Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  All the high hopes around making their own piece of shellac didn’t take them very far: they passed it around the band and their friends—each member got to have it for a week’s time—but nobody sent it off to London. The platter hid in John Lowe’s linen drawer until McCartney bought it back in July 1981.27 The “Danger” heard on Anthology 1, with forty-two seconds (a verse and chorus) edited out and heavy noise reduction applied, is a distant, tinny chorus waving at us from the other side of the myth.

  Lennon’s post–Quarry Bank routine avoided Mendips as much as possible. Days were spent at art college, cadging cigarettes and wedging in lunchtime sing-alongs with McCartney and Harrison; afternoons and evenings were whiled away at coffee bars like the Jac, gabbing about art and getting fresh with girls. And he kept visiting Judy’s household, acting as a big brother to his two stepsisters, Julia and Jacqui, often staying over on weekends, as if the Dykins house felt more like home than Aunt Mimi’s.

  On the evening of July 15, 1958, Lennon and Dykins were in the kitchen at the Blomfield Road residence cleaning up after tea; Julia was on her bike in the front garden, and Jacqui had been put to bed upstairs. As a sunny afternoon faded into dusk on that summer Tuesday, Judy called out to her daughter, “Just going to see Mimi, lovey,” and set off down the road toward the bus stop. Dykins’s mother—Nana to the children—stopped to talk with her on her way out, and Julia, then eleven years old, heard them both laugh. Julia remembered a premonition coming over her:

  Tonight, for no reason at all, I began to feel it wasn’t quite the same. Suddenly, I knew something was terribly wrong. How does a child feel panic? My recollection is that my chest felt uncomfortably tight and I wanted to retch. Waves of fear swept through me, as if someone was standing over me, threatening me with a huge, hard fist. Without thinking, I threw down my bike and ran faster than I ever had to the top of the road, to try and catch my mother before she got on the bus. It was too late. When I turned the corner she was gone.28

  After a long chat with Mimi, Judy left Mendips between 9:30 and 10 P.M. “Normally,” her daughter says, “Mimi walked with her across Menlove Avenue to the bus stop. Tonight Mimi said, ‘I won’t walk you tonight, Julia. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ ” Just as Judy was leaving the house, Nigel Walley came by looking for John. She invited him to join her on the bus ride and meet with John at her house. Walley declined, but offered to walk her to the bus stop at the intersection of Vale Road, where he waved good-bye as she crossed the street. “She had just started across the other side when a car hurled her up into the air,” Baird wrote. “She was killed instantly. She was just forty-four.”29 After hearing a thud, Walley turned back to see Julia’s body flying through the air. “I ran back to get Mimi, and we rushed to wait for the ambulance . . . white with terror, and crying in hysterics.”30 Years later, Walley told a Liverpool Echo reporter: “I must have been about 15 yards up the road when I heard a car skidding. I turned round to see John’s mum going through the air. I rushed over but she had been killed instantly. . . . I had nightmares about it for years. I can see it today—Julia lying there with her hair fluttering over her face.”31

  “Many years passed,” Baird wrote, “before John could bring himself to talk about that night,” and then his words still carried the gaping agony of the nightmare that engulfed his life:

  An hour or so after it happened a copper came to the door to let us know about the accident. It was awful, like some dreadful film where they ask you if you’re the victim’s son and all that. Well, I was, and I can tell you it was absolutely the worst night of my entire life.

  . . . Anyway, Bobby [Dykins] and I got a cab over to Sefton General Hospital where she was lying dead. I remember rabbiting on hysterically to the cabbie all the way there. Of course, there was no way I could ever bear to look at her. Bobby went in to see her for a few minutes, but it turned out to be too much for the poor sod and he finally broke down in my arms out in the lobby. I couldn’t seem to cry, not then anyway. I suppose I was just frozen inside.32

  John’s cousin Leila, with whom he’d spent summers in Scotland, was in medical school at Edinburgh University. Mimi sent a telegram which read: JUDY CAR ACCIDENT. DIED FRIDAY. FUNERAL TUESDAY. Leila rushed down to Mendips and went to Julia’s funeral “in a complete daze . . . I couldn’t stand it. I hated the funeral and everybody there. It was impossible to believe it was Julia in that box.” The normally loquacious Lennon turned white and clammed up; being around people was the last thing he wanted in the days that followed. At the reception in the Cottage (where Julia had briefly set up house with John as an infant during the war), Leila sat with John, his head on her lap. “I never said a word. I can’t even recall telling him I was sorry. There was nothing you could say. We were both numb with anguish.”33

