John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The Philippines, their next and final Far Eastern stop, were not a usual destination for traveling pop groups and had seemed like a brilliant territorial move on Brian’s part. Under the seemingly immovable dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos and his clotheshorse wife, Imelda, this was the most willingly Americanized nation in southeast Asia. Filipinos were renowned for their charm and friendliness and empathy with Western culture. The government-controlled press had whipped up feverish expectation over the Beatles’ visit, portraying it as yet another benefit of Marcos’s rule.

  Before their departure from Tokyo, Brian had politely declined an invitation to the Beatles to call on President Marcos and the First Lady during their brief stay in Manila, explaining that they had only a brief rest-time between shows and it was now policy for them not to act as their country’s emissaries while on the road. None of the Beatles’ party appreciated that no is a word Asian dictators do not understand. On the morning after their arrival, before they were even awake, a party of government officials arrived at their hotel with a fleet of limousines and motorcycle outriders. They were expected within the hour at Malancañang, the presidential palace-cum-for-tress. Sticking to his guns, Brian refused to let them be disturbed.

  When the quartet finally surfaced a couple of hours later, they were able to watch live television coverage of the function they were supposed to be attending: not the private luncheon mentioned in Tokyo but a garden party hosted by Mrs. Marcos for four hundred children of government apparatchiks and senior military personnel.. Lingering close-ups were provided of the First Lady’s puzzled pout and the children’s disappointed faces as the wait grew increasingly hopeless.

  The Beatles thus found themselves in the surreal position of being simultaneously VIP guests and pariahs. That evening, after giving two shows to a total of eighty thousand at Manila’s Rizal Memorial Stadium, they found all police and security cover withdrawn without explanation. Next morning, they awoke to outraged newspaper headlines that they had “snubbed the First Family,” and reprisals began in earnest. The Filipino promoter refused to hand over their share of the concert takings; government treasury officials threatened not to let them leave the country unless Brian paid a hefty cash sum in income tax. Their hotel joined in the attack, responding to room-service orders with trays of inedible food. Brian nobly took responsibility for the debacle, and went on Manila TV to explain that it had all been a misunderstanding, with no slight to the First Lady intended. As soon as he appeared onscreen, a blizzard of technical interference broke up the picture and drowned out his carefully rehearsed words. Mysteriously, as soon as his segment was over the interference ceased.

  The party’s departure for home next day, July 4, was a meticulously orchestrated nightmare. At Manila International Airport, no porters were available to handle their luggage; then every escalator came to a synchronized stop, forcing them to struggle up flights of stairs with the bags in subtropical heat. In the departure area, they were jeered, jostled, and even kicked by airport staff and bystanders. Crossing the open tarmac to the plane, everyone was in real fear of sniper fire from the heavily armed troops guarding the terminal. Moments before departure, Barrow, Brian, and Mal Evans were ordered off the aircraft again to sort out some nitpicking immigration point. Yet, amazingly, no Filipino customs official thought to search their luggage, which still contained most of the pot stash they had brought into the country with them.

  Back in Britain, they played down the episode, though much could be read into John’s expert mimicry of airport officials screaming “You just ordinary passenger!” “I was very delicate, and moved every time they touched me,” he told journalists at Heathrow Airport. “I could have been kicked and not known…” Privately, he made a vow “never [to go] to any nuthouses again.” On a copy of the tour itinerary next to Manila he scrawled, “Nearly fucking killed by the Government…and it’s just another Beatle day…. George said ‘They should drop an H-Bomb on Manila’ and we all silently agreed.”

  Already in 1966, an American public-relations disaster, for which John bore no individual blame, had been narrowly averted. In June, Capitol Records had issued an album entitled “Yesterday”…And Today, comprising tracks from Rubber Soul and Help! plus three from Revolver. Its cover, shot in London by Australian Robert Whitaker, plumbed levels of bad taste that Punk Rock, ten years later, would scarcely equal. Four smiling—nay, chortling—Beatles were shown in long white butchers’ coats, festooned with bloody joints of meat and naked, dismembered dolls. The outtakes were even more gruesome. One had George seemingly hammering nails into John’s head; in another, all four were joined to a woman by a string of sausages like an umbilical cord.

  Though the original concept was Whitaker’s, they all willingly embraced it, as John later said, through “boredom and resentment” at having to do “another Beatle thing,” and to subvert their cuddly moptop image: “There we were, supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were really aware of life.” The image was later interpreted as a deliberate one-fingered gesture to Capitol’s management, whom John in particular resented for issuing too many such cobbled-together albums without their permission or approval. If such a gesture was intended, it was completely lost on Britain, where the picture appeared in advertisements for “Paperback Writer” and on the cover of the Melody Maker.

  Capitol also noticed nothing amiss, put the cover into production as a “Pop Art experiment,” and had shipped a first pressing of 750,000 copies to record stores across America by the time alarm bells belatedly started ringing. Most of the albums were called back from the retailers before they could be displayed for sale, and a new cover picture was shot of the Beatles, grouped now very unsmilingly around an old-fashioned steamer trunk. Rather than manufacture a whole new cover, Capitol simply pasted this image over the existing “butcher” ones and shipped them back to their original consignees. Ever since then, memorabilia hounds have been carefully peeling the steamer trunk picture off The Beatles—“Yesterday” and Today, hoping to find the censored bloodbath underneath.

