Cynthia went into labour at four in the morning of Saturday, 6 April 1963. Her college friend Phyl was staying with her at Mendips at the time and called an ambulance. Still wearing a nightdress and with curlers in her hair, Cynthia was rushed to Sefton General Hospital, where it took until the early hours of the Monday for her baby to be born. Her mother was still in Canada, and no one came to see her as she waited, Phyl assuming, wrongly, that Mimi would visit. John was away with the Beatles on a second tour of the year with American stars Tommy Roe and Chris Montez in Portsmouth, and wouldn’t get home to visit her until the Beatles played Birkenhead on the Wednesday. By then he (or Brian probably) had organised for her to be moved to a private room, partly so that he wouldn’t be seen there, thus keeping up the lie that he was still single. Cyn was happier there. With no visitors, she’d felt like an unmarried mother when she’d been alone on the public ward.
John was, Cynthia would later say, genuinely thrilled when he saw the baby. ‘Who’s going to be a famous little rocker like his dad,’ he said as he held his son. They had decided to call the child John Charles Julian, after John, Cynthia’s father, and John’s mother Julia – although John had worried momentarily that Julian might sound like a sissy’s name.
He didn’t stay long at the hospital, but soon Cynthia’s room was filling with flowers and cards from the other Beatles and their friends who were in the know. Brian immediately offered to be a godfather. The nurses, of course, quickly guessed that John was the father, but not a word appeared in the newspapers, where there was still little interest in popular music. The Beatles may already have had two hit records and been causing considerable excitement wherever they played, but, with one exception, Fleet Street was still blind and deaf to them.
The exception was an interviewer from the London Evening Standard called Maureen Cleave who had been intrigued when told by a Liverpool friend about the excitement the group generated on Merseyside. She would later become very close to John and would one day write one of the biggest John Lennon stories of all.
For now, though, the rest of Fleet Street’s finest were wearing blinkers as Cynthia took her baby home to Mendips and John rejoined the Beatles in London for the New Musical Express Pollwinners Concert. They weren’t yet famous enough to be among those collecting prizes, but just to have been invited to appear alongside the nation’s favourites, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, about whom John had never hidden his contempt (until he met and liked them), was more than flattering.
Having been either on the road or in radio or recording studios since they’d arrived back from Germany in January, it was time for the band to have a break. Most new fathers might have gone home to help with a three-week-old baby, but that kind of domesticity wasn’t for John. And while Paul, Ringo and George flew to Tenerife to join Klaus Voorman, whose parents had a holiday home there, John went off for twelve days in Spain with Brian.
Whichever way it’s viewed, that was an odd thing to do. Setting aside John’s neglect of Cynthia, John and Brian were hardly best friends. It was John who had first begun to call Brian ‘Eppy’, which Brian didn’t like, and John could be brutal when he thought the manager was getting in the way. ‘You just take care of your percentage and leave us to worry about the music,’ he is reputed to have said when Brian began fussing at the first EMI recording session. Despite that, John chose to spend twelve days in Spain with his manager at a crucial time in his married life.
Loyally, Cynthia would later write that John asked her if she minded if he went and that she’d told him that she didn’t, and had given her husband her blessing. But was she, once again, accepting a situation that she knew she couldn’t change, that there was every chance that John would go whatever she said? Later John would admit it: ‘The holiday was planned. I wasn’t going to break it for a baby. I just thought, what a bastard I was, and went.’
Undoubtedly he must have been exhausted, but his Spanish break showed another side of John. When something got in the way of what he wanted to do he could be callous. Although, he had done the ‘decent thing’ by marrying Cynthia, that had been before he’d begun appearing on television, before Beatles records had topped the record charts . . . before he was a star. His world had now changed, and he knew that the girl he had once worshipped could hold him back if he let her.
Cynthia knew that, too. So, she stayed at home at Mendips with the baby, and John and Brian went to Torremolinos, where John would tease Brian about being gay. ‘I watched Brian picking up boys and I liked playing it a bit faggy . . . We used to sit in a café looking at all the boys and I’d say “Do you like that one? Do you like this one?”’ But, of course, the person Brian fancied most of all was John himself – something John had been very well aware of when Brian had suggested the holiday.
In his book John Lennon: In My Life, John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton would write that John had told him that, eventually worn down by Brian’s entreaties while in Spain, he allowed Brian to masturbate him. It’s highly unlikely that Pete would have made that up. He wasn’t a fantasist. What’s more, John also told a journalist friend about the episode.
But was John telling the truth? It was well known to those around him that he was keenly heterosexual. But he loved to shock, too. Did he invent a homosexual experience for the fun of it, or, perhaps, did he just exaggerate the incident after Brian made a pass at him? Both are possible. But, equally, as all his life he would be eager to experience anything new, was he curious about homosexuality? When Brian came on to him, did he simply want to know what it was like to be touched by another man?
In public he always denied that anything sexual had happened. As he told Rolling Stone: ‘It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was not consummated, but it was a pretty intense relationship.’
