The Love You Make (4 page)

But that night, after finding him with Yoko, there was little faith left. She sat up with Magic Alex most of the night, drinking wine and talking at a candlelit table in his apartment. She had never trusted Magic Alex before, but she desperately needed someone to talk to this night, and she poured her heart out to him. Many bottles of wine were finished by dawn, when she crawled into bed with Alex and made love to John’s best friend. Symbolically, it was a way of ending her relationship with John forever. Cynthia says that Alex practiced black magic and that he hypnotized her into doing it; probably she was just drunk.

Alternating between love and hate
was always what it was like with John from the very start. It scared Cynthia just to be around him when she first got to know him at Liverpool Art College. She was nineteen years old, he was eighteen and a freshman, and in just one year everybody in the school knew what a rotten egg he was. In art school in 1958 when everybody wanted to look “bohemian” and emulate the American “Beatniks,” with black turtleneck sweaters and duffle jackets, John Lennon played the hood, a tough and incorrigible Teddy Boy, the current British brand of juvenile delinquent. Cynthia watched him from the corner of her eye as he breezed through the back door of lettering class on Thursday afternoons in his long tweed overcoat, battered guitar slung over his back, myopically scowling at the world from behind thick, black-framed eyeglasses. He was tall and long-legged in a clumsy sort of way, and his unwashed drainpipe trousers were so tight that he had to snake each ankle into them to get dressed in the morning. He wore his hair in a greasy, molded wave above his forehead in lame imitation of Elvis Presley, his idol. He had a quick and witty, but very, very mean, tongue. He could lay someone to waste with a few of his barbs, and no one, teachers and students alike, was safe from his lethal wit. Unfortunately for Cynthia, he sat directly behind her during lettering class, and there was no escape. He did no schoolwork, and every other word out of his mouth was “fuck.” He wasted his time drawing cartoons of deformed babies and cripples, his fingers calloused from the guitar and stained from nicotine. The only time he ever spoke civilly to Cynthia was when he borrowed her ruler and pens, which he never returned and for which she was too frightened to ask. More often than not he had liquor or beer on his breath, and although he chain-smoked cigarettes, they were rarely his own, and it seemed his constant mission to bum one.

Cynthia Powell neither smoked nor drank. She was a proper girl with beautiful pale skin, blond hair, and limpid blue eyes, a girl so innocent she did not even listen to dirty jokes. She had been brought up in Hoylake, a comparatively posh Liverpool suburb across the Mersey, in a terraced house by the sea. She and her two older brothers had a strict but warm and protective upbringing. She developed into a sweet and demure teenager with a kind smile and soft voice. She dressed in prim coordinated skirt and sweater outfits and had dated the same boy every weekend for three years without ever venturing past the necking-on-the-doorstep stage. When he temporarily broke up with her for another girl, she spent six months pining for him until she got him back by walking her dog past his house late at night, staring wistfully at his windows. Her father died of cancer when she was seventeen, and the following year she entered Liverpool Art College.

She kept John Lennon at arm’s length with great apprehension for the first six months she knew him. She probably never would have bothered to get to know him any better if it hadn’t been for his guitar. One day, in the noisy basement dining hall of the art college, Cynthia had just finished a bag lunch that her mother had made for her when she noticed a small knot of students forming around the edge of the stage on the far side of the cafeteria. She went over with her girlfriends to see what was happening and found John sitting on the stage apron, playing his guitar and singing. He was singing “Ain’t She Sweet,” and he looked positively beatific. His glasses were off, and she could see his eyes for the first time. He relaxed as he sang, and all the anger and malice in his face were gone. His voice was lovely but most peculiar, a kind of nasal croon with a distinctly Liverpudlian accent called “scouse.” Some indefinable quality made it sound not so much sweet as poignant. Unable to tear herself away, Cynthia stood there in the enlarging crowd, listening to song after song, transfixed by the John Lennon emerging from underneath the tough shell.

She didn’t admit to herself that her feelings for him had changed drastically until one morning several weeks later when Cynthia was sitting several rows behind him in the school auditorium and noticed Helen Anderson put her hand on John’s head and affectionately begin to stroke his hair. Cynthia was so crazed with jealousy she almost jumped out of her seat. She sat through the rest of the auditorium period near tears, not even certain why. Was she losing her mind? Certainly she couldn’t have fallen for this lout, this vulgar brute, without even realizing it. But when, this time after lettering class, John again took out his guitar and began to play, she knew as she watched him sing that she was in love with him.

