John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  When the time came to leave, the Maharishi was seated alone in one of the outdoor arbors where his superstar disciples had so recently clustered so raptly at his feet. He made a last appeal to John to come and sit and talk things over, but received no response. Cynthia was touched by how sad and bewildered he looked, but both John and George feared he might have some sinister retribution up his sleeve. On the five-hour drive to Delhi, John began writing a foul-mouthed lampoon of a song around the word Maharishi. George persuaded him to change the title to “Sexy Sadie” and take out the swear words, just to be on the safe side.

  But the Maharishi cast no evil spell, nor did he long repine in his arbor. Shortly afterward, he flew to New York, checked into the Plaza Hotel and went on tour with the Beach Boys.

  “We made a mistake there,” John told the press back in Britain. “We thought [the Maharishi] was something other than he was. But we were looking for it and we probably superimposed it on him. We were waiting for a guru and along he came. But he was creating the same kind of situation…which he’s giving recipes out to cure.” Amazingly, it occurred to none of the international Beatle press corps to pursue the inside story of this speedy disillusionment, or even to coax John into being a little more explicit. So great was the relief that the Beatles had come to their senses, no further questions needed be asked.

  George would later regret their behavior, renew relations with the Maharishi, and become one of the TM movement’s most faithful mainstays. For John, there was to be no going back, though in time he acknowledged the positive effects of his stay in Rishikesh. “I don’t regret anything about meditation. I still believe in it and occasionally use it. India was good for me…. I met Yoko just before I went to India and had a lot of time to think things out there. Three months [sic] just meditating and thinking, and I came home and fell in love with Yoko and that was the end of it.”

  Actually, it was not quite that simple. Returning home to Kenwood meant more than he had expected—sharing Cynthia’s ecstatic reunion with Julian, seeing the little boy’s excitement at the presents they’d brought him, including a set of intricately carved wooden figures from the Maharishi. On the long flight back from Delhi, something had prompted John to give Cynthia a detailed account of all his infidelities down the years—all, anyway, that he could remember. Shaken by the Sears Roebuck–size catalog though Cyn was, she felt comforted that, at least, they seemed to be communicating again. A couple of weekends later, he went on his own to stay with Derek Taylor, who had returned from California to become press officer for the new Apple organization and was temporarily based with his family at a house named Laudate, belonging to Peter Asher, in Newdigate, Surrey. The sight of the Taylors’ large brood stirred up strange, unfamiliar emotions in John: when he came home, he told Cyn they ought to have more children to keep Julian company. She burst into tears and replied that he’d be much better off with someone like Yoko Ono. He still professed incredulity at such an idea.

  He was about to fly with Paul to New York to unveil Apple—which now encompassed a record label as well as films, publishing, retail, and electronics—to the American media. Cynthia asked to go with him, remembering their fun time at the Plaza in 1964, but he refused. Instead, it was arranged that she should go on holiday to Greece for two weeks in a group of former ashram students comprising Magic Alex, Jenni Boyd, Donovan, and his manager, a raffish character known only as Gipsy Dave. Having only just welcomed his parents home, Julian was packed off stay with Dot, the housekeeper, yet again. “John was lying on our bed when I left,” Cyn would remember. “He was in the almost trance-like state I’d seen many times before, and barely turned his head to say goodbye.”

  In New York, John faced the American press for the first time since the “bigger than Jesus” furor two years earlier. Paul and he were as effective a double act as ever, explaining how Apple would be the first business aimed at young people to be run by young people and informed by the hippie ideals of love, peace, and sharing, “a kind of Western Communism,” as Paul put it. “We’re in the happy position of not really needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for the profit. We’ve already bought all our dreams, so now we want to share that possibility with others.”

  John was in agreement all the way: “We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don’t have to go down on their knees in somebody’s office. The aim…isn’t really a stack of gold teeth in the bank. We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see if we can get artistic freedom within a business structure, and to see if we can create nice things and sell them without charging three times our cost.” Elsewhere, he likened Apple and all its mold-breaking ideals to an old-fashioned spinning top: “You set it going and hope for the best.” The same might have been said of the other, private venture he was about to begin.

