John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Living with Dunbar at his Bentinck Street flat was a twenty-one-year-old Greek named Ianni, or Alexis, Mardas, whom he had gotten to know through the wife of the Greek sculptor Nicholus Takis. Though Mardas currently worked as a television engineer, his true vocation was inventor of electronic gadgets, both for corporate and private use. So much did he impress Dunbar that the two formed a business partnership meant to combine their respective aesthetic and technological gifts. Despite the recent theft of his wife, Dunbar remained close to the Rolling Stones, and the pair duly won the job of lighting designers on a Stones European tour.

  Hanging out at Dunbar’s, Mardas soon met John and found opportunities to outline his proposed inventions to him. Some anticipated soon-to-be telecommunication developments, like a phone that dialed automatically by voice recognition and displayed the numbers of incoming callers. Others seemed more in the realm of science fiction: an X-ray camera, a protective force field that surrounded a house with colored smoke, or a building that could hover in midair. To John, whose practical knowledge was nil—who could not so much as change a lightbulb—all seemed equally, life-transformingly wondrous. Dunbar was suddenly out and Magic Alex, as John dubbed him, was in. He became the first serious interloper into the Beatles’ inner circle, even turning up with John for one of their meetings at Paul’s house and being proudly introduced to the others as “my new guru.”

  Having taken four months and cost an astounding £25,000, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was almost ready to meet its public. The final touch was shooting an album cover, designed by Peter Blake and destined to go down in Pop Art as well as pop music history. The Beatles, dressed as psychedelic bandsmen, were surrounded by a collage of cultural icons, high and low, from Bob Dylan and Marlon Brando to Karl Marx, Carl Jung, W. C. Fields, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy, Tommy Handley, and Diana Dors. John’s nominations of Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler were vetoed as “too far out,” though he was allowed the occultist and so-called Great Beast Aleister Crowley. Stu Sutcliffe’s image also made an appearance, beside Aubrey Beardsley’s and Max Miller’s. So did the Beatles’ Madame Tussaud’s waxworks as they had looked four years earlier, to the left of John in his yellow, red-frogged satin hussar coat with a French horn under his arm. Strange to reflect what anathema those quiet gray stage suits had once been to him.

  On May 27, Brian hosted a prerelease party for selected music journalists, attended by all four Beatles. According to the next week’s Melody Maker, “Lennon won the sartorial stakes with a green-flowered patterned shirt, red cord trousers, yellow socks and what looked like cord shoes. His ensemble was completed by a sporran. With his bushy sideboards and National Health specs, he looked like an animated Victorian watchmaker…” Close friends from the media pack noted that he was unshaven and haggard.

  His verdict on the finished album was typically downbeat and self-derogatory: “I actively dislike bits…which didn’t come out right. There are bits of ‘Lucy in the Sky’ I don’t like. Some of the sound in ‘Mr Kite’ isn’t right. I like ‘A Day in the Life,’ but it’s still not half as nice as I thought it was when we were doing it. I suppose we could have worked harder on it, but I couldn’t be arsed doing any more. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is a nice song, ‘Getting Better’ is a nice song, and George’s ‘Within You Without You’ is beautiful. What else is on it musically, beside the whole concept of having tracks running into each other?”

  That weekend, Brian threw an even more lavish party to celebrate Sgt. Pepper, this time at his newly acquired country house near Crow-borough, Sussex. As well as three Beatles and their consorts (Paul failed to arrive), the guests included Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, the songwriter Lionel Bart, London Philharmonic conductor Sir John Pritchard, and—most appealingly to John—the Beatles’ former press liaison man, Derek Taylor. Since quitting his job after a tiff with Brian on the ’64 American tour, Taylor had gone on to a successful career as a PR consultant in Hollywood. Brian now regretted his loss, and had backed up the party invitation with two first-class round-trip air tickets.

