John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Cynthia remained at Kenwood throughout the summer, in a limbo of grief and foreboding that only a cast-off wife of Henry VIII could have understood. Dot, the housekeeper, was still there; Les Anthony still for drove her, as well as John. Otherwise, she felt she had been amputated from his life “like a gangrenous limb.” Not long after his final visit, a photograph was taken of Cynthia sitting on the patio, with Julian’s head in her lap. The little boy smiles for the camera, the way little boys always must. But, as with every child whose parents break up—as with John two decades earlier—his childhood has been stolen.

  Out of loyalty to John (or fear of him, Cynthia believed), George and Ringo both kept their distance; so, more woundingly, did the two other Beatle wives, Pattie and Maureen, whom she had always regarded as friends. But one day she received a surprise visit from Paul McCartney, alone and bearing a single red rose. As Yoko confirms, Paul had been among the first people John told officially that he and she were now together. “We stopped the car outside his house and I waited while John went inside. It was partly a macho Liverpool thing, I think, in case Paul had been thinking of making a play for me.”

  Paul’s life, too, happened to be in a state of flux. The previous Christmas, after five seemingly perfect years together, he and Jane Asher had announced their engagement. Seven months later, Jane ended their relationship on discovering him in flagrante with an American girl named Francie Schwartz. Still shaken by her departure, he identified with Cynthia’s plight—and, in any case, felt no need to kowtow to John. That afternoon at Kenwood, he was kindly and supportive, offering Cynthia the single rose he had brought and joking that now perhaps the two of them should get married. On his drive down from London, he had begun writing a song in his head, intended to give words of comfort to Julian and provisionally called “Hey Jules.”

  He made no secret of the visit afterward, nor did John react in any way adversely. It was proof of the strength of their friendship in this, the last year they would be friends.

  22

  BACK TO VIRGINITY

  We are here, this is art.

  For now, John had no idea where he wanted to live with Yoko; all he knew was that Weybridge wasn’t it. After abandoning Kenwood, the two spent several weeks with no fixed address, first staying at Paul’s house, then hiding out with trusted members of the Beatles’ entourage like Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, and Peter Brown. In early July, they moved into Ringo’s London flat at 34 Montagu Square—the same place where, a few weeks previously, Cynthia had sought shelter with her mother.

  John was later to maintain that Yoko had, in the most literal sense, saved his life. “The king is always killed by his courtiers, not his enemies. The king is over-fed, over-drugged, over-indulged, anything to keep [him] tied to his throne. Most people in that position never wake up. They die mentally or physically or both. And what Yoko did for me was to liberate me from that situation…she showed me what it was to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by sycophants and slaves who were only interested in keeping the situation as it was…. She didn’t fall in love with the Beatle, she didn’t fall in love with my fame. She fell in love with me for myself, and through that brought out the best in me. [I realized], ‘My God, this is different from anything before. This is more than a hit record. It’s more than gold. It’s more than anything.’”

  They were, of course, not quite the runaway orphans of the storm, living on love alone, that such imagery might suggest. Whatever John’s triumph at having finally “broken out of the palace,” he was still connected to courtiers ready and waiting to fulfill his slightest whim, a seemingly bottomless bank account, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls. With all these cushions in place, it was heady to return to a makeshift, camping-out existence such as he hadn’t known since art college.

  The real change was in the attitudes imbued in him by his north-country upbringing and hardened by years of veneration as an earthly demigod. “I was used to being served by women, whether it was my Aunt Mimi—God bless you—or whoever, served by females, wives, girlfriends,” he would admit. “Yoko didn’t buy that. She didn’t give a shit about Beatles. ‘What the fuck are the Beatles? I’m Yoko Ono, treat me as me.’ From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said, ‘What do you want, a contract? We can have whatever you want, but don’t expect anything from me or for me to change in any way.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘The answer to that is that I can’t be here. Because there is no space where you are. Everything revolves around you, and I can’t breathe in that atmosphere.’”