  Part of Lennon’s estrangement can be gleaned from the way Julia’s daughters were treated: Dykins shuttled them off to relatives before the funeral, and they were not even told of their mother’s death for several weeks. Lennon already felt himself in some strange purgatory farther from that Dykins family orbit. Mimi, of course, was shocked, most likely blamed herself for not walking Judy to the bus, and was still slogging through the long, lonely tunnel of her husband George’s collapse. And given the tension between these sisters, Mimi had proven herself the last person Lennon might confide in about losing his mother for a second time. On top of Blackpool and losing his uncle George, here opens up a black hole of anguish and fury inside Lennon’s pride.

  Beyond the personal trauma, Julia’s accident proved a travesty of justice. The driver was an off-duty cop named Eric Clague, who was racing into work after oversleeping—he had yet to pass his driving test. An inquest established his lack of a license, and Nigel Walley was called as a witness, but Clague got off with a reprimand and suspension from duty. John, Bobby Dykins, and Mimi attended the hearing, devastated. Beatle historian Bill Harry reports that Mimi cried out “Murderer!” in the courtroom.34

  Many quotes from McCartney reveal how observant he was of Lennon’s complicated relationship with Judy, and how much the loss solidified their musical connection:

  His mum lived right near where I lived. I had lost my mum, that’s one thing, but for your mum to actually be living somewhere else and for you to be a teenage boy and not living with her is very sad. It’s horrible. I remember him not liking it at all. John and I would go and visit her and she’d be very nice but when we left there was always a tinge of sadness about John. On the way back I could always tell that he loved the visit and he loved her but was very sad that he didn’t live with her.35

  Of course, both boys were already conditioned to keep such feelings hidden, which only intensified the shared emotion. Judy’s death fed a strange, intimate currency between the two musicians, a private space they both used to underline their resentments against the world. McCartney remembered:

  Now we were both in this; both losing our mothers. This was a bond for us, something of ours, a special thing. We’d both gone through that trauma and both come out the other side and we could actually laugh about it in the sick humor of the day. Once or twice when someone said, “Is your mother gonna come?,” we’d say, in a sad voice, “She died.” We actually used to put people through that. We could look at each other and know.36

  Although Beatle fans know her only through stories and her son’s music, Julia Lennon lived long enough to catch whispers of John’s early Beatles with the Quarrymen, watch his first year at art college, and glimpse his early partnerships with Stu Sutcliffe and Paul McCartney. She heard John perform live more than a few times. She bought him his first guitar, taught him banjo chords, shared rock ’n’ roll through Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and designed his first colorful stage shirts. One scene that doesn’t seem to have a first-person testimony is the day John brought Judy his band’s first homemade recording, of “That’ll Be the Day,” a prize accomplishment. Her pleasure at coaxing Lennon’s creativity contrasted with Mimi’s disapproval; in many ways, Judy
and John both used the new style to rebel against Mimi. History still wonders: besides “Julia,” how many songs did John Lennon sing to the only grown-up in his world with an ear for rock ’n’ roll?

  Chapter 5

  Pools of Sorrow

  In the months following Judy’s death, Lennon spiraled into an emotional tunnel that left defining scars, and made nearsighted decisions that reaped long-term consequences. Perhaps this loss simply confirmed what Lennon had suspected since Blackpool: that his mother never was his, and never would be. Now this suspicion assumed a terrible immediacy just as his creativity began to win attention. Her loss made him lunge more toward release and meaning in art, one of the few comforts in a world of stiff-upper-lip platitudes. Three outlets stemmed his rage, trapdoors that could only simulate family stability: music, booze, and womanizing.

