shoulders slightly hunched, face thrust forward and slightly upward in that old familiar blend of defiance and myopia. It was a pose somehow complemented by the stubby-necked Rickenbacker 325, which, in another splurge of affluence, had been fitted with a new bridge and refinished from “natural” ivory to glossy black. As both singer and harmonica player on “Love Me Do,” he strummed no chords, merely slapped the guitar in time with one hand while his lips shaped the so-elementary words in a brittle cupid’s bow. Only when he played the harmonica passages did he seem completely involved, his face softening above his crossed-over hands as who knew what tinny-voiced echoes of boyhood were blown back to him.

  On November 26, the Beatles returned to EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, if not yet conquering heroes then at least as professionals deserving respect from the men in white coats. To take maximum advantage of their minimal fame, George Martin wanted a follow-up single for release early the following year. However, this time there was no question of calling in “professional” songwriters. Among the Lennon-McCartney songs already demoed was a John song, written some weeks earlier in his Aunt Mimi’s living room, amid the Coalport china and pedigreed cats. In its original form, it was a dramatic ballad after the style of Roy Orbison, ascending into ever higher regions of pleading and pain. For a title John reached back to the punning Bing Crosby lyric he used to love as a toddler with Julia: “Please lend your little ears to my pleas…” The song was called “Please Please Me.”

  At the November 26 session, this was pulled out of the drawer and, on Martin’s advice, given a radically different treatment. The angst-ridden ballad turned into an exuberant all-out rocker by John and Paul in an Everly-Brotherly duet, punctuated by harmonica wails and throaty bass, its tone no longer lonesome or lovelorn but as jokey as any average Scouser trying to steer his “gerl” into a back alley for a knee-trembler. Indeed, the ascending chorus of “Come on…Come on…COME ON!” climaxing in a falsetto “Whoa yeah!” had all the mirthful exhilaration of orgasm in a cold wind. After a single take, Martin switched on the studio monitor from his control room and told the four they had their first number one record.

  To learn the truth or otherwise of this prediction, they would have to wait until January; meanwhile, all that set the Beatles apart from a hundred other pop acts with half a hit was the tireless dedication and sheer chutzpah of their manager. This was never better shown than when Brian pitched them to Arthur Howes, then Britain’s foremost promoter of pop package shows. He devoted hours of research and persuasion to finding out Howes’s private telephone number, then rang up one Sunday night, correctly guessing it was the likeliest time to catch the promoter at home. This one cold call persuaded Howes to put them into a show at the Embassy cinema, Peterborough, on December 3, albeit with no payment other than traveling expenses.

  For a group long used to knocking audiences dead with their live act, the Peterborough appearance was a severe humiliation. Top of the bill was Frank Ifield, whose number one single “I Remember You” had helped inspire John’s harmonica riff on “Love Me Do.” The so-called “fabulous Beatles” were bottom, ranking below the Lana Sisters and a xylophone duo named Tommy Wallis and Beryl. Their performance met with stony indifference from their East Midland audience and later was sternly criticized by the local paper, the Peterborough Standard, for being “too loud,” especially in a number called “Twist and Shout.” But Arthur Howes saw something in them and offered them a second national tour, this one headed by American stars Chris Montez and Tommy Roe, scheduled to last through most of March.

  As Christmas approached, Brian drew up an elaborate full-page advertisement detailing the Beatles’ “Year of Achievement” for Mersey Beat readers: their EMI contract and acquisition of a “recording manager,” a “press representative,” and a fan club; their radio and TV appearances; the far-afield venues they had played and major stars with whom they had appeared; the current UK chart position of “Love Me Do” at number twenty-one; the stop-the-presses news that in the New Musical Express’s annual popularity poll, they had come in fifth in the category of British Vocal Groups.

