John Lennon: The Life (75 page)

If “Hey Jude” was a return to lovability for the Beatles, “Revolution” awoke the gladdest expectations in those whose hatred of the system did not include pop music and for whom John, Paul, George, and Ringo still ranked alongside Lenin and Mao. Young revolutionaries across two continents expected John to declare solidarity with them; instead, the message was “Count me out.” The song had barely gone on sale when the ugliest conflagration yet erupted in Chicago. Encouraged by the city’s corrupt mayor, Richard Daley, police went on the rampage, beating up demonstrators in full view of TV cameras, even turning their fury on innocent delegates to the Democratic Party convention. For apparently copping out when it came to the crunch, John was denounced as a “traitor” to the counterculture and, by implication, a tool of its deadliest foes. The militant soul singer Nina Simone recorded an answer to “Revolution,” urging him to “clean” his mind.

September also brought publication of
The Beatles
, the authorized biography by Hunter Davies. During the book’s preparation, Brian Epstein had died, the Beatles had discovered and discarded the Maharishi, Apple had begun, and John had gone off with Yoko: in the whole realm of nonfiction there was no hotter topic, and Davies had it all to himself.

For its time, the book seemed extraordinarily frank and open, especially about the Beatles’ childhoods and their early days in Hamburg. The lengthy interviews with each one were also unprecedentedly candid, John’s most of all, as he owned up to his failure at school and college and his belief that he was just “conning” the fans who regarded him as an oracle. However, the text had been thoroughly vetted in proof by the Beatles, their chief minders, and respective families. Brian’s homosexuality was not mentioned, beyond a sly reference to him as a “gay bachelor”—
gay
still generally meaning “lighthearted”—nor was there any hint of his fixation on John and John’s often brutal treatment of him. The book’s deadline meant
that Yoko was absent from the narrative, which ended with John still at Kenwood, swapping apparently empathetic banter with Cynthia.

Another thread in the continuing story which remained unpursued was that leading to Freddie Lennon and his pregnant twenty-year-old fiancée at their tiny flat in Brighton. Here, Freddie and Pauline Jones had hoped for the peace and seclusion to enjoy a relationship in its way as controversial as John and Yoko’s. Pauline’s widowed mother remained implacably opposed to the match, and determined to end it by any possible means. When maternal appeals, reproaches, and threats to Pauline proved useless, Mrs. Jones began legal proceedings to have her declared a ward of court, so making Freddie liable to criminal prosecution if the threatened marriage went ahead.

The resultant stress affected Pauline so severely that she suffered a miscarriage, and on the day of the court hearing she was still too weak to attend. To the surprise of both sides, the judge refused Mrs. Jones’s application, ruling only that Pauline could not marry Freddie until she was twenty-one.

Throughout all this, John remained one of their very few allies. After Pauline’s miscarriage—which happened while he was still nominally with Cynthia and Julian—he sent a sympathetic handwritten note from Kenwood, giving a new private telephone number but making no other reference to his own domestic situation. In a short time, Pauline became pregnant again. With the ban on their marriage still in force, she and Freddie decided to follow countless other star-crossed English lovers and elope to Scotland, beyond the jurisdiction of English courts. John not only knew about the plan in advance but paid their traveling expenses and sent a note wishing them good luck. They duly took a train to Edinburgh, where they married by civil ceremony on Pauline’s twentieth birthday. John continued to be generous, buying a house in Brighton to replace their rented flatlet and making over the deeds to Freddie.

No Beatles fan awaited their authorized biography more eagerly than Freddie Lennon. After what he had told Hunter Davies a year previously, he was expecting the full story of John’s early childhood to be finally on record. Freddie did not hope to be painted as an ideal husband or father, but he expected credit, at least, for having tried to
preserve his relationship with John’s mother, Julia, despite her twofold adultery. Above all, John would see enshrined in print that his father had not willingly abandoned him, but turned him over to Julia in what then seemed his best interests. Taken with the fact that by now John also had a forsaken son on his conscience, Freddie believed this would create new understanding between them.

