John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  About Paul, however, he was strangely muted, despite condemning the “Paul and Linda” McCartney album as “rubbish.” “He’s a good PR man, Paul. I mean he’s about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job…. I was surprised [McCartney] was so poor. I expected just a little more because if Paul and I are sort of disagreeing and I feel weak, I think he must feel strong…. Not that we’ve had much physical argument…. So I was surprised. And I was glad, too.” Their power to stimulate and goad one another still clearly existed for John, even if he now saw himself as the main stimulator. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, he hoped, would “scare [Paul] into doing something decent, and then he’ll scare me into doing something decent, and I’ll scare him, like that. I think he’s capable of great work. I think he will do it. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish nobody would, Dylan or anyone. I mean in me heart of hearts I wish I was the only one in the world….”

  His hardest words were reserved for the other Beatles’ supposed hostility to Yoko (forgetting that, to begin with at least, they had shown considerable tolerance). He mentioned almost hitting George, but omitted to mention having actually done so. Wenner asked if the McCartney album cover, showing Paul with a new baby daughter, might have been intended to rub in the fact of Yoko’s first miscarriage. “I don’t think he did that,” John said. “I think he was just imitating us, as [he and Linda] usually do, by putting out a family album. You watch—they do exactly what I do a year or two later…. They’re imitators, you know.”

  Fresh from sharing supreme studio power with Yoko and Phil Spector, he dismissed George Martin as “a translator” whose expertise had mainly benefited Paul. “If Paul wanted to use violins and that, [Martin] would translate it for him. Like “In My Life,” there’s an Elizabethan piano solo on it…. And he helped us develop a language a little to talk to musicians. Because I’m very shy and for many, many reasons, I didn’t much go for musicians…. That’s nothing personal against George Martin; he just doesn’t…he’s more Paul’s style of music than mine.” Harsh judgment on the man whose “translations” had included seamlessly joining the light and heavy versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” creating the fairground phantasmagoria in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” and arranging the casually requested “sound like the end of the world” as the climax of “A Day in the Life.”

  His view of the 1960s after almost a year’s reflection was that their great cultural and commercial youthquake had changed little of real importance. “The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except that there’s a lot of fag fucking middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes. And Kenneth Tynan’s making a fortune out of the word ‘fuck.’ But apart from that, nothing happened [except] we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything. It’s exactly the same…. We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game…selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in fuckin’ poverty with fuckin’ rats crawling over them…. That dream is over, it’s just the same only I’m thirty and a lot of people have got long hair, that’s all.”

  He saw his creative future in protest songs, even though their simplicity and universality were even harder to bring off than multilayered masterpieces like “Strawberry Fields.” “If I could be a fuckin’ fisherman, I would,” he burst out at one point. “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it isn’t fun, it’s torture…. I read about Van Gogh or Beethoven, any of the fuckers. And I read an article the other day—‘If they’d had psychiatrists, we wouldn’t have had Gauguin’s great pictures.’ And those fuckin’ bastards [the public], they’re just sucking us to death. About all we can do is do it like fuckin’ circus animals…. I’d rather be in the audience really, but I’m not capable of it…. I know it sounds silly, and I’d sooner be rich than poor and all the rest of that shit. But the pain. I’d sooner not be…I wish I was…ignorance is bliss or something. If you don’t know, man, there’s no pain.

  “I have great hopes for what I do, my work. And I also have great despair that it’s all pointless and shit—how can you top Beethoven and Shakespeare or whatever? And in me secret heart I wanted to write something that would overtake ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I don’t know why, that’s the one they always sang. I thought ‘Why isn’t somebody writing one for the people?’ That’s what my job is. Our job is to write for the people now. So the songs they go and sing on their buses are not just love songs…To me, I’m home. I’ll never change much from this.”

  Quoting a Beatles classic by other hands, Wenner asked if he had a mental picture of “When I’m Sixty-four.” “I hope [Yoko and I] are a nice old couple, living off the coast of Ireland or something like that,” John replied. “Looking at our scrapbook of madness.”

  This was his first visit to New York with Yoko, and her first trip back since 1966. He reveled in being introduced to her old downtown haunts, so different from previous stays besieged in the Plaza or the Warwick, though he had no inkling yet that he would ever settle here. “This is the first time I’m really seeing New York, you see,” he told Wenner, “’cause I was always too nervous or I was a famous Beatle…But it’s so overpowering…. I’m too frightened of it. It’s so much and people are so aggressive. I can’t take all that, you know. I need to go home. I need to look at the grass. I’m always writing about English garden[s] and that lot. I need that, the trees and the grass.”

