The Love You Make (3 page)

It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when Cynthia Lennon and her traveling companions had arrived at Kenwood, the £70,000 mock-Tudor mansion that John had purchased four years before in Weybridge, the “stockbrokers” suburb some forty minutes west of London. Cynthia had been on a short holiday with Jenny Boyd, whose sister Pattie was married to George Harrison, and one of John’s best cronies, the “electronics wizard” called Magic Alex. When the three of them arrived in a taxi from the airport, the front gates were unlatched, the porch lights were on, and there was no need for Cynthia to use her magnetically coded identification card to open the front door.

Inside the high-beamed entrance foyer, the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Cynthia and her friends paused for a moment to listen. The house was oddly quiet. There was no sign of Julian, her five-year-old son; or of Mrs. Jarlett, their loyal housekeeper; or of John himself. Cynthia went to the foot of the broad, mahogany staircase that led up to the bedroom and studio levels and called out, “Hello? Where are you? Is anybody home?” But there was only silence. Shrugging her shoulders at Jenny and Magic Alex, she turned to the left and went down four steps into a vast, beamed rectangular living room. It was not the living room of a reigning pop star but the lounge of a tasteful yet prissy stockbroker. The floors were covered in thick black wool carpeting, set off by two eighteen-foot lime green sofas and two matching club chairs. The sofas faced each other across a coffee table cut from a thick slab of Italian marble, polished like a giant slice of glazed cheesecake. The open hearth, carved of oak and marble, was tall enough for a man to stand in. Around the perimeter of the room the rich oak wainscotting had been sinfully covered in an extravagant silk yellow and lime check pattern that matched the drapes on the French windows overlooking the garden. Everywhere, on every shelf and table, were little antique
chachka.
These had been purchased by Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, who lived nearby and often stayed with her daughter and son-in-law. John disliked his mother-in-law so much he would give her £100 every day and send her off on afternoon antique-hunting trips to get rid of her.

Still, for all the careful attention, the room looked as cold as a furniture showroom; since it had been decorated, Cynthia and John had never entertained in it much less sat in it. Instead, they spent most of their time at the back of the house in a small, cozy sunroom, which is where she went to look for him next. The sunroom was a bright, pretty room, with large windows that overlooked tiers of landscaped brick terraces leading down to a swimming pool. The pool itself had a giant green mosaic eye inlaid in the bottom that stared back aqueously at the house. The sunroom was a clutter of furniture and pop-star artifacts. Across one wall was a white shelving and cabinet unit, which contained a jumble of stereo equipment, magazines, and books on spiritualism and art. Across one of the cabinet doors John had stuck an advertising sticker that said “Milk Is Good.” On the top shelf was a set of black light boxes, twinkling silently, while on a table in the corner a green lava lamp slowly undulated. On the walls were displayed framed posters and caricatures of John, mostly promotional pieces for the two books and one play he had written, but pointedly no gold records. There was also a curved wicker sofa with brown cushions. This impractical sofa was much too short for John to stretch out on comfortably, but it was upon this sofa that he usually could be found, curled up with a book or magazine. But not today.

“John? Are you here?” Cynthia called from the empty sunroom. She thought she heard something in the kitchen, like a muffled laugh. Apprehensively, she went through a large, paneled oak door to see what it was.

John, in his dressing gown, stood facing her, holding a steaming cup of tea in his left hand and a lighted Lark cigarette in his right. Yoko Ono was sitting at the kitchen table, her back to the door. She didn’t bother to turn around, but Cynthia recognized her by the voluminous columns of black hair that fell to her shoulders. The white, modern, multileveled kitchen was strewn with dirty dishes and half-eaten meals, as if the housekeeper hadn’t been let in for days. The shades were drawn, the lights dim.

“Oh, hi,” John said laconically, breaking the silence. He calmly took a sip of tea as Cynthia looked searchingly into his eyes. He looked very stoned, as if he had been up tripping all night and hadn’t been to bed at all. His long, lanky frame was covered in a layer of puffy fat, the results of drug edema and high living. His hair was stringy and matted and he looked generally unwashed. Behind his wire-frame National Health issue spectacles his irises were tiny specks of carbon, his eyelids droopy shutters. There was a long, motionless pause.