Back in England and off on a third tour in three months, this time with Roy Orbison (‘I knew we were successful,’ John said, ‘when Roy Orbison asked us if he could record two of our songs’), any gossip about the Spanish holiday was quickly forgotten, only to be reopened at Paul’s twenty-first birthday party in June.
The celebration took place in the large garden at the home of Paul’s Auntie Gin in the Liverpool suburb of Huyton, and, as befitting a young man whose first album was at the top of the charts, it was quite a do. All of Paul’s family and friends were invited, along with singers Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, who in the wake of the Beatles were now also part of Brian’s growing Merseyside caravan of talent.
It should have been a terrific party, and was at first, as Paul introduced his new girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, to his old friends (‘posh but really nice’, was the general view). Then, a rather drunk Bob Wooler, who had announced the Beatles at the Cavern for the last two years, made a silly, jokey comment: ‘Come on, John. Tell us about you and Brian in Spain . . . We all know . . .’
Without warning, John exploded. Lashing out, he began to batter Wooler’s face and body with both his fists and a stick. He was never good when he’d been drinking, and the other Beatles had seen him become violent in fights before. But his reaction to Wooler was of a different magnitude. He went berserk, to the extent that when he was pulled off Wooler, the inoffensive and much older man had to be quickly driven to hospital by Brian, where he was treated for bruised ribs and a black eye.
According to Cynthia, John was still livid with Wooler, muttering that ‘he called me a queer’ when, the party ruined, they got home. Pete Shotton, who with his girlfriend was also among the guests, had a different recollection. According to him, John carried on drinking and eventually the two got into a drunken conversation about wife swapping, which had recently been the subject of a Sunday newspaper exposé. ‘What about that then, Pete? Fancy swapping wives?’ John asked.
‘You mean you want to swap the girls for the night?’ Pete asked incredulously.
‘Yeah! Yeah! Great. Let’s do it.’
Pete, however, was having none of it.
John backed off. ‘Only kidding,’ he said, and dropped the subject.
Pete didn’t believe him. As far as he was concerned John, who, he said, was always happy to try anything once, had been serious. Cynthia almost certainly never knew.
The following day, when he had sobered up, John agreed with Brian to send a telegram to Wooler apologising for the attack. Although it bore his name it was written by Brian together with the Beatles’ new press officer, Tony Barrow. It read: ‘REALLY SORRY BOB. TERRIBLY WORRIED TO REALISE WHAT I HAD DONE. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY?’
Had he gone to see Wooler, John might have been able to say quite a lot more. But he chose not to. Privately, he may have been reflecting on the motives that had spurred the attack, thinking how any hint of homosexuality, no matter how untrue, could ruin his career and the Beatles’ future. That was the way it was in 1963.
John’s memories of the night, given just a couple of days before his death in 1980 to the BBC’s Andy Peebles, were that he’d been frightened by his own anger. ‘I must have had a fear that maybe I was homosexual to attack him like that. But I was very drunk . . . I hit him and I could really have killed someone then. And that scared me.’
Wooler could have sued, but instead he accepted a £200 ex gratia payment from Brian Epstein – which would be about £3,500 in today’s money. Had it happened a few months later, the incident would have been front-page news. But the only coverage of what was described as a ‘brawl’ was in the Daily Mirror, with no mention of the comment that had caused the attack.
It might seem bizarre that most Fleet Street editors were still not paying attention to the Beatles, but perhaps there were extenuating circumstances. Since the spring, rumours of a growing web of intrigue linking the British Minister for War, John Profumo, with a Soviet spy, by way of a very pretty goodtime girl and two of her West Indian lovers, had been fascinating newspaper readers. Day by day over the weeks, and libel lawyers allowing, new pieces were being regularly added to a jigsaw of sex in high places. The lady’s name was Christine Keeler, and she, and her attractive friend Mandy Rice-Davies, were, it appeared, being pimped around upper-class circles by Mayfair osteopath Stephen Ward. It was career-wrecking stuff for Profumo, who, after denying any adulterous impropriety, had to resign from the government, but it was a festival of hilarity and hypocrisy for readers as unsubstantiated rumours of High Court judges, royalty and government ministers attending upper-class orgies were reported, or hinted at, by the press. Nor did it end well, when Stephen Ward committed suicide in August.
But that wasn’t all. Parallel with the Profumo Affair was a notorious divorce that had been making its way through an Edinburgh court, involving the adulterous and aristocratic Duchess of Argyll, which included as evidence a photograph of the lady giving sexual relief to an unnamed man whose head was out of shot. Once again rumours danced around the country: ‘Who was the headless man?’ the tabloid newspaper demanded to know. And once again a government minister, Mr Duncan Sandys, had to resign. As it happens, he was not the gentleman in the photograph, but, having enjoyed the lady’s favours on a previous occasion, he hoped by giving up his job to escape their association being made public. That was not to be.
Nothing ever sells newspapers so much as a posh sex scandal, so perhaps Fleet Street had some excuse for overlooking the story that, out of their eyeline, just kept growing and growing.