John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  One of Brian’s last executive acts had been to sanction an authorized biography of the Beatles. Such things already abounded for the teenage fan market, but Brian, typically, had put together something much classier: a “real” book to be written by the Sunday Times journalist Hunter Davies and published in hardcover by the prestigious house of William Heinemann. Davies received generous access to each Beatle and interviewed their respective families, in return for paying them a third of his royalties and allowing his manuscript to be vetted by all four before publication.

  In John’s case, “family” now not only meant his Aunt Mimi but also a newly emancipated dad. Hunter Davies therefore talked at length to Freddie, who willingly provided a colorful account of his education at Liverpool Bluecoat Hospital, his courtship of Julia, his adventures and misadventures at sea, and the circumstances behind his sudden exit from John’s life. According to Pauline, John was anxious that the story should be published in its full and correct form. “No question that he wanted Hunter to portray the truth about his parents—after all, he had just learned via Charlie what really happened—and this had been corroborated and further explained by Freddie, and I truly believe he wanted to do his father justice.”

  In 1967, the Beatles knew nothing—literally nothing—about the vast business they had created and continued to generate. Brian had always taken care of everything, periodically bringing them contracts or agreements, which they always signed without question, often without even reading. After his death, therefore, extensive detective work was necessary to disentangle the Beatles from his other complex enterprises and construct a full financial graph of their career to date. When this was finally accomplished, it revealed anything but the infallible young tycoon they, and the outside world, had always taken him for. As often as Brian had been astute, he had also been naïve; as well as prescient, he could be shortsighted; among the breathtaking deals he had done for his boys were others of almost laughable inadequacy.

  Their two globally successful feature films, for example, had earned them only a pittance in comparison with the makers and distributors, and the rights for both had somehow ended up with the producer, Walter Shenson. Even worse was the maladministration of the merchandising opportunity—for Beatle wigs, toy guitars, bubblegum, and such—which, after their American conquest, had been virtually limitless. Not foreseeing the market potential, Brian handed over responsibility for granting merchandise licenses in the United States to a group of young British opportunists on a 90–10 percent split in their favor. Then, realizing his error, he began a lawsuit against his British partners, creating such confusion among the manufacturers involved that orders worth millions of dollars were canceled. As a result, the biggest marketing bonanza since Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse had dwindled to dribs and drabs, and a present and future fortune beyond computation was lost.

  For some time before Brian’s death, the Beatles had been discussing how to extend the creative control they enjoyed over their music output into the ancillary spheres, like films, publishing, and fashion, which earned such colossal sums off their name. John coined a bitter phrase, “the men in suits” for what he saw as the dull-spirited, dully clad oldsters ruling over those areas (though, in truth, it was besuited older men like George Martin and Dick James, not to mention Brian himself, who had given him his unprecedented degree of artistic freedom and also refrained from ripping him off in a thousand and one possible, permissible ways).

  With Brian’s full support, a first step toward greater autonomy had been taken before the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A Victorian house had been acquired in Baker Street, central London, and a small music publishing company established there, to be run by Terry Doran, “the man from the motor trade.” As it chanced, the art dealer Robert Fraser had lately supplied Paul McCartney with René Magritte’s painting of a green apple, entitled Le Jeu de Mourre (The Guessing Game). This image perfectly expressing the freshness and simplicity of the Beatles’ corporate intentions (as well as coincidentally recalling John’s first encounter with Yoko), the company was named Apple Publishing.

  One of Brian’s more mysterious failings, given all the high-powered accountants on his payroll, was in the area of investments and tax efficiency. Since the Beatles began making big money, there had been almost no systematic attempt to mitigate the Labour government’s punitive income tax rates, either by channeling their earnings into offshore accounts or investing in business or property within the United Kingdom. The one serious attempt to go offshore (which explained why Help! was partially shot in the Bahamas) had ended by leaving them in a worse tax hole than before. Brian’s view seems to have been that, as national treasures, it ill behooved them to spirit money abroad or otherwise try to sidestep their 90 percent–plus tax bracket.

  Whatever Brian’s fiscal miscalculations, they also learned that he’d left them more cash-rich than ever before in their career. In April 1967, the replacement of their original company, Beatles Ltd., by a partnership called Beatles & Co. allowed them to sell themselves to themselves for a capital gain of around £200,000 apiece. Also, EMI had been holding some £2 million in back royalties, which were paid only after the signing of the new recording contract in January. During Brian’s last months, they conceived one scheme to buy a Greek island and found a tax-exiled hippie commune there, then planned another to invest in property at home by owning their own private village of thatched cottages around a traditional green.

  With no new manager yet remotely in sight, the investment of their capital now had to be decided by the four themselves. “Our accountants came up and said, ‘We’ve got this amount of money. Do you want to give it to the Government or do something with it?’” John would recall.” So we decided to play businessmen for a bit…we really didn’t want to go into fucking business but the thing was ‘If we have to go in, let’s go into something we like.’”

