John Lennon: The Life (42 page)

The closely guarded secret of John’s new London address did not last long. Within only days of his arrival in Emperor’s Gate, a permanent picket of girls had formed outside the Grecian portico of number 13. No matter what time John and Cynthia went out or came home, the same chorus of squeals and thicket of autograph books would be there to greet them. Downstairs, the house’s only other tenants, Bob and Sonny Freeman, acted as unwilling concierges, answering dozens of rings on the doorbell each day or expelling unauthorized intruders from the communal hallway. Unfortunately for Sonny, she had blonde hair similar to Cynthia’s and a small son, Dean, who was the same age as Julian. Often when she took Dean into nearby Hyde Park, she would find herself followed and Dean’s stroller mobbed in mistake for that of the Beatle baby.

In these days, celebrities were not dogged night and day by scandal-ranking press columnists and paparazzi even in London, never mind outside. As the virtually open affair with Alma Cogan demonstrated, John could philander as much as he liked, secure in the knowledge that it would never get back to Cyn. On the road, his conquests included Maureen Kennedy, lead singer with the Vernons Girls, a sexy song-and-dance troupe originally formed by Vernons Football Pools in Liverpool. “While John was onstage, Mo would make me stand in the wings and hold her hand while she watched him,” fellow Vernons
Girl Frances Lea remembers. “When he sang “This Boy” in that slow, smoochy way, her nails used to dig into my palm until it hurt.”

On a tour of the Channel Isles, just before Beatlemania broke in earnest, he ran into an interesting old acquaintance, the poet and erstwhile paperback writer Royston Ellis. According to Ellis, he, John, and a female third party ended up bed together for a sexual romp featuring black oilskins and polythene bags, so planting the seed—as it were—of a song destined to emerge five years later. More prosaically, the poet offered a remedy for an infestation of crab lice John had picked up in the unhygienic toilets of theater backstages and cheap hotels.

Not all his amours were so tactfully far-flung. He also began a casual affair with Sonny Freeman, which Cynthia never suspected even though they were all living in the same house—one that would remain secret even after Sonny’s Norwegian connection and her wood-paneled flat had been transmogrified into a classic Beatles track.

T
hose whom Fate decides to make rich and famous discover sooner or later it is not the storybook happy ending they had always thought but merely a threshold to unimagined new problems, pressures, and dissatisfactions. And for John, once he had all the recognition he could ever seek, all the sex he could ever desire, all the expensive food and drink he could ever consume, all the shiny new guitars he could ever play, and all the many-colored, vari-collared shirts he could ever wear, the promised land was quicker than usual to reveal its drawbacks.

Being greeted by wilder acclaim than any other musical performer in history every time he stepped onstage might appear the ultimate artistic satisfaction. Initially, as any other twenty-three-year-old would, John found the mayhem of Beatles concerts exhilarating and the antics of the fans hilarious. But after a while, the sheer mindlessness of it all—the moronic perverseness of people claiming to love his music, lining up for hours to hear it, then drowning it in shrieks—turned his amusement to bafflement, frustration, and finally anger. It so happened that, for the very first time since he took
the stage at the Woolton fete, he was seeing his audience without the help of glasses. Back in April, on the Roy Orbison tour, an Orbison band member named Bobby Goldsboro (later a successful singer-songwriter) had introduced him to the modern ophthalmic marvel of contact lenses.

Though he mostly kept up his blank marble-effigy look, there were moments when he showed his opinion of his fans’ intelligence level in the way his former Quarry Bank classmates and fellow art students knew so well. Amazingly, no one among the thousands present was offended, indeed no one even seemed to notice when, in place of the regulation bow, he responded with a toothless village-idiot leer, stomping one leg on the stage as if it were malformed and clapping his hands with both sets of fingers curled into “spassie” claws.

Backstage, too, there were ordeals that had never existed when the Beatles were straightforward teenage idols. The most wearisome part of every show for John was the procession of local dignitaries and VIPs Brian would usher into the dressing room beforehand or afterward. No matter how overbearing, condescending, or plain ridiculous their behavior, he always had to be Beatlishly charming and polite. “It was awful—all that business was awful,” he would remember. “One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent…. I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee; it just happens bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand; the people you hated when you were ten.”

