Intelligent Life On Planet Rock
The Curious Life Of John Lennon
His sexual fantasies included Paul McCartney and his own mother. And he was haunted by a mystifying inability to forget any pain ever caused him. John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman adds a complex, epic dimension to "a major, towering presence of the 20th century". Paul Du Noyer investigates.
It's bloody enormous, for a start.
I had intended to take my review copy away on holiday, until it arrived by courier in two huge A4 binders. I would literally have needed an extra suitcase. The author tells me it runs to about 300,000 words and that was after he'd cut 60,000. Can there still be so much to say about John Lennon? Or indeed about anyone?
I would pitch Philip Norman's blockbuster somewhere in between its two best-known predecessors, namely Albert Goldman's The Lives Of John Lennon (a book he calls "malevolent, risibly ignorant") and Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography ("an honourable attempt"). But I would place it above both of them - more accurate, more perceptive and far better written. The great surprise for people like me, who have spent too many years reading about The Beatles, is the revelatory material that John Lennon: The Life actually contains. So, yes, there really is more to say.
The first eye-opener is John's incestuous desire for his mother Julia - a flighty and spirited woman who left him, as a child, in the care of her sister Mimi. (She was killed in a car accident when John was a teenager.) He spoke to Yoko of this fixation repeatedly; he confided it to others and speaks of it in a 1979 audio-diary. At 14 he lay next to his mother during her afternoon rest and wondered how far she would let him go.
Then it's suggested that he had a crush on Paul. "On the principle that bohemians should try everything," writes Norman, John had contemplated an affair, "but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality." Yoko, again, is party to this speculation. She recalls hearing people in the Apple office who called McCartney "John's Princess". One is never sure whether John really had those leanings - or just an intellectual curiosity and appetite for mischief. The same ambiguity surrounds his early Spanish holiday with The Beatles' gay manager Brian Epstein. (Although, when a Liverpool DJ unwisely made a jibe, Lennon battered him savagely.)
Norman writes with a shrewd eye for the wider context. He's especially good on the post-war, middle-class world of Lennon's childhood. We follow John from semi-detached tranquillity to art-school and Hamburg, to the London Palladium and the world. We are necessarily in familiar territory for a lot of the time, thanks not least to the author's own Beatle book, his estimable 1981 biography Shout!. Yet there is always an arresting new fact around the corner. Connoisseurs of trivia will enjoy learning that "eight days a week" was not a Ringo-ism, but a quip by Paul's taxi-driver on the way to a songwriting session with John. Nor had I known of John's fling with the pop singer Alma Cogan - a woman whom poor Brian Epstein, ironically, had once considered marrying.
More startling, though, is the business of Norwegian Wood. This song was always read as a coded admission of adultery - but with whom? The journalist Maureen Cleave is often suggested - she was pretty and clever and Lennon adored her - but Norman's evidence points elsewhere. When John moved to London with his wife Cynthia and their child Julian, they took a flat in South Kensington. It had been found for them by The Beatles' photographer Robert Freeman, who lived downstairs with his beautiful wife, Sonny. Now, she was German but preferred to say she was Norwegian. The Freemans' pad was fashionably wood-panelled. When Robert was out and Cynthia upstairs, John slipped down to see Sonny Freeman and they did, indeed, have an affair.
The book's numerous sources include both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, The Beatles' producer George Martin and their right-hand man Neil Aspinall. There are long-lost girlfriends from Liverpool and the "primal scream" therapist Arthur Janov. I even provided a few scraps myself.
Documentary evidence comes from the private papers of Aunt Mimi and John's autobiographical notes and tapes. A Lennon biographer always has the benefit of his songs, which are among the most candid ever written. And there are the ever-engaging public utterances: he was, says Norman, "perhaps the only celebrity in history who never did a dull or dishonest interview".
What must it be like to write a Lennon book with Yoko looking over one shoulder and Paul over the other? The author had Yoko's blessing for the project - although she's apparently unhappy with the finished result - and Paul agreed to be interviewed also. The tone is scrupulously fair to both of them. Yoko appears to have been pulled reluctantly into Lennon's orbit. She did not push her way forward to bag a Beatle. And McCartney has shown a forgiving side. I doubt whether he has forgotten Philip Norman's Sunday Times attack from years ago, a parody poem that ended:
O deified Scouse, with unmusical spouse
For the clichés and cloy you unload,
To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon
In the middlemost midst of the road.
