http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1237097/Maureen-Cleave-Did-I-break-The-Beatles.html
By Maureen Cleave
19th December 2009
We've just had another year of The Beatles. Who would have thought
it? Two of them, John and George, are dead and Ringo and Paul are in
their late 60s.
First there was the BBC documentary about their 1964 visit to the
U.S., a nation that is still tapping its feet to their performance on
The Ed Sullivan Show 45 years later.
Then their albums were digitally remastered and re-released. And now
artist Sam Taylor-Wood has made a feature film about the young
Lennon, called Nowhere Boy.
He's played by a tall handsome young actor called Aaron Johnson, not
at all like the original Lennon whose looks were against him that
pointed nose, long upper lip, those small narrow eyes. How could
someone who looked like this become a pop idol? And his clothes were
all wrong: 'Look at these trousers,' he'd say, 'must've sat in something.'
What mattered to The Beatles was their hair. 'Get your hair down,'
was the first thing they said to Ringo when he joined them.
The writer Jonathan Miller thought that our fascination with them was
attributable to the almost uncanny attraction we feel towards
identical quads. How different they were, yet strangely alike.
Shaking their heads was a signal to the audience to scream even
louder. They used to worry they would get too sweaty and their hair
would stick to their foreheads, making them look like Hitler. They
were accused of wearing wigs. 'In that case,' Lennon said, 'mine's
the only wig with real dandruff.'
I first met him in 1963, alerted to The Beatles by an Oxford friend
who came from Liverpool, the journalist Gillian Reynolds (now The
Daily Telegraph's radio critic). They wore boots, she said, and their
appearance inspired frenzy. 'They look beat up and depraved in the
nicest possible way.'
I was writing a column in the London Evening Standard called
horrors! Disc Date. But I had a fringe and red boots, which was a
good start. When they went to the U.S. for The Ed Sullivan Show, I
suggested to my editor I go, too. He was scathing. Take rock 'n' roll
to America? 'Coals to Newcastle?' But I went.
Two days later I had a telegram from him: BEATLES POSTERS STOLEN ALL
OVER LONDON. They soon became the most famous people in the
English-speaking world.
For two years they were out of breath: they had to run everywhere to
escape screaming mobs, of which they were understandably frightened.
I used to wonder what would happen if one of them fell over. Would he
be torn to pieces? Ringo used to say the only place he felt safe was
in the lavatory; the Standard once took a photograph of them all with
me in a loo, with Paul sitting on the washbasin.
People sometimes ask what they were like and the answer is more fun
than anyone else and terrible teases. The interviewer was outnumbered
four to one: they might put your coat in the wastepaper basket, offer
to marry you, seize your notebook and pencil, pick you up and put you
somewhere else, demand you cut their hair.
In hotel rooms, John's favourite game was shuffling his feet on the
carpet, then touching you on the cheek to give you a mild electric shock.
On the other hand, they were often kind, offering you cigarettes or a
swig from their bottles of Coke, making sure you never got left
behind. 'Come on, Thingy,' they'd bawl when it was time to move.
They'd get you a taxi. Once I thought the driver was taking an odd
way home, hardly surprising as they'd told him, '10 Downing Street.'
What Aaron Johnson does catch on screen is the Lennon who was always
the difficult boy in the back row, imperious, unpredictable,
indolent, playful, charming and quick-witted, but nervy, too.
When they asked him to speak at the Cambridge Union, he refused on
the grounds that he was a born heckler. He used to read the Just
William books by Richmal Crompton. Like William, he battled against
the odds and dreamed of empire.
One day, I picked John up in a taxi and took him to Abbey Road for a
recording session. The tune to the song A Hard Day's Night was in his
head, the words scrawled on a birthday card from a fan to his little
son Julian: 'When I get home to you,' it said, 'I find my tiredness
is through…' Rather a feeble line about tiredness, I said. 'OK,' he
said cheerfully and, borrowing my pen, instantly changed it to the
slightly suggestive: 'When I get home to you/I find the things that
you do/Will make me feel all right.'
The other Beatles were there in the studio and, of course, their
wonderful musical arranger George Martin. John sort of hummed the
tune to the others they had no copies of the words or anything
else. Three hours later, I was none the wiser about how they'd done
it, but the record was made and you can see the birthday card in
the British Library.