The book began by outlining each Beatle’s childhood in order of precedence, which meant its opening passage was devoted to “Fred” Lennon. A detailed account was given of Freddie’s education at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Hospital, his wooing of Julia, his career as a ship’s steward, and the wartime “lost weekend” that took him away from his family to wander around America and North Africa for eighteen months. But there was no mention of Julia’s having become pregnant by another man while Freddie was at sea, nor of her later extramarital relationship and two children with Bobby Dykins.

John was later to call Davies’s book “a whitewash,” claiming that his Aunt Mimi had insisted “the truth bits about me mother and that” should be cut, and he had “copped out” and agreed. Mimi did indeed receive a set of proofs, to which she reacted so explosively that John wrote to Davies, asking him to go and see her and calm her down. (“Do yer duty, lad,” the note ended.) But in a postscript to later editions of the book, Davies wrote that what upset Mimi were references to schoolboy rebelliousness and swear words. To appease her, Davies inserted the not inaccurate statement that after she took John over from Julia, he had been “as happy as the day is long.”

Not until 2006, with the publication of Davies’s memoir
The Beatles, Football and Me
, was a little more light shed, albeit unwittingly. The section on the biography contained a hitherto unrecorded background detail: that John had vetoed a passage “about a Welsh boyfriend of his mum’s.” This, surely, was none other than Taffy Williams, the soldier by whom Julia became pregnant and whose baby girl was given up for adoption despite Freddie’s offer to take her in. With the near-sacred memory of Julia that John cherished, he might well have felt squeamish about having the episode made public. Or perhaps he was simply doing Mimi’s bidding, or anticipating it. At all events, a story to his father’s indisputable credit remained untold.

A
fter five troubled months, work on the Beatles’ next album finally seemed to be nearing completion. As it had evolved, it was less the product of a band than of individual talents, still umbilically joined by name but frequently hostile and—perhaps even worse—apathetic toward what their colleagues were doing. During the strung-out recording process, different Beatles at various times were absent from the studio, sometimes even from the country—an unthinkable situation in the
Sgt. Pepper
or
Revolver
era. Previously, George Martin had been able to watch brilliance beget brilliance from a single control room; now he often found himself shuttling between John, Paul, and George, at work on separate tracks in three different studios.

It had quickly become clear that having Yoko with him at Abbey Road was no mere passing fad of John’s and that here, as everywhere else, he now regarded her as his muse. “The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” he would recall. “Because they were upset over the Yoko thing and the fact that I was again becoming as creative and dominating as I was in the early days, after lying fallow for a couple of years [
sic
] it upset the applecart…. Everyone seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love.”

Nor did the revolution end with Yoko’s presence at John’s side for every minute of every session, throughout every related conference, conversation, tryout and playback, and every meal-, tea-, coffee-, telephone-, and cigarette-break, often with Kyoko playing on the sidelines. Even when he went to the toilet, Yoko went, too—proof enough to incredulous onlookers of how deep she had her hooks into him. According to Yoko, it was one more manifestation of John’s jealousy and insecurity. “People said I followed him to the men’s room, but he made me go with him. He thought that if he left me alone with the other Beatles even for a minute, I might go off with one of them.”

Most unbelievably, at the end of a take, it was to Yoko rather than Paul or George Martin that he first turned for comment. And, being Yoko, she did not hesitate to give it. “John always said to me, ‘If you notice anything, just whisper.’ And I did notice a lot because in clas
sical music where I was trained, you learn how to listen to all the instruments. So I’d say something like, ‘The bass is not right,’ but I didn’t say it out loud. John was almost flaunting it, actually. He’d say, ‘OK, Yoko, what rhymes with this?’ and then say to the other three, ‘It’s fucking convenient to have her, right?’”