“Lettering class became my fix,” she later wrote in her autobiography. Now she couldn’t sit close enough to him or find enough reasons to run into him “accidentally” in the hallway. “I was spending miserable, agonizing hours wandering the drafty college corridors just in the hope of a glimpse.” It was only their mutual myopia that finally broke the ice. On one of those Thursday afternoons in lettering class, the students were paired off and told to give each other eye tests. Cynthia situated herself so she would become John’s partner. To Cynthia’s great delight, the results of the test proved that, without their glasses, they were each almost as blind as the other. John confessed how terribly self-conscious he was about his glasses and that sometimes he even refused to wear them in the cinema. By the end of the class they were friendly enough to nod hello to each other in the hallway.

When Cynthia heard through the grapevine that John’s big crush of the moment was Brigitte Bardot, she began to alter her appearance to please him. Her hair took on a brassy highlight and puffed up into a new, bouffant bubble. She traded in her demure sweater sets and calf-length skirts for tight black velvet trousers and revealing sweaters. At Woolworth’s she bought a pair of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings. By the end of a few months she even surprised herself with how tarted up she looked, sometimes so much so that the drunks on the bus going home at night would mistake her for a “toddie” and proposition her with money. Still, John paid little or no attention to her until an end-of-term Christmas party. Cynthia arrived at the party early, hoping John would be there. She put her glasses in her pocketbook and stood at the side of the room, squinting to make him out in the crowd. John didn’t arrive until the party was almost over. He made his way slowly around the room, talking to all the girls, joking with his friends. Cynthia hoped he would come toward her.

By the time John reached her she was limp from anticipation. Then he shocked her by asking her to dance. To her own surprise, she acted cool and calm with him on the dance floor. She seemed almost aloof. When John casually suggested they might go to a party together, Cynthia blurted out, “I’m awfully sorry, I’m engaged to this fellow in Hoylake.” She couldn’t believe she had said it. She could have kicked herself on the spot.

John’s face fell. “I didn’t ask you to marry me!” he snapped and walked away, leaving her on the dance floor.

Later that day, however, John had recovered enough to ask Cynthia to join him and his friends at the local student pub, Ye Cracke, on a street adjacent to the school. Cynthia took her best girlfriend, Phyllis McKenzie, along with her for “protection.” The tiny pub was swollen with rowdy students celebrating the end of semester, and caught up in the good spirits, Cynthia found herself buying John and the boys a few rounds of beer. Soon she was a little tipsy herself and laughing and talking, and John was teasing Cynthia about how proper she was. “No dirty words and no dirty jokes in front of Miss Powell, if you please,” he admonished them with mock sternness. “Didn’t you know Miss Powell was a nun, then?” It was at that moment, in the pub, that she realized she would be hopelessly in love with him for the rest of her life.

Later that afternoon in the one-room flat of a friend of John’s from art college, after a meal of fish and chips eaten from a greasy newspaper, she made love with John for the first time, on a dirty mattress thrown on the floor among paint tins and drying canvases. This flat on Gambier Terrace, where John stayed on and off, became their refuge. From that day on she met him there whenever there was an opportunity. Even when the electricity was cut off for nonpayment and there was no hot water or heat, she would spend the night with him there, curled up in blankets for warmth. They would emerge at dawn in the gray morning light as dirty as two chimney sweeps. Then Cynthia would rush home to Hoylake to take a bath, explaining to her suspicious mother that she had spent the night at a girlfriend’s house, before changing her clothes and rushing off to Liverpool and John again.

She quickly learned that it was no easy chore to be in love with John Lennon. I He was an angry young man with a temperament that often bordered on the nasty. He was irrationally jealous of any man Cynthia as much as looked at but wouldn’t think twice about flirting with another girl right in front of her. Once, when he went so far as to kiss a girl in a pub, Cynthia burst into tears and stormed off. He was full of unreasonable rage, and Cynthia was never certain what would set him off. His temper often turned violent, and she got used to being belted around, but no more than a good swift punch in the arm or having her arm twisted behind her back. Her friends warned her, “You must be out of your mind; he’s a nutcase; you’ll get nothing but trouble from that one; you’re really asking for it, aren’t you?” Cynthia was told that his former girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, had been pleased to get rid of him, she was so afraid of him. But Cynthia said she saw beyond all that anger. She saw into the hurt, helpless little boy underneath the rageful pose. John needed her. He needed her more than anybody had ever needed her in her life. And if she could just make him believe that she would stick with him, through all the bad as well as the good, she could soothe his troubled spirit. So that was her promise, not to desert him as everyone else in his life had deserted him. “I wanted desperately to see him at peace with himself and the world, for his sake and mine.”