  Yoko also had to do her share of adjusting. No man she had ever met before, certainly neither of her two husbands, had impinged on her consuming preoccupation with her career or mitigated the sense of being essentially a loner and outsider, which she had carried with her since childhood. Now here she was with someone who wanted—demanded—to spend every minute of every day with her, to be involved in every aspect of her life and to involve her in every aspect of his. Relatives back home in Japan who had so long bewailed her refusal to conform would have been astonished by the old-fashioned domestic roles she now accepted without a murmur. One night, John and she turned up at Derek Taylor’s home, where they were hospitably given the use of the Taylors’ marital bed. “Next morning, I asked what I should make them for breakfast,” Joan Taylor remembers. “Yoko told me that she was the only one who prepared John’s breakfast for him.”

  All this still wasn’t enough for John. Indeed, the frantic adolescent jealousy and possessiveness that had characterized his first wooing of Cynthia ten years earlier now seemed mild by comparison. Soon after he and Yoko got together, he asked her to write out a list of everyone she’d ever slept with before they met. Thinking it was just a game, she began jotting down names in lighthearted fashion—then realized that John took it with deadly seriousness.

  He regarded every man who crossed their combined path as an active and dangerous rival for her affections, and methodically set about cutting her off from all her existing male friends in avant-garde art and music, however elderly or gay. Anything that took Yoko’s attention away from him, even for a moment, counted as a threat. Though she lived her life in English, there were occasions when she spoke to Japanese compatriots, either in person or on the telephone, and glanced at Japanese-language books, newspapers, and magazines. John hated this, as it represented a part of her that he could not share. “He’d always be saying, ‘What are you thinking? Why aren’t you looking at me?’ I always had to look at him in the right way, straight into the middle of his eyes, or he’d start to get upset.”

  Though she had left her husband for him, he still regarded Tony Cox as an ever-present rival who might walk in and reclaim her at any moment. He accepted, however, that contact with Cox had to be reestablished so that Yoko could see Kyoko and discuss plans for a divorce. Paradoxically, when they did meet at last, John took an instant liking to his perceived deadly rival. And Kyoko charmed and captivated him as his own five-year-old never had. “My parents had an open marriage, so I was used to seeing them both with other people,” she remembers. “But even I could tell that John was something different. He was always very sweet. He never lost his temper with me, though I knew he had a temper. Later on, he and my mom and dad would have very bad rows in front of me. All of them believed in really letting it go.”

  Yoko was only beginning to learn what insecurity, even timidity, coexisted with John’s rock-star egotism. That summer, he had to keep his promise to write the “Liverpool Wank” sketch for Ken Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! revue. An exercise he once would have tossed off in a few seconds, so to speak, for “The Daily Howl” or Mersey Beat, now reduced him to agonies of indecision and self-doubt. Yoko asked him to tell her the story, and responded just as wholeheartedly to the idea of schoolboys group-masturbating amid cries of “Brigitte Bardot!” as John had to her imaginary “Snows of Kos.” With her standing at his shoulder, the way Paul McCartney once us
ed to, the sketch was finally typed and submitted.

  Behind her own art-star egotism, Yoko was not without hang-ups either. “I’m not an insecure artist, but as a woman I had all kinds of hesitations about myself. When I met John, I was self-conscious about my appearance. I thought I was too short, my legs were the wrong shape, and I used to cover my face with my hair. My hands are so stringy in a way, my fingers and all that. I was always hiding my hands. John said to me ‘No, you’re beautiful. You don’t have to hide your hands, your legs are perfect, tie your hair back and let people see your face.’”

  Before meeting John, she maintains, she never used the word fuck. “He told me once, ‘You’re too Asiatic, too Japanese, you should say ‘fuck.’ And a beautiful woman saying ‘fuck’ is really very attractive. I told him, ‘I’m not beautiful enough to say that,’ but I went to the mirror and practised going ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’”

  Despite years among artists in Greenwich Village, she had never taken drugs of any kind, not even nicotine, before coming to Europe. At the Knokke festival with the Bottoms film, she was given her first tab of LSD; in Paris shortly afterward, among Ornette Coleman’s jazz crowd, she tried heroin. Acid-guzzler though John was, he had always steered clear of smack, terrified by its association with needles and the physical degradation so harrowingly portrayed onscreen by Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm. Yoko had merely inhaled rather than injecting it, and reported no such calamitous aftereffects. “John kept saying ‘That must have been so interesting—what was it like?’” she recalls. “He never stopped hounding me about it.”

