John Lennon: The Life (69 page)

Afterward, John, Cyn, Freddie, and Pauline went on to a club with Lulu and Maurice Gibb, of the Bee Gees, whom Lulu was going out with; then the four were driven home together in the psychedelic Rolls. During the journey, John fell asleep; his head slipped down into Freddie’s lap and Freddie began stroking his hair. For a few minutes, it was as if the years, with their cargo of blame and guilt, had rolled away: Steward Alf and his “Little Pal” were once again as close as when they’d run away to Blackpool together, supposedly en route for New Zealand. Then the car stopped in Kew to let Freddie and Pauline out, and the spell was broken, never to be recaptured.

F
ew films have ever received a more universally venomous initial reception than
Magical Mystery Tour
. Certainly it marked a watershed: before it, everything went right for the Beatles, creatively speaking; afterward, almost nothing did. From first to last it could be held up as a textbook example of how not to make a movie. But for modern audiences, who have grown up with pop video and the unstructured comedy style of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, it is very far from the “blatant rubbish” that one outraged 1967 reviewer called it.

The irony is that it should have been made as an antidote to
Help!
and
A Hard Day’s Night
, in which John had felt “like an extra”—for on the Magical Mystery Tour the Beatles are little more than that. The only one with lines to speak on the actual coach trip is Ringo, play
ing the nephew of the “fat lady,” Jessie Robbins. John is spasmodically visible among the other passengers, wearing a high-crowned black hat with two long feathers, which gives him somewhat the look of a Native American medicine man. The Beatles’ ensemble dialogue is limited to a studio-filmed sequence in which they appear as long-robed, conical-hatted wizards in a laboratory, looking down on the coach’s progress like deities from Olympus in a Ray Harryhausen B movie. John adds the homey touch of a coffee mug to his wizard’s outfit and speaks in a tone of surprising campness. He also provides a fragmentary voice-over commentary, a device that lends the story some cohesion and also suggests that, had he lived, his speaking voice might have become as beloved across the English-speaking world as his singing one.

The oddest touch is the inclusion of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band’s three leading lights, Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes, and “Legs” Larry Smith, all giant-size extroverts, hogging limelight that seems to have been ceded to them without a murmur. The only real Lennon moment comes where the ill-matched lovers, Buster and Jessie, go to a restaurant. John is their waiter, with slicked-back hair and a small mustache, looking much as Freddie Lennon must have done in the first-class saloons of prewar cruise ships, as he dumps mounds of spaghetti onto their plates with a shovel. The whole sequence had come to him in a dream—or a nightmare, perhaps—of ladling out flavorless stodge to an indifferent public (never mind turning into his father).

But the film is essentially a vehicle for Beatles music, which certainly reaches
Sgt. Pepper
standard and several times goes a step higher. As a serial pop video, a tour through three rapidly emerging solo talents, it has all the magic which that effortful bus trip somehow missed. There is Paul singing “The Fool on the Hill,” an almost “Yesterday”-size future standard, on a Provençal mountainside, all big brown eyes and turned-up overcoat collar. There is George, seated cross-legged in incense-heavy twilight, intoning “Blue Jay Way” as if it is a new mantra from the Maharishi rather than a street in Hollywood. There are the four Beatles in identical white tailcoats descending a curved staircase painstakingly in step—as they would
soon cease to be—for another McCartney vaudeville number, “Your Mother Should Know.” And, vindicating the whole enterprise on its own, there is John’s “I Am the Walrus.”

Like “A Day in the Life,” this runner-up for the title of his masterpiece came from two unconnected and seemingly unconnectable sources. At Kenwood one day, the distant sound of a police-car siren stoked up his anger over the recent persecutions of good friends like Mick and Keith and the boys at
International Times
. On another occasion, Pete Shotton happened to mention that at their old school, Quarry Bank, senior English students were now made to dissect and analyze the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” just as they themselves once had analyzed the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley.

The result was a string of random images, fulminating against the repressive forces of law and order, with a sideswipe at credulous souls who pored over his words as if they were Holy Writ. By the time he had finished, the lyric was almost a miniature
Oh! Calcutta!
in the number of taboos it sought to shatter. But the habit of role-playing was still a hard one to break. For his first anti-Establishment rant, John therefore chose an alter ego from his favorite poem in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice
oeuvre, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” “Later…I realised the Walrus was the bad guy in the story and the Carpenter was the good guy,” he would remember. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’ve picked the wrong guy.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it: I Am the Carpenter?”