  Clive Epstein suggested that, harking back to Brian’s first success in management, they should open a chain of record shops. But this excellent idea seemed too stodgy and predictable and, moreover, would put them in the anomalous position of selling their rivals’ products. With millions of young Britons, female as well as male, now trying to look like Beatles, the most obvious option was clothes and lifestyle retailing. John had vague notions of a kind of alternative Marks and Spencer, gratefully recalling the inexpensive V-necked sweaters, in black or charcoal lamb’s wool, which used to bulk out his beatnik wardrobe in the late fifties. Paul, more upscale as usual, favored a version of Terence Conran’s Habitat shops with the difference that everything on sale would be white.

  In the end, it was decided to start with a single boutique, selling predominantly female fashions and accessories and modeled on Barbara Hulanicki’s hugely successful Biba shop in Kensington. Fortuitously on hand were the Anglo-Dutch design group collectively known as the Fool, who had designed and made extravagant hippie raiment for the Beatles, their womenfolk, and close friends, and also decorated John’s upright piano and the gypsy caravan in his garden. Without further ado, the Fool received £100,000 (more than £1 million in today’s values) to create a boutique located under the publishing company in Baker Street—and likewise named Apple. John’s electronics guru, Magic Alex Mardas (lately their guide in acquiring offshore Greek real estate) was hired to design and install the lighting, while John’s old school crony Pete Shotton, who had previously been running a small supermarket in suburban Hampshire, became shop manager.

  High on the independence agenda was the making of a film: not another slick United Artists production in which the Beatles felt “like extras,” but one giving them the same total control they enjoyed on record—and hence the same power to make masterpieces. What was more, they had a subject ready and waiting. Its origin was an outtake from the Sgt. Pepper sessions, written by Paul in the same homely, nostalgic spirit as “When I’m Sixty-four.” A feature of both his and John’s fifties childhood was the holiday “mystery tour
” by bus, setting out from Liverpool with a blank destination board and an air of great secrecy and anticipation, though invariably ending up at some familiar locale like Prestatyn or Blackpool. A Magical Mystery Tour was to have been among Sgt. Pepper’s attractions, its passengers summoned on board by John, enunciating his r’s like a Scouse Edith Piaf: “Rroll up! Rroll up for the Mysterrry Tour!…” However, once the track was recorded, it sounded too close to the album’s existing overture, so it was set aside.

  Subsequently, Paul came across the story of the Merry Pranksters, a troupe of American hippie entertainers and exhibitionists, led by the novelist Ken Kesey, who in 1964 had updated mystery tours for the oncoming flower-power generation. Aboard a Day-Glo-painted school bus, the Pranksters traveled across America, filming their own epic consumption of still-legal LSD, which they would administer in Kool-Aid to unsuspecting victims. Their journey was already an underground legend and would soon reach the mainstream in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. For the Beatles’ first independent film project, Paul proposed a British version of the Merry Pranksters’ journey, using the Magical Mystery Tour concept that had failed to make it onto Sgt. Pepper. Financing it, as they could, with no outside help, they would not merely star in the film but also write, produce, cast, and direct it.

  Only one person had ever been able to organize John, and it was still difficult to believe he was no longer around. “I still felt every now and then that Brian would come in and say, ‘It’s time to record’ or ‘Time to do this.’ And Paul started doing that…‘Now we’re going to make a movie. Now we’re going to make a record.’ And he assumed that if he didn’t call us, nobody would ever make a record. Paul would say, well, now he felt like it—and suddenly I’d have to whip out twenty songs.”

  Whatever his private feelings, however, John offered no objection to the Magical Mystery Tour project, accepting, with a touch of almost royal noblesse oblige, that the Beatles “had a duty to the public to do these things.” Though it would go down in history as Paul’s pet project—and mostly Paul’s fault—John seems to have played an equal part in such planning as was done.

  The formula seemed straightforward enough—simply charter a luxury coach, repaint it in psychedelic colors, hire a film crew, recruit a cargo of prankish cotravelers, then just take off into the Summer of Love’s golden afterglow. Professional actors were employed to portray a tour courier and his curvaceous assistant; the thirty-five-odd remaining passengers were a kind of living Sgt. Pepper collage, selected to evoke old-fashioned music hall schmaltz mixed with seaside-postcard vulgarity. They included the eccentric Glasgwegian songwriter-poet Ivor Cutler, the rubber-limbed comedian Nat Jackley, a childhood favorite of John’s, and, equally Lennonesque, a “fat lady” and a midget. More up-to-date humor and eccentricity were represented by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band. Paul was a huge fan of the Bonzos’ musical parodies and invited their three leading lights, Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes, and “Legs” Larry Smith to join the company, despite surprising resistance from John. (In recognition of this, Stanshall was to spend much of the trip in a T-shirt inscribed LUMP IT, JOHN.) The coach left London on September 11, setting a course for the westerly counties of Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall, which are considered Britain’s most “magical” region, with their ancient burial mounds, chalk figures etched on downland, and legends of King Arthur’s Camelot.