  During their short stay together at Kenwood, she had been startled by the quantity and variety of lesser drugs in his possession. “He was on everything by then. Next to his bed, he had a huge glass jar of pills, acid, Mandrax, I don’t know what that blue one was called…. In the morning when he woke up, he used to just grab a handful at random.” His current craze was for Mandrax (methaqualone, or Quaalude); he urged Yoko to try it but did not pressure her when she declined.

  She could do nothing about his heavy consumption of French Gitanes cigarettes and—nonsmokers still swimming much against the social tide—speedily joined him in the habit as a further mark of togetherness. She was more successful against the junk food he still mainly lived on, despite Brian’s and George Martin’s attempts to educate his palate. Yoko was a convert to the vegetarian, nondairy, and preservative-free macrobiotic diet with which more serious hippies proclaimed their abdication from the material world. One of her few male friends unthreatening to John was a young American expat named Craig Sams, who had pioneered macrobiotic cuisine in London virtually single-handedly. Together they became regulars at Seed, Sams’s tiny basement restaurant, off Westbourne Grove, where dishes were priced in shillings rather than pounds. As with all initiates, the regimen of brown rice and vegetables, and the elimination of sugar and preservatives, brought John a surge of energy and well-being. He could not get over how “brown rice and a cuppa tea [are the] biggest high I ever had.”

  Domestically, as opposed to creatively, the new tenants of the basement-and-ground-floor duplex at 34 Montagu Square might not have appeared a perfect macrobiotic balance of yin and yang. Yoko was accustomed to a habitat as chastely minimalist as one of her installations. John was a musician, a calling synonymous with dark, fetid rooms, dirty shirts, empty bottles, and cigarette butts floating in cold tea. It was therefore a pleasant surprise for her to discover his passion for domestic order, his fastidiousness about personal hygiene and fragrance, the care he took over the smallest aesthetic detail. One little trick he taught her would stay with Yoko long after he had gone. When putting on a baggy shirt, he would tuck it into his belt, then raise both arms at once so that its folds billowed out symmetrically all the way around.

  He was completely open and uninhibited with her, as she learned to be with him, owning up to his deepest sexual fantasies—like one of making love to a woman in her eighties, or even older, whose veined and wrinkled hands would be covered in diamonds. Over time, she became accustomed to his particular style of backhanded compliment. “Do you know why I like you?” he remarked on one occasion. “It’s because you look like a bloke in drag. You’re like a mate.” Yoko laughingly replied that she thought he must be “a closet fag.”

  John would later sum up his situation with a favorite song of his mother’s, “Those Wedding-Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” “When I met Yoko [it was like] when you meet your first woman and you leave the guys at the bar and you don’t go play football any more, and you don’t go play snooker and billiards. Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatever other than that they were old friends…. That was it. That old gang of mine was over the moment I met her. As soon as I met her, that was the end of the boys. But it so happened the boys were well known and weren’t just the local guys at the bar.”

  In reality, wedding bells were not yet even remotely on the cards, and the “old gang” had no sense of breaking up. To Paul, George, and Ringo, Yoko seemed no more than yet another of John’s passing fancies, which sooner or later—sooner rather than later—would pass away just like all the others. And whatever John’s inner thoughts, he remained a fully paid-up Beatle, subject to the remorseless manufacturing cycle, which, in late May, had summoned them back to Abbey Road Studios. With them they brought a much larger than usual song cache, mostly written during the weeks of enforced tranquility at Rishikesh. John had been the most productive, with fifteen potential new tracks as against Paul’s twelve and George’s six. And at the back-to-school session on May 30, his initial intention became clear: not to break up the old gang, but to augment it.