The opening lines (“I am he / As you are he / As you are me…”) seem so quintessentially Lewis Carroll that one checks the dictionary of quotations to see if they figure alongside “Will you walk a little faster…,” “Tweedledum and Tweedledee…,” and “You are old, Father William…” Carroll is there, too, in the juxtaposition of “policemen” with “pigs” and “flying.” (One of the Walrus’s philosophical musings is “whether pigs have wings.”) A Carroll-saturated childhood is there, too, in the varying riff from “Three Blind Mice” (“see how they run”…“see how they fly”); in the memory of 1950s school food and the immemorial playground chant of everything disgusting (“Yellow-matter custard / dripping from a dead dog’s
eye.”) John’s own current lifestyle is there, too, drenched in the same contempt as everything else, from “sitting in an English garden” to “singing Hare Krishna” and even “Lucy in the sky”: no longer a riverbank goddess but an inciter of urban mayhem.

The forces of censorship are challenged with “stupid bloody Tuesday,” “pornographic priestess,” and (God save us) “you let your knickers down.” The “expert texperts,” agog for hidden meaning, get “sitting on a cornflake,” “corporation T-shirt,” “crabalocker fish-wife,” “elementary penguin,” and “semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower,” with a recurrent lapse into pure baby-talk (“Goo-goo G’Joob”) lest they be in any doubt that “the joker laughs at you.” Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the other insistent refrain through this aria of fury and derision is “I’m crying.”

George Martin provided a wonderful score of sawing, grinding, bottom-register cellos, like sarcasm made melody, in which further insults, irony, and smut were hidden below the waterline. The Mike Sammes Singers, radio’s coziest middle-of-the-road vocal group, were hired for the play-out chorus of “Oompah-oompah, stick it up your jumper!” and “Everybody’s got one!” The multilayered sound effects even included a snatch of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
lifted from a BBC Third Programme performance starring Sir John Gielgud (the scene where Oswald is fatally stabbed and cries, “Oh, untimely death!”).

It was clearly a song far beyond the powers of any four-piece rock group, so that is how the Beatles perform it in
Magical Mystery Tour
—first in their familiar stage formation, with flower-power shirts and beads replacing round-collar mohair suits; then cavorting in walrus costumes of the crudest pantomime variety. John himself ends up with his head bound in white linen like the denizen of some eighteenth-century Bedlam as his fellow inmates dance the conga behind him, linked together by what looks like an outsize surgical bandage. Pop video would never get wilder or weirder than this.

The Beatles’ 1967 Christmas single had Paul’s cheerily unverbal “Hello Goodbye” for an A-side with “I Am the Walrus” relegated to the flip. The BBC instantly banned the song from radio play, citing the “knickers” reference from the wide choice available, but still
went ahead with prime-time transmission of the film as planned. It had been shot in color, but at this time the overwhelming majority of UK television viewers still received only black and white. The effect was thus of a home movie, with all the self-indulgence as well as ineptitude that implies. Its mistakes seemed to loom larger than CinemaScope while the good things vanished into murky gray haze. During the psychedelic “Clouds” scene, for instance—one of the few well-thought-out and effective blends of magic with the everyday—the nation’s screens seemed to go completely blank.

By long tradition, there is no hard news in Britain over the Christmas holiday; the papers therefore fell on
Magical Mystery Tour
like starving wolves, and word of the Beatles’ first flop beamed across a surprised and deeply offended world. The accompanying album reflected no such disappointment, however, selling a million copies in America and five hundred thousand in Britain.

As 1968 dawned on this sour, recriminatory note, it was Freddie Lennon’s domestic situation rather than his son’s that stubbornly continued to hold center stage. Right after Christmas, momentarily dismayed by the prospect of becoming Freddie’s wife, not to mention acquiring a Beatle as a stepson, Pauline Jones returned home to her mother and made a conscientious effort to live the life expected of a nineteen-year-old. But her feelings for Freddie proved irresistible. At the end of January, she moved into his flat in Kew and soon afterward became pregnant. To keep this news out of the media as long as possible, John agreed to provide Freddie with new accommodation in a locale unknown to any Fleet Street newshound. He and Pauline were therefore resettled in a one-bedroom flat in Brighton, fifty miles to the south.

Yoko, meanwhile, had more or less decided to continue her career in Paris. Yet she found her thoughts continually turning back to John, his clumsy seduction attempt, and her dismissive response. “I kept thinking, not ‘I really fucked up’ because I didn’t know the word ‘fuck,’ but ‘I really messed up.’ Because, always being in the public eye, he couldn’t have done it any other way, we couldn’t have had a regular date. So I realised I must be falling in love with this guy.”