The Royal Variety Show, seemingly the Beatles’ highest point to date, was for John the most distasteful bout of knuckling under yet forced on him. His perfectly pitched “rattle-yer-jewellery” line to the assembled Royals and bigwigs, in his own mind, represented only cowardice and compromise. “I was fantastically nervous,” he would recall, “but I wanted to rebel a bit and that was the best I could do.” In fact, he had been tormenting Brian with a threat to say “rattle yer fuckin’ jewellery.” On the old video recording, as the delighted applause ripples out, you see him almost pull one of his “spassie” faces,
then obviously think better of it. Significantly, although the Beatles were approached every subsequent year until almost the decade’s end, they never appeared in another Royal Variety Show.

For the most part, as their former press officer Tony Barrow recalls, John gritted his teeth and did whatever PR stuff was necessary, putting the good of the group as a whole before his own feelings. The good nature and impulsive kindliness of which he was capable could sometimes rescue the dodgiest PR stunt, as when
Boyfriend
magazine’s readers were offered a “date” with the Beatles as a competition prize. It was meant to be at a secret rendezvous, the Old Vienna restaurant in Bond Street, but inevitably the word got out and the place was besieged by screaming fans. “John turned up very late, with soaking wet hair and obviously in a foul mood,”
Boyfriend
’s Maureen O’Grady remembers. “But once he saw the rather scared little girls who were supposed to have ‘won’ him, he couldn’t have been nicer.”

As always, the danger-zone loomed when he had one too many of the exotic new drinks, the fine wines, vintage Cognacs, Scottish malts, and Russian vodkas pressed on him everywhere he went. As always, just one or two hits turned friendly, kindly, generally reasonable John into moody, bellicose, and cruel John, oblivious of how much noise he made, whom he insulted, or how innocent and defenseless might be the victim of his cat-o’-nine-tails tongue. “When we came home late at night, there was always a girl waiting for John who was a bit disabled,” Sonny Freeman remembers. “If he was drunk, he’d just tell her to piss off. I’d say, ‘John, be nice. You could at least give her an autograph.’ He’d say, ‘But I’ve given her twenty-five already.’”

There was also the thoughtlessly malicious John that the Australian entertainer Rolf Harris encountered as emcee of the first Beatles Christmas Show. “Before they came on, I did my Australian routine, telling the audience different Aussie words and explaining what they meant,” Harris remembers. “One night while I was on, John was standing in the wings, and had somehow got hold of a live mike. With everything I said, his voice would come booming over the PA: ‘Is that right, Rolf?…Are you sure about that, Rolf?’ It fair knocked
me through a loop. As soon as I came off, the Beatles went on, so I had to wait to the end of their show to have it out with John but I was still so mad, I was spitting chips. I said, ‘Look, if you want to fuck up your own act, that’s your prerogative, but don’t fuck up mine.’ John just turned on the charm: ‘Ooh, look…Rolfie’s lost his rag….’ Being angry with him was like trying to punch away a raincloud.”

If the pressures on John were colossal and unremitting, no newly minted young megastar could have had—and none since has had—a better support structure. Brian was not only unique as a manager in integrity, conscientiousness, imagination, and good taste; he also collected around him people for whom running Britain’s biggest-ever musical money-spinner was not a business (as their uniformly modest salaries proved) but a vocation.

The prime example was their record producer, George Martin, by a long way the greatest altruist and—other than Brian—the most all-round gentleman in pop music history. From his initial position of absolute power at Abbey Road Studios, there were any number of ways in which Martin could have exploited the Beatles. Other producers with far less input into the music would have claimed a share of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting credit and thus a third of the royalties, or sneaked B-sides written by themselves onto the reverse of each chart-busting A-side, or (with Brian’s other main Liverpool acts also on board) sought personal glory for having invented the Mersey Sound. Instead, Martin remained a background figure who selflessly devoted his musical skills to nurturing and developing John and Paul’s unschooled talent, pruning and shaping the rough material they brought him, translating their ideas into reality, turning the precious ore into perfectly cut diamonds.