  When he returned from New York on May 16, Cynthia was still away. To keep him company at Kenwood, he invited Pete Shotton to come to stay for a few days. It was as if he needed the cover of their old “Shennon-Lotton” school partnership for what he was finally daring to do.

  Two nights later, after Pete had gone to bed, he screwed up all his courage, telephoned Yoko in London, and asked her to come down right away. The hour was late and the journey a long one, but she kept her resolution not to say no a second time. “John told me he didn’t have the car, so I’d have to come in a taxi,” she remembers. “He said he’d meet the taxi at the gate and pay it off. Usually, he didn’t handle money at all, so I was really impressed that he had the whole thing so carefully worked out.”

  She arrived at Kenwood sometime around midnight. Now that the moment was finally here, both found themselves overcome by shyness. “I didn’t know what to do,” John would recall, “so we went upstairs to my studio and I played her all the tapes that I’d made, all this far-out stuff, some comedy stuff, and some electronic music. There were very few people I could play those tapes to. She was suitably impressed, and then she said ‘Well, let’s make one ourselves,’ so we made Two Virgins. It was midnight when we started…it was dawn when we finished, and then we made love at dawn. It was very beautiful.”

  Once the top was spinning, all John’s doubts melted way, although Yoko’s were to linger a while yet. “This is going to work,” she remembers him assuring her. “You’re a wonderful creative artist…and I’m rich.”

  For all Cynthia’s nervous premonitions, she was totally unprepared for what awaited her on her return from Greece. Arriving back at Kenwood with Magic Alex Mardas and Jenni Boyd, she found the house strangely quiet, with no sign of Julian or Dot the housekeeper. In the rear sun parlor, that former small oasis of family togetherness, John and Yoko were seated on the floor together—wearing identical bathrobes according to Cynthia but “work-clothes” according to Yoko. John showed no signs of guilt or even surprise, merely looking round with a casual “Oh…hi.” Upstairs, a pair of Japanese slippers stood neatly outside the guest bedroom, although the room showed no signs of occupancy. Cynthia simply turned and fled.

  When she nerved herself to return to Kenwood a couple of days later, Yoko had gone, Julian and Dot were back, and John greeted her as though nothing had happened. According to Cynthia, when she brought up the scene in the sunroom he insisted that it meant nothing of importance and it was still her whom he loved. He even made love to her that night, after a physical estrangement now running into years.

  In the days that followed, however, he seemed to grow cold and withdrawn once again. There was much going on in his professional life, what with the launch of Apple and the run-up to a new Beatles album. As fearful for her marriage as Cynthia was, a Beatle wife’s duty not to create a nuisance or distraction still took precedence. She therefore asked permission to go on holiday again, this time to Pesaro in southern Italy, accompanied by Julian, her mother, and an uncle and aunt. A worldlier soul might have scented danger in the promptness of John’s agreement.

  Within hour
s of Cynthia’s departure, Yoko had left Tony Cox and Kyoko and moved into Kenwood with John. “We both knew this was it,” she remembers. “We were both so excited about discovering each other, we didn’t stop to think about anyone else’s feelings. We just went ahead, gung-ho; what we had was more precious than anything else.”

  The creative union that had come before their sexual one now went into instant, multimedia overdrive. The brief time they spent together at Kenwood was largely devoted to making two films celebrating their newfound love. The first, officially titled Number 5 but known as Smile, showed John’s face in close-up, smiling, grimacing, and waggling his eyebrows. Taken with a camera that recorded 20,000 frames per second, this animated snapshot could be stretched out to almost indefinite length; Yoko originally intended it to last four hours, but eventually whittled it to fifty-two minutes. The second of these so-different Kenwood home movies was called Two Virgins, after the music they had made together in John’s studio. Compared with the visuals that music would ultimately inspire, it was an innocently lyrical sequence of faces merging and separating, and hazy silhouettes wrapped in an embrace.