Finally, Yoko turned in her chair to face Cynthia, or rather to confront her. There was no trace of an embarrassed smile, no glimmer of apology or explanation. Inscrutable was truly her perfect description. Cynthia looked at her. What an unlikely victor she was for John’s affections. She was a grim, unsmiling woman, with a pale, oval face. At thirty-six she was eight years older than John and more than a little out of shape. Not what you’d call a sex symbol. To top it off, she was presently married and had a six-year-old daughter. Looking at her sitting there, it suddenly dawned on Cynthia that not only was Yoko in a bathrobe, it was
her
bathrobe. “Oh, hi,” Yoko said, cool, unruffled.

An excruciating silence followed as a sardonic smile slowly crossed John’s face. He seemed prepared to wait for Cynthia to speak first, so she decided to act the only way she knew how, the way she had acted through all the years of unexpected madness with the Beatles—as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. In a surreal moment, she heard herself reciting the little speech she had prepared when she was on the plane with her traveling companions, who now stood speechless behind her in the doorway of the kitchen. “We were all thinking of going out for dinner tonight,” Cynthia said softly. “We had breakfast in Greece and lunch in Rome, and we thought it would be lovely to all have dinner in London. Are you coming?”

Even as the words left her mouth she regretted saying them. John stared hard at her. For a moment she was terrified of him, of his sabersharp tongue that slashed out at her so easily. She prayed he wouldn’t humiliate her any further in front of Yoko. He only murmured, “No thanks.”

With that she turned and ran from the kitchen. She went from room to room in the house, gathering things to pack, useless things, mementos of a marriage that had never really worked, a photograph she would never want to see again, an invitation to a party she would want to forget. While Jenny and Magic Alex waited for her in the front hall, she raced up the main staircase to the second floor and down the hall to the master bedroom, a room nearly half the size of a tennis court, with floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall closets, his and her dressing rooms, and a bed eight feet wide on which she had waited countless nights for him to come home, only to fall asleep alone. On the way down the hall, she spotted Yoko Ono’s tattered slippers placed neatly outside the door to the guest room, and for the first of many times that day Cynthia burst into tears.

Well, she told herself, at least they hadn’t used her own bed.

In her heart
, although she could hardly admit it to herself, she knew the marriage had been doomed from the start. From the day they had met, John had struggled with demons and monsters of his own, and there was little she could do to exorcise them. Fame and fortune had turned out to be only ironies in his life. His mother and father had failed him, Paul had failed him, the Maharishi had failed him, and somehow, long ago, she had failed him. She watched as the jet-set leeches came to feed on his energy and money and sapped him dry. She stood by while, during the last few years, he kept himself afloat in a stormy sea of drugs. At twenty-eight he was virtually a drug addict; with very brief exceptions he had been high and drunk almost every day of his life since she had met him. At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbiturates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth. On some of his acid binges he would trip for weeks on end, until all the color had washed out of his vision and he was seeing things in black and white. “As far as I was concerned,” Cynthia wrote, “the rot began to set in the moment cannabis and LSD seeped its unhealthy way into our lives.” But it wasn’t the acid and the pot that finally took John from her; it was another woman.

The fact that this seemingly wacky Japanese woman turned out to be the one was a stunning revelation to Cynthia. For as long as she could remember there was always some woman after him, or his wallet or his fame. The women ran the gamut from archetypical sleazy groupies to movie stars and writers. Only a few weeks before, John had confessed to dozens of infidelities committed during the eight years of their marriage, none of which she had suspected. He claimed in his list of conquests the American folk singer Joan Baez, the English actress Eleanor Bron, the
Evening Standard
journalist Maureen Cleave, and American pop singer Jackie De Shannon, along with what he estimated at three hundred other girls in towns and cities around the world. Yet it seemed that none of them had been capable of capturing his attention. Until Yoko.

