Divorces are rarely happy affairs and so it proved with that of John and Cynthia, and, by any standards, John didn’t behave well. His first action was to sue her for divorce citing adultery with a man called Roberto Bassanini, the son of the owners of the hotel in which Cynthia had stayed in Pesaro. His second was to refuse to take Cynthia’s phone calls. She, and therefore his son Julian, now aged five, were locked out of his life.
At first John and Yoko had stayed on in Kenwood, Pete Shotton not having found a house for them both, with Cynthia living with her mother in Ringo’s spare basement flat in London’s Montagu Square. But Yoko was a city person and soon she became bored in the Surrey suburb. So, a house swap was arranged by which John and Yoko went to Montagu Square, and Cynthia, plus mother and son, moved back into Kenwood. Typically, John left most of his clothes and belongings behind when he moved on.
His friend Pete Shotton was soon moving on, too. When asked by John to tidy up the Montagu Square flat because he and Yoko were too busy, he resigned. Yoko had an imperious air about her, and Pete couldn’t see how she was busy when all she did was hang around John all day. ‘Who the fuck do you think I am?’ he would later write that he shouted at John. ‘This is Pete Shotton. Do you remember me? I don’t clean your fucking house for you. I’m not here to tidy up your underpants and fold your girlfriend’s knickers. I’ve had it. I’m leaving.’
Initially John insisted on all the divorce negotiations being carried out by lawyers, but eventually he agreed to a face-to-face meeting with Cynthia at Kenwood. She assumed it would be just the two of them, but when John arrived, Yoko was with him. Both were dressed entirely in black.
Looking thinner and strained, John came straight to the point. ‘What did you want to see me for?’ he asked crossly as, like a stranger, he sat down in his own home, Yoko at his side.
‘Can’t we find a better way to do this?’ Cynthia asked. ‘I haven’t been unfaithful to you. I’m sure you know that.’
‘Forget all that bullshit, Cyn. You’re no innocent little flower,’ John came back, quickly turning defence into attack. Then he questioned her about Bassanini and a young American she’d liked and talked to in Rishikesh. For Cynthia, it was like a flashback to the ferocious jealousies he’d exhibited if she’d so much as talked to another boy when they’d been at college.
At some point in the conversation, Yoko went into the kitchen for a glass of water where she was given a severe ear-bashing by Cynthia’s mother, along the lines of, ‘Haven’t you any shame?’ That wasn’t the way Yoko saw things.
It wasn’t the way John did, either. Abruptly ending the meeting, and calling ‘Bye’ to Julian, who had been hovering in the kitchen throughout the encounter, he and Yoko got back into the car and were driven away.
Over the next few months the accusation that Cynthia had committed adultery was withdrawn and the divorce went ahead on the grounds of John’s uncontested adultery with Yoko. He would speak to his wife only once more before the divorce – on the subject of money.
‘My final offer is seventy-five thousand,’ Cynthia would say he told her in a phone call. ‘That’s like winning the pools for you. So, what are you moaning about? You’re not worth any more.’
All of us who knew John recognised that he had a callous streak. But, even so, it’s difficult to understand why he would speak to the woman he had once loved to distraction in that way, knowing that his abandonment of her was going to change her life and prospects completely.
What was new and confusing to Cynthia was that, for the first time, the generosity he casually lavished on others no longer extended to her. He had never cared about money. Pete Shotton had been given the money to buy, among much else, a small supermarket; a not particularly close friend from college got a house; Magic Alex was given a Jaguar; and Yoko got whatever she wanted and whatever it cost to promote her career. But, although it was John who was breaking up the marriage, Cynthia’s lawyers were going to have to fight for her. In the end they settled for £100,000 (about £1.5 million in today’s money) with a further £100,000 to be put into trust for Julian, when he reached the age of twenty-one. It was a lot of money at the time to Cynthia, but it wasn’t a huge amount to John.
He had, however, only half arranged the transfer of his affections. Once his divorce was finalised he wanted to marry Yoko. But she was still married to Tony Cox, who was now of the opinion that he’d been shafted.