Of all the stories contained within this teeming tale, few are as strange as that of Alfred Lennon, John's wayward father. A rascally Scouse seaman, it's true that he abandoned John in childhood, but not without a struggle to keep him. Later, as a penniless drifter, he sought the company of his Beatle son but never expected much. At 54 he eloped to Gretna Green with a teenage bride and they had two sons - Lennon's little-known half-brothers. Unaware the superstar now wore a beard, he once took along that quintessentially 1970 gift, a bottle of aftershave. The visit enraged Lennon, who responded with brutal fury and threatened to have him killed - poor Alf was so shaken he filed a statement with a solicitor, in the event of his unnatural death.
It's another instance of John's propensity to extreme nastiness. His behaviour towards his first wife, Cynthia, has some repellent aspects too. Such stories, and they're well documented, make you question the posthumous sanctification of Lennon. The Man of Peace was, in a way, the classic idealist - he loved the human race in abstract but could be a complete bastard with individuals, including his own family. He admits as much in one of his last-ever songs, I Don't Wanna Face It: "You wanna save humanity/But it's people that you just can't stand".
But there, in the humour and self-awareness, we catch a more endearing man as well. Quick, funny and frequently kind, Lennon never stopped learning, questioning and revising his ideas. Where he was headed, we can only guess. There was never much need to "expose" or "debunk" John Lennon - in his songs, from Cold Turkey to Jealous Guy, he always got there before you. Lennon: The Life may be a warts-and-all sort of book, but it's also respectful and affectionate. In the end, it's the portrait of a complex man, and it's as big as it needs to be. This is the best Lennon book so far.
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To read Paul Du Noyer's interview with Philip Norman, buy the October 2008 issue of The Word.
Albert Goldman part two?
I am actually so enraged about this article and book that I will just express my knowledge as a well read fan of John Lennon, someone who has listened to any interview with the man himself over the past twenty years, and read every authorised and unauthorised text there is to read. I have NEVER heard of homo-erotic feelings he may have had for Paul McCartney, and I would bet my left leg that Paul himself would simply scoff at any such auggestion if asked. As for the 'interview' in which John says he had sexual feelings for Julia,this may well be, as the 'mother' side of her was largely covert throughout his early years and I'm sure she was more 'friend' than 'mother', and yet: where's the taped interview in which John admits all of this? I'd like to hear it. He did very little press in 1979.
Anyway, firstly: Cynthia Lennon, a woman who, if you were to soak in this journalist's words, would be a battered, penniless, unloved, controlled and bullied victim, has written two books on John, and paints him as a less-than-ideal husband, but makes NO mention of John taking all her money and making her live in near-poverty while he was touring the world in luxury! Nor does Cynthia herself mention that she was guiltless during their eventual divorce, as she had been having an affair with Alexis Mardas in the Greek Isles while John was having an affair with the love of his life, 'loony' Yoko Ono.
Truth is that their marriage had been unravelling for two years, and they had fallen out of love. She was well looked after financially, had nannies for Julian, and John bough her mother a house. John married her when he got her pregnant, even though he wasn’t in love with her. He was twenty years old. Sure, he was absent as a father, but if you look at the Beatles touring itinerary between ’62 and ’66, they had no more than one week breaks throughout the entire period. They were worked (and exploited by U.S promoters) to the bone, and were prisoners of hotels, constant victims of death threats, targeted by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966, attacked in the Philippines because they snubbed Imelda Marcos and basically besieged by fans and the press to the point where they couldn’t set foot in the street anywhere in the world, including their homes in London.
This is laughable. Here is a comparison: When Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was in a relationship with a woman who had his child, he simply took off and utterly abandoned her when the Stones began their trip to stardom. He subsequently had no contact with his 'wife' and child for the rest of his life.
Keith Moon fits the mould of an abusive husband far more perfectly: he would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, when the Who weren't even touring, and came home, 'coming down' from his binges and would command his wife to cook him meals at 3am, punch the crap out of her on regular occasions (she had no less than three broken noses from his abuse) and imprisoned her in the family home so furiously that she eventually 'escaped!'
Phil Spector literally imprisoned his wife Ronnie, halted her recording career, threatened her with guns, beat her and made her drive with a blow up dummy of himself on the occasions he 'allowed' her to actually leave his fortress of barbed wire, with German Shepherds and gun towers.