Among the admirers her work attracted in Paris was Ornette
Coleman, the great American saxophonist and exponent of classically influenced “free jazz.” It happened that Coleman was about to visit London to appear at the Royal Albert Hall, and he suggested that Yoko should join him onstage there. So she returned to London, resolved not to say no if John asked a second time, however he might ask it. When she tried to open the front door of her flat at Hanover Gate Mansions, it was blocked by a deluge of letters on the hall mat. All of them were from John, who had never realized she was out of the country. The single postcard she’d sent him had obviously not penetrated the protective screen. “I said to him later, ‘When you wrote me all those letters, weren’t you worried I’d run to a newspaper or something? You’re a married man.’ He said, ‘I used to write long letters like that to Stu Sutcliffe.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I’m a replacement for Stu, am I? He was a guy and I’m a woman….’ I thought that was a little bit strange.”

I
n February, the Beatles finally kept their six-month-old promise to study transcendental meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in India. The emergence of a new object of worship in John’s life during that time had not dimmed his enthusiasm for the Maharishi and determination to make the group standard-bearers for TM. “This is how we plan to use our power now—they’ve always called us leaders of youth, and we believe that this is a good way to give a lead,” he said. “The whole world will know what we mean, and all the people who are worried about youth and drugs and all that scene—all those people with the short back and sides—they can all come along and dig it, too.”

True to his word, he took everyone he could round up to meet the Maharishi, including his actor friend and playwriting partner, Victor Spinetti. To Spinetti’s surprise, the “giggling guru” lampooned by Fleet Street proved insightful, even witty. “A woman in the audience stood up and asked, ‘Tell me, your Highness, how do you teach children the process of Transcendental Meditation?’ ‘My dear lady,’ the Maharishi said, ‘They invented it.’”

Since the previous August, many other pop and show-business figures had followed the Beatles into the Maharishi’s flock. As a result,
they were to lead a virtual celebrity package-tour out to India, also including the folksinger Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and the young American film actress Mia Farrow (fresh from shooting the scary
Rosemary’s Baby
with Roman Polanski in a strange old Manhattan apartment building named the Dakota). Since the pilgrimage included wives and girlfriends, John had no choice but to take Cynthia. She had, in fact, embraced the Maharishi’s teachings as wholeheartedly as had Pattie Harrison, viewing them as a means to get John off drugs and restore some peace and stability to their marriage. What she did not know was that John had also invited Yoko to join the party under the guise of a celebrity fellow-traveler. Yoko was game enough, and even attended a preliminary briefing in London. But when John raised the idea with the others, he met such resistance that he lost his nerve and had to tell her he’d been unable to swing it.

He, George, and their wives flew to Delhi on February 15, followed by Ringo, Maureen, Paul, and Jane Asher four days later. In their absence, the Beatles’ nonmeditative public had been provided with a new single, “Lady Madonna”—an oddly Catholic note to strike at such a moment—written by Paul and borrowing the “See how they run” motif from “I Am the Walrus.” But where John had used it to evoke blind-mice panic, Paul was simply referring to a sluttish earth mother’s laddered tights.

Rishikesh is situated two hundred miles north of Delhi on the banks of the River Ganges, looking toward the snow-flecked Himalayas. A little apart from the town stood the ashram where the Beatles were scheduled to spend three months. John later remembered it as “a sort of recluse holiday camp…. It was like being up a mountain, but it was in the foothills hanging over the Ganges, with baboons stealing your breakfast and everybody flowing round in robes…. It was a nice scene. Nice and secure, and everyone was always smiling.” Living conditions, though simple, were far from Spartan: the students lived in substantial stone bungalows equipped with hot water and Western plumbing, and the all-vegetarian food—the best kind in any part of India—was appetizing and plentiful. Nor was their guru too insistent that they led lives of absolute purity. In addition to
the squads of servants with which India provides every foreign visitor, they were allowed their own personal retinue. Roadie Mal Evans lived with them at the ashram, his main job buying and cooking eggs for Ringo, whose delicate stomach could not stand spicy food. A constant stream of telephone calls and cables kept them in touch with their parallel existence as heads of the ever-growing and diversifying Apple organization. Neil Aspinall flew out and spent a week with them while another trusted aide, Tony Bramwell, was based in Delhi to receive and forward letters from home, the week’s music-trade papers (for news of “Lady Madonna”), and any significant new record releases by their rivals. Even “behind the wire,” as they soon learned, a handful of two-rupee notes bought extra home comforts, from chocolate bars and camera film to booze and hash.