John Lennon: The Life (39 page)

Now, too, came growing awareness that, as well as being bold enough to perform under their real names, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs, both for their own group and other artistes with whom they contested the charts. In addition to Billy J. Kram
er’s hit with “Do You Want to Know a Secret? the
Please Please Me
album inspired two further cover versions. Duffy Power, from the Larry Parnes stable, released a bluesy version of “I Saw Her Standing There,” and Kenny Lynch recorded “Misery,” which had originally been written for Helen Shapiro. For John, Lynch’s soulful treatment was marred by the presence of Bert Weedon, doyen of British session guitarists—even though Weedon’s “Play in a Day” tuition book had once been his bible. “I saw the Beatles up in Dick James’s office, when he was presenting them with a set of cuff links each for ‘Please Please Me,’” Lynch remembers. “John said to me ‘What’d you want to have Bert Weedon on the session for? I would have played if you’d asked me.’”

On April 8, at Liverpool’s Sefton General Hospital, Cynthia Lennon gave birth to an eight-pound boy. The delivery was a tricky one, as the umbilical cord was found to be partially wrapped around the baby’s neck. John was still on the road with Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, and did not manage to get to the hospital until a week later. By this time, local Beatles fans had received seismic intelligence of the event and were staking out the front entrance, so he had to be smuggled through a service door in disguise. Unfortunately, Cynthia had been given a room with a glass partition looking on to the main maternity ward. John’s reunion with his exhausted and still pain-racked young wife and first meeting with his newborn son thus took place before a grinning audience of patients and nurses.

The baby was named John Charles Julian, after his father, his maternal grandfather, and, indirectly, John’s mother, Julia. In fact, he was always to be known as Julian. Yet again showing supportiveness far beyond any ordinary manager, and heedless of religious complications, Brian Epstein immediately volunteered himself as godfather.

John was as entranced and excited as any other young father by the tiny edition of himself he held in his arms that day. On his visits home, he liked to have baby Julian put into his arms, fresh from the bath, smelling of milk, new blanket, and talcum powder. He also liked to boast that Julian would not be brought up to be good-mannered, like him and his cousins Mike and David, but would be “a free spirit.” However, the practicalities of parenthood had little appeal
for him. When Cynthia changed a nappy, he had to leave the room; otherwise, he warned, he would vomit.

Cyn had hoped Julian’s arrival would create more of a bond between Mimi and her during John’s absences. Alas, Mimi’s baby-caring days were now too remote for her to feel much empathy with her great-nephew—especially when he revealed a pair of lungs almost powerful enough to rattle the Royal Worcester on its shelves. To make matters still more tense, Cyn’s mother, Lilian, was home from Canada for good, and naturally wanted to spend as much time as possible with Julian and her. Mimi and Lilian had not met since their row at the Powells’ house three years earlier, and showed little more enthusiasm for each other now—but Lilian could not be denied access to Mendips and her grandson whenever she chose. Family visitors grew accustomed to finding them in the front lounge and Mimi in her first-floor bedsit, muttering about the “two fat, lazy lumps downstairs, quaffing bottles of Guinness.”

Despite all the witnesses both inside and outside Sefton General, not a word about Julian’s birth reached the ears of a single journalist, national or local. Round-the-clock monitoring by Brian and Tony Barrow ensured that John gave nothing away. And, once back on the road with Paul, George, and Ringo, he seemed to
Boyfriend
magazine’s Maureen O’Grady as much “a free agent” as ever.

On April 21, the Beatles appeared as a special attraction in the
New Musical Express
’s annual poll-winners’ concert at Wembley Empire Pool, for the first time actually sharing a stage with John’s particular bêtes-noires, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Before starting their third all-Britain tour in four months, there was time for a short holiday. Paul and George went to stay with their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann at his family’s vacation home in Tenerife. And John provoked amazement—and speculation that continues to this day—by going off to Spain alone with Brian Epstein.

