John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  That hair, it was the very limit, the absolute end. I was almost a Screaming Auntie, much to David’s amusement. I could contain myself not one minute more, & promptly phoned him & a good old time battle royal followed, no holds barred & two receivers were banged down. So that was that. He phoned me on Monday, saying he couldn’t help it—too busy—same old excuse, but that I would see it has been cut for the Eamonn Andrews Show on Sunday night. Well, we’ll see, a Gimmick is all right, but that’s going too far. I honestly thought at first it was a wig, he was being funny, fully expecting it to be pulled off. However, we are friends again—at the moment.

  He says he has written another very good song, not the one just released, he thinks it’s a much better one but it’s for the [new] film. Title for the film just one word up to now.

  Just had surveyor’s report on The Moorings…thought I would have another look at it after all, but a lot of woodworm in it…So I’m on the lookout again. May have a look at Bournemouth.

  No, John did not go to boarding school, a big mistake on my part…Now [he] blames me for keeping him at home, & look what I’ve got——a long-haired rebel! My Sister phoned after Lucky Stars, from Edinburgh—and said, or yelled—“Did you see him?”—Shouting—“You are to blame for all this nonsense.’ So poor old Mimi. What can one do with a highly intelligent, in his own way, clever rebel—answer—nothing.

  No photographs of Self. I get enough Shocks without Seeing myself.

  Have a nice holiday. John’s half sister Julia is coming tomorrow. She’s working like mad on A Levels. She’s 18, is taking Russian as an extra, and definitively not interested in the Beatles, much to John’s annoyance, and he’s not interested in her Russian—so—

  Bye to you and love

  Mimi

  Mimi did subsequently have a look at Bournemouth, accompanied by John, Cynthia, and Julian in the all-black Rolls, but again could find nothing she liked in the town itself. They were about to give up and return home when an real-estate agent steered them to Canford Cliffs, a suburb of expensive modern homes that overlooked neighboring Poole Harbour. Here in Panorama Road, a luxurious bungalow named Harbour Edge had just come on the market, priced at a hefty £25,000. “There were still people living there, so I didn’t want to go in, but John did,” Mimi remembered. “I was shocked because he had his old jeans on with holes in, and a silly cap on; he looked a mess, but in he went, bold as brass, and ‘Do you mind if I look around?’ John liked the place straight away. He said to me ‘If you don’t have it, Mimi, I will,’ and then he rang his accountant and that was that.”

  Harbour Edge was, in fact, an ideal choice, secluded and peaceful, yet with the busy panorama of Poole Harbour a few feet away to provide constant interest and banish any feeling of loneliness. By the time Mimi let Jane Wirgman know her new address, the wrench of leaving Merseyside had already begun to fade:

  …Still looking for different things, which somehow seem to have gone astray, including letters, my own fault of Course.

  This is a Semi Bungalow, in Some ways not as nice as my own house in Woolton. I miss the lovely trees, especially the two big Elm Trees in the back garden, there are plenty of trees here, but they are mostly tall Pines.

  But the view over the Harbour here is lovely, with the Purbeck Hills in the distance. The Harbour is very deserted now, of small boats anyway, mostly tankers and fussy little tugs bustling about.

  After her move south, as she grew older and more overtly dependent on John, a new note entered their relationship. Often it was if their former roles have been reversed: now he had become the over-solicitous, scolding parent and Mimi the stubborn, rebellious child. In another letter to Jane she wrote:

  …I am trying to get ready for a holiday in Florence & Venice. John insists…& I have always wanted to See Michael Angelo’s Boy David Sculpture & others. So I’m trying to Sort out my rags etc. I leave London about 10 AM 3 May & return 17 May when John’s Car will meet me & I am to go on to Weybridge. “You Know Who” was on the phone for an hour yesterday morning, bossing me about Something awful. I Say ‘Yes dear, oh of Course dear” & go on my own way, which saves a lot of trouble, but the dear boy, I’m quite Convinced, wonders how I’m walking without Crutches! So old, so old. Ah well!

