John Lennon: The Life (38 page)

Where collective publicity like interviews or personal appearances were concerned, Barrow usually told Paul McCartney what was required and he rounded up the others. “Paul was a born diplomat, and always had an instinctive understanding of what journalists wanted. I tended to be a bit wary of John at the beginning. In his eyes you were his enemy until you’d proved yourself as his friend. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was all bravado—that it came from a lack of self-confidence. John was the one of the Beatles it took me longest to get through to. But once that happened, he became the best friend I had in the group.”

Despite having Barrow on the case full-time, Brian was open to anyone else who might have power to secure his boys a single additional column inch. Backstage at
Thank Your Lucky Stars
he had met Andrew Loog Oldham, a nineteen-year-old publicist who would later enjoy almost as spectacular a managerial career as his own. Oldham was already in partnership with Brian’s original London PR
rep, Tony Calder and, during early and mid 1963, he took over from Calder in the Beatles’ media blitz.

With the national popular press still largely indifferent to youth culture, and the “quality” press seemingly not even aware of it, the best route to their target audience was through magazines produced specifically for teenage girls, such as
Jackie
and
Boyfriend
. Oldham therefore lost no time in taking them to
Boyfriend
’s office, just off Regent Street, and turning them loose on the magazine’s staff writer, a stunningly attractive blonde-bouffanted nineteen-year-old named Maureen O’Grady. “We did a photo shoot with them in the little studio we had upstairs,” she recalls. “Pop stars in those days tended to get a bit above themselves…wearing silk suits with camel-hair coats slung around their shoulders. Craig Douglas used to smoke a cigarette in a holder. But the Beatles were just so friendly and down-to-earth. They called me ‘Mo’ right away, as if I’d known them all my life.

“In one of the first pieces I ever wrote on them, I made a really silly mistake about John. I was so young and naïve that I assumed everyone had a mother and a father just like I did, so I mentioned John’s mother without checking as if she was somewhere up there in Liverpool. When I next saw the Beatles, John said, ‘There was something wrong in what you printed about me,’ and then he took me on one side and explained that his mother was dead. I was very upset, and apologised, but he was perfectly calm and nice about it. Because I admitted my mistake and said sorry, he just forgave me and never mentioned it again.”

Boyfriend
’s good opinion was so vital that Brian arranged for O’Grady and a photographer to go up to Liverpool and catch the Beatles in one of their very last ballroom appearances in the city, then join them afterward at the Blue Angel club. “That was the first time I ever saw how brutal John could be with Brian. I was with them in the dressing room when Brian came in, doing his efficiency number, like ‘Now then, what’s the running-order tonight?’ John really laid into him…‘The music’s our business, you just do the bookings and take your percentage….’ Epstein said nothing, just fiddled with a sheet of paper and drifted away.”

More important than any print medium in first bringing the Beatles to national attention was the radio wavelength that had once brought John
The Goon Show
,
Dick Barton—Special Agent
, and
Life with the Lyons
. They had auditioned for the BBC Light Programme back in February 1962, and passed, albeit with some reservations. (“Paul McCartney—no. John Lennon—yes,” the producer jotted at the time.) On January 26, 1963, they made their first appearance on
Saturday Club
, a two-hour live performance show that John and Paul had each listened to avidly on their Saturday-morning lie-ins since its launch in the tea-chest-and-washboard era as
Saturday Skiffle Club
.

Sunday mornings brought further atypical swathes of live pop in
Easy Beat
, an hour-long show, almost replicating
Saturday Club
’s ten million listeners, sandwiched between morning worship and
The Archers
. Both programs—like TV’s
Thank Your Lucky Stars
—were emceed by Brian Matthew, a thirty-five-year-old former actor who, unusually, combined the starchy tones of a classic BBC announcer with a genuine interest in pop music and musicians. It was Matthew who had bestowed the Beatles’ highest accolade to date, calling them “musically and visually the most accomplished group to emerge since The Shadows.”