  Together with making films in which he was indubitably not “an extra” came John’s first essay into sculpture since he’d helped Stu Sutcliffe build a driftwood collage on the beach near Hamburg. Yoko had recently been invited to contribute a work to London’s newest experimental gallery, the Arts Lab in Drury Lane. At John’s suggestion, and with his collaboration, this became a piece called Build Around, a wooden base covered with chunks of broken glass and plastic, to which spectators could add their own contribution. One day when both Paul and Ringo were driving through London with him, John suggested they might like to stop off and see the exhibit. But both turned out to have pressing previous engagements.

  Fleet Street took some time to wake to the hottest Beatle-related story since “Bigger than Jesus.” On May 22, Apple launched yet another offshoot, a bespoke tailoring business (described Sgt. Pepperishly as “Civil and Military”) in Chelsea’s King’s Road. When John arrived for the press-packed opening party at nearby Club Dell’ Aretusa, Yoko was by his side and never left it.

  They had, in fact, chosen exactly when and where to unveil their partnership. In three weeks, the prestigious National Sculpture Exhibition was to be held in the precincts of Coventry Cathedral (along with Liverpool, Britain’s most famous martyr to wartime bombs). Through her contacts in the art world, Yoko arranged that she and John should contribute something. John proposed that it should be two acorns, which they would then ceremonially bury, one facing to the west, the other to the east, to symbolize their meeting and the merging of their two cultures. The exhibition organizers naturally jumped at the chance of John Lennon’s participation but were less keen to include something called Acorn Event in the catalog, so instead the pair produced their own. To describe their piece, John simply wrote, “This is what happens when two clouds meet,” a sentiment that so impressed Yoko that for her own entry she merely repeated it. He also ordered a white wrought-iron garden seat to mark the site of the acorns, and a silver plaque inscribed JOHN BY YOKO ONO, YOKO BY JOHN LENNON, SOMETIME IN MAY. 1968

  The Acorn Event was to take place on the exhibition’s preview day, June 15. Early that morning, John and Yoko set off for Coventry in the psychedelic Rolls with Les Anthony at the wheel and a trailer bearing the garden seat hitched on behind. On reaching the cathedral, they received a first taste of the disapproval and hostility that lay ahead. An officious cleric told them their acorns could not be buried on the exhibition site because it was consecrated ground. Straying from his ecumenical brief, the cleric added that, in any case, acorns were “not sculpture.” An irate Yoko then gave the names of several prominent British sculptors, insisting that any one, if contacted, would vouch for her standing in the art world. A phone call was actually made to Sir Henry Moore, but he was not at home.

  Eventually, a compromise was reached: John and Yoko could bury the two pots containing their acorns in unconsecrated ground a little distance away, and mark the spot with the garden seat and silver plaque. Within a couple of days, the acorns had been dug up and carried off by Beatle souvenir hounds. A fresh pair were interred by proxy and a round-the-clock security guard was mounted over them.

  Possibly because of its esoteric nature, the Acorn Event attracted comparatively little press coverage. But when John’s stage play returned to the National Theatre three nights later (no longer entitled Scene Three Act One but John Lennon: In His Own Write) the wolf pack was out in force.

  Strictly speaking, only a third of the evening belonged to John. The dramatization of his two books evolved by Adrienne Kennedy, Victor Spinetti, and him ran less than an hour, not nearly long enough in 1968 (though it would be today) for a stand-alone commercial production. The National’s director, Lord Olivier, therefore decreed it should be bolstered by two other short plays from earlier centuries, both of which, in a nod to Spinetti, would also be directed by an actor. The first of these makeweight minidramas was The Covent Garden Tragedy by Henry Fielding, noteworthy only for the truism “Enough is equal to a feast.” The second—its title prophesying headlines soon to come—was John Maddison Morton’s nineteenth-century comic interlude, A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion.

