John Lennon: The Life (52 page)

The lyric that emerged was not boy talking to girl so much as patient to psychotherapist, or lost soul to Samaritan: “Help me if you can I’m feeling down…I’m not so self-assured…Every now and then I feel so insecure…Help me get my feet back on the ground…Won’t you please, please, help me?” These might seem astonishing admissions by the supposedly hard, cynical John Lennon, though to one perceptive American reporter they can have come as no surprise. The future feminist crusader Gloria Steinem, who interviewed him for
Cosmopolitan
magazine, recorded a telling exchange amid the melee at New York’s Riverside Motor Inn. “The tall girl leaned over to Lennon and told him that his skin was looking mottled again. ‘I know,’ he said, and looked embarrassed. ‘It’s nerves.’”

At the time, even John himself did not realize how much his “Help!” words came from the heart. “…later I knew, really, I was crying out for help,” he would recall. “The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. I was eating and drinking like a pig, and I was as fat as a pig, dissatisfied with myself, and subconsciously I was crying for help…You can see the movie: he—I—is very fat, very insecure [there are, in fact, no visible traces of either] and he’s completely lost himself. And I was singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was, but then things got more difficult…. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help. It’s real.”

Paul McCartney, who joined the composition process at an early stage, admits to having had no idea of the song’s true motivation. “There was some pessimism in John’s songs, but “Baby’s in Black”
was one we wrote together, and we liked heavy, black, bluesy songs because many of the [American] songs we liked were rooted in the blues and R&B…. It probably is true that John might have identified a little more than I did with those. To me—to both of us—they were essentially just the blues genre, which we loved, but it did transpire later that John was having a harder time with his emotions.”

In the studio, John’s solitary cri de coeur turned into another joyous Beatles A-side, its title merely emphasizing how little help they needed from anyone. A two-part lead vocal and speeded-up tempo further defused the message: while John’s impassioned top line grabbed listeners by the lapels, Paul’s buoyant countermelody reassuringly patted their heads. “The real feeling of the song was lost because it was a single,” John said later. “We did it too fast, to try to be commercial…I remember, I got very emotional at the time, singing the lyrics. Whatever I’m singing, I really mean it. I don’t mess around.” The B-side was a Paul composition, almost parodying the same SOS theme with a cheerful call-and-response chorus of “I’m down…I’m really down…Down on the ground….” Has any other million-selling double-sided disk ever been so jam-packed with depression?

The
Help!
sound track album, released in August, showed a John not influenced by Bob Dylan so much as possessed by him. The standout Lennon contribution was “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a somber ballad about rejection and alienation, couched in more “literary” language (“…head in hand, turn my face to the wall…”) than he’d ever previously tried, and played in folkie acoustic style, without overdubbing. His voice, too, had taken on a Dylanesque quality: harder and more nasal than before, its phrasing more adventurous, its tone laced with bitter irony as much as bleak self-pity.

The best-remembered
Help!
album track, however, did not feature in the film nor—amazingly—in the current British charts. This was a tune that Paul had awoken one day to find running through his head, a pensive little melody so fully formed and inevitable in its pattern that he assumed it must be some well-known air he was simply recollecting. Only after playing it to several expert arbiters, including George Martin and Alma Cogan, did he accept that it truly was his
own invention and add some lyrics, changing the rough title “Scrambled Eggs” to “Yesterday.” Since it was outside anything in the Beatles’ canon, sounding more Anglican hymn than anything, Martin decided to recorded it as a solo by Paul, replacing John, George, and Ringo with a classical string quartet. Nevertheless, it went onto the Beatles album of the moment and, according to usual practice, its composition was credited to Lennon and McCartney. Though John may have criticized Paul’s later forays into the mainstream, he did not object to this one, even praising a “bluesey note” in the cello passage.

Over the next thirty years, “Yesterday” would break the record of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as the most-recorded song of all time. Such were the musical riches pouring from John and Paul in 1965 that Parlophone didn’t bother to release it as a single.

