John Lennon: The Life (20 page)

On bus journeys, he would choose a seat behind some balding
elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming overparody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. “John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,” she would remember. “Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.”

The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in the hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.

As “going out with” moved into its next phrase, “going steady,” the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away forever.

Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a
small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knickknacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.

Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat, and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, “in tears.”

This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights with him in town. Fortuitously, Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s landlady at 9 Percy Street had rented the whole ground floor to a new tenant who in turn sublet its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.

Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another
boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. “I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.”

In these days, it was still considered quite normal for men of every stamp—and northern Englishmen above all—to keep “their” women in line by physical chastisement if and when they saw fit. “As a teenager all I saw were films where men beat up women,” John would recall. “That was tough, that was the thing to do, slap them in the face, treat them rough, Humphrey Bogart and all that jazz….” Cynthia’s autobiography,
A Twist of Lennon
, published in 1977, made no mention of having suffered physical abuse from him. Some twenty years later in a BBC documentary, she recounted how, one night when she was not seeing John, she and Phyllis McKenzie had gone to an out-of-town club and afterwards been given a lift home by two boys they had met. Next day at college, she mentioned the innocent episode to John. Phyllis then described finding her in tears after he’d “slapped her face.”

Cynthia’s second autobiography, published in 2005, had a harsher story to relate. One evening at a party, John “went mad” after someone told him she was dancing with Stu Sutcliffe. They stopped as soon as they saw the look on his face, and Cyn hastened to mollify him. The next day, however, he followed her down to the ladies’ toilets in the college basement. When she came out, he hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall, then walked off without a word. As a result, she chucked him, and they stayed apart for three months until John persuaded her to take him back. Even according to this score-settling account, he was never again physically violent to her.

Summer of 1959 brought the multipart examination that Inter
mediate students had to pass before moving on to their chosen specialty. Despite his dismal past performance in almost all the areas covered by the exam, John managed to scrape through. Well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers alike rallied round to help him make up the deficiencies of the past five terms. Stu Sutcliffe gave him a crash course in basic painting skills, devoting night after night to the task in an empty lecture room, while Cynthia waited patiently at an adjacent desk.

As well as taking the examination, he was required to submit course work in the form of paintings or drawings. “The trouble was, he hadn’t done anything like enough,” Ann Mason remembers. One day, while I was going through my stuff with Arthur Ballard, I saw John standing there, looking a bit despondent. So I offered him some of my drawings to put in for the exam. I wondered if I’d get one of his tongue-lashings, but he just said ‘Oh, yeah…great!’” Both Cynthia and Thelma Pickles would also later recall making similar contributions to his portfolio.

The college had just inaugurated a Department of Commercial Design, for which the polymathic Bill Harry was already bound. To Ballard, it seemed the obvious place to develop John’s talent for cartooning and satire. Because of his reputation as a troublemaker, however, the department head, Roy Sharpe, refused to accept him. A fuming Ballard retorted that Sharpe would be better off “teaching in a Sunday school.”

The college’s only alternative was to put John into the Painting School alongside Stu Sutcliffe, tacitly hoping that over the next two years Stu’s talent, energy, and dedication might prove to be contagious.

I
n March 1958, Elvis Presley had been drafted into the U.S. Army, the glorious inky billows of his hair planed to the scalp, his blue suede shoes traded for heavy-duty boots, the inimitable name rendered down to a mere serial number, the insolent flaunt of his crotch replaced by a stiff-backed salute.

“The King” was the greatest but by no means only loss to rock-’n’-roll’s barely erected pantheon. In February 1959, Buddy Holly
was killed when his chartered plane crashed on a tour of the snow-bound American Midwest, so leaving thousands of British boys—John among them—bereft of a friend whose speaking voice they had never heard, wondering where their next lesson in how to play rock music would come from. Yet just before his death, Holly, too, had apparently decided to move on from rock ’n’ roll; his final recordings were thoughtful ballads, with his backing group, the Crickets, replaced by a string orchestra.

