John Lennon: The Life (47 page)

19 April, 1964

 

Dear Jane

 

Thanks for your letter. I saw [the Beatles] on TV Saturday night & by now I gather you like John!! They are all nice, but of course John’s my boy. Didn’t he look great (and the others) with their straw hats?

No, I don’t think you are a Silly or Sentimental Ole Slob.

Remember, if you girls hadn’t liked them, well…where would they be? and they do appreciate that fact.

He has always been funny at home to, and the latest thing is that he’s been calling me—“Me Old Aunty.’ Wait till I see him. Here’s Ringo’s address…

 

The next letter from Mendips contained a surprise enclosure—a Hofner guitar string, which John had bought for his Club 40, still coiled in its packet.

Dear Jane

 

Looking through John’s old rubbish, his room was always full of things all boys seem to collect, I found this old string. It has been here for years. I think he uses more expensive ones these days, but this one belongs to his Art College days. I thought you might like it…

 

When
In His Own Write
was published, Jane sent a copy to Mimi with a request for John to autograph it. Back came the reply:

Thanks for letter, Jane.

 

John’s in Scotland at the moment. I’ll try to get the book signed, but as you know, I don’t see so much of him. Anyway, I’m glad you are happy with it. He tells me he may do another one later in the year.

By the way, he promised me one and I am patiently waiting, although I have read it, & laughed.

All the best
Mimi Smith

 

 

To set the seal on literary London’s acclaim, John was invited to be guest of honor at a Foyle’s lunch on June 18. These gatherings, sponsored by the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest bookshop,” were held at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and previously had been graced by authors such as Winston Churchill, Charles Chaplin, and Noel Coward, all of whom repaid the honor with a gracious and
witty postprandial speech. For the John Lennon event, six hundred people bought tickets and the head table was carefully planted with sympathetic-minded celebrities, among them the violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, the designer Mary Quant, the
Daily Express
cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the composer Lionel Bart, the comedian Arthur Askey, and the ex-Goon Harry Secombe, as well as John’s, and Brian’s, great friend Alma Cogan.

John initially expressed willingness to make the traditional speech, but as the day approached he became increasingly uneasy about it, even admitting “I durn’t” to a radio interviewer in his thickest fauxnaif Scouse. On the eve of the lunch, Brian telephoned Foyle’s to say that there would, after all, be no speech from John but that he, Brian, was more than happy to say a few words instead. Unfortunately, no one passed on Brian’s message to the organizers, and six hundred literati and celebs waited agog for Lennon witticisms à la Royal Variety Show. Instead, he got to his feet, mumbled, “Thank you, it’s been a pleasure,” then sat down. Once again, the media could not find it in their hearts to criticize him. Some reports helpfully reworded his mumble into a more Beatly “Thank you…you’ve got a lucky face.”

He was not the only one currently bursting into print. Earlier that year, Brian had been asked to write his autobiography by Souvenir Press, a publisher somewhat lower in prestige than Jonathan Cape. Rather than foster authorial fellow feeling in John, it inspired a put-down that even then rocked bystanders, like George Martin, back on their heels. What should he call his life story, Brian wondered aloud one day. “
Queer Jew
,” replied John without missing a beat. Its eventual title, in oblique acknowledgment to the Cavern club, was
A Cellarful of Noise
. John referred to it, if at all, as
A Cellarful of Boys
.

The second half of 1964 was to be spent mainly in satisfying the international Beatle hunger that the first half had created, with visits to Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and finally back to America. Since this time it was positively “no wives on tour,” John felt obliged to make amends to Cynthia in advance for his impending long absences. The two therefore arranged an Easter weekend break at the Dromoland Castle Hotel, a baronially
grand establishment in Ireland’s County Clare. With them went George Harrison and his new date Pattie Boyd, a pretty blonde fashion model in the John-approved Bardot mold who had played one of the schoolgirls in
A Hard Day’s Night
. Despite elaborate security, the foursome were immediately tracked down by press photographers and after only one night decided to abandon their visit and return home. To avoid the cameras, Cynthia and Patti disguised themselves as hotel maids, then were smuggled off the premises in an outsize laundry hamper.