  “He wanted me to be part of the group,” Yoko says. “He created the group, so he thought the others should accept that. I didn’t particularly want to be part of them. But by that time, he had got all the avant-garde friends of mine out of my life, so I had nobody else to play music with. I couldn’t see how I would fit in, but John was certain I would. He kept saying ‘They’re very sensitive guys…. You think they’re just Liverpool gits, but no, they’re very sensitive…. Paul is into Stockhausen…They can do your thing….’ He thought the other Beatles would go for it: he was trying to persuade me.”

  So when John settled himself on his stool with his guitar in the sacred vault of Studio Two, there beside him on a matching stool, in matching allover black, sat Yoko. It was a moment worthy of the great 1920s cartoonist H. M. Bateman, who portrayed monumental social gaffes and the reeling shock of bystanders: “The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Loyal Toast,” “The Boy Who Threw a Snowball at St Moritz,” and “The Guardsman Who Dropped His Rifle on Parade” might now have been joined by “The Beatle Who Brought a Chick to a Recording Session.” However, while there certainly was Batemanesque jaw-dropping and eye-popping among the Beatles’ retinue, this “most unwarrantable intrusion” left the other three—to begin with—relatively unfazed. “I think John told them some kind of sob story, like she was depressed or she was in pain, so he wanted me to be there to cheer me up or something like that,” Yoko says. “So George came over and said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ They were all treating me like this depressed woman they had to cheer up.”

  This summer of 1968 was to be altogether different from the happy, hazy twelvemonth ago whose apotheosis had been Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A word that had haunted European politicians for decades after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, and which the postwar world believed to be extinct outside Latin America, was displacing love and peace on young lips everywhere. The word was revolution. In late 1967, China’s despot, Mao Tse-tung, had launched his so-called Cultural Revolution by inciting mobs to turn on liberal and intellectual elements who threatened to soften his totalitarian regime. Conversely, a few months later, a popular revolt in Czechoslovakia, led by the liberal Alexander Dubcek, threw off the repressive rule of Communist Russia to establish a “Prague Spring” of democratic self-determination until it
s brutal extinction by Soviet tanks the following August.

  In parts of the world where no dictators ruled, the call for overthrow was no less urgent, the demagoguery no less frenzied, the street fighting no less ugly, the bloodshed no less random. Paris’s fabled springtime brought the worst civil unrest since the Liberation, as college students rose up jointly against the Vietnam War and the landslide reelection victory of France’s wartime savior, Charles de Gaulle. In London, a savage antiwar riot outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square ended with three hundred arrests and ninety police casualties. As America itself saw its armies humiliated by guerrillas in southeast Asia, its name reviled throughout the so-called free world, its once idyllic college campuses in turmoil, its once pacific black communities in open revolt, it also had to face the realization that the dreadful event in Dallas on November 22, 1963, had not been a one-off tragedy, but the beginning of a trend. In April, the great civil-rights leader Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper as he stood on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, John F. Kennedy’s younger brother, Bobby, would be ambushed and shot dead in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, having just launched his own presidential campaign with a pledge to end the Vietnam slaughter.

  But revolution no longer signified its old hot blood: revolution was cool. And for the first time ever, classless. Middle-class British students were among the fiercest converts to Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, or Maoism, often flitting from one to the other and back again, and seeing no contradiction between their new beliefs and the comfortable capitalist lifestyle, which the system they professed to hate still allowed them. A range of institutions, from the London School of Economics to Hornsey College of Art, followed the Czech example in declaring themselves breakaway states, but with the important distinction that no tanks came to meet them. Emergent leaders of this Europe-wide academic insurrection, like France’s Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Britain’s Tariq Ali, received worship almost on a par with rock stars. It was an untrendy flat indeed where posters of Lenin or Mao did not compete with the new psychedelic individual head shots of the Beatles. When a new club opened in London, more plushly luxurious than any before, and more dedicated to excluding the lower orders, it was called—what else?—the Revolution.