  When Taylor and his seven-months-pregnant wife, Joan, flew into Heathrow Airport on the morning of the party, they were met by John, Ringo, and Terry Doran, all in full hippie regalia, strewing flowers and ringing little bells. Joan Taylor, who had always been nervous of John’s unpredictable moods and lashing tongue, now found herself warmly hugged by him. “This is the new thing,” he explained. “You hug your friends when you meet them and show them you’re glad to see them. Don’t stand there shaking hands as if everyone’s got some disease. Get close to people.”

  The Taylors stayed the weekend with him and Cynthia at Kenwood, and they all traveled down to Brian’s in the newly psychedelic Rolls. During the party, John offered Joan a tab of acid, telling her that Derek had already accepted one from George. Despite the advanced state of her pregnancy, she took it. “John and George looked after Derek and me for the rest of the night,” she remembers. “They couldn’t have been kinder or more attentive.”

  Sgt. Pepper was released on June 1, 1967. With its sumptuous packaging and giveaway novelties—paper mustaches and sergeant’s chevrons the buyer could cut out and wear—it was itself a party invitation, perfectly timed for the golden season that would become enshrined as the Summer of Love. It topped the UK album chart for twenty-seven weeks, selling half a million copies in its first month, and in America stayed number one for nineteen weeks, selling 2.5 million by August. A whole generation, still used to happy landmarks through life, would always remember exactly when and where they first played it, and their amazed delight as the needle bit into its grooves.

  A further innovation was providing the lyrics of each song in full on the album’s back cover. Lennon and McCartney’s words would therefore be read and reread by more millions of people than any modern author, certainly any poet, could hope to reach in a dozen lifetimes. However, that also meant they could be studied at leisure by moral guardians whom past purely verbal reference to “prick teasers” or “finger pie” had completely escaped.

  “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was instantly banned by the BBC for spelling out the letters of the drug that increasingly dominated newspaper headlines. John retorted that the song had nothing to do with LSD but was simply the title of a painting his son Julian had done at school—a story which Paul would later corroborate. It is a plausible enough explanation if one accepts that John never took acid or encouraged its use, that he was completely word blind, and that he took an ongoing and responsive interest in Julian’s schoolwork.

  Nonetheless, “Lucy” managed to be heard throughout the British Isles, and ultimately would prove the most influential track on the whole album. For it set the pattern for British psychedelic rock as a marriage of self-consciously poetic language with the visions of earliest childhood. Thus Pink Floyd’s concept album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn would borrow a chapter heading from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Keith West would make the Top 10 with an Enid Blytonish song about children mourning a village grocer, and Traffic’s Hole in My Shoe use a lisping Alice voice-over to evoke “a place where happiness reigned all the year round and music played ever so loudly.” At times the UK charts would seem positively silted up with dragons, magic spells, rocking horses, smiley-faced kites, and tin soldiers.

  “A Day in the Life” also was banned by the BBC, and many U.S. radio stations, although that provocative “I’d love to turn you on” was just one cause of its exclusion. The man who “blew his mind out in a car” was assumed to have been on an LSD trip and the “4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” to represent needle puncture marks; the middle section (by Paul) about having “a smoke” and going into “a dream” was taken to be about pot; even the instrumental “sound like the end of the world” was accused of suggesting narcotic delirium. Indeed, every song on the album was to be put through the X-ray machine and set alarm bells ringing, if not for drug advoc
acy then for sexual innuendo. “With a Little Help from My Friends” earned double notoriety, for its reference to getting high and the unspecific (but obviously grubby) “What do you see when you turn out the light?” “Fixing a Hole” was interpreted as yet another injection metaphor, where Paul had been thinking only of home improvement. The “man from the motor trade” in “She’s Leaving Home”—a reference to Brian’s car-sales partner, Terry Doran—was said to be a synonym for an abortionist.

