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

by Tim Riley

  The Beatles’ accommodations, Lapham noted, were more spacious than those for “meditators of lesser stature,” with indoor plumbing and comfortable furniture. The talk was all about how the band would stay for a full three-month term and then travel with the Maharishi to his lake houseboats in Kashmir, where they would take written and oral exams. Cynthia Lennon was dressed in “vivid and tailing silk,” Lapham remembered, and was very beautiful, but had an air of sadness about her.17

  As Lennon unwound, he suffered the classic symptoms of LSD withdrawal: “I was in a room for five days meditating. I wrote hundreds of songs. I couldn’t sleep and I was hallucinating like crazy, having dreams where you could smell. I’d do a few hours and then you’d trip off; three- or four-hour stretches. It was just a way of getting there, and you could go on amazing trips.”18

  Ringo arrived with Paul four days after Lennon, with one case each of baked beans and eggs. Magic Alex smuggled in some hooch from the village across the river, which tasted like petrol, Cynthia remembered. A scene from the Anthology relates their first gathering with the swami, the group sitting cross-legged on the floor in a circle with the bearded old man. Lennon got up, walked around behind, and patted him on the head, saying, “There’s a good little guru.”19 Everybody dissolved into giggles, including the Maharishi. The ashram’s social politics swelled with adolescent gamesmanship. Most residents were American or British, but a few of the Swedish students had already won a reputation for meditating beyond all reason: one of them sat for twenty-one hours straight, as if endurance equaled enlightenment.

  John became increasingly aloof: he rose early and left the room without speaking to Cynthia. Once he took his own room, he withdrew from her completely. “From then on he virtually ignored me, both in private and in public.” When she approached him about his distance, he pushed back defensively: “I just can’t feel normal doing all this stuff, I’m trying to get myself together. It’s nothing to do with you. Give me a break.”20

  In the Anthology, McCartney tells of a revealing interaction between Lennon and the guru, who shared Lennon’s obsession with technology. One day, a helicopter came to take the Maharishi to an appearance in New Delhi, and the students all traipsed down to the river to see him off. Before departing, he offered one of them a quick ride alone with him in the chopper. “Of course, it was John,” McCartney remarks. “I asked him later, ‘Why were you so keen to get up with Maharishi?’—‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I thought he might slip me the Answer.’ That was very John!”21 Only later did Cynthia figure out what preoccupied Lennon. Early morning posts brought letters from Yoko almost daily. “There was I,” Cynthia reflects, “trying to give John the space and understanding he asked for, with no idea that Yoko was drawing him away from me and further into her orbit.”22

  Although Ringo left early, complaining about the food, the other three Beatles stayed on, and most remembered the atmosphere as friendly and calm. When Lennon grew disillusioned with the Maharishi, Cynthia watched in disbelief at the intensity of his anger toward someone she found a perfectly serene, inoffensive leader. She suspected Alex Mardas of planting ideas in Lennon’s head, like some devious Iago. “A couple of weeks before we were due to leave, Mardas accused the Maharishi of behaving improperly with a young American girl, a fellow student.”23

  Lennon later remembered how leaving the Maharishi meant a confrontation, something he usually avoided like disease. So he bore into the mystic, funneling all his leftover grief around Alf, Julia, and Brian, and one episode seemed to confirm Lennon’s suspicions. The Maharishi asked why Lennon insisted on leaving, and Lennon shot back, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.” I don’t know why, the old man answered, you must tell me. And Lennon kept on at him, saying, “You ought to know.” Lennon reports: “He gave me such a look. And I knew then when he looked at me, because I’d called his bluff. I was a bit rough to him. I always expect too much,” before adding this whopper: “I’m always expecting my mother and I don’t get her, that’s what it is.”24

  Some accounts have Harrison joining in Lennon’s indignation; others have Lennon acting alone, seeking confirmation from George but otherwise not involving him. Lennon later told Cynthia he had been having his own doubts about the Maharishi’s “interest in public recognition, celebrities and money.” Both Cynthia and Harrison went on record as being vaguely miffed at Lennon’s outburst—they considered the Maharishi a sweet old man whose greatest crime, perhaps, was in enjoying the spotlight a bit too much.