I
n October 1964, a general election had brought the Labour Party under Harold Wilson back to office after thirteen years of Conservative rule. As prime minister, Wilson did not promise to be much fun. Although only forty-nine, the youngest British premier since Rosebery, he seemed a good ten years older with his silver hair, stern cherub face, and flat, prim Yorkshire vowels. In stark contrast to the tweedy aristos who had preceded him, he wore a rubberized Gannex raincoat, holidayed no farther abroad than the Scilly Isles, and smothered his food in proletarian HP Sauce. His aura was that of some cold, practical efficiency expert dedicated to sweeping away the complacent inertia of Toryism and creating a modern, “dynamic” and “purposive” nation, as he ringingly expressed it, “forged in the white heat of the technological revolution.”

But Wilson’s John Blunt exterior was deceptive. While in public he drank bitter beer and smoked a homely briar pipe, his private preference was for brandy and cigars. Under the seeming high-minded asceticism lay a fascination with show business glamour and an insatiable hunger for personal publicity not seen at 10 Downing Street since the days of Winston Churchill.

The true tone of the Wilson era was set on June 11, 1965, with publication of the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Though billed as
the sovereign’s personal choice, the recipients are nominated by the prime minister’s office and traditionally receive automatic Royal assent. The Beatles were each to receive the MBE: membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Those selected for any honor first receive a letter asking if they are willing to accept it (which some are not). The Beatles’ letters came in brown official envelopes, outwardly indistinguishable from banal missives like income tax demands or—until a few years previously—conscription into the army. When John’s envelope arrived, he later said, he thought he was being “called up” [for military service] and so “chucked it in with the fanmail.”

It was the first time such recognition had ever been given to anyone under the age of twenty-five, let alone to rowdy pop musicians. Although the media were generally enthusiastic (
SHE LOVES THEM YEAH YEAH YEAH!
ran one banner headline, as if it were all the Queen’s idea), many among the older generation bewailed the cheapening and vulgarization of the honors system, little guessing how much further that process still could, and would, go. Several existing MBE-holders returned their decorations in protest at being bracketed, as one put it, with “a gang of nincompoops. The four recipients themselves were at first equally dubious, unsure whether they wanted to be sucked into the Establishment quite so far. “We all met, and agreed it was daft,” John would remember. ‘What do you think?’ we all said. ‘Let’s not.’ Then it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play. We’d nothing to lose, except that part of you which said you didn’t believe in it.”

Following the success of
In His Own Write
, John had contracted with Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape to produce a sequel for publication the following year. Having now used up all his student and
Mersey Beat
material, he had to start this second book from scratch, which gave the project an unpleasant flavor of school homework. To limber up, he began reading Chaucer, Edward Lear, and his other supposed stylistic influences, even making a stab at James Joyce’s nonsense epic,
Finnegans Wake
. “It was great, and I dug it and felt as though [Joyce] was an old friend,” he reported. “But I couldn’t make it right through the book.”

Cape duly received a further batch of prose, verse, and black-and-white illustrations, mostly wrought amid the splendor of his Kenwood den. However painfully extracted, the material this time was both more ambitious and funnier, with noticeably less schoolboyish harping on physical disability or race. “The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield,” featuring the great detective “Shamrock Wolmbs,” caught the authentic tone of a Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story as well as turning “Elementary my dear Watson” into “Ellafitzgerald, my dear Whopper” and “recuperated” into “minicoopered.” “Cassandle” was a well-observed parody of the
Daily Mirror
’s columnist W. F. Connor, aka Cassandra, even down to the line drawing of Connor that headed his column. A poem, “The Wumberlog (or The Magic Dog),” evidently inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” ran to seven printed pages.