  The transatlantic media were now in full cry for a Beatle to admit to using drugs. But the first one to break cover was the last anybody had expected. In a Life magazine interview with the Beatles, published on June 19, Paul admitted in having taken LSD “about four times” and enthused about its power to unlock the brain’s hidden creative potential. As a result, this normally infallible PR man for the group unleashed a storm of criticism and reproach almost on “bigger than Jesus” level: The Daily Mail branded him “an irresponsible idiot” for giving out such a message to youth, while the American evangelist Billy Graham offered up intercessionary prayers. However, the Beatles were still considered such a national treasure that no police action resulted. And Paul handled the furor adroitly, saying that he’d just given an honest answer to a direct question, and that if the media were worried about publicizing drugs to the young, they could simply not have printed and broadcast his words.

  The Beatles preserved traditional solidarity, John and George admitting (along with Brian himself) that they, too, had tried LSD, albeit only “half a dozen times” back in the era when it was still legal. Privately, both were annoyed that, having virtuously resisted turning on for something like eighteen months, and while still a rank beginner in comparison to themselves, Paul should now step forward as the Beatles’ resident acidhead. Years from now, after the bitterness between them had cooled, John would pay wry tribute to Paul’s knack of hogging the limelight, good or bad: “He always times these big announcements right on the letter, doesn’t he?”

  In fact, John himself was about to make an announcement of far greater magnitude. The same BBC that had lifted its skirts in horror at “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was also still a matchless public-service broadcaster, with a global mission to enlighten and unite. June of 1967 saw the corporation inaugurate the first truly international television program, using the new communications satellites that now orbited the earth. Entitled Our World, it involved eighteen different overseas broadcasting systems and was to be transmitted simultaneously by three satellites across five continents (though not in the Soviet Union, which pulled out at the last moment). For the BBC’s own segment, there could be only one subject, irrespective of the recent terrestrial scandals they had stirred up.

  On the evening of Sunday, June 25, Studio One at Abbey Road suffered its greatest invasion to date. Thanks to those beeping orbs in the far heavens, a total of 350 million people across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia, the United States, and Latin America could join the Beatles as they recorded a brand-new song (actually just singing to a backing track) watched by a live audience of full-dress flower children, including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richard, Eric Clapton, and Keith Moon of the Who. The song had been written by John as a distillation of the hippie creed, the Beautiful People’s prescription for anything and everything that ailed the watching planet: “All You Need Is Love.” As simple in form as “Three Blind Mice” on the offbeat, with lyrics more like slogans than sentences (“Nothing you can do that can’t be done…Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung…”) it was the first instance of his power to create anthems that transcended language, culture, or religion. However calculated, and laughably simplistic, it was not a bad first message for satellite broadcasting.

  The famous black-and-white footage of the transmission shows a serious John the world had never seen before, seated on a stool, with a single headphone speaker clamped to one ear, singing expressionlessly between chews on a wad of gum. Yet several irrepressible Lennonisms undercut the virtuous mood. The song opens with trumpets sounding “La Marseillaise,” theme-song of the French Revolution, an episode not best known for propagating love. And in its closing instrumental maelstrom of classical brass and 1940s swing, we feel him cast off earnestness like a chafing sandal: “Al-to-ge-ther…ev’rybo-dy,” he exhorts with mock booziness as if his 350 million watchers are sharing some Saturday-night pub sing-along. He even throws in a sarcastic “She loves you yeah yeah yeah”—the last rites for that hated distant past of four years ago.

  “It’s ea-sy,” he says of love, through gum-chews, though for him, as he must already guess, it will be anything but.

  20

  MAGIC, MEDITATION, AND MISERY

  I was scared. I thought, “We’ve fuckin had it now.”

  On the August Bank Holiday weekend of 1967, the Beatles were together in Bangor, north Wales, being initiated into transcendental meditation by their new spiritual teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Two days into the course, they heard that Brian Epstein had been found dead at his London home of an alcohol and barbiturates overdose, aged thirty-two. The enduring image of that moment is John’s face, blank with horror amid popping flashbulbs as the massed media clamor for a reaction. “I dunno what to say…. He was a beautiful feller and it’s terrible.”