  With American Beatle fans spared the sight of their darlings seeming to exult over decapitated and limbless babies, arrangements ran smoothly ahead for the seventeen-day tour, due to begin in Chicago on August 12 and as yet regarded by no one as the Beatles’ last ever. Recovered from their mauling in Manila, the four settled down to enjoy a summer that would enter British mythology rather like the long Edwardian picnic before World War I. That spring, America’s mass media had finally noticed the explosion of pop music, fashion, art, and design in London, which a small in-crowd had had almost to themselves for two years. In April, Time magazine had published a cover story on this new “style capital of Europe,” listing all the ways in which it was suddenly “swinging.” The result was to bring millions of young people pouring across the Atlantic to experience London’s boutiques, clubs, and alfresco fashion parades, and the ancient monuments, red buses, black taxis, and trotting Horse Guards that had, inexplicably, become their accessories. The very Union Jack was suddenly groovy: no longer a symbol of dusty imperial yesterdays, but a fashion statement flaunted by every young today-person on T-shirts, coffee mugs, or plastic shopping-bags.

  One might have thought national self-esteem could rise no higher, yet it did. On July 30, at Wembley Stadium, England beat West Germany in the final of the soccer World Cup, proving World War II had not been a fluke after all. The final grace note in this sun-soaked symphony should have been the Beatles’ departure on yet another bonanza American tour just over a week later. Instead, without warning, the heavens opened.

  Back in March, the London Evening Standard had published yet another series of articles by Maureen Cleave, the Beatles’ most trusted chronicler. Cleave’s theme was that they had now risen above all competition and changes in fickle teenage taste to “a secure life at the top” otherwise enjoyed only by the Queen. Thanks to her equally good relationship with Brian, she was granted instant access to each Beatle
in turn, with none of the time rationing or PR supervision that would be imposed on modern interviewers. Paul McCartney came to her London flat and sang “Eleanor Rigby” to her; George and Ringo were equally accessible, friendly, and frank. John she saw during one of his spells of domesticity in Weybridge.

  The article, headlined “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This,” ran in the Evening Standard of March 4. Cleave reported John to be still uncannily like portraits of King Henry VIII, “arrogant as an eagle…unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, charming and quick-witted.” He had given her a guided tour of his toy-crammed mansion, with three-year-old Julian at their heels, on the way, letting drop a remark with dire implications for the Beatles’ “stable life at the top,” never mind for his wife and son. “I’m just stopping [here] like a bus-stop…. I’ll get my real house when I know what I want…. You see, there’s something else I’m going to do—only I don’t know what it is. All I know is this isn’t it for me.”

  Framed in a paragraph about his seeming lack of any self-doubt was this fateful quote: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

  The observation did not come out of nowhere, as it seems to in the story. Later, Cleave mentions the eclectic range of John’s literary taste, citing titles such as Forty-one Years in India by Field Marshal Lord Roberts and Curiosities of Natural History by Francis T. Buckland (though not The Psychedelic Experience). She also says he has been reading “extensively about religion,” without mentioning exactly what. He had, in fact, been deeply absorbed in Hugh J. Schonfield’s Passover Plot, a nonfiction book currently topping the bestsellers. Schonfield, a leading biblical scholar, advanced the controversial thesis that Jesus was a mortal man who planned his miracles to fulfill Old Testament prophecies, and faked his own crucifixion, using his disciples as unwitting accomplices—hence John’s perception of them as “thick.” The idea of Timothy Leary and Buddha as harbingers of a brand-new faith, whose holy communion was dispensed on sugar lumps, also must have colored his attitude.

  It should further be pointed out, with no disrespect to Maureen Cleave, that those notorious words may not have been exactly what John said. Even the most articulate interviewees can ramble or lapse into non sequitur, and reporters often paraphrase or conflate quotes without damaging their essential accuracy. Cleave had not been looking for sensationalism, and at the time thought no more about the statement than “it was just John being John.” The fact was that her conversations with him had produced far more obviously explosive material, much of it impossible to print in the Evening Standard or any other paper, then or since. Once, for instance, he had talked about his mother, Julia, how he still missed her and how beautiful she had been. Seemingly in all seriousness, he added that before she disappeared from his teenage life, he only wished he’d taken the opportunity to have sex with her.

  “Christianity” to British readers overwhelmingly meant the Church of England, an institution that, in the dawning new consciousness of 1966, fewer and fewer people took with any seriousness. Anglican cathedrals and churches might be cherished in the national heritage, but Anglican worship and Anglican clergy were the butt of every contemporary satirist from Alan Bennett to Peter Sellers (who, not long before, had recorded a cover version of “Help!” in the persona of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsay). That, in pure box-office terms, the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” was clear at underattended C of E services every Sunday of the year, as it also was in the church’s rather desperate efforts to liven up the proceedings with pop rhythms and guitars. Polemicists were constantly making the very same point, in pulpits ranging from the Daily Mail to the Church Times.