Liverpool in 1958
was not exactly a fairy tale setting for a romance. It was a grim, gray city with a beleaguered population. Once one of the four busiest port cities in the world with a large influx of Welsh, Irish, and Chinese immigrants, its six hundred acres of deep docks made it a major World War II supply line across the North Atlantic and thus a prime target for Hitler’s bombs. Nightly, a veritable firestorm was unleashed on the city by the Luftwaffe, turning it from a bustling, prosperous terminal into a cratered shell of sandstone from which no phoenix ever rose. The ports were so damaged it was joked that a man could walk across the river Mersey on the hulls of sunken ships. The Lancashire Cotton Mills and the Cotton Exchange, the city’s industrial lifeblood, were all but closed during the war and never revived.

The city was named after the Liver (live-ah) bird, once the symbol of King John, an eagle with a fleur-de-lis in its beak. But when the city was reconstructed by Prince Rupert in 1644, it was thought the Liver bird was a cormorant holding a piece of seaweed. Thus, the humble seagull holding a drooping shred of sea grass became the city’s emblem. A giant Liver bird sculpture sits atop the Royal Liver Insurance building, which faces the Mersey. According to legend, if the bird falls, so does Liverpool, so it is carefully guy wired to the building. Amazingly, the sculpture was one of the few things left standing after the air raids of World War II.

John Winston Lennon was born during one of those massive air raids on October 9, 1940, in a maternity home on Oxford Street. He was the issue of a long, only half-serious romance. His mother, Julia Stanley, had met his father, Fred Lennon, twelve years before in Sefton Park, one of Liverpool’s few oases of green. It was a spring day, and Fred was a dapper sixteen-year-old who had only that week been discharged from the orphanage he grew up in. He was wearing a bowler he had just purchased to impress the girls. When Julia ran into him strolling through the park, she said, “You look silly.”

“You look lovely,” Fred responded, smiling, and sailed his hat off into the lake.

Julia’s parents and four sisters all vehemently disapproved of Fred Lennon, but Julia thought the two of them made a good pair. The third youngest, she was a headstrong, fun-loving girl, with high cheekbones and dark devilish eyes. She loved being naughty and slightly outrageous and having a night out on the town. Fred considered himself a real smoothy and played love songs for her on his banjo at the pub. Julia thought he had the “perfect profile.” Marriage, however, was over a decade in coming, largely because of Freddie’s career as a steward on ocean liners and Julia’s family’s disapproval. One day in December of 1938, as a kind of a prank to rankle Julia’s family, they posted banns at the registry office and got married. They spent the night in a movie theater in celebration, after which Julia went home to her house and Fred to his.

Two years later when John was born, Fred was off at sea. And it was off at sea he stayed. Each month Julia’s only contact with him was a visit to the shipyard office to pick up the support payments he was sending for her and infant John. The payments stopped when John was eighteen months old. After a time Julia wrote Fred off, never expecting to hear from him again. She heard a rumor he had jumped ship; no one knew what had happened to him.

Little John was five years old before his father turned up, his pockets bulging with cash, boasting of an extraordinary adventure. Freddy claimed that he hadn’t deserted ship at all but instead had gotten drunk during a stopover in New York and hadn’t made it back to his ship in time. He was arrested and marched off to a jail cell on Ellis Island, where he was eventually remanded to a Liberty Ship heading for North Africa. His fortunes hadn’t proved much better on the Liberty Ship either, where he was accused of stealing a bottle of liquor from the hold. When the ship finally docked in Africa, Freddie was thrown in jail for three months. Finally allowed to go free, he had made his long journey home, becoming involved in various wartime rackets, mainly selling black-market stockings, and he had made a killing. He reappeared in Liverpool full of easy money for his wife and child.