  The Maharishi made a convenient proxy for Lennon’s suspicions about Cynthia: Mardas produced a letter another camper named Tom Simcox had written to her, which inflamed Lennon’s jealousies even though he had spent the whole time sneaking in letters from Ono. On the way out of the camp, Lennon wrote a new song about being made a fool of by an Indian mystic. George diplomatically urged Lennon to rewrite “Maharishi” (it became “Sexy Sadie”).

  Once back at home, Lennon’s routine failed to revive his dashed hopes for an improved family life. Cynthia remembers them returning to the same bed, “but the warmth, and passion we had shared for so long were absent.” And the marital discord seeped into the way Lennon treated Julian. Paradoxically, Lennon’s confessions to Cynthia about his infidelities led to a “moment of real warmth,” Cynthia writes. “We were in the kitchen when he said, out of the blue, ‘There have been other women, you know, Cyn.’ ” She was taken aback, but also touched by this sudden bout of honesty from her distant, distracted husband. “That’s okay,” she told him. At her most naïve, she seemed at times the perfect match for Lennon’s overindulged savvy. “He came over to where I was standing beside the sink and put his arms round me. ‘You’re the only one I’ve ever loved, Cyn,’ he said, and kissed me. ‘I still love you and I always will.’ ”25

  But this confession didn’t clear his conscience the way he must have hoped, and Lennon’s aloofness returned. At one point, Cynthia even suggested he get back in touch with Yoko Ono. “She seems to be more on your wavelength.” Lennon suggested that Cynthia go off to Greece for a holiday. Lennon had to finish some songs for the imminent Beatles recording sessions, and band meetings became more and more involved in launching a new company, and that was eating up everybody’s home time. Cynthia was reluctant at first, hoping to spend more time with John and to get him to spend more time with Julian. But he persuaded her, and Julian went off to stay with Dot the housekeeper’s family nearby. As Cynthia packed to leave, John didn’t even get out of bed, waving to his wife “in a trance-like state I’d seen many times before. . . . [He] barely turned his head to say good-bye.”26

  During Cynthia’s trip to Greece, Lennon and McCartney traveled to New York to publicize the Apple company’s launch. They gabbed with reporters on a tugboat circling Manhattan, and Lennon got testy at a hotel press conference. On The Tonight Show, Lennon seemed unaware that he was sitting next to his old Hollywood free spirit twin, Tallulah Bankhead, then appearing as Batman’s Black Widow on television. Lennon and McCartney pronounced their time with the Maharishi as a fling, a mere eccentric phase. Now that they were launching a business, everything would be different.

  When he returned to Kenwood, Lennon busied himself with his attic reel-to-reel tape recorders and invited his boyhood friend Pete Shotton for a stay to keep him company. Shotton had invested some of Lennon’s money in a supermarket chain and now became involved at the earliest stages with Apple as a manager. In his memoirs, he describes how Lennon lit on a new idea and decided to call together all the company principals the next morning. Shotton was hoping he’d forget overnight, but the next day, Lennon was anxious to ride into London.

  His inner circle—all three Beatles, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, and Shotton—were summoned into a secret Apple board meeting. They took their seats keen to hear what Lennon was so excited to tell them. “Right,” John began from behind his desk. “I’ve something very important to tell you all. I am . . . Jesus Christ come back again.
This is my thing.” Stunned, Paul, George, and Ringo stared back at Lennon, perhaps calculating the effects of chemistry at play in his head. The scene was “utterly surreal,” Shotton remembers, unguardedly arrogant and yet somehow delivered with perfect aplomb.

  After some awkward silence, the meeting dissolved, and the Beatles made excuses for their partner: he tended to be a bit bonkers sometimes, you know, wouldn’t hurt a fly, but working with the man got you used to this type of circus. Not to worry. Lennon and Shotton went out for drinks. John told the waiter he was Christ. “Oh, really?” said the man blandly. “Well, I loved your last record. Thought it was great.”27 That seemed to break the spell.