  Filmmaking of any kind requires extensive forethought and extreme precision; in general, the more spontaneous the style, the greater the planning and organization behind it. But the Magical Mystery Tour was achingly devoid of either. No locations had been reconnoitered in advance, no permits and clearances had been obtained from nervous local authorities, nothing was explained to the cast, and there was no script. Throughout the bus’s four-day odyssey, it was followed by a convoy of media vehicles sometimes stretching back almost a mile. Police forces turned out in strength to hold back the roadside crowds and deal with the unremitting traffic chaos. An emblematic scene (one of many cut from the finished film) showed the coach stuck halfway across a narrow bridge, hemmed in by vehicles in front and behind, and an infuriated John jumping out and tearing the Magical Mystery Tour placards off its sides.

  While developing their dual role as movie magnates and shop owners, the Beatles saw no anomaly in discussing their conversion to transcendental meditation and commitment to spreading a gospel founded on the unimportance of worldly things. For John, especially, meditation seemed as much a wonder cure as Bile Beans or Ovaltine in the newspaper advertisements of his childhood: “You feel more energetic, you know, just simply for doing work or anything. You come out of it and it’s ‘Who-o-oaah, let’s get going!’”

  He took just as seriously the duty now imposed on him to spread the Maharishi’s teaching in places where no TV lights or cameras would be waiting, to convert others as he himself had been converted, and advertise transcendental meditation as a complete antidote and alternative to drugs. “We’ll ask for money from anyone we know with money,” he promised. “Anyone that’s interested in the so-called establishment—who’s worried about kids going wild and drugs and that.” To the media, the most interesting obligation for him and the other three was contributing a week’s wages, which clearly would add many thousands of pounds to the Maharishi’s coffers. John replied that it was no more than fair for them to give what other disciples did, that only a single joining fee was levied and that this lack of discrimination between rich and poor “[is] the fairest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  On September 29, just back from the Magical Mystery Tour, he and George together submitted to gentle probing about their conversion on David Frost’s ITV chat show. Despite the earnest matters under discussion, John remained his familiar droll, artless self—a knack that eluded George and, alas, always would. At one point, George explained to Frost that some spiritual leaders, like Buddha and Krishna, are born divine, while others manifest divinity later in life. “So Maharishi’s one of them,” John chipped in. “He was born quite ordinary, but he’s working on it.”

  For most journalists, the Maharishi was irrevocably cast as a pint-size Rasputin, casting his unhealthy spell over four gullible modern czarinas. And concern for those once-uncomplicated moptops reached the highest levels. Not long after the Frost interview, the Queen held a levee at Buckingham Palace for the chivalric Order of Knights Bachelor, whose members included Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI. As she shook Lockwood’s hand, Her Majesty commented, “The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?”

  October finally saw the release of How I Won the War, John’s debut as a serious screen actor. The film was marketed largely on his name and attracted an initial surge of his music fans, though this rather tailed off as word got around that he neither sang nor played guitar in it. After the London premiere, Cilla Black hospitably gave a party for John and his costars, plus an assortment of mutual music-business friends, at her flat in Portland Place. As Cynthia had attended the premiere, John had no choice but to bring her on to the party. During the evening, Cilla was approached by a fellow hit-parader, Georgie Fame, with an embarrassed look on his face. “Did you know,” he said, “that Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe?”

  “I went upstairs,” Cilla recalls, “and sure enough there inside my wardrobe was Cynthia. When I asked what she was doing, she said, ‘I’m waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.’” Though unaware of the developing crisis in their marriage, Cilla knew John well enough to realize what a mistake this was. “I told Cyn, ‘You’d better face it, kid—he’s never gonna come.’”

  Yoko Ono, meanwhile, popped up intermittently in the British press with art projects that seemed quintessential examples of Swinging Sixties wackiness. One was a short black-and-white film, directed by her husband, Tony Cox, officially entitled Number 4, but known forevermore as Bottoms. In it, consecutive pairs of nude buttocks, female and male, in tight close-up, undulated rhythmically as thei
r owners walked on a treadmill and discoursed in voice-over about the experience (an extremely rare one for Britons then) of publicly baring one’s behind. Another work, first attempted in late 1966 but not accomplished to Yoko’s satisfaction until almost a year later, was a performance art event called Wrapping Piece, using as props the massive stone lions that recline on plinths at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. These sacred Victorian monuments now found themselves enveloped by her in billowing white canvas—the first British national treasure, as it were, to go into the bag.

  Her relationship with Cox had by now broken down beyond repair, though the two remained professionally interdependent and their five-year-old daughter kept them theoretically together. Kyoko was an enchantingly pretty child, if somewhat resigned to her parents’ erratic lifestyle and stormy relationship, and a sense that she was already more grown-up than either of them. As she recalls now, her only glimpses of normal family life came through the friends and neighbors in whose care she was often left. “I had no experience of the popular culture other girls of my age were exposed to.” Some friends of Cox’s with whom she often stayed in Brighton took her to the cinema one day, to see The Sound of Music. The film’s visions of childhood so transfixed Kyoko that she made them take her back to see it six times more.