John Lennon: The Life (60 page)

The film’s nominal star was Michael Crawford, playing the dimwit squad commander, Lieutenant Goodbody, whom Gripweed serves as orderly. Crawford had brought his wife, Gaby, on location with him, and of an evening, the two would often drop in at the flat John shared with Neil for a drink or to play Monopoly. The Crawfords liked the flat so much that John offered to exchange it for their large rented villa, which had the—for him—irresistible attraction of a table-tennis table in its front hall. Soon after this accommodation swap, an NEMS emissary arrived from London, bringing John a large box of chocolates with hashish carefully packed among them. “When we tried to open the box, the lid flew off,” Neil remembered. “All the hash fell into the shagpile carpet. We lost almost the whole lot.”

A few days into the shoot, John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, turned up with his matte black Rolls Phantom V, recently equipped with further luxury accoutrements, including a fold-down bed and a set of external stereo loudspeakers. To maximize the shock value of these, John had supplemented his in-car record collection with “The Colonel Bogey March,” Peter Sellers’s parody of a party political broadcast, and assorted farmyard sound effects. There was also a microphone with which he could make his own broadcasts at shattering volume. One night in London, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was seated in a parked limo when he heard himself challenged by what he took to be a police bullhorn. Hopeless druggie that he was, the moment almost brought on cardiac arrest. But it was only John, pulling his leg.

The black Phantom with its thunderous sound track became a familiar sight around Almería, whose inhabitants nicknamed it
“El Funebre,”
or the Hearse. Neil Aspinall remembered mad journeys to and from the various outdoor locations, bouncing on rutted roads, with John and his fellow actors squashed into the back, Bob Dylan’s voice wailing over the external speakers and rustic Spaniards staring in bafflement.

Near the end of the shoot, Cynthia came out for a holiday, accompanied by the ever-supportive Ringo and Maureen. In place of John and Neil’s “damp and tatty” bachelor quarters, Cyn rented a much larger, more luxurious villa with its own swimming pool. This stood on the site of an old convent and was suspected of being haunted by its former occupants, though in an unthreatening,
Sound of Music
kind of way. One morning when Maureen awoke, the ribbons on her nightdress had all been mischievously tied in knots. And as the party held an impromptu singsong in the candlelit front hall, mysterious voices seemed to join in. Cyn for one had no doubt that the place was “full of beautiful spirits.”

According to legend,
How I Won the War
revealed John to be a natural screen actor. With the increasingly successful Richard Lester for a mentor—so the story goes—he could easily have crossed over from music to a busy film career, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley before him. He failed to do so because, at the last, he found it not
challenging enough and, more pertinently, realized a film star’s life could be even more confining than that of a Beatle.

Lester certainly believed he had potential, but this particular vehicle does not show overmuch evidence of it. Gripweed plays only a minor part in the story and has little to say (although Charles Wood’s relentlessly absurdist dialogue gives every character a tinge of
John Lennon: In His Own Write
). His asides are rather labored pseudo-Lennonisms, as when he admits to having joined the British fascist party: “I was a great mate of [Oswald] Mosley’s. I used to hold his voice for him when he lost his meetings.”

There is, however, one moment of horrible prescience. As Gripweed crosses a field in a black-and-white sequence, hostile gunfire catches him in the midriff. He looks down at himself, then incredulously at us. “I knew this would happen,” he says. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” His face then appears in color, close up, with a smear of blood at his mouth. “I’m not a thief really,” is his last, plaintive gasp. “I’ve never found anything worth taking.” When Cynthia saw the film, that scene reduced her to tears. For she felt it was how John really would look at the moment of his death.

A century and a half earlier, Thomas de Quincy had recorded how, for the habitual drug tripper, “the minutest incidents of childhood and familiar scenes of later years [are] often revived.” So it was for John when the songwriting urge returned to him during these weeks of nonmusical filmmaking. The autumnal Spanish sun awoke memories of July Saturdays long ago in Woolton, when the sound of distant brass-band music would make him tug at his Aunt Mimi’s arm, desperate for coconut shies and cotton candy. In place of blinding white walls and terra-cotta roofs, he saw the sandstone orphanage whose annual fete had been the highlight of his boyhood summers; he saw the iron front gates, the grimy Gothic casements, the official signboard with its anomalous melt-in-the-mouth name: Strawberry Field.