The world-circumnavigation was planned in two phases: Europe to Australasia in June, trans-America in August. On the eve of the first phase, seeming disaster struck when Ringo was hospitalized with acute tonsillitis. Few, if any, modern bands would consider making so important a trip across the globe without their regular drummer: in this case, despite some mutterings from George, a session player named Jimmy Nicol was hired on salary, put into a Beatle suit and bangs, and sent out on half a journey of a lifetime.

In Amsterdam, the second stop, shrieking Dutch fans perched on top of high lampposts, even jumped into the canals to pursue the Beatles’ open-top launch. Europe’s most sexually liberal city after Hamburg also demonstrated how little they needed professional PR people to safeguard their wholesome public image. At the first opportunity, all four left their hotel and made a beeline for the red-light district, by repute second only to the Reeperbahn. “Just as we got there, the police rolled up,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “They literally tapped us on the shoulder and said, ‘Naughty Beatles, back to your hotel’ as if we were schoolboys. We said, ‘OK, fine.’ They took us to the hotel—then John and I went straight out again and back to the red-light district. When we came out again, it was dawn and all the people were on their way to work.”

For the Hong Kong–Australasia leg, their entourage had an extra member: Aunt Mimi. It was entirely John’s idea, as Tony Barrow recalls, born of the same impulse that had catapulted Cynthia to New York: “He wanted the people closest to him to see how important he was.” Mimi needed little persuading because the trip would allow her to visit her relations in New Zealand—the ones she might have
joined permanently but for John’s mother’s death. Aunts on tour might have been even less welcome to his companions than wives on tour. “But we all knew Mimi and how much she meant to John,” Aspinall said. “There was no problem.”

So Mimi prepared to leave Mendips for the longest time since John’s babyhood, deputing her two nephews, Michael and David, to move in during her absence and look after the garden and the cats. During her meticulous packing, she found time to write to thirteen-year-old Jane Wirgman in Surrey, returning the copy of
In His Own Write
that Jane had sent her, hoping to get it autographed by John.

I will not see him until I join him at the airport for the Australian-New Zealand tour. [The Beatles] have one night in Hong-Kong, but I have to go on. He’s afraid I may be nervous if there is a crowd there. He’s right too!

You will get the book signed by John later.

You’re very nice, too—Mimi Smith

 

The atmosphere was still nearer a Royal tour than a rock one. At Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport, the Beatles crossed the tarmac ringed by colonial police in peaked caps and shorts and later performed to an audience entirely made up of British military personnel and their families. Wherever crowds of Chinese onlookers closed in on Mimi, a path was instantly cleared for her with cries of “John Mama! John Mama!” Landing at Sydney’s Mascot Airport in an almost monsoon-strength rainstorm, they found they were scheduled to parade around the airport on a flatbed truck, with only short capes and flimsy umbrellas for protection—which, amazingly, they did. The lashing rain made all the dye run out of their capes and soak through the garments beneath so that when each undressed later, his skin was mottled royal blue.

Ringo rejoined the lineup in Melbourne, and Mimi parted company from it to visit her Stanley relatives in New Zealand. “I was bewildered by the unexpected deluge of photographers, reporters, flash-bulbs etcetera,” she would later write to Jane Wirgman. “I’m Sure the reporters thought I was a half-wit. I didn’t let anyone know
I was with them. I had left them (thankfully) in Australia & arrived alone in N.Z., expecting only the family to meet me.”

A Hard Day’s Night
received its premiere at the London Pavilion cinema on July 6, before a VIP audience including John’s Royal targets “Princess Margarine” and “Bony Armstrove,” aka Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. As he exchanged receiving-line banter with the princess, his face wore an expression only describable as Washington embassy-it-is. Nonetheless, the trendy Royals were so charmed that they could hardly be persuaded to leave the after-show party and go on to their next engagement.