Their ten-day trip has passed into legend as the point when Brian finally came clean about his alleged homosexual passion for John—and when John may fleetingly have reciprocated it. Whether or not one accepts that interpretation, the whole episode was bizarre in the extreme. Whatever Brian’s private feelings, it was an inexplicable step out of his normally shy and decorous character, especially at a
moment when John’s first duty was so obviously to Cynthia and their newborn son—Brian’s godchild. And John himself clearly needed little persuading, despite the furor it was bound to cause. “Cynthia [had had] a baby and the holiday was planned, but I wasn’t going to break the holiday for a baby,” he would recall. “I just thought what a bastard I was, and went.”

But some believe he had a quite different agenda—notably Bill Harry,
Mersey Beat
’s founder-editor, who knew both John and Brian well at this time. According to Harry, Brian felt that to maximize the Beatles’ teen appeal, Paul would have to be given the greater prominence onstage. “He wanted to change them from John’s group into Paul’s group. So he took John away to Spain so that they could have some privacy while he explained the whole thing to him.” Paul McCartney, too, has come to believe the holiday had a political rather than sexual motive, but one dictated more by John than Brian. “John was a smart cookie. Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress on Mr. Epstein who was boss of the group…. He wanted Brian to know whom he should listen to.”

John himself, while admitting to “a pretty intense relationship” with Brian during the ten days, claimed on the record to have been no more than a fascinated observer of his manager’s very different lifestyle under the forgiving Spanish sun. “I watched Brian picking up boys, and liked playing it a bit faggy. We used to sit in a cafe in Torremolinos looking at all the boys, and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one? Do you like this one?’ I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time, ‘I am experiencing this….’” One day, they unexpectedly ran into some visitants from a rather more wholesome summer holiday—Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who were making a record in nearby Sitges. “I turned around in a restaurant and saw Brian and John at a table on their own,” Richard remembers. “We had no idea what they were doing there.”

John later allegedly told his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton that Brian had made advances to him and that, out of a mixture of curiosity and pity, he had briefly responded. It was, in fact, not the first time he’d made such a claim, even though the young men who for years had shared rooms and even beds with him—not to mention the young women who had done likewise—all felt sure there was
not a gay molecule in his whole body. Often it was done merely to shock, as with Horst Fascher back in April 1962, when Brian had personally delivered the Beatles to Hamburg to open the Star-Club. “I heard there was an English guy drunk in the next-door bar, who I first thought must be a musician,” Fascher remembers. “But when I go in there, I find Brian Epstein sitting up at the bar, passed out cold with his head on the counter. So I go back into the Star-Club and tell John to come and help me get him out of there. When John comes into the place, he just picks up a half-empty glass of beer from the counter, pulls back Brian’s collar and pours the beer down his neck. I asked him if that was any way to be treating the Beatles’ new manager. ‘It’s OK,’ John said to me. ‘I already gave him one up the ass.’”

Brian himself seems to have given his version of the episode to one person only. This was his close friend Peter Brown, then manager of NEMS’s Charlotte Street record store, later a crucial figure in the Beatles’ retinue. Four decades later, Brown prefers still to maintain discreet silence, beyond the general observation that “Brian had a tendency to prefer oral sex.” He disputes, however, that John accompanied Brian to Spain for political motives, to maintain his ascendancy within the Beatles. “It had nothing to do with advancement of career. John knew that he already had Brian as an ally; he knew that Brian liked him, was attracted to him and stimulated by his intellect. Anyway, I don’t believe John was that manipulative. And the idea of going along with it, and trying to take advantage of it, just wouldn’t have been Brian’s way.”

Years later, John finally came clean about what had happened: not to anyone who’d been around at the time, but to the unshockable woman with whom he shared the last decade of his life. He said that one night during the trip, Brian had cast aside shyness and scruples and finally come on to him, but that he’d replied, “If you feel like that, go out and find a hustler.” Afterward, he had deliberately fed Pete Shotton the myth of his brief surrender, so that everyone would believe his power over Brian to be absolute.