Meanwhile, when John Lennon got Cynthia pregnant, he married her, even though he had mixed emotions about this, and stayed married to her for six years in a loveless relationship, took her on many Beatles tours (such as the famous first U.S tour the Beatles went on).....included her in his 60s psychedelic lifestyle (the famous first acid trip he had included her and George Harrison plus his wife Patti for example). He was adulterous on tour, but *what 60s famous male musician wasn't adulterous?????* The only 'stable' 1960s pop marriage I can think of is ray Davies from the Kinks who was totally committed to his marriage and his wife later cheated on him, breaking up the marriage.
John Lennon was a homebody, and this meant he was, after touring ceased in 1966, he was at home with Cynthia permanently.
This quote both amuses me and angers me as well:
"Certainly his callous blend of macho faithlessness and nearly deranged jealousy continued. Soon after taking up with Ono, he demanded that she write out a list of everyone she'd slept with - then flew into a rage when he saw it."
Oh dear. John got angry about Yoko having sex. Firstly, I have read every book and article ever written about John Lennon, and I have never heard of this. But I'm sure it is possible, John certainly had a temper and was jealous when it came to Yoko. But he got angry? Is this even worth the paragraph in this 'article'?
I mentioned the total libel that is the 'John killed Stu Sutcliffe' crap. This features prominently in Goldman's book, and has no factual evidence to support it. I love the way the journalist says that "Norman even investigates - inconclusively" about John being Sutcliffe's murderer! So 'Norman' is a forensic crime specialist now is he? Or is he a stupid sensationalist muck raker, whose 'investigation' consists of reading the section of Goldman's book that asserts this? ALL of the Beatles were beaten up in both Liverpool and particularly Hamburg, two extremely violent cities for guys with leather jackets and chips on their shoulders. Certainly the speed the group was eating like lollies at that point would not have helped Sutcliffe's condition, but it is pretty much established fact that Sutcliffe had a genetic condition, and if he didn't, there would be a queue of 'suspects' in his 'murder'.
Finally, this quote is beyond ridiculous:
"With Ono, he restyled himself as king of the counterculture, with even less authenticity."
Who judges the 'authenticity' of John's status as 'king of counterculture'? John Lennon once said that 'the 1960s was just a great time for people to dress up'; he was disillusioned by the supposed 'revolution' of the 60s. He saw the Haight Asbury movement as like a modern day bowery, full of spotty faced pointless kids on acid, and Christ, just listen to the lyrics of 'Revolution' in which he is talking to the world about his stance on political change. His peace protests, which lasted for years and were, for the record VERY authentic, producing 'Give Peace A Chance', 'Imagine' and 'Love', were seen then AND now as genuine, powerful, off the wall certainly but lacking in drive and substance? Surely not. He gave up two years of his life and considerable time in which he could have churned out commercially successful cash cow records, to campaign for peace, in an artistic, funny and attention grabbing fashion.
John Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman because Chapman read an interview with Lennon in which it was apparent that after years of peace campaigning and fighting for various causes ('Woman is the Nigger of the World' precipitated 'I am Woman' by at least a year if not more), he wanted to focus on family, and Yoko was making the family a lot of money by assuming the role of business manager, five days per week, at offices full of cigar smoking male chauvinist capitalists, and she actually increased the Lennon family earnings by double. Chapman read this and thought 'this man once sang "Imagine no possessions" and now look at all the possessions he's got' thereby equating John with Holden Caulfield from 'Catcher in the Rye' and murdering him.
The basic fact is that 'Norman' is saying nothing new, infact if Goldman was still alive he could probably sue 'Norman' for plagiarism! I see nothing here that every muck raking anti-Lennon critic has been saying since Lennon died. If Lennon was alive they would be too afraid to say it because Lennon's pen was mightier than anything a two-bit sensationalist could muster. If I read this book and find even one new piece of information, I'll retract everything I said. Goldman said that Lennon was a heroin addled, reclusive Brian Wilson style wreck before his death, and went so far to say that if Lennon was in better shape physically, he would have survived the bullets! Come on people. This man was human, and humans make mistakes. Lennon would be the first to acknowledge that, and think for a moment, what the world would be like if John Lennon had not given us twenty years of poignant, tuneful, soulful and beautiful songs. Do not listen to imbeciles that just want to make a buck re-hashing old, old misinformation and speculation. Read Cynthia Lennon's book or May pang's book 'Loving John', even Fred Seaman's very anti Lennon books, at least Seaman was a trusted member of John's inner circle for three years up until his death. These are books written by people who were there, not people who, in 2008, want to buy a mansion, Porsche and litter of poodles by trashing the greatest songwriter of the 20th Century.
End of rant.