  The Beatles’ third consecutive British and American number one single, released in November 1964, had given no hint of anything amiss with John. As well as writing the track and singing lead, he also partnered George in the two-handed guitar riff that ran through it. The guitars sounded more like keyboards and seemed set at two different volume levels; the intro began with an echoey groan of feedback, originally produced when John happened to lean his switched-on guitar against a live amp. Despite these founding experiments in sonic novelty and distortion, his lyric was one of pure, simple euphoria. Fresh from a triumphant American tour and elevation to the Weybridge landed gentry, what else could his message possibly be but “I Feel Fine”?

  Somewhat different signals were to be read in the album Beatles for Sale, which also had instantly gone gold a month earlier. In contrast with clear-cut, upbeat Paul songs like “Eight Days a Week” and “I’ll Follow the Sun,” John explored grayer areas of self-doubt, mourning, and embarrassment—“No Reply,” “Baby’s in Black,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”—though, as usual, he had made essential contributions to Paul’s lightness, just as Paul had to his darkness. His spirits seemed highest in the cover versions that still interspersed Lennon-McCartney originals: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” Doctor Feelgood and the Interns’ “Mr. Moonlight,” and a faithful copy of Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” The album cover showed the four still with their Stu Sutcliffe art-student look, swathed in thick black knitted mufflers. John’s face had a strangely drawn, affronted look, as if the snap of the camera shutter had coincided with some mortal personal insult.

  It was a strange and wholly new kind of creative frustration he was discovering: to have his every new song awaited so hungrily yet listened to so inattentively, his least predictable themes greeted with the same shrieks of undiscerning rapture, his bleakest thoughts submerged and transfigured by the Beatles’ collective joie de vivre. Watch him in early ’65, performing a showstopper from Beatles for Sale, ducking between his lead vocal and the mouth organ he now has on a frame like Bob Dylan’s. Would you believe such energy, and ecstasy, could be generated by a song called “I’m a Loser”?

  The follow-up single to “I Feel Fine,” released in April 1965, found him in nothing like the same mood of euphoric well-being. “Ticket to Ride” was, on the face of it, a traditional waving-farewell-at-the-station song, rooted in characteristic Lennon wordplay. Paul McCartney’s cousins, Mike and Bett Robbins, good friends to the former Nurk Twins in their struggling days, now ran a pub in the small seaside town of Ryde, Isle of Wight. John had been with Paul to stay with the Robbinses, a journey necessitating a “ticket to Ryde” by ferry across the Solent.

  But the song contained no echo of that pleasant visit, still less the brave optimism traditionally expressed to departing loved ones by those they leave behind. The tone in which John saw off his anonymous “gerl” was one of glum passivity and self-deprecation: “She said that living with me was bringing her down / That she would never be free when I was around…” Whereas previous chart-aimed Beatles tracks had all been bouncy and toe-tapping, this was slow, somnolent, almost hypnotically repetitive—embryonic heavy rock, even heavy metal. Had such a term yet existed, it might almost have been called “druggy.”

  “Ticket to Ride” was a foretaste of the second Beatles feature film, on which work had begun in February. Once again, the producer was Walter Shenson and the director Richard Lester. Thanks to the global success of A Hard Day’s Night, this sequel had received a heftily increased budget from United Artists and an upgrade from black-and-white to color. Rather than just playing themselves, the Beatles now played parodies of themselves; no longer shut away under guard but having adventures in the outside wo
rld like characters in a cartoon strip. The script—by American screenwriter Marc Behm and British playwright Charles Wood—concerned the efforts of a fanatical Eastern sect to retrieve a sacred ring, which has somehow wound up with the other trademark chunky baubles on Ringo Starr’s fingers. An impressive supporting cast included distinguished actors like Leo McKern and Patrick Cargill and two modish new faces from the satire boom, Roy Kinnear and Eleanor Bron. The provisional title, combining Hinduism’s most familiar deity with Beatle jokiness, was Eight Arms to Hold You.