  With all the loss thickening the Mendips air around Aunt Mimi, he moved in with Stu Sutcliffe and used the art college as a branch office for his music. The public-address system was pirated as the band’s equipment, and Lennon talked Sutcliffe’s painting teacher, Arthur Ballard, who ran the Student Union committee, into purchasing a reel-to-reel tape recorder. This Grundig machine was rarely on campus after the school bought it: Lennon and Sutcliffe began recording Presley songs and mimicking their favorite Goon Show radio routines at one of Sutcliffe’s early apartments at 9 Percy Street: “Lennon was Peter Sellers, skinny Stuart was Harry Secombe, Rod [Davis] was Michael Bentine and Spike Milligan,” writes Pauline Sutcliffe.1 (These tapes have been lost.)

  Given Lennon’s poor showing his first year, it’s a wonder they let him stay. “I mean, in England, if you’re lucky you get into art school,” he remembered. “It’s somewhere they put you if they can’t put you anywhere else.”2 Few at Quarry Bank seemed to sense they were getting razzed by a top-shelf comic talent; at least at art college, a few caught on to Lennon’s routine, including Sutcliffe and perhaps Ballard, who remarked of Sutcliffe that he “seemed more a mentor to Lennon than best friend.”3 Early on, Ballard advocated for Stuart’s painting, and hoped his talent might rub off on Lennon. Sutcliffe was “always helping him get back up to standard and fill out his notebooks with the required research notes and essays.”4

  At first, Lennon burrowed down into painting to follow Sutcliffe’s lead. Then, after bedding around like the sailors who streamed through the docks, he fixed on a steady girlfriend from his lettering class, a docile brunette named Cynthia Powell. They recognized each other as blind bats too proud to wear glasses; their myopia became destiny. Powell commuted into Liverpool from the suburb of Huyton on the peninsula across the Mersey, where Sutcliffe had grown up. Their mutual friends were stupefied by the romance: Lennon the tough, cynical crackpot soon made her over as a blond, short-skirted Brigitte Bardot, the garish opposite of her subdued personality. “Cynthia was so quiet,” a former girlfriend of John’s, Thelma Pickles, told biographer Hunter Davies, “completely different type from us. She came from over the water, the posh part, from a middle-class area. She wore a twin set [a prim matching outfit]. She was very nice, but I just couldn’t see her suiting John. He used to go on about her, telling us how marvelous she was. I just couldn’t see it.”5 A “twin set” is what the Royals wore; it blared a prudishness both behavioral and, more important, philosophical. Pickles herself had just jumped off Lennon’s romantic whirligig, screeching, “Don’t blame me that your mother’s dead!” one night in the Jacaranda.6 Cynthia’s attitude was different. Powell’s family was what the British called “respectable,” the next-best thing the middle class had to stature or power (or money); that is to say, she was bred in all particulars to be put off by someone of Lennon’s coarseness—so she fell particularly hard. If Mimi Smith hadn’t practiced such a smothering attachment to her nephew, you can almost imagine her approving of Cynthia, because she came from the right station. But escaping Aunt Mimi’s clutches, Lennon simply grabbed on tight to the first port that would take him.

  He would speak disparagingly of this relationship, one of his longest, and he rarely was faithful to Cynthia. But the two somehow endured Beatlemania’s early typhoon, and Lennon’s affectionate letters read profoundly sincere. First reprinted in Ray Coleman’s 1984 biography, they teem with “I love you”s and “XXX”s. Cynthia’s insights across two books trace revealing strands of Lennon’s private character. Both Powell memoirs, A Twist of Lennon (1982) and John (2005), can at first ring naïve—she seems not to have shared the slightest interest in rock ’n’ roll. But dwelling inside Lennon’s shadow, Powell gets underestimated: in the UK, she’s viewed as the stalwart, salt-of-the-earth shotgun wife who anchored all of Lennon’s wayward excesses, before and after his fame swallowed them both. (After all, even Yoko Ono kicked this guy out after a few years of marriage.) And Powell makes uncannily brutal remarks as the union ends: The first is her simple suggestion that he’d be happier with “someone like Yoko” even as he’s figuring it out for himself. The second concerns his Beatles: “You seem to need them even more than they need you.” That kind of observation is enough to bring many a husband running back into the speaker’s arms. Cynthia’s choices were guided by abiding love and forgiveness beyond all self-respect.