The lyric he now began to write (sitting on a powdery Mediterranean beach with Neil Aspinall a few feet away) turned “field” into “fields,” suggesting more the overgrown grounds that were once part of his Outlaws’ domain. What emerged was no nostalgic pic
ture postcard, but an abstract painting in sound: mystical and ambiguous yet at the same time more revealing of its author than mere memoirizing could ever have been.

Its opening words are so familiar that one can easily overlook the layers of meaning, or rather mood, contained in them. “Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to…” is a straightforward invitation to accompany him on the walk he took so often with Mimi and Uncle George. Then comes the Learyesque assertion that “nothing is real,” then what should have been “nothing to get hung up about.” (For pampered, privileged Sixties youth, “hung up”—mildly depressed or confused—was the very worst one could feel.) Unwieldy to scan, “hung up about” collides with “hang about,” and maybe a touch of gallows humor, to end up as “hung about.” Then we are back to childhood with a cry that might have come from the Sally Army orphans themselves as their team won the egg-and-spoon race: “Strawberry Fields forever!”

John himself always said the lyric was “psychoanalysis set to music” and declared it and “Help!” to have been “the only true songs I ever wrote.” For him, the words signified how little he had really changed in the years since Strawberry Field was his adventure playground. “The second line [of the second verse] goes ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ What I was trying to say was ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius. It’s the same problem I had when I was five.’” In fact, egotism is the last very thing that strikes you. The air of hippie wisdom and stoicism soon gives way to self-confessed mental muddle and perplexity, and finally outright incoherence (“I think I know I mean, er, yes but it’s all wrong…”) that nonetheless still rhymes true and has the correct number of feet per line. Other psychedelic songwriters produced druggy gibberish; John had to produce
crafted
druggy gibberish.

He also spent the time in Almería pondering what he might do with himself now that live concerts would no longer regulate his existence. “I was thinking, ‘Well, this is the end, really,’” he later recalled. “‘There’s no more touring. That means there’s going to be a blank space in the future….’ That’s when I really started considering life without the Beatles—what would it be? And I spent that six
weeks thinking about that. ‘What am I going to do? Am I going to be doing Vegas? But cabaret?’ I didn’t even consider forming my own group or anything, because it didn’t enter my mind. Just what would I do when it stopped?

“And that’s when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of [the Beatles] without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening.”

I
n the first and more forgiving of her two autobiographies, Cynthia Lennon dated the collapse of her marriage to the moment when John began to take LSD in quantity—to “eat the stuff,” as he himself put it—and, as a result, turned into someone she no longer recognized or could communicate with. “There is an expression jazz musicians use when playing with a musician who is not quite in tune with the rest, ‘He must be listening to a different drum,’” wrote Cynthia. “That particular expression adequately describes the way I was feeling…. John was still searching, whereas I thought I had found what I wanted out of life.”

The thought was doubtless a consoling one amid the events that were soon to overwhelm her. But everyone else around John knew that the “different drum” had been beating ever more insistently long before acid came along and that, numerous as were its malefactions, Cynthia’s loneliness, unhappiness, and ultimate humiliation could not be counted among them.

It was a source of general wonderment that John and she had stayed married for four years, and that none of the beautiful, bright women who incessantly threw themselves at him had yet consigned her to the well-supplied rubbish dump of show-business first wives. Her uncomplaining sweetness and mildness had earned the sympathy of the other Beatles, their partners, and their whole entourage, although there were some who thought that John also deserved a measure of sympathy. Nobody was fonder of Cyn than George Martin, yet John’s situation was one Martin well understood, having himself been forced into a first marriage at the too-young age of twenty-two. “That marriage was doomed to failure.” he says. “And so, I’m afraid, was John’s to Cynthia.”