  During their short stay, he also codirected two more films with Yoko. Up Your Legs Forever, another production “for peace,” showed 365 pairs of bare legs in succession, provided by, among others, Allen Klein, Jann Wenner, the filmmaker Donn Pennebaker, the actor George Segal, the journalists Al Aronowitz and Tom Wolfe, and the artist Larry Rivers. Fly was a twenty-five-minute color sequence of an ordinary housefly crawling over a young woman’s prone, naked body. There was an initial hitch when none of the flies provided would act as required, even with the woman’s skin thickly coated in honey. A fresh consignment, rounded up in neighborhood restaurant kitchens, were gassed with carbon dioxide until they were barely ambulatory. After almost a day’s filming, one of them finally staggered its way to stardom.

  Yoko’s father, Eisuke Ono, had retired from his high-level banking job in America and returned with her mother, Isoko, to Tokyo. There she now took John to meet his new in-laws at last. Having visited Japan only once previously, as a captive Beatle, he had no real sense of the country or its culture, and expected all its inhabitants to be as diminutive as Yoko. “He said ‘I bet your Dad is a real dwarf. Because all Japanese men are like that,’” she remembers. “So I said, ‘Well, you’ll see.’ Because his Dad was a dwarf. And when we went there, he was so surprised that my father was taller than he was.”

  In fact, Yoko’s family, especially its proud and socially prominent Yasuda side, had followed the adventures of the past eighteen months with no less dismay and embarrassment than had John’s. After her appearance nude on the Two Virgins cover, the Yasudas even issued a press release, saying they were “not proud” of her but were of her cousin, a classical cellist who had won a prize in Sweden. At the family’s ceremonial yearly get-together, her name was pointedly never mentioned. Most wounding of all was her mother’s assertion—first made after her elopement with Toshi Ichiyanagi—that her behavior adversely affected her father’s health.

  She wondered how John would go down with the beautiful, cultivated Isoko, but need not have worried. “He said, ‘Just leave it to me”—and my mother adored him. There are pictures of her, holding his arm and gazing adoringly into his eyes.” The formidable Eisuke, too, was won over, though not as unreservedly. “With both my parents, looks were everything. My father was wearing a velvet smoking-jacket, and John just his khaki tunic with
the military insignia. And Tony, my first husband, had been very handsome. After meeting John, my father took me aside and said, ‘The other one was better looking.’”

  Though Apple continued to release all four ex-Beatles’ solo records, it had shrunk to a wizened remnant of its former luscious self. Most of the staff at 3 Savile Row had been fired, the Georgian town house put up for sale, and the business transferred to a small, anonymous office in St. James’s. The last two key executives of the pre–Allen Klein regime had finally resigned, Peter Brown to run Robert Stigwood’s organization in New York, Derek Taylor to handle PR for the Warner/Elektra/Atlantic record label. From the Beatles’ former support team, there remained only their original, irreplaceable roadies, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. Neil tended to assist George on developing film projects, while Mal continued his special role, halfway between bodyguard and nursemaid, mainly with John. On the Plastic Ono Band album, he receives a credit for “tea and sympathy.”

  With no press office to screen or program media interviews, John himself chose which publications and writers to engage with. And if their political credentials were right, prestige and circulation did not matter. In January 1971, he agreed to do an interview for Red Mole, a tiny ultraleft magazine edited by the Indian-born, Oxford-educated radical Tariq Ali, who had famously led the antiwar demo outside the American Embassy three years earlier. Ali’s co-interrogator was Robin Blackburn, a future professor of sociology and editor of the New Left Review. While neither could believe their scoop, John was worried his presence might lower the tone of such a serious publication.

  In a session almost as long as one given to Rolling Stone, he banished all memory of growing up in the comfortable, unoppressed bourgeoisie and declared himself a working-class hero for real. “I’ve always been politically-minded, you know, and against the status-quo,” he said in a passage at once true and fantastical. “It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, as I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean it’s just a basic working-class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up by the system…. But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there’s many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I’ve been satirising the system since my childhood.”

  An important new strand in his thinking was also unveiled. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch had appeared the previous October, spurring women to demand liberation from age-old male dominance that the freedom-giving Sixties had somehow left out. Yoko, understandably, was in the vanguard of this Women’s Lib movement, having been schooled in male dominance in Japan and continued to suffer from it throughout her artistic career. To her, female subservience was analogous to the enslavement of Africans a century earlier, and in 1967, to Britain’s Nova magazine, she said so with a typically extreme metaphor: “Woman is the nigger of the world.”

  John may once have been the archetypal “male chauvinist pig,” in Greer’s scornful phrase, but love had brought about a remarkable transformation. “We can’t have a revolution that doesn’t involve and liberate women,” he told Red Mole. “It’s so subtle, the way you’re taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She’s a red-hot liberationist and was quick to show me where I was going wrong even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That’s why I’m always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women. How you talk about power to the people unless you realise that ‘the people’ is both sexes?”

