John Lennon by Maureen Cleave (1981)

 

John Lennon

By Maureen Cleave

London Observer

1981

     I knew him from early in 1963 when the Beatles recorded "Please Please Me", which was top of the hit parade until 1966, by which time they were the most famous people in the English-speaking world.

     He didn't change all that much in that time. Far from being surprised, pleased, and grateful to be rich and famous, he seemed nettled at not having been so earlier. "I was always rather surprised," he once said, "that I wasn't a famous painter."

     If he hadn't liked me, I would never have dared to like him, but I had a nice pair of red boots that were considered rather avant-garde at the time, and he fancied those. All the Beatles were obsessed with physical appearances, particularly with their own hair. The dreaded moment in any performance was when their fringes stuck to their foreheads with sweat, making them look slightly like Hitler. 

    John Lennon never succeeded at looking like a pop singer. His face was against him. That long, pointed nose, small, narrow eyes, long upper lip. It was a Holbein portrait, not a contemporary image. His super, silliest stare was due to equal parts of a natural arrogance and short-sightedness. He was too vain at first to wear spectacles, too disorganized for contact lenses.

     Other pop singers bought their parents attractive bungalows in the suburbs. John Lennon showed his father, Fred, the door. "I've only seen him once before in my life," he said cheerfully, without qualm, "and I'm not having him in the house. His clothes were all wrong. Look at those trousers." He would say, mystified. "Must have sat in something."

      He once ordered a gorilla suit. "I thought I might pop it on in the summer and drive around in my Ferrari. Actually, it's the only suit that fits me."

     He always said whatever came into his head. Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, presented them with some gold discs, fumbled with the words of the song "You're Fired," said John. Groucho. Marx would have said that, but with a script. 

    People, of course, were rude to them, too, at the beginning. This is what Paul Johnson wrote in the New Statesman in 1964 about the television audience of Jukebox Jury: "What a bottomless chasm of vocality they reveal. The huge faces bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain store makeup. Their open, sagging mouths and glazing eyes, their hands mindlessly drumming in time to the music, the broken stiletto heels and shoddy stereotypes with it close, those who flock round The Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures. "

There is a touch of humor in the description they put up with this fairly good humor; much of the time, Ted Heath said they didn't speak the Queen's English. To which John said that "a lot of people who voted for him didn't speak the Queen's English either."

     His favorite childhood author was Richmond Crampton of the William books, and I always thought he had a lot in common with William: the untidiness, the antisocial behavior, the unself-consciousness. Like William, he was always battling against the odds, yearning for the impossible. Like William, he triumphed. At last, he always found his own story, The Beatles' story, romantic; he'd like to talk about both the rags and the riches. Indeed, by the time they reached the top, there wasn't much else to do but talk. 

    You can become a solicitor or a social worker without idolizing other solicitors and social workers. But it's impossible to become a pop singer without first being a fan. Some of this early naivety survives their initial fame. "I can remember what it was like," John Lennon said, "waiting for Gene Vincent and thinking 'He's coming! He's coming!'" 

     They had years uninterrupted by the National Service, in which to be fans, in which to plot and plan for their turn, which would surely come. "I used to read the ads in Ravel for guitars and just ache for one. I used God like everybody else for this one thing I wanted. 'Please, God, give me a guitar.'

     "This boy at school had been to Holland. He said he'd got this record at home by somebody called Little Richard, who was better than Elvis. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We used to go to this boy's house after school and listen to Elvis on 78s. We'd buy five senior service loose in the shop and some chips and go along. The new record was  'Long Tall Sally.'  When I heard it, it was so great. I couldn't speak. You know how you are torn? I didn't want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn't want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind. How could they be happening in my life? Both of them, and then someone said, 'it's a (N word), singing.' I didn't know Negros sang, so Elvis was white, and Little Richard was black.

     "But I thought about it for days at school. Of the labels on the records of Elvis and Little Richard, one was yellow, and the other was blue, and I thought of yellow against the blue."

