John Lennon: The Life (58 page)

One might have thought national self-esteem could rise no higher,
yet it did. On July 30, at Wembley Stadium, England beat West Germany in the final of the soccer World Cup, proving World War II had not been a fluke after all. The final grace note in this sun-soaked symphony should have been the Beatles’ departure on yet another bonanza American tour just over a week later. Instead, without warning, the heavens opened.

Back in March, the
London Evening Standard
had published yet another series of articles by Maureen Cleave, the Beatles’ most trusted chronicler. Cleave’s theme was that they had now risen above all competition and changes in fickle teenage taste to “a secure life at the top” otherwise enjoyed only by the Queen. Thanks to her equally good relationship with Brian, she was granted instant access to each Beatle in turn, with none of the time rationing or PR supervision that would be imposed on modern interviewers. Paul McCartney came to her London flat and sang “Eleanor Rigby” to her; George and Ringo were equally accessible, friendly, and frank. John she saw during one of his spells of domesticity in Weybridge.

The article, headlined “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This,” ran in the
Evening Standard
of March 4. Cleave reported John to be still uncannily like portraits of King Henry VIII, “arrogant as an eagle…unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, charming and quick-witted.” He had given her a guided tour of his toy-crammed mansion, with three-year-old Julian at their heels, on the way, letting drop a remark with dire implications for the Beatles’ “stable life at the top,” never mind for his wife and son. “I’m just stopping [here] like a bus-stop…. I’ll get my real house when I know what I want…. You see, there’s something else I’m going to do—only I don’t know what it is. All I know is this isn’t it for me.”

Framed in a paragraph about his seeming lack of any self-doubt was this fateful quote: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

The observation did not come out of nowhere, as it seems to in the story. Later, Cleave mentions the eclectic range of John’s literary taste, citing titles such as
Forty-one Years in India
by Field Marshal Lord Roberts and
Curiosities of Natural History
by Francis T. Buckland (though not
The Psychedelic Experience
). She also says he has been reading “extensively about religion,” without mentioning exactly what. He had, in fact, been deeply absorbed in Hugh J. Schonfield’s
Passover Plot
, a nonfiction book currently topping the bestsellers. Schonfield, a leading biblical scholar, advanced the controversial thesis that Jesus was a mortal man who planned his miracles to fulfill Old Testament prophecies, and faked his own crucifixion, using his disciples as unwitting accomplices—hence John’s perception of them as “thick.” The idea of Timothy Leary and Buddha as harbingers of a brand-new faith, whose holy communion was dispensed on sugar lumps, also must have colored his attitude.

It should further be pointed out, with no disrespect to Maureen Cleave, that those notorious words may not have been exactly what John said. Even the most articulate interviewees can ramble or lapse into non sequitur, and reporters often paraphrase or conflate quotes without damaging their essential accuracy. Cleave had not been looking for sensationalism, and at the time thought no more about the statement than “it was just John being John.” The fact was that her conversations with him had produced far more obviously explosive material, much of it impossible to print in the
Evening Standard
or any other paper, then or since. Once, for instance, he had talked about his mother, Julia, how he still missed her and how beautiful she had been. Seemingly in all seriousness, he added that before she disappeared from his teenage life, he only wished he’d taken the opportunity to have sex with her.

“Christianity” to British readers overwhelmingly meant the Church of England, an institution that, in the dawning new consciousness of 1966, fewer and fewer people took with any seriousness. Anglican cathedrals and churches might be cherished in the national heritage, but Anglican worship and Anglican clergy were the butt of every contemporary satirist from Alan Bennett to Peter Sellers (who, not long before, had recorded a cover version of “Help!” in
the persona of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsay). That, in pure box-office terms, the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” was clear at underattended C of E services every Sunday of the year, as it also was in the church’s rather desperate efforts to liven up the proceedings with pop rhythms and guitars. Polemicists were constantly making the very same point, in pulpits ranging from the
Daily Mail
to the
Church Times
.

So unremarkable was John’s viewpoint in British eyes that the
Evening Standard
subeditors did not headline it nor even highlight it in the layout. And, ready and waiting though the national media were to jump on anything a Beatle said, no news bulletin picked up on it, no mass-circulation editorialist commented on it, no popular columnist even seemed to notice it. The single note of dissent—and that a very mild one—came from John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham, writing in the
Guardian
. Cleave’s article was later syndicated to various overseas publications (including the
New York Times
) and again produced no reaction.

Not until four months had passed did the backlash finally hit. An American teenage magazine called
Datebook
resurrected the Cleave interview for a spread in which John was to feature, entitled “The Ten Adults You Dig/Hate.” His comments on the Beatles’ and Jesus’s comparative drawing power appeared in isolation, with one sentence lifted out as a cover line: “I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” The spread appeared in
Datebook
’s August issue, which reached newsstands in mid-July, three weeks before the start of the Beatles’ tour.

In cynical, agnostic Britain, buried in a paper unavailable outside Greater London, the words had barely raised an eyebrow. In God-fearing America, blazoned across the front of a magazine nationally available to young people, their effect was very different. Within hours of
Datebook
going on sale, the Associated Press reported that radio station WAQY in Birmingham, Alabama, the very heart of the Southern Bible Belt, had announced a ban on Beatles records forthwith. Radio stations serving devout communities in Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Utah, and New York instantly followed WAQY’s lead—although no New York City deejay joined the ban and station WSAC in
Fort Knox, Kentucky, which had not previously played the Beatles, now began to do so “to show our contempt for hypocrisy personified.” The more showmanlike and publicity-hungry of the banning brigade smashed the actual disks on air, sponsored disposal bins in public places, labeled
PLACE BEATLES TRASH HERE
, even built bonfires or provided wood chippers so that listeners could personally consign their fallen angels’ singles and albums to purgatory or pulp. Churches, chapels, temples, and tabernacles across the land joined in as with one voice, calling down hellfire on the Beatles’ heads and any of their flock who now bought Beatle music or attended Beatle shows with instant excommunication.