  According to many timelines, this Jesus Christ episode occurred on or around May 18. On May 19, Lennon made a call to London and sent his driver to collect Yoko Ono to come spend the night at Kenwood. Shotton remembers him telephoning “out of sheer boredom.” “There’s something about her,” Lennon told him. “I’d just like to get to know her a bit better . . . and now’s a good time to do it . . . with the wife away and all.” The next morning, Pete arose to find John sitting at the table in his favorite little morning room off the kitchen. Wrapped in the kimono robe he preferred round the house, Lennon was chasing down one of his beloved boiled eggs with gulps of hot tea. “I haven’t been to sleep,” he told Shotton. “Yeah, I was up all night with Yoko.” But as Shotton began to leer mischievously, Lennon cut him off with dead sincerity. “Yeah, Pete, it was great,” he said quietly.

  Then Lennon asked Shotton to find him a new house to live in. This struck his friend as “no less incredible” than declaring himself Jesus Christ only twenty-four hours before. “I want to go live in it with Yoko,” John told him. Just like that? Shotton asked. “Yeah, just like that. JUST LIKE THAT. This is IT, Pete. This is what I’ve been waiting for all me life. Fuck everything else. Fuck the Beatles, fuck me money, fuck all the rest of it. I’ll go and live with her in a fucking TENT if I have to.”

  John and Pete both jumped to their feet. “This is incredible,” said Pete. “It IS incredible,” Lennon responded. “Just incredible. It’s just like how we used to fall in love when we were kids. Remember when you’d meet a girl and you’d think about her and want to be with her all the time, how your mind was just FILLED with her? Well, Yoko’s upstairs now and I can’t WAIT to get back to her. I felt so hungry that I had to run down here and get meself an egg—but I can hardly bear to be away from her for a SINGLE MOMENT.”28

  So messianic intimations of greatness may simply have signaled a looming sense of upheaval in search of a trigger. If Lennon couldn’t be the Savior, then perhaps he should trust these same restless impulses struggling for control of his life and jump ship. Shotton remembers Lennon as “euphoric” that morning, even as they both spoke about the new difficulties this would bring down on everybody. Cynthia’s name was not so much as mentioned, never mind Julian’s. Such were the preoccupations of the free-love ethic: beyond the hypocrisies of men wanting frequent noncommittal sex with many partners, the children simply got lumped in with the baggage of an unwanted wife.

  But it’s also a sign of Lennon’s provincialism and something more: he barely knew Yoko, except that she had a reputation as a trippy artist, felt perfectly comfortable telling him no at her exhibition back in 1966, and seemed perfectly comfortable getting scooped up by Lennon’s driver and leaving her own husband and child, to stay up all night playing with sound effects.

  A couple of days later, Cynthia returned to Kenwood from holiday full of high spirits. She strode toward the morning room to see if Lennon fancied dinner out, only to find the curtains drawn, and an unfamiliar presence in the house. “There was no Dot to greet me, no Julian bounding through the door, shouting with delight, for a hug.” When she caught her breath, she realized she was looking at Lennon and Yoko Ono, sitting on the floor, cross-legged, facing each other in robes, next to a table of dirty dishes.

  “Oh, hi,” Lennon said matter-of-factly.

  Cynthia blurted out the only thing she could think of: “We were all looking forward to dinner in London after lunch in Rome and breakfast in Greece. Would you like to come?”

  “No, thanks,” Lennon replied. Greeting his long-suffering wife with a new lover, wearing her own robe, Lennon had set things up just so he could get caught, treating Cynthia as if she was “an intruder” in her own home.

  “In my worst nightmares about Yoko I had not imagined anything like this,” Cynthia writes.29 She turned and raced out of the house.

  Ono’s headstrong campaign to win Lennon’s affections had finally worked out. Her life up to that point had been a series of just such brash moves. Although born, before World War II, into a prominent family of Japanese bankers, the young Yoko Ono was scarred by much of the same emotional neglect and class anxiety that Lennon suffered in Liverpool. Her artistic personality combined Eastern detachment and Western passion, Buddhist play and Christian self-consciousness. Long before she met Lennon, her high-art ambition had mixed with pop-art candor to make her a significant draw for progressive galleries.