  So unremarkable was John’s viewpoint in British eyes that the Evening Standard subeditors did not headline it nor even highlight it in the layout. And, ready and waiting though the national media were to jump on anything a Beatle said, no news bulletin picked up on it, no mass-circulation editorialist commented on it, no popular columnist even seemed to notice it. The single note of dissent—and that a very mild one—came from John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham, writing in the Guardian. Cleave’s article was later syndicated to various overseas publications (including the New York Times) and again produced no reaction.

  Not until four months had passed did the backlash finally hit. An American teenage magazine called Datebook resurrected the Cleave interview for a spread in which John was to feature, entitled “The Ten Adults You Dig/Hate.” His comments on the Beatles’ and Jesus’s comparative drawing power appeared in isolation, with one sentence lifted out as a cover line: “I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” The spread appeared in Datebook’s August issue, which reached newsstands in mid-July, three weeks before the start of the Beatles’ tour.

  In cynical, agnostic Britain, buried in a paper unavailable outside Greater London, the words had barely raised an eyebrow. In God-fearing America, blazoned across the front of a magazine nationally available to young people, their effect was very different. Within hours of Datebook going on sale, the Associated Press reported that radio station WAQY in Birmingham, Alabama, the very heart of the Southern Bible Belt, had announced a ban on Beatles records forthwith. Radio stations serving devout communities in Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Utah, and New York instantly followed WAQY’s lead—although no New York City deejay joined the ban and station WSAC in Fort Knox, Kentucky, which had not previously played the Beatles, now began to do so “to show our contempt for hypocrisy personified.” The more showmanlike and publicity-hungry of the banning brigade smashed the actual disks on air, sponsored disposal bins in public places, labeled PLACE BEATLES TRASH HERE, even built bonfires or provided wood chippers so that listeners could personally consign their fallen angels’ singles and albums to purgatory or pulp. Churches, chapels, temples, and tabernacles across the land joined in as with one voice, calling down hellfire on the Beatles’ heads and any of their flock who now bought Beatle music or attended Beatle shows with instant excommunication.

  From there, the uproar ricocheted throughout Christendom. Racially segregated South Africa briefly enjoyed a feeling of moral superiority when its national broadcasting service joined in the Beatles music ban. Stations in Holland and Spain did likewise on behalf of Protestants and Catholics respectively; there was even condemnation from the Pope via the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which commented that “some things may not be dealt with profanely even in the world of beatniks.” Bounced back to Britain from all these foreign parts, the once-overlooked quotes became a subject for feverish debate in the press and on television, with John receiving almost unanimous criticism, if not quite for sacrilege, then for vainglory, naïveté, and astounding bad timing. Never before—not when Elvis Presley’s pumping crotch outraged the mid-fifties, nor when Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin, nor even when Chuck Berry went to jail—had a pop star been so publicly and relentlessly put on the rack.

  From Brian Epstein the crisis called forth all the diplomatic skills that had somehow failed him in Manila. Impressively, no attempt was made to blame Maureen Cleave by claiming she had misquoted John or used remarks meant to have been off the record. Instead, Brian quietly contacted Cleave and asked her to make no comment on the matter from here on. Such was her respect for him and John—and her shock and bewilderment at what was happening—that she agreed. It’s hard to imagine any modern pop writer at the center of a world sensation backing away from the limelight so readily.

  Brian’s first idea was that John should tape a statement to be played on U.S. radio and TV, apologizing for the offense that had been caused. But i
n the event, it was Brian himself who made the statement at a press conference at New York’s Americana Hotel, using techniques of projection and timing learned long ago at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. No communiqué from a political summit could have been more measured or dignified, as the young Jewish manager strove to put the Christian hue and cry into proportion. John, said Brian, was “deeply interested in religion,” but his views on the subject had been “misrepresented entirely out of context…. What he said and meant was that he was astonished that in the last fifty years the Church of England, and therefore Christ, had suffered a decline in interest. He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be, to him, a more immediate one upon certain of the younger generation.”

  Though clearly a question mark the size of a mushroom cloud now hung over the Beatles’ American tour, they flew out of Britain on August 11 to begin it in Chicago, as planned. Six days earlier, Revolver had had its British release, with “Eleanor Rigby”/“Yellow Submarine” as its accompanying single. For now, the brilliance of the music took second place to this far more burning question.

  Before leaving, John gave a brief television interview, with Paul McCartney beside him in the very obvious role of verbal minder. Was he worried by what might be waiting for him across the Atlantic? “It worries me,” he replied, unusually casting around for the blandest words possible. “But I hope it’ll be all right in the end, as they say.” Paul then stepped in, at his most smilingly emollient, insisting, “It’ll be fine.” Later, John would tell a reporter in America he had been “scared stiff” by the chorus of damnation, and had at first wanted to pull out of the tour. “I thought they’d kill me, because they take things so seriously here. I mean, they shoot you and then they realise it wasn’t that important. So I didn’t want to go, but Brian and Paul and the other Beatles persuaded me.”