Paradoxically, his former long absences on tour had kept things on
a relatively even keel. Whenever domestic life grew oppressive, there was always that escape back into a world where he could live like a bachelor—and what a bachelor! At the same time, however much casual sex he had on tour, the pitiless spotlight that always shone on him as a Beatle prevented any more lasting involvements. “When he was travelling with the boys, there was no possibility of being seriously unfaithful to Cyn,” George Martin says. “That couldn’t happen until the treadmill finally stopped.”

The physical attraction between them, once so overwhelming, had completely evaporated; in Cynthia’s words, they lived together “like brother and sister.” With the storms of John’s jealousy and possessiveness long since blown out, their relationship settled into humdrum habit. “We never rowed,” Cyn would recall. “We just rubbed along together without fireworks.” This eerie equilibrium continued even after John’s adventures with acid began creating mood swings between the comatose and the vicious. She had recently confided to him that she, too, felt creatively stifled and would like to return to painting or one of the other subjects in which she had shone at art college. John seemed sympathetic, so one evening while he was out, Cynthia devoted hours to painting a floral design on the white TV set in Kenwood’s sunroom. Next morning, she found he had come in late, drunk or stoned, and had covered her handiwork with adhesive stickers all bearing the same slogan for the “drink more milk” campaign.

Cynthia’s first, accidental encounter with acid, courtesy of dentist John Riley, had been more than enough for her. But John pleaded with her not to judge it on that one bad experience, promising that, if she tried it again in the comfort and security of their home, with himself and other initiates on hand to provide support and comfort, its wonders would be revealed to her. A pleading John by this time was such a novelty as to be irresistible. Thinking it would at least add to their small store of togetherness, she agreed.

A whole weekend was specially set aside for this “Operation Cynthia”—the longest period of time John had devoted to her since Hamburg days. Three-year-old Julian was packed off to stay with the housekeeper, Dot Jarlett, and a special support squad moved in to Kenwood, among them George and Pattie Harrison, Brian’s as
sociate Terry Doran, and an actress friend of Pattie’s named Marie Lise. The den was prepared for the sacred ritual, with banked-up cushions, candles, smoldering incense, and atmospheric music. Cyn was still wondering how the acid would be given to her, whether on sugar cubes as before or in pill form, when she realized she was already slipping under the influence. It had been secretly put into her drink, in case she should chicken out at the last moment.

But this trip proved no better than her first. Stumbling into a nearby cloakroom a few moments later, she saw a skull grinning back at her from the mirror above the basin. John came after her and took her back into the supposed safety of the circle, but here, too, horrid visions soon closed in. When Terry Doran said something to her, he seemed to change into an alligator, then into a snake. One of the household cats that happened to be present became multicolored and multiform, its fur vibrating in time to the music. Even the pile in the carpet seemed to heave and twitch as if it had a life of its own.

The experience ended with a group hug and a chorus of congratulations to Cynthia, in which none seemed prouder or more loving than John. Much as she basked in this unwonted tenderness, she told him that for her LSD was “terrifying and dangerous” and she wanted nothing more to do with it. John, so she said, accepted this decision and put no further pressure on her; she, in turn, resigned herself to his growing immersion in the drug and alienation from herself and Julian.

In whatever John did, he still needed a special crony to act simultaneously as his mentor and follower. Where acid taking was concerned, this role was filled for some months by John Dunbar, the Indica Gallery’s cofounder and director. Dunbar was a perfect companion, formidably well versed in avant-garde art yet equally at ease in the pop world through his marriage to Marianne Faithfull and friendship with the Rolling Stones. He was already a seasoned acidhead, having discovered it while hitchhiking around America as an undergraduate.

The two often took acid together at Dunbar’s flat in Bentinck Street, Mayfair, where a whole wall of the living room ended up covered with their drawings of visions they had experienced. But John made no attempt to conceal his activities from Cynthia. “We did a
lot down at his place in Weybridge as well,” Dunbar remembers. “Cynthia would usually be there, but in another part of the house. You got the sense that their life together was over in any meaningful way…John just didn’t happen to have moved on yet. Julian would often be around, too, but not getting a lot of attention from his father. I can remember John telling him, ‘No, I’m
not
going to mend your fucking bicycle.’”