John Lennon: The Life (49 page)

The Beatles had all been fans of Dylan since George had bought his second album,
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
, featuring “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and the nuclear apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” For John, it had brought a total rethink of his approach to songwriting. “I had a sort of professional…attitude to writing pop songs,” he would recall. “[Paul and I] would turn out a certain style of song for a single…. I’d have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn’t consider them to have any depth at all. To express myself I would write…
In His Own Write
, the personal stories
which were expressive of my personal emotions. Then I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively but subjectively.” It was already starting to happen, albeit in lyrics still ostensibly stuck in the realm of boy-meets-girl. “You Can’t Do That,” the B-side of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” gave romance a threatening tone that only Cynthia had heard before; “I’ll Cry Instead,” originally intended for the
Hard Day’s Night
sound track, found its author casually disclosing: “I’ve got a chip on my shoulder bigger than my feet.”

Before starting out on tour, John had asked Aronowitz to fix a meeting between Dylan and him, rather nervously stipulating it must take place on his territory. The appointed place was the Beatles’ New York hotel, the Delmonico, after the first of their two performances at the West Side Tennis Club stadium in Forest Hills, Queens. That same evening, as it happened, Brian was hosting a lavish reception at the hotel, to which other, more anodyne American folk artistes, like Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio, had been invited. Dylan turned up outside, escorted only by Aronowitz and a roadie named Victor Maimudes, and called the Beatles’ suite from a phone booth across the street. Neil Aspinall was dispatched to escort him up, bypassing the fellow folkies who were so soon to regard him as a traitor.

A few minutes later, John was shaking hands with the touslehaired, full-faced, cold-eyed youth who could get as much power from a single acoustic guitar and wired-up mouth organ as the Beatles could through their three Vox amps. Obviously fascinated by one another but equally unable to admit as much, they exchanged greetings and superficial pleasantries in a manner later described by Aronowitz to Allen Ginsberg as “demure.” Brian Epstein’s hospitable diplomacy also badly misfired. Invited to have a drink, Dylan made his usual solidarity-with-the-hoboes request for “cheap wine.” Brian had to reply apologetically that there was only vintage champagne.

Things began to loosen up when Dylan—secretly a keen observer of commercial pop—revealed that he knew the Beatles’ songs well, though their British accents had produced one major misunderstanding on his part. In “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” he thought the line “I can’t hide, I can’t hide” was “I get high, I get high”—i.e., a reference to smoking marijuana. Rather shamefacedly John and Paul had
to confess that, far from smuggling it onto a hit single, they’d never even tried pot in any serious way. “We may have had a bit up in Liverpool,” Neil Aspinall says. “But that was only twigs…not real leaves.”

The omission was quickly rectified in an adjacent bedroom, Aronowitz producing the stash, Dylan himself attempting to roll an introductory joint but messing it up; his roadie, Victor Maimudes, then taking over to fashion individual roll-ups for each Beatle in case the squeamish Britons balked at the usual practice of passing a single one from mouth to mouth. John refused to sample his until Ringo went first as his “royal taster.”

Within a few moments, those misheard words from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had come true. Brian Epstein, deprived of his managerial dignity and poise, could do nothing but slump on a sofa, repeating, “I’m so high, I’m on the ceiling…” Paul, in one blinding flash, understood the whole meaning of life and ordered Mal Evans to follow him around, making a careful note of everything he said. On John and Ringo, the sucked-in draughts of sage-scented smoke had a rather simpler effect: neither of them could stop laughing. From here on, John’s code for suggesting they repeat the experience would be “Let’s have a laugh.”

A further and more relaxed meeting between Dylan and him took place at the tour’s last-stop hotel, the Riviera Motor Inn, close to Kennedy Airport. Later, accompanied by Neil Aspinall, they managed an incognito visit to a neighborhood diner. “If ever Bob got together with the Beatles after that, John was always the one he zeroed in on.” Aspinall said. “He knew who was the leader of the band.”