There was a topical commentary on the “General Erection,” in which “Harrassed Wilsod” had defeated “Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom” (Sir Alec Douglas-Home, pronounced “Hume”) and the “Torchies” (Torchy the Battery Boy was a children’s television character) “by a very small marjorie.” No great faith in the new prime minister was evident, despite his generosity with MBEs: “We must not forget to put the clocks back when we all get bombed, Harold….” The book was called
A Spaniard in the Works
after another of its prose offerings, the story of Barcelover-born car mechanic Jesus El Pifco (a foretaste of larger sacrilege to come). The cover picture showed John in a cape and wide-brimmed Spanish hat, somewhat resembling the trademark for Sandeman’s Port. Lest the pun in the title should not be clear enough, his right hand flourished a large spanner.

British publication was on June 24, coincidentally just after a Beatles European tour that had included shows in two Spanish bullrings. To promote the book, John made the rounds of highbrow arts programs, both radio and television, often reading extracts as well as answering questions. He admitted that
A Spaniard in the Works
had been hard work of a very different kind from touring, songwriting, and recording. “I could only loosen up to it with a bottle of Johnnie Walker…. We [the Beatles] are disciplined but we don’t feel as though we are. I don’t mind being disciplined and not realising it.”
Had he plans to try writing at greater length, say in a novel? “The Sherlock Holmes seemed like a novel to me, but it turned out to be six pages…. I couldn’t do it, you know. I get fed up. And I wrote so many characters in it, I forgot who they were.”

Help!
opened in British cinemas with a Royal charity premiere on July 29 at the London Pavilion, attended by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. John’s Aunt Mimi was also there, and later sent a report to Jane Wirgman that showed her as capable of “rattling their jewellery” as her nephew:

So you liked ‘Help’. Well I didn’t, although the Colour was very good. I went to the Premiere & it was like a mad house at the Show. I Sat immediately behind P. Margaret, & when the Beatles came in I was panic Stricken, almost anyway. The girls in top balcony yelled & leaned over the edge & only for an attendant—one of them was nearly over. Everybody, it seemed, in the film world & a lot of Stage Stars too, were selling programmes, & Some of the most outlandish dresses and hair dos—all there to be Seen, not to See the film. It was for Charity, So did good. At the dinner at the Dorchester later also Some Funny Sights, but John was in great form & our table was in an uproar and Jane Asher is really a delightful girl. One thing I’ll always remember was the Sight of a woman, 80 if she was a day, yellow wig on, low cut dress, face a mask under heavy makeup, mass of wrinkles, doing the rumba & up for every dance & whats more a good dancer. I thought at first She was a ‘Comic Turn’, & could not take my eyes off her. Ah Well, funny people these days to be Seen—and John Says I’m funny looking, So there you are.

 

Both the single and the album went straight to the top of their respective charts, the pattern being repeated in America with the same predictable double-click when the film opened there a month later. John had scarcely concluded his trip around literary London—which this time, significantly, did not include a Foyle’s lunch—when he was swept away on a second Beatles tour of North America, the last the four would make without their hearts either in their boots or their mouths.

Brian had been crafting the itinerary since the previous February, choosing just ten venues for his boys’ two-week journey, each a nationally or regionally celebrated arena or sports stadium with the highest standards in spectator comfort and security and a sound system of proven quality. The opening one, on Sunday August 15, was to be the most memorable of all: the newly opened William A. Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, home of the New York Mets baseball team.

The original plan had been for the Beatles to arrive by helicopter, touching down on the baseball diamond in front of the specially built stage. However, for safety reasons they had to land on the roof of the adjacent World’s Fair Building, then travel the remaining hundred yards inside a Wells Fargo armored truck. It was still a heart-stopping moment as they dipped low over Shea’s pristine blue, white, and orange bowl, and the capacity crowd of 55,600 roared up a greeting, mingled with skyward camera flashes like wartime anti-aircraft flak. Brian’s copromoter, Sid Bernstein, remembers a phrase John used to him, which, in the clamorous urban twilight, had an almost biblical ring: “It’s the top of the mountain, Sid…the top of the mountain.”