  Also, for the first time ever, John’s words had been subjected to a blue pencil. In one of the dying gasps of theatrical censorship, a parody Queen’s speech he had written specially for the play was ordered to be cut. (It would be reinstated later in the year, after censorship ended.) Spinetti wondered how this might affect John’s view of their collaboration, but he should not have worried. On the morning of the premiere, a gift arrived at the flat where they had worked so many nights together. It was a huge rubber elephant with a label I’LL NEVER FORGET VICTOR SPINETTI SAYS JOHN LENNON.

  For all the National Theatre’s tripartite billing, no one imagined it was Henry Fielding or John Maddison Morton who brought crowds and massed photographers to the Old Vic theater that rainy night of June 18, 1968. John and Yoko sat in the front row of the dress circle in matching white outfits, flanked by the other Beatles and their usual consorts. Mixed with laughter and applause for the production came heckling cries of “Where’s your wife?” and “Where’s Cynthia?” To limit such awkward moments, the after-show celebration was low-key. “There was no party,” Spinetti remembers. “We all just went round the corner to a pub.”

  Next morning, every front page in Britain trumpeted the month-old fact that John Lennon had left his wife and begun an affair with Yoko Ono. The unanimous public response was blank incomprehension. Despite recent travails, John still lived a life that was the envy of millions. He could have anything in creation that he wanted. With such clothes and cars and mansions and beautiful dolly birds at his disposal, what could he possibly want with a fiercely unglamorous-looking Japanese woman from the art world’s lunatic fringe?

  Cynthia was still on holiday in Pesaro, unaware of all these developments. It also happened that, for the first time in ten years’ unbroken dedication to John, she was enjoying the company of another man. This was an Italian named Roberto Bassanini, two years her junior, whose parents owned the hotel where she was staying. According to Cynthia, it was no holiday romance—she was there with Julian; her mother, Lilian; and two other relatives. Bassanani simply supplied the kindness and attentiveness that had so long been lacking at home. One evening, on her return from a family outing with Bassanini, she found Magic Alex Mardas awaiting her at the hotel. As she would recall: “[Alex] said, ‘I’ve come with a message from John. He is going to divorce you, take Julian away from you and send you back to Hoylake.’”

  Mardas could not, or would not, add any explanation to this shockingly bald statement. Cynthia began preparations to return home immediately but—no doubt partly a result of her traumatized state—was stricken by laryngitis and a high fever and pronounced unable to travel. It was while still confined to bed in Pesaro that she finally read English newspaper re
ports of John’s “new love.”

  Once bitten, twice shy, Cynthia did not return to Kenwood with Julian, but instead sought refuge with her mother, who by now was living in central London in a flat owned by Ringo Starr. She at once tried to contact John via the Beatles office, but met the same defensive shield that any ordinary female supplicant would have. Eventually she was notified that John intended to sue for divorce on the grounds of her adultery with Roberto Bassanini. Again she begged Peter Brown, the Beatle aide most like Brian Epstein, to persuade John to talk to her face-to-face. Civilized, sympathetic Brown tried his best, but had to admit failure. Eventually a message came that John and Yoko had left Kenwood, so Cynthia could make use of it, if she chose, pending divorce negotiations. Having nowhere else to go and only £1,000 in the bank, she accepted this offer, taking her mother with her. The house was still just as she had last seen it, with all John’s myriad possessions, and even his books, in their usual place.

  A week or so later, he finally agreed to a meeting with Cynthia at Kenwood. Even for this most agonizingly private of encounters, he and Yoko turned up together, clad in the matching allover black that had already become their trademark. Cynthia was supported by her staunch ally—and John’s old adversary—her mother. In vain she protested that she was not and had never been involved with Roberto Bassanini; John merely switched tack and accused her of fancying a young American actor who had been among the meditators at Rishikesh and to whom she’d barely even spoken. When Cyn still failed to scream at him, Lilian Powell weighed in, giving full vent to the anger and contempt she had felt on her daughter’s behalf for so long. Les Anthony, waiting by the Rolls outside, remembers “all hell breaking loose.”