It says much for the affection in which he was held, and their tradition of loyalty and tolerance, that the other three did not simply lay down their instruments and walk out. Paul, true to character, tried diplomacy, which John later saw as underhandedness, accusing him of “gently coming up to Yoko and saying, ‘Why don’t you keep in the background a little more?’ It was all going on behind my back….” Ringo Starr was frankly baffled but, as always, managed to strike the right note with John when he confessed as much. “I used to ask [him], ‘What’s this about?’” Ringo later recalled. “He told me straight: ‘Well, when you go home to Maureen and tell her how your day was, it takes you two lines, “Oh, we had a good day in the studio.” Well, we know exactly what’s going on….’ I was fine after that, and relaxed a lot around Yoko.”

George by contrast, despite long marinading in soft-tongued Buddha-speak, was his most bluntly charmless. “[He] insulted [Yoko] right to her face in the Apple office,” John would remember. “Just being straightforward, that game of ‘Well, I’m going to be upfront because this is what I’ve heard, and Dylan and a few people said you’ve got a lousy name in New York and you give off bad vibes.’ That’s what George said to her and we both sat through it. And I didn’t hit him, I don’t know why.”

To include all the material that had been recorded, the album would have to be in the new and still relatively unusual double-disk format. George Martin was opposed to the idea, arguing—in vain—that its several undoubtedly first-rate new songs should be arranged into a single-disk suite that would certainly be the equal of
Revolver
, if not quite
Sgt. Pepper
. The Beatles were agreed on one point at least: everything had to go in. For Martin, one track above all represented this unfamiliar spirit of indiscipline and self-indulgence. John had taken the extended finale to his original slowish performance of “Revolution” (now known as “Revolution 1”) and, with Yoko’s help,
turned it into an eight-minute mélange of tape-looped sound effects, shrieks, moans, and random voices, including Yoko’s command (or warning) “You become naked.” The overall effect was rather like tuning a radio dial to a series of incomprehensible foreign radio stations. To distinguish it from its parent track, and acknowledge his approaching October birthday and overall lucky number, John called it “Revolution 9.”

As the sessions continued fitfully into the summer, Yoko discovered that she was pregnant. The timing was not good, with divorce proceedings under way against Cynthia on grounds of her alleged adultery with Roberto Bassanini, and matters between Yoko and Tony Cox, specifically over custody of Kyoko, as yet unresolved. John, however, reacted with a joy and excitement that would have brought a sour smile to Cynthia’s face, remembering his gloomy resignation before Julian’s birth back in 1963.

Ringo had always been the glue that bonded the Beatles, and so—albeit in a negative sense—it still proved. One day, he went to John with the amazing news that he wanted out. “I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it and you three are really close.’” he later remembered. “And John said, ‘I thought it was you three.’ Then I went over to Paul’s…and said the same thing…and Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three.’” Assuming his career as a Beatle was over, he took his family on holiday to Sardinia. The other three, genuinely mortified, put aside their conflicts with one another and sent a telegram after him: “You’re the best rock ’n’ roll drummer in the world. Come on home. We love you.” When Ringo returned to Abbey Road a few days later, he found his drum kit covered with more flowers than the
Sgt. Pepper
cover. The episode concentrated everyone’s minds, and from there on they buckled down until the job was finished.

On October 13, John recorded the album’s thirty-second and final song, its most individual and independent piece of work—in effect, his first-ever solo track. It was a ballad called “Julia,” after the mother he had never stopped thinking of since her death ten years before—and who had recently been conjured up afresh through the memories of old friends like Pete Shotton and Nigel Walley in Hunter Davies’s bi
ography. Indeed, it was less song than séance, with John alone in the studio but for his acoustic guitar, his voice free of any technical distortion, speaking rather than singing to that flighty auburn-haired spirit. Grief, yearning, shyness, and self-knowledge came together in language of which any contemporary “serious” poet might have been proud: “When I cannot sing my heart / I can only speak my mind….” But in the months since he had made “Yer Blues,” anguish and fury had softened into gossamer dreaminess, the former
King Lear
cataracts and hurricanoes dwindled down to the softest sea-shell sigh. For Julia now had an alter-ego—Ocean Child, the English translation of the name Yoko.