Whether
Saturday Club
or
Easy Beat
, the format was the same. The Beatles would give a live studio performance, without any technical enhancement, often reaching far back into their Hamburg repertoire for R&B or pop covers they no longer played onstage and would never record. In between would come Goonish repartee with an indulgent Brian Matthew that listeners soon began to enjoy as much as the music.

JOHN
(
shouting
): OK, Ring’?

RINGO
(
in distance
): All right, John. Can you hear me?

JOHN
(
to Matthew
): Can you hear him?

MATTHEW
: Not really. I hope not.

JOHN
(
in whisper, as if Ringo is geriatric patient
): We’ve brought you the flowers.

RINGO
: Oh, good.

JOHN
: And the grapes.

RINGO
: Oh, I like grapes.

PAUL
: He likes grapes, you know.

JOHN
: Brian’s nose is peeling, listeners.

 

Among the PR duties entrusted to Tony Barrow by Brian, none was more important than preserving the fantasy of John’s bachelor-hood. No Fleet Street newspaper of this era cared whether or not a newly successful pop musician was married and about to become a father. But to magazines like
Boyfriend
, it certainly was an issue. “Rumours started to go around that John had a wife hidden away up in Liverpool,” Maureen O’Grady remembers. “But when I asked him if it was true, he always denied it. And on the tours and when the Beatles were down in London, he always acted like a totally free agent.”

Brian’s flat in Falkner Street had provided only a temporary answer to the Cynthia problem. After a couple of late-night scares from oddballs wandering in off the street, with John away and only little Dot Rhone to protect her, Cyn felt too nervous to continue living there. Showing the Stanley family’s famous solidarity yet again, John’s Aunt Mimi invited him to bring Cyn back to live at Mendips, where she could enjoy a peaceful and secure environment until the baby was born.

To minimize friction this time around, Mimi divided the house into two halves. John and Cynthia had the whole ground floor, enjoying sole use of the kitchen, morning room and drawing room, and sleeping in the former rear dining room. Mimi retreated upstairs, sleeping in the old student lodgers’ room and cooking scratch meals on a Baby Belling stove in John’s boyhood room above the front porch. The house’s single bathroom also had to double as her makeshift scullery.

John’s return to Mendips in his new persona of famous pop star caused excitement throughout the extended family circle that had helped to raise him. His cousin Michael Cadwallader remembers his distributing copies of the
Please Please Me
album as proudly as he used to hand round his cartoon strips and handwritten magazines. One early, impressive sign of his new wealth was taking Cynthia off to Paris for a delayed honeymoon: they stayed at the luxurious
George V Hotel—a place destined to recur in Beatles history—went shopping, and met up with Astrid Kirchherr for a boozy evening out that ended with all three of them passed out in bed together.

John was also quick to repay Mimi at least some of what she had spent on him. He paid off the balance of the mortgage on the house and bought a showy three-piece suite for the drawing room and numerous other luxuries and domestic gadgets, whether needed or not. Thanks to the guitar that she used to declare would never earn him a living, Mimi now knew financial security for the first time in her adult life. No more would that diamond engagement ring have to be pledged with the pawnbroker in Smithdown Road.

But the cost of having John at home again was Mimi’s cherished peace and privacy. Local Beatles fans quickly divined his new address and took up permanent station in clumps of two and three, like industrial pickets, outside the front gate. In the whole of Mendips’s quiet mock-Tudor life, even during the war years, its back door had never needed to be locked. Now, if Mimi left it ajar for even a minute, she would find her kitchen ransacked of plates and crockery by the house’s souvenir-hungry besiegers.

Unlike modern first-time mothers, Cynthia attended no prenatal classes and received no preparation of any kind for giving birth and what lay beyond. And John on his fleeting visits home was either too buoyed up with excitement or dead with fatigue to worry about how she was feeling physically or how anxious or bewildered might be her state of mind. Even in pregnancy, he expected her to keep up the image he liked, for the odd moments when he might like to see it. Once while he was away on the road, a failure of communication at the hairdresser’s led to Cyn’s Bardot-length hair receiving a severe crop. When John came home and saw it, he refused to speak to her for two days.

