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

by Tim Riley

  This mood fuels the movie’s high spirits alongside its musical bounty: Harrison singing “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” has all the family warmth behind it of older brothers prodding a sibling to take the reins; Lennon’s rhythm guitar on this track kicks Harrison along like he’s spurring a horse. Lennon’s “I Should Have Known Better” sustains one long ripple effect of his careening harmonica; and “If I Fell” balances hesitant devotion on an emotional precipice. With McCartney’s upper harmonies, the song gave Lennon’s onscreen shell a hard-won vulnerability to make him the movie’s most three-dimensional character.

  Offstage, Lennon was described as a “hard case.” That’s what Epstein told his father, Alfred Lennon, when a newspaperman brought him around to meet his son on the movie set. This would be the first time the two had seen each other since that Blackpool scene in 1946 almost eighteen years before. Alfred claims to have been reluctant, in his memoirs, and the encounter appears to have been awkward but not hostile. Epstein reassured Lennon that despite what the papers were saying, he had no interest in “jumping on the band wagon,” or asking for money. Alf writes that Lennon “vaguely remembered” being in Blackpool with his dad, but couldn’t remember exactly when. They parted politely if ambivalently, but Alfred was soon short on cash, and sold his story for £200 to a publication called Tit Bits. On Epstein’s advice, Lennon made Alfred a gift of £30, then put him on a weekly stipend of £12 to keep him quiet. This seemed to have worked for a while.27

  While the Beatles filmed, the American charts played catch-up with all their British releases. The legendary Billboard charts dated April 4, 1964, showed Beatles singles monopolizing the top five slots, a first and a lasting record. It’s more understandable knowing that American listeners were simply devouring British records made throughout 1963, as the UK recording dates show:

  Billboard’s Top Five Singles, Week Ending April 4, 1964

  1. “Can’t Buy Me Love” (1964)

  2. “Twist and Shout” (1963)

  3. “She Loves You” (1963)

  4. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963)

  5. “Please Please Me” (1963)

  Somehow this legend obscures the comet’s tail: seven more Beatles singles listed throughout the top hundred. Swan cashed in on Capitol’s marketing: “She Loves You” bumped “Hand” off the top slot at the end of January; and by March, Vee-Jay scored with “From Me to You,” neither of which Capitol had yet released. Even a Vee-Jay subsidiary like Tollie put out “There’s a Place” and “P.S. I Love You,” and MGM hustled the old Hamburg Tony Sheridan tracks into success by February. Capitol was being punished for its oversight; although every company was simply working overtime to fill a demand that might have gobbled up even more records had there been any.

  Finally, there was another Lennon-McCartney on Billboard’s top hundred: “World Without Love,” from Peter and Gordon (which Billy J. Kramer had rejected as too soft). And as famous as this Billboard top five record remains, even that was trumped down under, where the Beatles monopolized the top six Australian chart positions. As Americans dealt with this four-headed monster set loose over top forty radio, the British checked front pages for leaks from the movie set.

  The group’s last day of shooting (April 24) pressed up against a TV special (Around the Beatles), Scottish dates in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and BBC radio tapings (From Us to You), before a three-week holiday in May, their last break of the year.

  John, Cynthia, and young Julian Lennon had been living in a temporary London apartment that spring. John had bought a family home outside London and hired decorators to overhaul its interior. At least outwardly, he seemed to be investing in some fantasy of domesticity. The three of them finally moved into their new house, called Kenwood, in Weybridge, Surrey, but had to live up in the attic as renovations dragged on. It was yet another delayed homecoming. To soften the blow, Lennon took his wife off to Tahiti for a vacation, via Amsterdam and Honolulu, with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, a model he’d met on the film set. Epstein booked them as Mr. and Mrs. Leslie and Mr. Hargreaves and Miss Bond. During the first days of travel the press caught up with them in Hawaii, but after a first day getting used to their boat (“Cynthia and I were feeling sick and puked everywhere,” Harrison remembered), they had some privacy, swimming and snorkeling and sailing from island to island.28

  June and July saw Australia and New Zealand erupt with echoes of the mania that had visited the Beatles in America (Cynthia had to finish settling into Kenwood alone with Julian). Nobody wanted to carry on without Ringo Starr, sidelined with tonsillitis, but the band was pressured to keep its commitments; Epstein could simply not figure when he could squeeze in rain dates with the year so crowded. A session man named Jimmy Nicol played at being a Beatle for three weeks until Ringo rejoined the tour. Reporters were waiting for the band when they returned to London. Lennon wanted to get the rumors out of the way first: they had not been pelted with eggs from “non-diggers.”

