He was the feisty, outspoken genius of the Beatles, who struggled
through a conflicted life. Thirty years after his murder, a British
writer who knew him wonders how John Lennon would have lived into his
golden years
By Ivor Davies
September 26, 2010
John Lennon was only 23 when I first met him in a San Francisco hotel
room in August 1964. But even then he was a total original.
John Lennon would have turned 70 on Oct. 9 had he not been
senselessly gunned down outside his New York apartment in December
1980. Like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley and Michael
Jackson, Lennon went too soon.
He was the real, eccentric genius of the Beatles. Back then they were
the raw new group from 'Liddypool' (as John liked to call the city of
his birth) embarking on their first North American tour. I was
assigned by my editor in London to cover their trip.
So on a sunny August afternoon in 1964, I showed up at the San
Francisco Hilton, elbowed my way past hordes of screaming young women
to a penthouse suite where I met the Fab Four.
Ringo was callow. George was inclined to be distant -- not
comfortable in the presence of strangers. Paul was already displaying
early signs of becoming a kind of male 'Stepford Wife' -- a super
friendly, smooth-operating schmoozer, who remembered your name from
the get-go, made you feel that you were really important to him, and
that was before I saw him with women where he was the master of the
art of the Lothario.
But John. Well, he was an oddity from the outset who never strove to
please anyone.
I sensed that he was by far the most complicated and therefore the
most interesting. He was already an unmerciful cynic and the most
mercurial of the lot with a dark, sick Monty Python sense of the
ridiculous. He was constantly battling with manager Brian Epstein,
with whom he had a strange love-hate relationship.
On our 35-day odyssey in the Beatles' chartered jet, in guarded hotel
rooms there was John: 'ciggie' and rum and coke in hand, and often
fortified with an assortment of pills to keep him running. He'd
invite us media types to join him in a game of Monopoly.
He displayed a surprisingly capitalistic tendency while ferociously
wheeling and dealing as he snapped up properties in games that often
went on all night.
Yet, unlike the other three Beatles, he had a strongly developed
social conscience. He sounded off about gun-obsessed Americans,
particularly on our Dallas stopover a year after John F. Kennedy was
assassinated, and unlike most rock and rollers he paid attention to the news.
He was angry after seeing reports of police attacking blacks with
water cannons during the Philadelphia race riots, which occurred that
September during the tour. It was he who insisted that Epstein get a
commitment from the local promoter that audiences at their concerts
at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., would be integrated.
"Watch it," John told Epstein, "they may try to stick a few Negroes
in the corner and say it's integrated."
One of the most memorable times I recall was the night we were
supposed to go to Jacksonville.
Hurricane Dora was raging and, in mid-storm, our flight, the most
nerve-racking of the whole trip, was bucking and bouncing.
So we detoured to Key West and the next day, just 144 km from Havana,
with the rains thundering down outside, we sat in John's room,
eating, gossiping and playing Monopoly while in the background, Fidel
Castro railed on endlessly in Spanish on the TV direct from Havana.
John had been popping Preludin, which he kept in a little black bag
tucked away in the bathroom. He and all the Beatles swallowed the
'Prellys,' as they called the uppers, like jelly beans. They had
become part of their daily routine in Hamburg, helping them to
sustain eight-hour, seven-day-a-week club sessions.
John also smoked pot that day and he made no excuses for any of it.
He'd been pill popping since he was 17. He was in a mellow though
critical mood about the tour, sounding off about the awful sound
systems at venues.
As Castro bellowed on, John declared: "We're like a bunch of f--ing
budgies. We'll all end up like performing fleas in suits."
He was also fed up, he said, with the "rubbish" line of Beatle wigs
that the concert promoters were peddling.
"They ought to take all those souvenirs and burn the bloody lot," he said.
The other thing that drove John crazy was the idea some of the fans
believed that the young rockers had magic healing powers. At almost
every stop, the sick and the handicapped would be wheeled into the
front three or four rows of the arena.
While trapped in his hotel room, John, looking for some kind of
release, would suddenly launch into a pantomime act: contorting his
body and walking around like a deformed person, he mimicked the
disabled. To outsiders that might appear cruel, but it betrayed a
real outrage at the ridiculousness of believing that they were
anything else but a quartet of young British artists doing their best
to entertain fans. Other times, he'd strut around the hotel room in
Chaplinesque-Hitlerian pose, finger below nose, to mimic the Fuhrer.
Lennon always remained true to his beliefs. In the late '60s, he
became a vitriolic and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War: In 1969
he and Yoko went to bed 'for peace' for a week in Montreal and
followed it by unveiling the new song, Give Peace a Chance, in
Toronto. His antiwar beliefs were completely sincere. He even took an
uncredited role in Richard Attenborough's movie musical about the
First World War, Oh What a Lovely War. He played an anonymous soldier
opposite Laurence Olivier, not to be confused with the 1967 Richard
Lester movie How I Won the War highlighting the inept military, which
starred Lennon.
His outspoken beliefs landed him in hot water in the U.S. He was
proud to be on Nixon's enemy list. He'd already become something of a
pariah, of course, with his outspoken comment that the Beatles were
more popular than Jesus. Fans in America burned Beatles records as
John vainly tried to explain that what he said had been taken out of
context. Had he lived today, the anti-religionist who grew up in a
city bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants would have
had a good laugh at the news two years ago: the Pope had finally
forgiven him for his comments!
The older he got, the quirkier he became. In the '70s, after making
his home in New York, he split from Yoko Ono and showed up in 1974
for an interview at record producer Lou Adler's Bel Air mansion with
his girlfriend May Pang -- who was John and Yoko's former secretary.
We met early that afternoon and he was already sipping a drink. He
was strangely unfocused and jittery and while he posed for pictures
at the pool he seemed somewhat troubled. Much later I learned it was
Lennon's most confused period. He was drinking heavily, and taking
LSD and pills -- a habit that had killed Brian Epstein several years earlier.
And it wasn't until years later that we learned that John's
on-the-edge, high-wire lifestyle stemmed ultimately from his unhappy
and unsettled childhood.
A few years earlier I had interviewed Dr. Arthur Janov, the
originator of Primal Scream therapy in whose centre in Los Angeles
John and Yoko had been treated in 1970, as Janov said, "to kill his
childhood pain."
Lennon had read Janov's book and underwent treatment in Los Angeles.
It involved being isolated from friends and family in a soundproof
room and recreating his actual birth as he lay in a fetal position.
That presumably released him from his original childhood trauma.
Janov filmed it all, noting that the therapy had wiped John's
childhood slate clean, enabling him to shift burdens that had
troubled him all his life.
So what would John have been like at 70?
No doubt the same feisty, outspoken original he had always been.
While he abhorred pomp and circumstance, there is little doubt that
he would have eventually accepted a British knighthood. Not so much
to strut around as Sir John, but more so because he would have liked
the idea of his wife being Lady Yoko. She harboured great resentment
for the British who treated her like a leper when she first came into
John's life after his divorce from first wife Cynthia.
And there is little doubt he would have remained a fierce critic of
the wars fought by Britain and his adopted homeland in the name of peace.
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