On every hand, deities that once had flashed and thundered invulnerably from the heavens now seemed to be plummeting to earth. During a 1957 Australian tour, Little Richard had seen Russia’s Sputnik space satellite flash through the night sky and interpreted it as a personal summons to him from God. Symbolically throwing a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbor, he had given up singing “Good Golly Miss Molly” and begun training for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded out of Britain when it emerged that he was bigamously married to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Gayle. Chuck Berry had been arrested on immorality charges connected with a teenage waitress, for which he would eventually receive two years imprisonment.

Across the Atlantic, however, rock was suffering no such vertiginous decline. Performers like Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and the Everly Brothers, who had become yesterday’s men in their homeland, continued to release records and play concerts in Britain—and across Europe—and be welcomed there as rapturously as ever. Britain also by now had its own fledgling rock-’n’-roll scene, which gained in strength and confidence as its American exemplar lost heart.

One British city, above all, devotedly kept the rock-’n’-roll flame alive. In Liverpool, dozens of scrubby skiffle groups of yesteryear had metamorphosed into rock combos whose names combined unalloyed Yank-worship with native humor and wordplay: Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors (a play on America’s Danny and the Juniors), Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. Several of the
groups were far more than mere Buddy Holly copyists, featuring pianos and saxes like the “rockin’ bands” behind Little Richard and Larry (“Bony Moronie”) Williams.

At the bottom of the heap, so far down that few people even knew they existed, were John Lennon and the Quarrymen. Indeed, despite all the shaping-up that had gone on since Paul’s arrival, there was serious doubt if they would last very far into 1959. January 1 found them back onstage at Wilson Hall, playing for the overdue Christmas party of the Garston bus depot’s social club. The booking had came through George Harrison’s bus-driver father, who in his spare time acted as the club’s entertainments secretary and compere. Harry Harrison had also persuaded the manager of a nearby cinema, The Pavilion, to drop by and catch their act with a view to giving them further work in the future.

“To start with, everything went really well,” drummer Colin Hanton remembers. “We were even given our own dressing-room to rehearse and tune up in. The act went over great—all the bus-drivers and clippies [conductors] really dug us. When they tried to draw the stage curtains after our first set, something went wrong with the mechanism, and the curtains wouldn’t pull. John made a joke about it to the audience, which got a big laugh, and we played an extra number while the problem was sorted out. When we came offstage, feeling really pleased with ourselves, we were told ‘There’s a pint for each of you lads at the bar.’ We ended up having more than just a pint, so for our second set we were pissed out of our minds, all except George—and we were terrible.”

The aftereffects of beer and failure inevitably led to a row on the bus journey home. As an older workingman, Colin had no taste for sick humor and took exception when Paul began joking around in John’s “spastic talk”—“thik ik unk,” and so on. After a heated exchange, he jumped up, rang the bell one stop too early, piled his drums off the bus, and never showed up for another performance.

John was thus left alone with his two schoolboy sidemen Paul and George—a matchless combination one of these days but back in British rock-’n’-roll’s Ice Age an unmitigated catastrophe. For without a drummer, however indifferent, three acoustic guitarists, however
resourceful, could not hope to be taken seriously as a live group. Without the underpinning beat of bass pedal, snare, and tom-tom, their songs did not qualify as rock, merely a form of jumped-up skiffle or folk that in the average riotous Liverpool hall would have to fight even to be heard. They put a brave face on it, and approached several promoters for work as a nonpercussive trio, but from each one came the same brusque query: “What about your rhythm?” John’s hopefully reassuring reply of “The rhythm’s in the guitars” was the cue for slammed doors all over town.

One that remained slightly ajar led to a place he had previously thought an impregnable bastion of anti-rock-’n’-roll prejudice. Stu Sutcliffe and Bill Harry both sat on the entertainments committee of the art college’s union society, the students’ social body, and managed to talk down the trad jazz zealots sufficiently to get the Quarrymen occasional bookings for college dances. At Stu’s and Bill’s prompting, the committee also voted funds to buy an amplifier, officially for the use of all visiting entertainers but in practice so that John, Paul, and George could give the rhythm in their guitars some extra bite.