Three years went by. The novelty wore off, and The Beatles were fed
up. 'Here I am,' said John, 'famous and loaded and I can't go
anywhere.' It was time for Rolls-Royces with black windows and lots
of shopping at Asprey. Paul, always better at ordinary life than the
others, stayed in London; John, George and Ringo, with wives and
children, moved to daft stockbroker Tudor houses in the Weybridge-Esher area.
They were in and out of each other's houses all the time, watching
television, playing rowdy games of Buccaneer, making mad tapes. Paul
would come to see John to write songs. At midnight, they might set
off, with chauffeurs, in Rolls-Royces or Ferraris for London.
You might get invited to stay. 'We've got a pool,' John would say,
'so bring your body.' This was after he'd asked with interest which
day of the week it was. There was all day to chat.
I'd just got married. He was disappointed in my engagement ring,
which was a ruby that glowed rather than glittered. (He was
interested in my husband. I'd never introduced them he was too
tall. The Beatles didn't like men taller than they were.)
I put forward a case for marital fidelity and he was interested in
this, as he was in all ideas. 'Do you mean to say I might be missing
something? I hope I grow out of being so sex mad. Sex is the only
physical exercise I bother with.'
John would show you around the house, little Julian panting along
behind clutching a large porcelain cat. The house was full of winking
lights, there since Christmas eight months earlier. There was a suit
of armour called Sidney, a large crucifix, a pair of crutches (a
present from George), a gorilla suit… 'I thought I'd put it on and
drive round in the Ferrari.' He said it was the only suit that fitted him.
John talked a lot about the past. Nowhere Boy is set in his teens
when having been brought up by his strict and starchy Aunt Mimi
he rediscovered his mother, Julia. Julia was quite the opposite,
exciting and huge fun, and he spoke bitterly about the off-duty drunk
policeman who ran her over and killed her.
Shortly after he'd bought his grand house in Weybridge, he'd had a
visit from Fred Lennon, the father who'd abandoned him. 'I showed him
the door,' he said cheerfully. 'Only seen him twice in my life.' No
sentimental nonsense, no reconciliation.
He talked of other things, too. 'I used to read ads for guitars in
Reveille and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for
this one thing I wanted. "Please God, give me a guitar."
'Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We'd buy five Senior
Service loose cigarettes and some chips and would go to this boy's
house after school and listen to Elvis on 78s. Then this boy said
he'd got a new record. He'd been to Holland.
'This record was by somebody called Little Richard, who was bigger
than Elvis. It was called Long Tall Sally. When I heard it, I
couldn't speak. You know how it is when 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.'
Elvis was, by all accounts, a pretty moderate fellow, but he could
sing and, above all, he could move. His movements came from imitating
the bumps and grinds of burlesque strippers, but in photographs they
appeared wild, free and fearless.
That was how he looked in penny-pinching England where you wore
clothes until they wore out. His was the torch The Beatles carried.
The last time I visited John, he had been reading about religion and
typically John had strong views about it.
'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I
needn't argue about that. I'm right and I will be proved right. We're
more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock
'n' roll or Christianity.'
It was March 1966 and the quote appeared, not in the headline, but
well down the page. Only The Guardian picked it up. 'God is not
mocked,' the writer wrote.
Months went by until July when a U.S. magazine called Datebook
printed it and all hell broke loose. Radio stations banned The
Beatles and shares in their company Northern Songs plummeted. The
Beatles finished their last U.S. tour and never played in public again.
In 1986, Yoko Ono published a little book by John called Skywriting
By Word Of Mouth, written two years before he was murdered in 1980.
He never wanted to grow old, but he was only 40 when he died.
In an autobiographical fragment, he writes: 'I always remember to
thank Jesus for the end of my touring days; if I hadn't said The
Beatles were "bigger than Jesus" and upset the very Christian Ku Klux
Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other
performing fleas. God Bless America. Thank you, Jesus.'
I was so grateful to him for writing that. John might well have been
jealous of the handsome actor who in his youth plays him in the
film. As someone who could only afford to buy cigarettes loose and in
fives, he would certainly have envied the number of cigarettes he
gets to smoke. But he wouldn't have minded. He hadn't much time for
reality. As he once said: 'Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.'
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