  Born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Yoko had a prestigious Japanese pedigree.30 Her mother, Isoko, was the granddaughter of Yasuda Zenjiro, one of Japan’s most famous “merchant princes.” Zenjiro founded the Yasuda Bank and built one of the largest zaibatsù, or corporations, in early modern Japan. The son of a poor samurai, Zenjiro retired from business to become an elderly philanthropist, a cultural icon who gifted Yasuda Hall and Yasuda Koˉdoˉ to the University of Tokyo. He held a sacred place in family lore even before he was assassinated—as if sounding early a family theme—at the age of eighty-two by a right-wing ultranationalist, in 1921. His son Zenzaburo, Yoko’s grandfather, had already joined the House of Peers (or aristocrats) when he took over his father’s business. But unlike his hardworking father, Zenzaburo retired early to enjoy his wealth. His daughter Isoko, Yoko’s mother, struck the forward pose of a moga (literally, “modern girl”), a 1920s term that connoted social chic and worldliness. By 1945, the Yasuda Bank ranked as the fourth-largest zaibatsù, after Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo.

  On the paternal side, Yoko’s ancestry was no less illustrious. Her great-grandfather, Saisho Atsushi, was a viscount with the Tokugawa shogunate, the warriors overthrown by the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Tsuruko, Yoko’s grandmother, had actually studied English and music at a Protestant college and converted to Christianity. She married Ono Eijiro, the intellectual son of an impoverished yet respected samurai. To win over his new in-laws, Eijiro gave up academia to become president of the Japan Industrial Bank. His son, Yeisuke, who married Isoko, earned degrees in Economics and Math from Tokyo’s Imperial University. Ono Yeisuke had aspirations to be a concert pianist but followed his father’s path and gave up a promising aesthetic career to conform to the family’s banking interests.

  Just before Yoko came along, Yeisuke, as a high-ranking official at the Yokohama Specie Bank, specializing in foreign exchange, was transferred to San Francisco. With Yoko, Isoko soon followed her husband to America, where they lived until 1937, when they returned to Japan. At age four, Yoko entered Keimei Gakuen, a Christian academy founded by the Mitsui family, for children who had lived abroad. Yoko’s family returned to America, for a banking assignment Yeisuke had been given in New York City, just before war broke out.

  Perhaps because of these relocations (transience imprinted itself on Yoko’s childhood much as it did on John’s), the Ono family sprouted intense personalities, and Yeisuke encouraged his children in music as a way of compensating for his own dashed ambitions. As a result, Yoko Ono’s blended lineage created a unique family environment for a war child: she received a half-Buddhist, half-Protestant upbringing in a worldly, aristocratic family that marked her as a modern child of Japan’s upper class. Reading, education, and aesthetics were stressed daily in the home, which would always color the little girl’s lively independent streak.

  As war came, Ono Yeisuke found himself stationed wi
thout his family in Hanoi, Vietnam, running Tokyo’s wartime bank. At the height of the American air raids on Japan, in March 1945, Isoko returned to Japan with her three children and took shelter in a bunker in Tokyo’s Azábu district. Soon after, they fled to the Karuizáwa mountain resort to hide alongside the imperial family. Some of Yoko’s memories of being twelve include huddling in that bomb shelter with her mother and being teased by the rural children for “smelling like butter” (bata kusai), a racist taunt that marked her outside, “city-girl” status. Here, Yoko remembers learning to flex an iron will. She and her brother Keisuke lay on their backs: “Looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof, we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive.”31 You can imagine John and Yoko sharing earliest memories of bombs, craters, and lost relatives.

  When the family returned to Tokyo after V-J Day, they found the city completely destroyed. Later, they learned that their father had been imprisoned in a French-Indochinese concentration camp in Saigon. Like the rest of the country, they started life over again, while hearing of the horrors of the atomic bomb dropped first on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. The Americans who had dropped those bombs now occupied their country.

  The generation that grew up in the shadow of that devastation learned to act as if the war had never existed, as if they could jump-start life after such gaping atrocities and bury its phantoms without a trace. After the war, Yoko attended Gakushuin, or Peers’ School, her family maintaining the artistocratic and intellectual profile its members had held for centuries. This secondary institution was exclusive to members and relatives of the imperial family and the Japanese parliament, until the peerage was dissolved under General MacArthur’s occupation. When Yoko Ono entered classes there in 1946, her classmates included Emperor Hirohito’s eldest son, Akohíto (who would assume his father’s title upon the emperor’s death in 1989). Another classmate was Yukio Mishima, the almost mythic novelist and nationalist martyr; he committed ritual seppuku (suicide) in 1970 to protest “aberrant Westernization.”