  Despite numerous other projects and preoccupations, Brian had retained exclusive managerial responsibility for the Beatles and Cilla Black, the only other of his original Mersey Beat stable to inspire anything like similar dedication. And in their off-road state, the Beatles still relied heavily on him, collectively and as individuals. The previous January, he had concluded a new deal with their UK record company, EMI, replacing the minuscule royalty rate they had had to accept as newcomers in 1962 with a whopping 10 percent of retail price. He had been closely associated with the Sgt. Pepper project while simultaneously fielding a plan (abortive, as it would prove) for the playwright Joe Orton to script their next film. In September, his own five-year management contract was due to expire, and there seemed little doubt about its renewal, albeit possibly for a smaller commission than his previous 25 percent.

  His relationship with the Beatles during these final months was that of a parent bird watching its newly launched fledglings with a mixture of concern and amusement, ready to swoop to their aid at the first faint cheep for help. After Paul’s admission to Life magazine, Brian came forward alongside John and George to say that he, too, had taken acid and found its effects beneficial. From then on, he stood shoulder to shoulder with them and other British musical and cultural luminaries in pleading the harmlessness of soft drugs and protesting against the ferocity of the police’s crackdown. A few days after chorusing “All You Need Is Love” on the Beatles’ Our World telecast, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard each received an absurdly harsh prison sentence for the minor drug offenses committed six months earlier. Set free after a media outcry, the two Rolling Stones celebrated their liberation with a new single entitled “We Love You,” a sarcastic riposte to the British judiciary, on which John and Paul featured anonymously as backup singers.

  On July 14, a rally calling for the legalization of pot drew five thousand supporters to London’s Hyde Park. Eight days later, the Times published a full-page advertisement headed “The Law Against Marijuana Is Immoral in Principle and Unworkable in Practice” and signed by Brian (who had paid for it), the four Beatles, and sixty other distinguished names, including Graham Greene, David Hockney, Jonathan Miller, David Bailey, and Kenneth Tynan.

  In his private life, Brian remained as troubled and unstable as he had ever been. That same month, Parliament introduced a new Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized sex between consenting males over the age of twenty-one. Although the day was still far off when most gay men would feel able to come out, the new legislation brought an end to fear, persecution, and victimization for thousands. But unluckily for Brian, his sexual tastes still lay well outside the law. On the evening before his deat
h, he had left a group of friends at his Sussex house and returned to London alone, bored and frustrated because a party of rent boys had failed to materialize for his entertainment. His homosexuality, though still unexposed by the media, was well known to those who pulled the strings of public life; it can have been the only reason why, for all his vast contribution to Britain’s economy, culture, and international prestige, he had never received an honor from the Queen or any other official recognition.

  To the very end, he never lost his infatuation with John, nor the hope that, some glorious day, his feelings would be requited. One of the few people to whom he admitted—or half admitted—as much was Jonathan King, a rising young singer-writer-producer who had had a number one single, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” while still a Cambridge undergraduate. Throughout the centuries of oppression, gay men had learned to communicate almost telepathically. So with Brian, King remembers, there would be no more than an expressive eye flutter behind John’s back or when his name was mentioned—“a sense of ‘he may come over to us one day.’”

  Since their ill-advised Spanish holiday in 1963, John had never given the smallest grounds for such hope. But he was always conscious of this power over the man on whom, paradoxically, he also relied so much. His public cruelties to Brian, usually jibes at his race if not his sexuality, were legendary within their common circle. Once, while Brian was away in America, John said it was to sign up “a rhythm and Jews group.” The B-side to “All You Need Is Love” was a hippiedebunking Lennon song called “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” ostensibly mocking the Beautiful People but providing a coded double dig at Brian. In practice sessions (some say on the finished track also), John sang its chorus of “Baby, you’re a rich man, too” as “you’re a rich fag Jew.”