In contrast with the huge retinues of modern bands, the Beatles traveled with just two roadies—then more formally known as road managers. The loyal, overburdened Neil Aspinall had now been joined in the task by Mal Evans, a Liverpool Post Office engineer and part-time bouncer at the Cavern club. Between them “Nell” and gentle giant Mal took care of everything a small army would nowadays be deployed to do in getting the Beatles to gigs, through the crowds, and on and off stage: they drove the vans, humped
the equipment, liaised with house managements, supervised security, checked the (rudimentary) sound and lighting, set the stages, brought in food, drink, and whatever else their charges required, and, most crucially, policed the backstage areas and dressing rooms. Friends but not equals, servitors but never servile, Neil and Mal would stay with the Beatles as long as there was any kind of road to be managed; they were the little bit of down-to-earth Liverpool the four carried with them to inconceivable summits, trusties where no one else could be trusted, a breath of sanity and normality even where the madness seemed most overwhelming.

But the most vital defensive resource they had was their own friendship. Whereas extreme fame tends to blow rock bands apart, it only welded the Beatles more tightly together. There were disagreements, even fights, but, at this stage, no politics; as with D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, or William, Ginger, Henry, and Douglas, it was “all for one and one for all.” Eyewitnesses recall moments when they would close ranks against some overintrusive journalist or guest VIP, all with never an impolite word spoken or a slackening of their friendly, charming Beatleness. A signal would be sent to one of the road managers—usually blunt-spoken Neil—and the offender would be shown the door with all four moptops seemingly mortified to see him go.

After years of sharing bedrooms—and often beds—they had the innocent physical intimacy of puppies sprawled over each other in a basket. Paul McCartney recalls how on one nighttime van journey northward in freezing fog, with Mal Evans at the wheel, a stone shattered the windscreen. Mal simply punched a hole through the broken glass and pressed on at about three miles per hour through the fog with only the curb to guide him. The sole defense the four Beatles had against the resultant icy wind was a bottle of whiskey. Finally, the cold became so bad that they lay on top of each other in a vertical pile, warming themselves with their own collective body heat. When the one on top was nearly frozen, he would change places with somebody lower in the pile.

When the four performed badly onstage or in the recording studio, rather than recriminate against one another, they would turn on
their roadies, blaming some, usually nonexistent, fault in the lighting, sound, or equipment. “That was what I called Road Manager’s Syndrome,” Neil Aspinall said. “Soaking up the aggravation and not answering back was part of our job.” New to the business as Mal was, he committed some serious blunders, including losing John’s precious Gibson Jumbo acoustic guitar at Finsbury Park Astoria. “An outsider watching John sometimes mightn’t have thought he was the most likeable person,” Aspinall conceded. “But I’d say to them, ‘Could you get up on a stage and do what he did?’ And if he blew up over something, he’d always apologise. It might take him two years, but he’d do it.”

As Beatlemania grew, another kind of backstage duty became increasingly common. Audiences generally included groups from local children’s hospitals and institutions, many of them severely disabled, who would be placed in the front rows directly in the Beatles’ sight line. Often, too, they would be expected to meet and greet teenagers or children in wheelchairs who heartbreakingly incarnated John’s “spassie” act. “No one used to ask if it was all right beforehand,” Neil remembered. “When we got to the theatre, the dressing room would be full of wheelchairs.” It was perhaps not too great a price to pay for their own abundant health and wealth—though their fellow NEMS artiste Cilla Black recalls one occasion, at least, when their good nature was abused in the most cynical way. “At the Christmas Show, I saw people using children in wheelchairs just as a trick to get in to see them.”

Aghast at becoming some peripatetic Lourdes shrine, the other three sought refuge in John’s unrepentant mockery and mimicry of “cripples.” The word became code for anybody who outstayed their welcome: one of the Beatles had only to say “Cripples, Neil” for the dressing room to be cleared forthwith.