With the Beatles as a foundation, Brian Epstein now began assembling a roster of Liverpool talent whose success rate would make the Larry Parnes stable of old seem broken-winded. In March, his second signing, Gerry and the Pacemakers, reached number one with “How Do You Do It?”—the sure-fire hit that the Beatles had so ungratefully rejected. In May, a third NEMS acquisition, Billy J.
Kramer and the Dakotas, reached number two with “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”—a ballad showing John and Paul at their cutest, which George had sung through heavy winter catarrh on the
Please Please Me
album.

The Beatles did not object to this diversification of their manager’s energies or resent their fellow Merseysiders’ success. It was John, in fact, who urged Brian to sign up the Big Three, the city’s hardest rock combo, featuring his friend John Gustafson on bass. He was also friendly and encouraging to Priscilla (“Cilla”) White, a sometime coat-check attendant at the Cavern, who sang with various bands around town, displaying a vocal power that could almost shatter glass. The Beatles backed Cilla—“Cyril,” as John called her—at a first, unsuccessful audition for Brian at the Majestic ballroom in Birkenhead. Nine months later, after hearing her sing jazz rather than R&B, he put her under contract as Cilla Black, so creating one of the best-loved personalities in British show business.

The emergence of so many hitmakers and would-be hitmakers from the same faraway and hitherto obscure city opened Fleet Street’s eyes to pop music as a source of news at long last. Stories began appearing with increasing frequency about what was dubbed the Mersey Sound or Liverpop. The accent that so many southbound entertainers over the years had tried to purge from their voices became the last word in new northern chic. All at once, it seemed, the country couldn’t get enough Scouse.

Mimi would later recall her astonishment one night at seeing John on television, speaking in the thick, lugubrious “wacker” accent she had managed to keep at bay throughout his boyhood. “I was shocked to hear him. When he came home, I said, ‘John, what’s all this about, what’s happened to your voice?’” His reply was to parody the broadest Toxteth or Dingle dialect—which pronounces
this
as “dis,”
them
as “dem,” and
there
as “dere”—both as a tease to Mimi and a reassurance that what she’d seen was quite deliberate and calculated. “‘It’s all dis-dem-dere, Mimi, dis-dem-dere,’” he said. And he’d do a little dance, a kind of Fagin act, rubbing his hands, and laugh and go “‘Money, money, money.’”

“Ask anyone who knew him then…he didn’t really talk like that.
I brought him up properly, not to talk like a ruffian. But John knew enough about the music world to put it all on. The fools believed he was really like that. The fools!”

T
here are few trickier tasks than finding a follow-up to a hit single, especially one as explosively original as “Please Please Me.” The Beatles knew it might have been just a lucky shot they would be unable to repeat, and were all too aware of what must follow. Parlophone would halfheartedly underwrite a couple more attempts, then give up; like hundreds before them and thousands since, they would sink into the painful obscurity of one-hit wonders.

Their follow-up, “From Me to You,” therefore repeated its predecessor’s winning formula of Lennon harmonica and toppling falsetto, though with a more leisurely John-led harmony—an almost childlike “la-la-la da-da dum-dum-dum”—and a subtler, minor-chorded middle eight. Despite the sharp drop in power and risky foray into subtlety, it reached number one within two weeks of its release on April 11. The Beatles by this time had joined their second Arthur Howes national package tour, this one costarring two imported American heartthrobs, Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. As on the Helen Shapiro show a month earlier, the headliners found it progressively more of a struggle to keep their audiences’ attention.

It was only after this second hit that the names of the individual Beatles became generally known. And, in those days, their names had the same novelty value as everything else about them. After the creaky artifice of pop-star pseudonyms—the Billys and Dickies, the Storms and Wildes and Furies—“John Lennon” and “Paul McCartney” had a refreshing candor. “George Harrison” indeed was almost too frank in its evocation of some cloth-capped war veteran playing dominoes in a pub with sawdust on its floor. Only “Ringo Starr” added a traditional touch of Yank-worshipping fantasy.