T
he only truly invented part of
A Hard Day’s Night
is that onscreen Paul has a grandfather, a disreputable Irish Scouser (played by Wilfred Brambell, from Britain’s beloved TV comedy
Steptoe and Son
) who turns up out of nowhere and becomes a source of hideous embarrassment to all the boys—drinking, stirring up trouble, and chasing women half his age. Toward the end of the film, having repeatedly landed them in the soup, he receives a little homily from John: “You know your trouble. You should have gone west to America. You took a wrong turning and what happened? You’re a lonely old man from Liverpool.”

The words were to prove ironic, their tone of kindly disinterest even more so. For it was during the filming of his scenes with this fictitious old reprobate that John’s father, Alf Lennon, walked back into his life.

Seventeen years had gone by since the summer day in Blackpool when Alf had let Julia take back six-year-old John, and then, losing all appetite for seafaring, had disappeared into Britain’s landlocked underclass. In all this time, he had made no effort to see or communicate with John, not even after Julia’s death in 1958. His thinking had the same mixture of fatalism and quixotic pride that had so often torpedoed his career afloat. With the transference of John into Aunt Mimi’s care, Alf decided he could no longer play any meaningful part in his son’s life or hope to correct the negative image of himself retailed to John by Mimi. His decision caused him great pain, so he later said, and in the decades that followed, he often wondered how his “little pal” was getting on. Then in late 1963, the headlines of every newspaper, magazine, and news broadcast in Britain let him know.

Alf was by now past fifty but, in all his own time “on the road,” had not advanced a single step in status or income. He still worked as a kitchen porter—a euphemism for dishwasher—in pubs and small hotels in the midlands and south, usually choosing jobs where room and board were provided. Since 1946, he had acquired neither property nor savings, put down no roots, nor found any relationship to erase the memory of Julia. Even so, he remained a jaunty figure, standing barely five feet four inches on the legs that childhood rickets had stunted; his long hair swept back like an old-fashioned musical maestro. He was the life and soul of every kitchen where he worked, performing his menial tasks with gusto, singing at the top of his voice, as content as ever with the transitory satisfactions of a drink and a laugh. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped calling himself Alf and instead adopted his second Christian name, shortening it to Fred or the more debonair Freddie.

Freddie Lennon was working at a pub called the Grasshopper, near Caterham, Surrey, when John Lennon first began to be written and talked about on a national scale. Not until several people had commented on their identical surname and city of origin did Freddie suspect he might be this famous young Lennon’s father. Without consulting him, so he later claimed, the pub’s chef shopped him to the
News of the World
—hence the exposé that the author Michael Braun reported to be hanging over John’s head in late 1963. But this
one did not reach fruition. So incensed was Freddie by the chef’s action that he quit his job and took off before the
NoW
’s sleuths could get to him.

By his account, he originally had no intention of contacting John, knowing that any approach would inevitably brand him as a sponger. He therefore did his best to avoid notice, taking a new KP post at a hotel in the south coast resort of Bognor Regis. By this time press stories were starting to appear about how John had been abandoned by his father as a small boy and had not seen nor heard from him since. The first part, at least, was a calumny: Freddie’s only “abandonment” had been going away to sea, latterly on war service. He had abducted John to Blackpool intending to make a new life for the two of them in New Zealand; by his own lights, he’d had only John’s interests at heart in allowing Julia to reclaim him.

The two Lennon uncles, of whom grown-up, famous John was hardly conscious, also played their part in breaking Freddie’s cover. His oldest brother, Sydney—who had cherished hopes of adopting John prior to the Blackpool episode—considered Freddie almost as much a ne’er-do-well as did Aunt Mimi. Now, as Beatlemania set in, Sydney wrote to Freddie, sternly warning him not to bring “shame” on John by attempting to cash in on his wealth and celebrity. On the other hand, his ever-loyal younger brother, Charlie, urged him to put the record straight about the circumstances that had brought John into Mimi’s care rather than Sydney’s. An outraged Freddie returned to Liverpool, accompanied by Charlie, and publicly berated Sydney outside his place of work. As a result, the two brothers never spoke to each other again.