On May 11, the
Please Please Me
album reached number one in
Record Retailer
magazine’s chart, where it was destined to stay for virtually the rest of the year. A week later, the Beatles set off on yet
another UK package tour with an imported American star as its theoretical headliner. The names originally mooted for this increasingly thankless task had included Duane (“Mister Twangy Guitar”) Eddy, the Four Seasons, and—a particular idol of John’s—Ben E. King, the Drifters’ former lead singer. In the end, it was Roy Orbison, the Texan singer-songwriter whose suboperatic ballads had inspired John to write “Please Please Me.” Even Orbison’s giant voice, however, could not hold the audiences hungry for Beatles. After a few days, they were given his place at the top of the bill, an affront he took like a perfect gentleman. “You can’t measure success,” John would later reflect, “but…the moment I knew [Paul and I] were successful was when Roy Orbison asked if he could record two of our songs.”

June saw the start of
Pop Go the Beatles
, a weekly radio show on the BBC Light Programme, transmitted live on Tuesdays at 5:00 p.m., the time-honored slot for
Children’s Hour
. Its theme song, performed by the Beatles themselves, was a burlesque version of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Between numbers came some crunching verbal collisions between John and a hapless announcer named the Lee Peters, known behind his back as “Pee Litres.”

ANNOUNCER
: Something you may not know is that the boys are responsible for their own arrangements. Tell me, John, how did you get on to this next one?

JOHN
(
in comically thick Liverpudlian-Irish
): Well, ye just git yer gitar and strrroom it like…ye know Mister…rrrock and rrroll loike…

ANNOUNCER
: John, what’s your secret?

JOHN
(
in stage whisper
): We’ve got the box, Harry.

ANNOUNCER
(
baffled
): Well, Harry, I hope you’re very happy with the box. And now, in case I get “boxed in,” here’s a request from…

 

On the June 6 program, John led a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” for Paul McCartney’s twenty-first, twelve days later. To accommodate both Paul’s friends and his large extended family, and also
escape fans lying in wait on the doorstep, the party was not held at 20 Forthlin Road but in a pavilion in his Auntie Jin’s back garden in Huyton. Among the guests were his new actress girlfriend, Jane Asher, fellow Merseybeat stars Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, the Cavern club’s deejay Bob Wooler, and two of the Shadows, Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, who were appearing in a summer show in Blackpool.

During the evening, Bob Wooler came up to John and made a teasing reference to his and Brian’s recent Spanish “honeymoon.” John reacted with an unthinking fury he had seldom shown even in Hamburg, punching Wooler repeatedly around the face and body. Alcohol undoubtedly took Wooler’s gift for the mot juste a step too far. But it was still an extraordinary assault on one of the Beatles’ greatest allies, as well as on an older and much weaker man.

John later claimed to have been “out of my mind with drink…Bob was saying ‘Come on, John. Tell me about you and Brian—we all know….’ You know when you’re twenty-one, you want to be a man. If someone said it now I wouldn’t give a shit, but I was beating the shit out of him…and for the first time I thought ‘I can kill this guy.’ I just saw it like on a screen: if I hit him once more that’s going to be it.”

Paul’s twenty-first had been ruined—and the Beatles’ future might well have been also. The area in which Fleet Street did cover pop music was that of antisocial behavior. Every national paper would leap on the story of a hit-parader who at one moment played “Pop Goes the Weasel” in the BBC’s
Children’s Hour
slot and at the next beat up deejays in drunken frenzies. No one realized the possible disastrous consequences more clearly than did John himself. “I was [feeling] so bad the next day,” he remembered. “We had a BBC appointment in London…and I wouldn’t come. Brian was pleading with me to go and I was saying, ‘I’m not….’ I was so afraid of nearly killing Wooler.”

Wooler, who had suffered bruised ribs and a black eye, was dissuaded from suing for assault by an ex gratia payment of £200 and a contrite telegram sent by Brian in John’s name:
REALLY SORRY BOB TERRIBLY WORRIED TO REALISE WHAT I HAD DONE STOP WHAT MORE CAN
I SAY?
The attack had far greater psychological effect on a shy, vulnerable character into whose life John and the others had brought the only genuinely bright spot. To the end of his life, he would never quite get over it.