Yoko Ono was different, so it seemed. Yoko Ono had something that all the others did not: perseverance that bordered on obsession. It was a mixture of guts and gall that went beyond
chutzpah
into the range of something spooky. By now everyone in the household was a little wary of her. After meeting John at an art exhibit she had been unshakeable. Cynthia always thought that John’s first mistake was supporting Yoko’s art and giving her money; that would only keep her coming round for more. In the beginning she showed up at the Apple business offices and demanded to see him. When she was told that John rarely went to the office she came on to the Beatles’ loyal friend and road manager, Neil Aspinall. And when Neil rejected her, she managed to collar Ringo Starr, but Ringo couldn’t understand a word the cryptic poet/artist was going on about and soon fled. The security guards at the Abbey Road EMI recording studios, where the boys recorded their albums, used to joke that she was part of the fence, and once she threatened to chain herself to the gates in an attempt to get in to see John. Then came a long-distance assault on Kenwood. It began with a barrage of phone calls, and then, when John’s telephone number was changed three or four times, Yoko sent dozens of letters. The letters first insisted, then demanded, John’s support for her art projects. Cynthia intercepted many of the letters and began to save them when they turned dark and despairing, in case Yoko ever followed through on the threats to kill herself. She had already tried to do herself in once in Japan, and the letters sounded sincere. According to Cynthia, Yoko wrote: “I can’t carry on. You’re my last hope. If you don’t support me, that’s it, I’ll kill myself.”

Very much alive, Yoko began to appear at Kenwood in person, waiting in the driveway of the house for John to come and go. She stood there from early in the morning until late at night, no matter what the weather, wearing the same scruffy black sweater and beat-up shoes, so intense and scowling that the housekeeper, Dorothy Jarlett, was afraid to go near her. One day Cynthia’s mother took pity on the forlorn figure and let her into the house to make a phone call and have a glass of water. But Yoko only used the occasion to leave her ring behind, which gave her a pretense to return the next day and demand to be let inside. One morning a package arrived from Yoko which Cynthia and her mother opened; it contained a Kotex box in which Yoko had buried a broken china cup painted blood red. John had a laugh about it, but Cynthia and Lillian Powell didn’t find it one bit funny.

Eventually, Yoko’s dogged pursuit of John became so blatant that it developed into something of a private joke between the married couple. Yoko’s
grande atrocité
occurred one night when she turned up at a Transcendental Meditation lecture John and Cynthia were attending in London. When it was over she followed them out of the lecture hall and into the backseat of John’s psychedelically hand-painted Rolls-Royce limousine and sat herself down between them. Cynthia and John exchanged embarrassed smiles over her head until the chauffeur dropped her off at Park Row, where she was living with her husband. By the time Yoko got out of the car, Cynthia had become thoroughly disheartened by the woman’s apparent ability to entertain John with her crazy schemes. “Maybe Yoko’s the one for you?” she asked John apprehensively.

John laughed that short, nasty laugh of his. “Her? She’s daft. She’s not the one for me. She’s amusing is all. I don’t fancy
her.
”

Yet there she was, six months later, sipping tea in the kitchen of Kenwood, looking very much like she was the lady of the house. While Jenny and Magic Alex waited with the taxi, Cynthia packed whatever she could into a single bag and rushed downstairs to the driveway and loaded her suitcase in the trunk of the taxi with the rest of her vacation luggage. Jenny and Magic Alex piled into the backseat with her, sitting on cither side. They had offered to put her up for a few days at the flat they platonically shared in Victoria, so that Cynthia could have a few days to sort things out. The three of them sat in silence as the taxi moved down Kenwood’s long, paved drive for what Cynthia imagined would be the last time. At the front gate she lighted a cigarette and then covered her eyes with a fluttering hand, weeping silently as she smoked.

Again and again she wondered to herself that John could be so cruel to her, and yet she could still be in love with him and willing to forgive him. Anybody else would have given up long ago. But that was the promise that Cynthia had made from the beginning, to always be there, no matter what, to never desert him no matter how bad he was to her. She knew this was a self-defeating and masochistic promise, yet there was no way to force herself to break it. She believed that she and John were destined to be together through life by a higher force, and that they would always be together, into death and after, for eternity. She still believes it to this day.