  Unlike their first three albums, their fourth LP (to be called Beatles for Sale) competed for studio time with near-constant world touring between May and September. Tracks took shape as a patchwork of sessions scattered across several months between live gigs and TV shows. Two sessions just before their American tour inched them toward an album sequence, with two new songs and two new covers: on August 11, they worked up fourteen takes of “Baby’s in Black,” and three days later came “I’m a Loser” (eight takes), “Mr. Moonlight” (four takes), and “Leave My Kitten Alone” (five takes), which got held. On their way back to the States, they did a gig at the Opera House in Blackpool with a mod band called the High Numbers, soon to be the Who. The next morning, on August 18, they flew from London to San Francisco (with refueling stops in Winnipeg and Los Angeles), where nine thousand screaming fans greeted them.

  In the six months since the Ed Sullivan Show appearances, North American audience fever had grown. That first trip had been a tease, and a marketing coup. For the summer, fans waited anxiously to see and hear them in their hometowns. Epstein booked twenty-seven concerts in twenty-five cities over thirty days, including such onetimers as Jacksonville, Florida, and Ontario, Canada, cities that would never see the band again. Booked at $50,000 per show in large municipal arenas, the Beatles grossed more than a million dollars in ticket sales alone. Beatlemania swelled: A Hard Day’s Night had proved a major summer hit, so they returned as titans, not upstarts. Beatlemania had only one setting: more.

  Fan idolatry began to worry people, and not just the inner circle. As the Beatles worked their way through airports and hotels and found themselves even more hemmed in than before, there were fewer daring escapes, and increasingly complicated evasive maneuvers. The Beatles insisted that Epstein hire his own security detail after a shortage of policemen in Toronto put them at serious risk. Most local police forces were overwhelmed, and improvised with overtime detail, but all of them were learning the game as they went along. Everybody agreed: this was a completely new level of crowd numbers and hysteria, which made those chase scenes from A Hard Day’s Night look tame.

  Perhaps Epstein thought the schedule was reasonable, but the sheer press of people proved exhausting, and summoned mixed emotions: this was adulation beyond the band’s wildest dreams, but it was also fierce and defensive daily work that involved enormous compromises to everyday dignities. And it put their fantasy America, the wild Chuck Berry world of burgers and shakes, where they had forged their love for the music, into vivid relief.

  A young reporter named Larry Kane, from Miami, joined the tour, selected by Epstein as a regular because his business card made him look like the news director for Florida’s tiny WFUN. In truth, he was green, and ambivalent about his assignment—a hard-news guy who resented getting sent out on this teenybopper story. His basic decency turned him into a lifelong Lennon friend.

  From way back, Lennon had had a coarse habit of insulting whoever approached him, as a way of screening out jerks, poking people to fin
d out where they lived. This approach intensified with fame. Kane remembers the first time Lennon greeted him with scorched earth charm. Kane had flown from Miami to San Francisco on August 19. After a meeting of the press entourage with Derek Taylor, the PR liaison, he dropped by to meet the Beatles in their hotel suite, only to be accosted by Lennon. “Why are you dressed like a fag ass, man? What’s with that? How old are you?” Epstein turned red. Kane decided to punch back: “Well, it’s better than looking scruffy and messed up like you.” Lennon simply stared.