By a bizarre coincidence, while John was actually filming some of the later
Hard Day’s Night
scenes with Wilfred Brambell, the real-life “lonely old man from Liverpool,” who might well have “gone west to America” like his own Kentucky minstrel father, and certainly had taken the mother of all “wrong turnings,” was only a matter of yards away. Freddie had come to London in search of work and was drinking tea in a café near the Scala Theatre, where the film’s climactic Beatles concert takes place—including an unintentionally prophetic moment when Brambell pops up through a trapdoor among the four as they play. The sight of screaming fans around the
theater, so Freddie later said, helped decide him to put his side of the story into print.

His chosen platform was the
Daily Sketch
, the milder of the two weekday tabloids then circulating in Britain. Predictably, the
Sketch
was less interested in putting the record straight than in the live-action scoop of actually confronting John with his missing father. Freddie was stowed away in a hotel under guard, to prevent any rival paper getting to him, and liberally plied with alcohol. Each day, in cloak-and-dagger fashion, he was driven to the Scala Theatre and kept waiting in the car while the
Sketch
’s people negotiated with the Beatles’ for access to John.

The meeting, as Freddie later recalled it, was brief and initially glacial. John showed no emotion at seeing him, merely asking point-blank what he wanted. Freddie replied that he was not after money or any other kind of share in the Beatle bandwagon: all he sought, after years of character assassination, first by Julia’s family, then by journalists, was a chance to defend and explain himself. Once this assurance was given, he said, John’s attitude seemed to soften. Freddie told his tale: how Julia had left him for another man but how nonetheless he had been willing to take her back, how he had not deserted John but had been emotionally blackmailed into relinquishing him. Father and son exchanged some reminiscences of times together back in the gray war years—even managed to share a laugh or two. After twenty minutes or so, Freddie departed, feeling that the reunion had not gone badly, though John was later to recall: “I saw him and spoke to him, and decided I still didn’t want to know him.”

Mimi, too, had received advance warning that Freddie was about to resurface. When the press stories about him first began circulating, he sent her an aggrieved letter, reminding her of the true facts as he saw them, which Mimi marked “return to sender” without reading. Though Freddie no longer had power to take him away, Mimi still “felt a shock go right through my body to my fingertips and the tips of my toes” when John telephoned and told her of the meeting and the resultant
Daily Sketch
story. He reassured her—as he himself believed—that Freddie would not trouble them further.

E
ven without errant fathers turning up on his doorstep, living in London had become more trouble to John than it was worth. The fans besieging his rented flat in Emperor’s Gate continued to increase, in number and agitation, their ranks now swollen by converts from America, Europe, and Australasia; the telephone rang almost nonstop day and night, both in the Lennons’ duplex and Bob and Sonny Freeman’s ground-floor flat. Little though John wanted to leave the city’s ever-blossoming scene, he recognized that Cynthia and Julian had a right to some peace and privacy. Another factor way well have played its part in the decision. Freeman, the Beatles’ invaluable photographer, still seemed unaware of John’s trysts with his Pirelli calendar-girl wife—and Cyn certainly was. Better, then, to quit while one was ahead.

Too busy and disorganized to find a new home for himself, John handed over the problem, as usual, to Brian Epstein. Brian in turn passed it to his accountants, the Albemarle Street firm of Bryce, Hanmer and Isherwood, which also channeled his boys’ income and living expenses. As it happened, the head of the firm, Charles Isherwood, lived in Weybridge, the heart of the Surrey Stockbroker Belt. Isherwood suggested the town’s St. George’s Hill estate, an enclave of baronial-style properties that already harbored several big show-business names, among them Charlie Drake and Spike Milligan. John voicing no objection to the area, a short list of available houses was drawn up for Cynthia and him to view.

They chose the third one they saw, a twenty-seven-room mansion situated on a grassy hill among several acres of landscaped garden. The house was mock-Tudor in style and named Kenwood after the famous Robert Adam–designed stately home in North London. If John had consciously set out to find a southern counterpart to Woolton and a magnified Mendips, he could hardly have done better. The house was bought on his behalf for £20,000 in the early summer of 1964. Pending extensive renovations both to the building and grounds, John, Cynthia, and Julian took up residence in a staff flat in the attic.