  Next day, he phoned Tariq Ali to say he’d written a song around a phrase that had run through their discussion, “Power to the People.” He was so pleased with it that he sang and played its instantly chantable refrain to Ali over the wire. Its proposition was the same as had been aired so tentatively on the Beatles’ White Album: “You say you want a revolution…” However, the payoff was no longer “You can count me out,” but “We gotta get it on right away.” There was a call to “give the workers what they really own” and a searching question to his new brothers in the proletariat, “How do you treat your woman back home?…She got to be herself / So she can free herself….” Released as a Plastic Ono Band single, it reached number seven in the United Kingdom and eleven in the United States. Communism and feminism came together in the charts for the first and last time.

  Paul’s original intention had only been to sue Allen Klein. But his lawyers’ advice was that John, George, and Ringo’s appointment of Klein against his wishes breached the partnership agreement they made as Beatles & Co. in April 1967, and his best means of protecting himself against Klein in the future would be to have it legally terminated. Since the other three opposed the idea, he would be suing all of them as well as Apple Corps, which owned 80 percent of the partnership.

  The case opened in the Chancery Division of the High Court on December 31, 1970, while John was still in New York. Paul’s counsel called for the dissolution of Beatles & Co., for impartial accounts of its dealings to be compiled, and for a receiver, or independent financial arbitrator, to oversee its finances henceforward. The judge, Mr. Justice Stamp, was told that the partnership’s bookkeeping had been “lamentable,” that despite income of between £4 million and £5 million per year, it might have insufficient reserves for outstanding income tax and surtax, and that Klein had been paying himself commission to which he was not entitled. The hearing was adjourned after undertakings from Apple’s legal team that a substantial interim sum would be paid into the partnership and Paul’s share released to him without delay.

  When proceedings reopened on February 19, 1971, John, George, and Ringo’s counsel, Morris Finer QC, counterclaimed that Klein’s appointment had been a necessary measure to save the Beatles from “almost total bankruptcy.” Klein had transformed their finances, doubling their income in the first nine months of his management and earning them just over £9 million between May 1969 and December 1970, of which £8 million was record royalties.

  Paul was the only one of the partners to attend court and give oral evidence. Mr. Finer read out an affidavit from John, saying that before Klein’s advent, Apple had been “full of hustlers and spongers,” that two company cars had disappeared, and “we owned a house that no one could remember buying.” Surprisingly, in view of his own longing to break free, he portrayed the partnership as something that had always had its discords but was nevertheless urgently worth preserving. “From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred pop-type music and we preferred what is now called underground. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrast in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm and contributed to our success. If Paul is trying to break us up because of anything that happened before the Klein-Eastman power struggle, his reasoning does not make sense to me.”

  In the witness box, Paul was questioned about another somewhat surprising statement in John’s affidavit—that even when making their respective solo albums, “We always thought of ourselves as Beatles, whether we recorded singly or in twos or threes.” He replied by quoting John’s climactic assertion on the Plastic Ono Band album: “I don’t believe in Beatles….” Klein had not been a passive appointee of the other three, he maintained, but had actively tried to create dissent, sometimes even pretending to side with him against John. He instanced a telephone conversation in which Klein had allegedly confided, “You know why John is angry with you? It’s because you came off better than he did on Let It Be.” In another exchange about John, he recalled Klein observing, “The real trouble is Yoko. She’s the one with ambition.”

  After an eleven-day hearing, Mr. Justice Stamp proposed appointing an arbitrator who would combine the roles of manager an
d receiver and would in turn appoint submanagers—including Klein—to run the Beatles’ and Paul’s financial affairs as separate entities. Neither side would accept this, so on March 12 the judge appointed Douglas Spooner, a partner in a firm of City accountants “as receiver and manager of the group’s business interests pending trial of the main action.” While concluding that their financial position was “confused, uncertain and inconclusive,” Stamp found no evidence that Klein “had or would put partnership money into his pocket.” An appeal on behalf of John, George, and Ringo was lodged, but dropped a few weeks later because “they considered it to be in the common interest to explore means whereby Mr. McCartney could disengage himself from the partnership by agreement.”

  Receivers being associated with business disaster and bankruptcy in the British mind, it was widely assumed that the Beatles had finally fulfilled John’s prophecy and gone broke. However, this one was not only dealing with his clients’ debts but also the massive income, mostly in record royalties, they continued to generate. All the Beatles received intermittent payouts from the receiver and had additional substantial sources of extra-partnership income not affected by the court judgment. Apple owned only 20 percent of Maclen, John and Paul’s music-publishing company, and John’s 40 percent of the proceeds from cover versions and worldwide radio play continued to flow in from Northern Songs under its new owners, ATV. Even after a receiver was appointed for Maclen also, the Lennon-McCartney royalties continued piling up on a Himalayan scale. Although technically superseded by Mr. Spooner, Klein remained John’s manager in practice and was more than ready to advance him any additional capital he needed. In short, while plotting the end of the capitalist system with Tariq Ali and the Red Mole boys, he could go on spending as if there was no tomorrow.