From there, the uproar ricocheted throughout Christendom. Racially segregated South Africa briefly enjoyed a feeling of moral superiority when its national broadcasting service joined in the Beatles music ban. Stations in Holland and Spain did likewise on behalf of Protestants and Catholics respectively; there was even condemnation from the Pope via the Vatican newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano
, which commented that “some things may not be dealt with profanely even in the world of beatniks.” Bounced back to Britain from all these foreign parts, the once-overlooked quotes became a subject for feverish debate in the press and on television, with John receiving almost unanimous criticism, if not quite for sacrilege, then for vainglory, naïveté, and astounding bad timing. Never before—not when Elvis Presley’s pumping crotch outraged the mid-fifties, nor when Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin, nor even when Chuck Berry went to jail—had a pop star been so publicly and relentlessly put on the rack.

From Brian Epstein the crisis called forth all the diplomatic skills that had somehow failed him in Manila. Impressively, no attempt was made to blame Maureen Cleave by claiming she had misquoted John or used remarks meant to have been off the record. Instead, Brian quietly contacted Cleave and asked her to make no comment on the matter from here on. Such was her respect for him and John—and her shock and bewilderment at what was happening—that she agreed. It’s hard to imagine any modern pop writer at the center of a world sensation backing away from the limelight so readily.

Brian’s first idea was that John should tape a statement to be played
on U.S. radio and TV, apologizing for the offense that had been caused. But in the event, it was Brian himself who made the statement at a press conference at New York’s Americana Hotel, using techniques of projection and timing learned long ago at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. No communiqué from a political summit could have been more measured or dignified, as the young Jewish manager strove to put the Christian hue and cry into proportion. John, said Brian, was “deeply interested in religion,” but his views on the subject had been “misrepresented entirely out of context…. What he said and meant was that he was astonished that in the last fifty years the Church of England, and therefore Christ, had suffered a decline in interest. He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be, to him, a more immediate one upon certain of the younger generation.”

Though clearly a question mark the size of a mushroom cloud now hung over the Beatles’ American tour, they flew out of Britain on August 11 to begin it in Chicago, as planned. Six days earlier,
Revolver
had had its British release, with “Eleanor Rigby”/“Yellow Submarine” as its accompanying single. For now, the brilliance of the music took second place to this far more burning question.

Before leaving, John gave a brief television interview, with Paul McCartney beside him in the very obvious role of verbal minder. Was he worried by what might be waiting for him across the Atlantic? “It worries me,” he replied, unusually casting around for the blandest words possible. “But I hope it’ll be all right in the end, as they say.” Paul then stepped in, at his most smilingly emollient, insisting, “It’ll be fine.” Later, John would tell a reporter in America he had been “scared stiff” by the chorus of damnation, and had at first wanted to pull out of the tour. “I thought they’d kill me, because they take things so seriously here. I mean, they shoot you and then they realise it wasn’t that important. So I didn’t want to go, but Brian and Paul and the other Beatles persuaded me.”

When the four reached Chicago, it was obvious that Brian’s statement had not nearly quelled the outcry and that something would have to come from John personally. Their itinerary was to take them
through several of the states where divine retribution was being called down on their heads and their music cast onto heretics’ pyres. The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, an organization normally dedicated to murdering and terrorizing black people, had appointed itself the avenger of outraged Christianity throughout the South. There was a real possibility of some attack on John, or the group as a whole. If the situation did not improve, Brian told associates, he would call off the tour here and now.

A meeting took place among John, Brian, and the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow, in Brian’s suite at the Astor Towers Hotel. Remembering John’s defiance after the Bob Wooler–bashing episode four years earlier, Barrow might have expected him to dig his heels in and refuse to take back a single word. Instead, he was distraught to think he might have ruined the tour, and desperate to make any amends he could. “He actually put his head in his hands and sobbed. He was saying ‘I’ll do anything…whatever you say. How am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I’ve said?’”

Later, supported by his fellow Beatles, he faced the media assembled like some latter-day Spanish Inquisition in Barrow’s suite a couple of floors below. With the stress of the situation, his face seemed to have become thinner, the contours of his nose sharper, his Beatle cut somehow alien, like a borrowed hat. Other stars in such a situation would have read from a brief statement, answered a couple of questions, and left as quickly as possible. John, however, stayed on the firing line until everyone who wished to had taken a shot at him. His replies turned into an extended monologue, which soon went far beyond what he had been coached to say, and, on the whole, hit as many right buttons as his original quote had wrong ones: “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ or anti-religion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we were greater or better…not comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever…I happened to be talking to a friend and I used the word ‘Beatles’ as a remote thing—‘Beatles’ like other people see us. I said they are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus, and I said it in that way, which was the wrong way, yap yap….”

Now and again, the Star Chamber dissolved into laughter as touches of the old free-range John showed through. “If I’d said, ‘Television is more popular than Jesus,’ I might have got away with it,” he remarked at one point, an observation both witty and true. “…My views are from what I’ve read or observed of Christianity, and what it was, and what it has been and what it could be. I’m just saying it seems to be shrinking and losing context…. People think I’m anti-religion, but I’m not. I’m a most religious fellow…” The media wanted ritual penance, and this was made with a sincerity that could not be doubted: “I’m sorry I opened my mouth.”