  Overall, however, neither lavish budget nor living color resulted in anything half as engaging as A Hard Day’s Night. The complexity of the plot and overnumerous supporting characters meant that the Beatles were often marginalized except in their set-piece performance sequences. Leo McKern, in particular, as the sect’s high priest, who takes time out from murderous plotting to discuss theology with a Church of England vicar, ruthlessly upstaged everyone in sight. John was later to complain with good reason of feeling “like extras in our own film.”

  Much of the interest lies in the eerie accuracy with which Behm and Wood’s silly knockabout plot foreshadows real events soon to follow. The Indian theme, with sitars plunking Beatle tunes, is the most obvious but no means only example. At one point, ordinary police protection having failed to shield the foursome from Goddess Kaili’s turbaned hit squad, they are shown hiding out inside Buckingham Palace. At another, they try to foil their pursuers by flying out of Heathrow Airport in disguises intended to make them unrecognizable as Beatles. John’s round glasses and long, flowing beard are precisely what this particular Beatle will be wearing in earnest four years hence.

  A sequence was filmed on location in the Bahamas—not because the plot demanded it but simply as a quid pro quo to that celebrated tax haven for sheltering some of the Beatles’ earnings. The islands were still a British Crown Colony, and, in an echo of the Washington episode, the four found themselves pressured into attending a formal black-tie dinner at Government House in Nassau, along with Brian Epstein, Walter Shenson, and Richard Lester. “We’d spent the day filming at what was supposed to be a deserted army barracks,” Lester remembers. “When we got there, we found it was a psychiatric institution where old people and children were crowded together in the most terrible conditions. All of the Beatles were sickened by it.” Incensed by the contrast between that and the governor’s glittering soiree, John rounded on the nearest official, who happened to be the Bahamian minister of finance. “He really tore into this guy,” Lester says. “In front of Walter, Brian, me…everyone.” The minister protested feebly that he was doing his best and, in fact, received no payment for his job. “In that case, you’re doing better than I thought you were doing,” John snapped back.

  Among his fellow cast members, he found a special empathy with Eleanor Bron, the actress-comedienne cast as the Kaili sect’s reluctant handmaiden. Thirty-one-year-old Bron was currently famous for her appearances on the BBC satire show Not So Much a Programme…More a Way of Life. Intensely beautiful, intensely clever, and intensely private, she awoke all John’s well-concealed love of intellectual women and chivalry toward vulnerable ones. One day on a remote Bahamian island, she and the Beatles found themselves cornered by a mob of press photographers, who demanded that Bron should strip and pose for “bikini shots” with the four. “John dealt with them in no uncertain manner,” Lester recalls.

  The new elements in the Beatles’ sound on “Ticket to Ride” did indeed reflect a new element in their lives. Since their initiation by Bob Dylan the previous summer, all four had become regular marijuana users, avid for any chance to seek a place apart and pass around the thin, loosely packed cigarettes whose laughter-giving powers had proved so instant and infallible. And, despite Brian’s paranoia over their public image, they carried generous supplies of the drug with them wherever they went. Before each tour, the two roadies Neil and Mal would empty out a full-size carton of two hundred regular cigarettes, then fill each pack with prerolled joints, resealing the cellophane outer wrapper with a warm iron so that no customs official would suspect it had been opened.

  Though pot had been illegal in Britain since 1920, most police officers as yet had little or no experience of it. One day when Les Anthony was driving all four Beatles along Exhibition Road in Kensington, a police car pulled him over for a routine traffic offense. “When John wound down the back window to see what was going on, all this pot smoke came billowing out,” Anthony remembers. “But the coppers seemed to have no idea what it was. When I went home after a day round and about with John, my clothes used to reek of it.”