  The two weeks between December 18 and 31 found them back in Hamburg, working off the last installment of their commitment to the Star-Club with palpable bad grace despite bigger-than-ever star treatment from Manfred Weissleder. “We could feel that they thought we were history already,” Horst Fascher remembers. “Brian had been telling them it might be bad for their image to say they had worked in St. Pauli, and they better keep their noses clean. Paul kept telling John, ‘Don’t do that,’ and John sometimes even listened, which I never saw before.”

  Midway through the irksome Christmas fortnight came a surprise: Patricia Inder turned up in Hamburg with a companion named Jean, ostensibly to see her friend Johnny Gustafson of the Big Three. “John’s face lit up when he saw me,” Patricia remembers. “He lifted me on his shoulder and carried me all around the Star-Club. Later on, after the Beatles had finished playing, he came to where I was sitting and threw a coat over both our heads, and we had a good snog. I couldn’t understand why I kept getting all these filthy looks from Bettina, the barmaid.”

  Though full of the plans and possibilities of 1963, he did his best to convince Patricia they should go on seeing each other secretly at her friend Sue’s flat, with the candles and fresh packs of chewing gum under the pillow. “‘It doesn’t have to end,’ he kept saying to me. If I’d been a bit older and wiser, I’d have kept on with him. But I was looking for love, and I knew that, the way he was going, I could only ever have a tiny part of John. It broke my heart, but I told him we had to finish.”

  On Christmas Day, since the Beatles had nothing else to do, King-size Taylor took them along to the special festive lunch provided by the dockside seamen’s mission. “There were all the trimmings, turkey and Christmas pudding, and a blessing beforehand,” King-size remembers. “When Grace was over, John shouted out ‘Thank Christ for all this food….’” Two days later, as a belated Christmas gift, “Love Me Do” reached its number seventeen peak in the UK. Elvis Presley was at number one with another of his bland post-army ballads, “Return to Sender”; Cliff Richard was number two with “The Next Time” and the Shadows number three with “Foot-Tapper.”

  That New Year’s Eve, the Beatles bade farewell to their old life with a ragged, drunken performance on the Star-Club stage, captured for posterity by Kingsize Taylor’s tape recorder. “We all had a meal first at the Mambo Schankey. As we left, I saw John pick up a knife and fork from the table and shove them into his pocket. When the Beatles come onstage, the first thing he does is pull out the knife and throw it at someone in the audience. Admittedly it was only a table knife.”

  The most crucial exposure that the Beatles had with “Please Please Me” was an ABC-TV pop show called Thank Your Lucky Stars, tr
ansmitted at 5:40 p.m. each Saturday. Their appearance, recorded on January 13 and shown six nights later, happened to coincide with the heaviest snowfalls for almost a century. The maximum number of teenage consumers were therefore gathered around the home hearth, eating high teas of eggs, chips, and baked beans on soggy toast drenched in thick brown sauce. Many scarcely even realized this was the same quartet that had recorded the cool, ironic “Love Me Do.” For now, along with the crazy hair, bizarre necklines, and mutant violin bass, came energy and exuberance such as no homegrown pop group had ever dared show, on or off television. The call burst out of the black-and-white screen into some four million living rooms with beige-tiled fireplaces and plaster ducks flying up walls: “Come on!…Come on!…COME ON!” Britain’s blue-collar youth needed no second bidding.

  Reviews in the music and trade press—a vital factor in both wholesale orders and retail sales—reflected the same excited surprise. The all-important New Musical Express, in the person of disc jockey Keith Fordyce, said “Please Please Me” was “a really enjoyable platter, full of vigour and vitality,” while the World’s Fair prophesied, not inaccurately, that the Beatles had “every chance of becoming the big star attraction of 1963.” From the day of its release, the single flew off the shelves with no market manipulation needed from NEMS of Liverpool. Nonetheless, the Beatles’ own friends and family members were mobilized to push it along by every possible means. One of the most influential radio outlets was the BBC Light Programme’s Two-Way Family Favourites, a record-request show for military personnel and their families posted overseas. According to John’s cousin Michael Cadwallader, even Aunt Mimi was persuaded to send in a request for “Please Please Me” in the guise of a serviceman far from home.