  Kane played a hunch and switched subjects: he asked Lennon about Vietnam. This caught Lennon by surprise. Kane watched his face light up, and listened to a “scathing diatribe” against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, just passed on August 7. President Johnson had rammed the measure through Congress to begin escalating American troop buildup in Southeast Asia. “I was taken aback by the intensity of his anger and knowledge base,” Kane wrote, “and also by the eloquence of his protest.” Kane left not knowing what to think, but on his way back to his room he felt a tap on his shoulder: “Hey, really enjoyed the interview,” Lennon said, “specially about the war in Asia. Liked the talk. Look forward to more stuff. Sorry about the clothes bullshit.”29

  The combination of Kane’s comeback and his challenging political question had won Lennon over. And it told Kane something peculiar about Lennon: he had a fervent political conscience, read the papers, and felt completely at ease discussing American world politics as President Johnson connived his way into the war. It would not be the last time the two discussed Vietnam.

  Somewhere the band had mentioned that they liked jelly beans, and suddenly it was hard for them to get through a number without feeling the hard candy shells hitting their bodies onstage. The opening night of the tour, San Francisco’s Cow Palace, had to be stopped twice because the band was getting pelted. Police came onstage and pretended to impose order. Even at this early stage, Kane remembers, there was a quality of mania spinning out of control. Afterward, a plane was waiting to take the entourage to Las Vegas. “How did it feel out there?” Kane asked Lennon.

  “Not safe,” Lennon replied. “Can’t sing when you’re scared for your life.”30

  The Sahara Hotel was hopping with girls when the Beatles’ limousine pulled up in the early morning after their postconcert from San Francisco. Private hotel detectives shepherded the band in and up to the twenty-third floor, where Epstein had booked his typical entire floor for the Beatles and the touring party. Kane had barely fallen asleep before he awoke to a heavy knocking at 5 A.M. He opened his door to Neil Aspinall’s new roadie, Malcolm Evans. “We need you. Can you put on a tie and jacket?” Evans, Derek Taylor, and Aspinall asked him a favor: would he go down to the lobby and explain to a worried mother that her twin girls were all right—even though they’d been found unchaperoned in John Lennon’s bedroom? They were among a parcel of girls who had penetrated security and threatened to puncture the Beatles’ clean image with scorching headlines. Kane took a deep breath and bailed Lennon out, even though he had no idea what the circumstances may have been. This earned him a trusted place in the tour’s inner circle.

  Another incident told of how Lennon tested even trusted confidants. During the flight from Las Vegas to Seattle, Kane heard the word “kike” leak out of the rear of the plane, where the Beatles and Taylor were seated. He heard it again and couldn’t contain himself. He headed straight to the Beatles’ small compartment, stuck his head in, and said, “Listen. I just wanted to say that I heard a word that really pisses me off. I’m Jewish, and I won’t stand for that crap. I mean, whoever said it, can’t you think before you talk?” Everybody blanched. Kane returned to his seat and figured he had just handed in his pass.

  After a few minutes, Taylor came forward to put things right, taking the fall even though Kane knew it was not his voice. “Doesn’t matter. It was said nonetheless. I’m sorry,” Taylor replied. Soon Lennon came up to sit with Kane. “We had a relaxed and compassionate conversation about the roots of prejudice in Liverpool,” Kane recalled. Standing up to Jewish slurs was not Epstein’s style: he was treated like a brother for the rest of the tour. Even as a hard-core news guy, Kane was astonished at how big the Beatle story was as it kept unfolding. Epstein caved in and hired a private security detail at every concert. In Montreal, 150 people were treated for injuries after the crowd swarmed the band’s brief set. “American audiences were not just shrill and manic,” Kane remembered, “they seemed to want to devour their idols whole.”31

  On their first trip to New York since doing The Ed Sullivan Show six months prior, Ronnie Bennett hooked up again with Lennon at the Warwick Hotel, their base for the area’s gigs in Forest Hills and Atlantic City. Murray the K called her to hitch a ride up to the Beatles’ suite so he could do interviews: the Ronettes, he knew, were on the band’s official guest list. When Ronnie walked into the hotel suite that afternoon, she remembers Lennon turning cynical about the vast array of refreshments. “We’re prisoners up here,” he said, “so they have to feed us well.” After Murray finished his yapping and had his photo taken with the Ronettes and the Beatles, John and George and Ronnie and the others sat down on the floor, spun records, and talked all afternoon.