     Children liked the Beatles because they looked like furry animals, puppies that you could pat and fondle. But they were, of course, grown men, and they had rakish habits. John, Paul, George and Stuart Sutcliffe (who later died) after 18 months in Hamburg, playing and eating and sleeping on the stage, knew each other better than most married couples -- in sickness and in health, for better or worse and always for poorer, everything was a group activity, including, as John Lennon said later when he spilled the beans in Rolling Stone -- sex.

     These bacchanalian reveals were called orgies, to rhyme with Porgy, and were part of any tour. Indeed, the group of any tour, of any group, away from home. "I hope I grow out of it," John Lennon said, "Being so sex mad.  Sex is the only physical exercise I bother with." I once put forward a case for marital fidelity. He was interested in this, as he was in all new ideas. "Do you mean to say," he said "I might be missing something?"

    Everything happened so fast when Cynthia was first brought to London with their son, John Charles Julian. They were all installed in a not very nice flat beside the West London air terminal. There were always fans outside, just a few, days and nights, and all weathers. John always ignored them totally. He was frightened of them. 

    Then he, George, and Ringo all moved into till carpeted, interior-decorated mansions in Weybridge and Esher; they saw only each other, scarcely knowing day from night. John was, for him, preposterous. The sitting room had yellow tartan walls. "What day is it?" John would ask with interest when you rang up. There were no regular meals, but there probably hadn't been those since they were 15. 

    They gave each other presents. George gave John a pair of crutches. John gave Ringo a small stuffed puppy in a glass case standing on a little carpet. They dropped in on each other in their Ferraris and Rolls-Royces. They played buccaneer and the dictionary game, watched television with the record player turned up high at the same time, they took each other's photographs, recorded each other's voices, and late at night, they set off for London and the clubs.

     John could sleep almost indefinitely. Those who were nervous of him were reassured by this natural indolence; he usually cooperated because he was too lazy to argue. He added daily to his possessions, but they got the upper hand, a giant compendium of games from Aspreys that he could open but not shut, a suit of armor called Sydney, more telephones, of which he did not know the number, the Rolls Royce with a television set, refrigerator, writing desk and yet another telephone. He only got through once to somebody on this telephone, and they were out.

     He was a young man waiting for something to happen. "This won't do at all," he said, "I'm just stopping here, like at a bus stop. I think of it every day, me and my Hansel and Gretel house, and it won't do. I'll get my real house when I know what I want. I'll take my time."

     There wasn't much time left, and he went on wasting it. He loved money, but he was disappointed. In vain. It hampered him. "Here I am famous, so loaded, and I can't go anywhere." Is difficult to cope with such fame unless, like the royal family, you have a training and supporting setup. Others in his position take up eating, paranoia, and hypochondria. All the Americans have psychoanalysis. As a matter of course, he tried pills, drink, pot, and dope, not to satisfy a self-destructive urge, but rather from boredom. 

    John's disposition was basically cheerful. He was delighted to see anybody who got in from outside to know what you had read, what you had seen. I cannot think that his life was blighted by the loss of his mother, though he was made very angry by it, or that he resented being working class, or that a noble mind was overthrown by evil capitalist pressure; he was bored. 

    He had too many choices, too little to do. He had never done a conventional day's work in his life, and he had no self-discipline. The rot set in when there was no reason to get up in the morning. His bad and unpredictable behavior prevented him from meeting more interesting people, and his laziness inhibited him from learning anything new. 

    But there were a few more creative years left, and he wrote some of his best songs. How he composed them was a mystery. He did say he thought of the words and the music together. He once arrived at the recording studio with the tune for "A Hard Day's Night", the theme song for their first film, in his head, the words written on the back of a birthday card sent to his son, Julian: 'To baby Julian,' it said 'from Jackie, a morning regular.'

     "But when I get home to you," the song read, "I find my tiredness is through and I feel all right." I said. I thought 'that my tiredness is through' was a weak line. "Okay", he said, obligingly, getting out his pen and crossing it out, and he wrote, "I find the things that you do, they make me feel all right."