My Hell In a Dream World
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Daily Record
October 19, 1976
Beatle John Lennon was introduced to the drug LSD when someone secretly put it in his coffee, and soon he was sucked away into a dream world. His first wife, Cynthia, claims the drug was in sugar lumps served with the coffee after a dinner party at the home of a friend of fellow Beatle George Harrison, and when John and Cynthia finally came out of their drug trance, they looked at each other and set their feet on different paths.
"It was terrifying," Cynthia says in an interview in Women Magazine. "It was John's first time, as it was for all of us. He thought it was wonderful. I tried to pull him back, but I couldn't. There were so many people around him trying to influence him. They'd say, 'I can invent an island where you can have sunshine all the time,' and John believed them.
Cynthia, now 36, and Lennon were divorced eight years ago. She has married twice since. Of the Beatles, she said the four of them "always seemed to me to be very vulnerable. I was older than all of them and felt like their big sister, but the Beatles were married to each other, and in many ways, girls were superfluous".
Cynthia lived in a big house in the stockbroker belt of Surrey, and although her husband appeared to be the master of his own destiny, she said in many ways, he was quite Victorian. "When our baby Julian was two or three years old, if he wasn't perfect with his knife and fork and his table manners, there would be a troubled scene."
Cynthia gradually became aware of Lennon's friendship with the Japanese artist and filmmaker Yoko Ono, and she tried to escape to Italy. She said, "Everyone knew I was John Lennon's wife, and it made me some kind of celebrity. Before I knew where I was, there was a detective following me. John was having me tailed while he was back in Weybridge sleeping in our bed with Yoko Ono."
Cynthia moved out, obtained a divorce, and was shocked by the publicity. A brief, disastrous marriage to Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini followed. There was difficulty too with Julian, who was now attending a state school in Wimbledon.
Cynthia said, "There were those who buttered him up because of who his father was, and those who used it as an excuse to bully him." Eventually, she met John Twist, who had also had a broken marriage. Soon, they were promising to marry as soon as they were free, and Cynthia swears he has brought her the peace she has been seeking in her eight years since her divorce from John Lennon.
She said, "I knew John was nervous with me. He was imagining all sorts of things. He's a mechanical engineer and had visions of me wanting a jet set life. It was only when he got to know me that he realized how wrong he was."
John, now her husband, said, "I expected her to be very conscious of who she was and to treat everyone else as slightly beneath her; it took me a long time to get used to the fact that she didn't."
When he moved out of earshot, Cynthia said, "He's a good man, kind, gentle, down to earth, and sane, but I do worry about him. He's married to John Lennon's wife and is stepfather to John Lennon's son, and that's hard for anyone to follow. I try to make it clear to him that for me those years are dead and buried."
Not for everyone, unfortunately. Cynthia said, "It can still be sad when you're talking to someone, and you regard them as a friend, and as you walk away, you hear them whisper, 'Know who that was, don't you?' But they'll get used to me, and then they'll let me forget." Perhaps.
After reading this article in the newspaper, John wrote an 'open letter' to Cynthia. Apparently, what she said hit a nerve with him.
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