  By evening, Ronnie sensed a change come over the scene. “A lot of the people who’d been hanging around during the afternoon had already left, and as I looked around, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more young girls in the suite than there were when the press was hanging around earlier. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that a whole new kind of scene was about to start.”32

  One of the bedrooms seemed to exert a special pull. “C’mon,” Lennon said to her. “Don’t you want to see what’s so interesting?”

  By this point, of course, all kinds of rumors swirled around the Beatles’ activities. They were well-known partiers, and any kind of date conferred immense status.

  But the bedroom scene Ronnie described in her memoir reeks of adolescent exhibitionism. “When people saw that I was with John, they kind of moved aside, and that’s how I got my first clear view of the naked girl on the bed,” having sex with one of the Beatles’ entourage. “I guess it was enough to just be in the same hotel suite as them, as if that gave her something to tell her grandchildren.” For Ronnie, then a virgin, the whole spectacle had a surreal air, of deeply forbidden acts suddenly enacted as ritual. “This was 1964,” she wrote, “when you couldn’t even get films with that stuff in them—and here was an actual girl having naked sex in every different position!”

  With Ronnie on his lap, on a “ringside seat,” Lennon couldn’t hide his arousal. She felt a mix of discomfort and odd curiosity. “I was all ready to leave the hotel, but for some reason I didn’t particularly mind staying, either. As strange as that whole situation was, I was never the least bit nervous around John. I felt secure around him.” For all his lust, she was moved by something else in him.

  Lennon led her into his bedroom to “recapture” the atmosphere they had shared in London. “He stood behind my chair and let his hands fall down on the back of my neck. It felt so good that I had to remind myself that I couldn’t be doing stuff like this.” With all her might, she gently started telling John about her romance with Phil Spector. He interrupted. “I know all about you and Phil. I just thought you and I might have something, too.” Despite his persistence, she left without incident.

  Lennon called her up the next day announcing a great escape, asking her advice on where to find some good eats. Ronnie picked John and George up and took them to her favorite barbecue haunt in Harlem, Sherman’s, at 151st and Amsterdam, where she and Lennon wordlessly settled into a friendship. She reported no more romantic encounters.33

  A fifty-year vantage makes it hard to appreciate how suddenly everything was happening, and how much pressure Epstein felt about taking advantage of the moment. Martin asked for two albums per annum in addition to quarterly singles. At a time when pop was disposable, in a business sector where
every flash of success was fleeting at best, the Beatles were constantly pitched the question “What will you do when the bubble bursts?” as if it were theirs to control, or they had any spare moments for reflection. Answering this question across America became a chore and then a joke and then a tiresome existential broken record.

  According to press agent Tony Barrow, Lennon still insisted on humiliating his manager. John walked in on Epstein and Barrow one day, “beaming broadly,” shook Tony’s hand, and walked over to where Epstein was sitting. “At the last moment John’s hand plunged down to Epstein’s groin and he grabbed hold of his testicles and held on tightly. Epstein involuntarily gasped in pain and my eyes watered in sympathy. Still grinning broadly and gripping relentless John simply said: ‘Whoops!’ ” Shocked and disgusted, Barrow could barely speak. “This happened in 1964 at a point in time where John and the other Beatles still seemed to have a great deal of respect for Epstein—far too much, I thought, to do something like this to him, especially in front of any third party.” Like other staffers who recall such scenes, Barrow concluded that Lennon had deliberately humiliated Epstein in front of an employee. “If I had not been in the room I don’t think he would have bothered.”34 Flaunting perversion to both love interests and colleagues seems to have been a Lennon specialty.

  Epstein’s ham-fisted scheduling led to disjointed recording sessions between bouts of travel. Three final sessions in late September and early October gave them enough tracks (fourteen) for the next album, although by this point it was happening in such a flurry that all sense of continuity evaporated. On the last day of September, they laid down three more originals: “Every Little Thing,” “What You’re Doing,” and “No Reply,” which Lennon had originally offered to Billy J. Kramer. October 2 and 3 saw them rehearsing and taping an appearance on the American TV show Shindig! On October 6 they whipped off “Eight Days a Week,” thirteen takes, during which a stray “I Feel Fine” guitar lick popped up, and two days later, “She’s a Woman” sprang out of them.