  When Lennon first approached her to dance at an art-college mixer, Cynthia demurred, saying she had a boyfriend in Huyton. “Well, I wasn’t asking you to marry me then, was I?”7 Lennon shot back. Later, with Hunter Davies in 1967, she reflected on their early courtship: “I wasn’t in a hurry to introduce John to my mother,” Cynthia told him. “I wanted to prepare her for the shock. . . . Molly, the cleaning woman, once caught John hitting me, really clouting me. She said I was a silly girl to get mixed up with someone like that.”8 Some of her earliest memories of courtship include his drubbings.

  Lennon’s unconscious emotional radar led him to a more stable counterpart as he thrashed about against the death of his mother. “I was in a sort of blind rage for two years,” he said. “I was either drunk or fighting. It had been the same with other girl friends I’d had. There was something the matter with me.”9 Picking up where Mimi left off, there was plenty of mothering for the old-fashioned Cynthia to do.

  Lennon had spent his first year at art college still living at Mendips, shuttling to classes on the bus and crashing at Sutcliffe’s apartment on Percy Street. By his second year, even his rows with Mimi had grown stale, beyond repair, and perhaps Mendips couldn’t hold their combined grief.

  “John was mesmerized by Stuart, who was always a noted stylist, crossing the boundaries between high and low art,” wrote Pauline Sutcliffe.10 Sutcliffe’s influence on Lennon cannot be overstated: there existed no gap between the painters Sutcliffe admired and the music Lennon kept going on about; for them, art had both aesthetic and commercial attributes—something the Beatles would synthesize through album covers. Ballard remembered Sutcliffe as “wistful yet tough,”11 and when Sutcliffe moved from Percy Street to a new flat on Gambier Terrace, Lennon followed—it was the one place where he and Cynthia found any privacy.

  Bill Harry remembers hanging out at Sutcliffe’s flat going on about modernism, painters like Nicolas de Staël, novelists like Albert Camus, and actors like Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean.” Sutcliffe’s own paintings adopted the late-impressionistic style of Van Gogh, another tragic hero. In the tradition of beatnik pretense, remembers Pauline Sutcliffe, “at times, it was a game to find characters, new and from the past, who they would consider worthy of their adulation, and it seemed that the more obscure your choice, the cooler you were.”12 In London in 1956, a sweeping collage built from American magazine ads by the young Richard Hamilton, called Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, had raised a stir at the This Is Tomorrow exhibition by the Independent Group at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. A new British impulse venerating fantasies of American consumerism began disrupting formal art circles and was later dubbed pop art. Like Sutcliffe, Hamilton demonstrated how many art students viewed painting�
��a traditional “high” art—as part of the same continuum as popular arts like movies, pop music, commercial fiction, and even advertising.

  Meanwhile, the Quarrymen gigged sporadically at private parties, and McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon gathered with their guitars at the school cafeteria, the Jacaranda, or the McCartney home, but seldom at Mendips. Musically, they made headway in fits and starts, learned new records, chased down solos and vocal harmonies.

  Winning over rakish audiences became a defining scene at Quarrymen appearances, as rough-and-ready skiffle expanded into fisticuffs rock. Colin Hanton remembers a night in Wilson Hall when “a massive Teddy Boy, who’d had too much to drink, climbed up on stage. I thought he was going to thumb John but he went up to Paul and eye-balled him, nose to nose. ‘I want you to do Little Richard.’ Paul certainly wasn’t going to argue with this hulking drunk, so he announced that our next song would be ‘Long Tall Sally.’ ” They hadn’t planned on playing it, so Paul invented and then repeated a lot of lyrics. “He was brilliant at it,” Hanton recalls. “And the drunk was happy.”13

  Learning how to thrive in such settings measured any musician’s mettle, where girls itching to dance and boys itching to fight clashed in spasms of class rage. In a place like Garston or Litherland, when word got around that one of these Quarrymen hailed from a snob town like Woolton, the Teds, who needed very little encouragement, pulled out razors and bicycle chains and sent many dances careening into violence. The idea that Lennon, this tough Woolton “phony,” with his ducktail and drainies, would show up and make music was barely tolerable; that their own girlfriends screamed for the band only bolstered their motivation. The irony of grammar-school boys striving to sound a notch beneath their station seems to have been lost on them. Here lies the crux of Lennon’s class puzzle. After all, what was the future author of “Working Class Hero” to do—tell them his Woolton auntie took in students to make ends meet?