Happily, buying Kenwood coincided with acquiring wealth he could actually see. Nor was his quarter share of the Beatles’ world
wide performance fees and record royalties anywhere near the end of it. In February 1965, Northern Songs, the publishing company whose creation solely to handle Lennon-McCartney compositions had seemed like pure swagger two years earlier, was floated on the London Stock Exchange. Never before in Britain had pop songs become a commodity like oil and grain, nor had stockbrokers and City analysts turned to the
Melody Maker
Top 20 chart as hungrily as they did to the
Financial Times
. The flotation was a spectacular success that saw Northern’s two-shilling (10p) shares rocket in price to 7s 9d (almost 40p) and the value of Dick James’s original £100 company reach almost £3 million.

Prior to flotation, John and Paul sold 85 percent of their respective shares, a transaction that netted them each £94,270, between £2 million and £3 million by today’s values. Their work for Northern Songs had previously been assigned through a company named Lenmac Enterprises Ltd., which they now sold to Northern for another £140,000 apiece. From here on, their songs would be supplied through a new company, Maclen (Music) Ltd.—a little-noticed instance of Paul’s name coming first. City investors, at least, no longer considered pop a passing fad. The guarantee of Northern Songs’ stability and growth was that, via Maclen, John and Paul were contracted to supply it with material until 1973.

Thus no expense was spared to make John’s new home a showpiece rivaling any of the millionaire hideaways round about. Brian’s interior designer, Ken Partridge, was hired to sweep away Kenwood’s old-fashioned décor and provide its already-immaculate grounds with new adornments, including a Hollywood-size swimming pool. Given carte blanche by John, Partridge knocked down walls, inserted new staircases, laid vistas of black carpet—bruiseable by the lightest footfall—and put in a state-of-the-art kitchen so complicated that the supplier had to send someone from London to teach Cynthia how to use it. John had barely glanced at Partridge’s original plans and now took violent exception to much of what had been done. Further large sums were spent in undoing and replacing the designer’s handiwork—for example, exchanging his hard red-leather couches (which Ringo Starr inherited) for softer velvet ones.

Despite John’s far-from-constant presence there, the house was
always preeminently a reflection of his character and ever-changing taste. At ground-floor level, the main room was a den—dens being as much a feature of twentieth-century British suburbia as morning rooms—containing his books, two Stuart Sutcliffe paintings, and an impressive desk where he planned to sit and write like any great author from literature. Another room had three Scalextric miniature racecar sets combined into one vast layout; another had slot machines, table football games, and a jukebox of rock-’n’-roll classics. In the attic was a music room filled with his guitars, pianos, and tape recorders. A Mellotron organ which proved too difficult to manhandle up the final narrow stairs, stood on a half landing below.

The latest craze was for Victoriana and Edwardiana: brass bedsteads, flowered chamberpots, fringed lamps, enamel signs for Oxo or R. White’s lemonade, sepia photographs, and mementoes of the Boer War and World War I, which had been familiar fixtures in the childhood of John’s generation but now suddenly assumed a delicious quaintness and irony. Kenwood rapidly filled up with such “fun” objects, each representing a brief, costly burst of enthusiasm on John’s part—a huge altar crucifix rescued from some condemned church, a Victorian family Bible, a suit of armor named “Sidney,” a gorilla costume, which he liked to say was the only thing in his gigantic wardrobe that really fitted him. In the book-lined front hall hung a Great War recruiting poster, with Lord Kitchener pointing a stern forefinger above the famous slogan “Your Country Needs YOU.” John positioned it so that anyone approaching the front door was greeted by Kitchener’s baleful, mustachioed stare through an adjacent window.

Amid the rather impersonal tailor-made luxury were unmistakable reminders of the smaller mock-Tudor house, and the region, that had nurtured him. If careless of all his other impulse-bought possessions, he arranged his books in meticulous order: Swift, Tennyson, Huxley, Orwell, the well-thumbed red cloth bindings of Richmal Crompton’s William stories. Half a dozen cats—including one named Mimi—padded around the designer rooms, making messes on the pristine black carpet and tearing at the costly fabrics with their claws. Domestic life, such as it was, centered on a small sunroom opening onto the garden, rather like Mendips’s old morning room.