The film won ecstatic reviews in the United Kingdom and, later, when it opened across America. Andrew Sarris in the
Village Voice
dubbed it “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,” though most reviewers found more obvious parallels in Mack Sennett’s silent-screen Keystone Cops and, of course, the Marx Brothers. Some months afterward, Richard Lester bumped into Groucho Marx, the brothers’ cigar-chewing wise guy—so presumably John’s counterpart—and found him less than flattered by this comparison. “At least,” he grouched, “you could tell us apart.”

On July 10, the film also had a special charity premiere in Liverpool, combined with a civic reception for its stars. Despite having carried their home city’s name into the stratosphere, all four were uneasy about this homecoming-in-state—specifically about their welcome, or lack of it, from all the fans they’d left behind. Through various channels, they’d heard they were “finished” at the Cavern club, which, for John in particular, took some of the shine even off having played Carnegie Hall. But Liverpool knows how to do crazy enthusiasm as well as cool antagonism. On their drive into town from Speke Airport, cheering crowds lined every roadside. Among the welcoming delegation was Bob Wooler, the Cavern deejay John had beaten up at Paul’s twenty-first birthday party for insinuating he’d had an affair with Brian. “Hello, Bob,” John greeted him. “Has anyone given you a black eye lately?”

At the Town Hall, the Beatles were presented with ceremonial keys to the city by the lord mayor, then made an appearance on the balcony overlooking Castle Street to wave at the multitudes below. Framed among beaming dignitaries in fur-trimmed robes and chains
of office, John could not resist adding a few Nazi-style salutes. Once again, a bit of potentially catastrophic devilment seemed to go over everyone’s heads. For Brian, in any case, that day’s main problem had nothing to do with John. Someone among the crowd was found to be circulating leaflets with a paternity claim against Paul. Working feverishly to trace and neutralize this saboteur, Brian and his PR team had no time to worry about the odd, reckless Lennon Sieg Heil.

Among the guests at the civic reception, and in the Odeon cinema audience later, were most of the extended family in which he had grown up: his Aunts Harrie and Nanny and Uncle Norman, his cousin Stanley, and his young cousins Michael and David and half sisters Julia and Jackie. “Trouble was that John had been his usual disorganised self admin-wise, and we stood around, not really knowing what was going on,” his cousin Michael says. “I remember him saying from the Odeon stage, ‘Where was my family?’” The Beatles returned to London immediately after the film, so that was all his relatives would see of him.

Mimi, however, missed the occasion. She was still in New Zealand, enjoying a reunion with her Stanley kinfolk, which eventually lasted almost all summer. “She only came home when she did because some man out there had started to show an interest in her,” Michael says. “She wasn’t having any of that.”

Waiting for her at Mendips were the usual piles of fan mail for John, of which only one, with a Kingston-on-Thames postmark, demanded a reply:

251/29 October 64

 

Dear Jane

 

I quickly recognised your writing—thousands of letters waiting here. Oh dear!

I arrived home about two weeks ago, but have since been up to Edinburgh and Glasgow to see John, as I haven’t seen him since Wellington, New Zealand.

I gather [the Beatles] are to be in pantomime Christmas time. I may go up, or sooner, to see them. However, he will be home on 8 November. I’ll see what’s what.

…You will simply love boarding school. I know—you see….

Lovely big party travelling out [on tour] with the boys, and what do you think! I sat behind the Pilot when we landed at Darwin, 2 AM, and I really think Pilots are the ‘tops’.

Enjoy the Show, what an excitable little girl you are.

love Mimi

 

 

T
raveling rock shows were, of course, nothing new in America. But the Beatles’ return there in August, to remedy the coitus interruptus of February, imposed unprecedented new demands on what had been a relatively straightforward process. The result was the first-ever rock tour as we now understand the term, a blueprint for the thousands more that were to come but also unique in its combination of excess and innocence. Five weeks later, when it was all over, even John could not summon up a snide or cynical word. “It’s been fantastic,” he told radio reporter Larry Kane. “We’ll probably never do another tour like it…it could never be the same.”