  By the time John turned his mind to writing a title song for the film, some seven weeks into production, it had been renamed Help! Initially working alone at Kenwood, he embarked on a formula that seemed straightforward and superficial enough, a Beatly love song conveying the film’s cartoon-strip terror and confusion. Into the mix also went the chorus from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” a song John had played and replayed since its appearance a year earlier: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

  The lyric that emerged was not boy talking to girl so much as patient to psychotherapist, or lost soul to Samaritan: “Help me if you can I’m feeling down…I’m not so self-assured…Every now and then I feel so insecure…Help me get my feet back on the ground…Won’t you please, please, help me?” These might seem astonishing admissions by the supposedly hard, cynical John Lennon, though to one perceptive American reporter they can have come as no surprise. The future feminist crusader Gloria Steinem, who interviewed him for Cosmopolitan magazine, recorded a telling exchange amid the melee at New York’s Riverside Motor Inn. “The tall girl leaned over to Lennon and told him that his skin was looking mottled again. ‘I know,’ he said, and looked embarrassed. ‘It’s nerves.’”

  At the time, even John himself did not realize how much his “Help!” words came from the heart. “…later I knew, really, I was crying out for help,” he would recall. “The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. I was eating and drinking like a pig, and I was as fat as a pig, dissatisfied with myself, and subconsciously I was crying for help…You can see the movie: he—I—is very fat, very insecure [there are, in fact, no visible traces of either] and he’s completely lost himself. And I was singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was, but then things got more difficult…. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help. It’s real.”

  Paul McCartney, who joined the composition process at an early stage, admits to having had no idea of the song’s true motivation. “There was some pessimism in John’s songs, but “Baby’s in Black” was one we wrote together, and we liked heavy, black, bluesy songs because many of the [American] songs we liked were rooted in the blues and R&B…. It probably is true that John might have identified a little more than I did with those. To me—to both of us—they were essentially just the blues genre, which we loved, but it did transpire later that John was having a harder time with his emotions.”

  In the studio, John’s solitary cri de coeur turned into another joyous Beatles A-side, its title merely emphasizing how little help they needed from anyone. A two-part lead vocal and speeded-up tempo further defused the message: while John’s impassioned top line grabbed listeners by the lapels, Paul’s buoyant countermelody reassuringly patted their heads. “The real feeling of the song was lost because it was a single,” John said later. “We did it too fast, to try to be commercial…I remember, I got very emotional at the time, singing the lyrics. Whatever I’m singing, I really mean it. I don’t mess around.” The B-side was a Paul composition, almost parodying the same SOS theme with a cheerful call-and-response chorus of “I’m down…I’m really down…Down on the ground….” Has any other million-selling double-sided disk ever been so jam-packed with depression?

  The Help! sound track album, released in August, showed a John not influenced by Bob Dylan so much as
possessed by him. The standout Lennon contribution was “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a somber ballad about rejection and alienation, couched in more “literary” language (“…head in hand, turn my face to the wall…”) than he’d ever previously tried, and played in folkie acoustic style, without overdubbing. His voice, too, had taken on a Dylanesque quality: harder and more nasal than before, its phrasing more adventurous, its tone laced with bitter irony as much as bleak self-pity.

  The best-remembered Help! album track, however, did not feature in the film nor—amazingly—in the current British charts. This was a tune that Paul had awoken one day to find running through his head, a pensive little melody so fully formed and inevitable in its pattern that he assumed it must be some well-known air he was simply recollecting. Only after playing it to several expert arbiters, including George Martin and Alma Cogan, did he accept that it truly was his own invention and add some lyrics, changing the rough title “Scrambled Eggs” to “Yesterday.” Since it was outside anything in the Beatles’ canon, sounding more Anglican hymn than anything, Martin decided to recorded it as a solo by Paul, replacing John, George, and Ringo with a classical string quartet. Nevertheless, it went onto the Beatles album of the moment and, according to usual practice, its composition was credited to Lennon and McCartney. Though John may have criticized Paul’s later forays into the mainstream, he did not object to this one, even praising a “bluesey note” in the cello passage.

  Over the next thirty years, “Yesterday” would break the record of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as the most-recorded song of all time. Such were the musical riches pouring from John and Paul in 1965 that Parlophone didn’t bother to release it as a single.