Cox had encouraged Yoko to pursue John, but only as a patron for her art. He hadn’t expected her to run off with the Beatle – although, knowing her as well as he did, perhaps that thought should have crossed his mind.
Dan Richter, who was an old friend of Yoko’s and who worked for John and Yoko from 1969 to 1973, explained in his book The Dream Is Over how Cox believed that Yoko owed him quite a lot. ‘He got her out of the mental hospital in Japan, he kept her going, raised money for her shows . . . went after all the publicity, found backers for her films, borrowed money from banks . . .’ And now, it seemed, she was dumping him in favour of a rich, famous fellow who could do so much more for her.
The Coxes’ marriage had always been built on Yoko’s career, and like that career it had sometimes been shaky, Yoko disarmingly admitting that she saw Cox, in part, as an agent. And it seemed it was the loss of that agent role that vexed the cuckolded Cox most.
The solution lay, as so often, in money. Cox didn’t have any, but he did have some very substantial debts, including unpaid rent on Hanover Gate. John, on the other hand, was extremely rich. A transfer from John of £40,000 to Cox, so that the latter could settle his debts, together with airline tickets for him and a new girlfriend to the Virgin Islands, where he could quickly divorce Yoko, did the trick. The divorcing couple also agreed amicably to the joint custody of Kyoko.
All told, replacing one wife with another cost John around £150,000 that year (just under £2.4 million in today’s money), but to him it was worth every penny. He was more than merely in love with Yoko. He was mesmerised by her. It didn’t matter if the workforce at Apple found her bossy – and they were right, because she certainly was that, one of them remembering her as ‘a very pushy broad with not an ounce of humble in her’. Or, indeed, if Paul and George resented her presence in the studio when they were working – and they had every reason to, because whatever talents Yoko had they did not include, at that time, an ability to either understand or make popular music.
None of that concerned John. He saw Yoko as the most intelligent woman he had ever met, who was also very beautiful – looking, he thought, like a cross between himself and his mother, as he wrote to his Aunt Harriet and Uncle Norman – and someone ‘who had the same sense of humour as he did’. That was particularly important. Most photographs of the time show Yoko looking glum. But she and John giggled a lot together, as he frequently and fondly teased her. Altogether he saw sides of her to which her detractors were quite blind.
In another relationship, his life was advancing in a contradictory manner. Because, while manoeuvring to get out of his marriage to Cynthia, he was simultaneously helping his now reconciled father, Freddie, into a marriage with Pauline, his student lover. Pauline had become pregnant, and Freddie was anxious to do the decent thing, as John had done with Cynthia, by marrying the girl. But how? Pauline, who was still under the age of twenty-one, had been made a ward of court by her mother who disapproved of Freddie. That meant there was nowhere in England where Pauline could be legally married to the father of her unborn baby.
Nowhere in England, maybe. But Scotland has always kept its judiciary separate from that of English law. If the couple could get to Scotland, they could be legally married. Which is exactly what they did, with John footing the bill for his father and girlfriend to run away romantically to the little village of Gretna Green, just over the border inside Scotland.
What Mimi’s comments were when she read of John’s part in his father’s escapade is not known. What was recorded was her opinion of Yoko when John took his new lover down to Sandbanks to meet her. If Cynthia had been a disappointment, Mimi’s initial opinion of Yoko was worse. She was probably polite enough on the day, but later she revealed her true thoughts when she talked, in those less diplomatic times, to journalists.
‘I took one look at her,’ she told one reporter, ‘and I thought, “My God, what’s that?” I didn’t like the look of her right from the start. She had long black hair, all over the place, and she was small . . . I told John what I felt while she was outside looking across the bay. I said to him, “Who’s the poisoned dwarf, John?”’
It’s very unlikely that she ever spoke those words to John’s face. If she had, she would almost certainly have been shunned henceforth, and she wasn’t. But for those who wonder where John learned to exaggerate and speak so caustically and plainly about others, look no further than the woman who raised him.
A little plain speaking from John, or any of the Beatles, to the staff of the Apple boutique in London might conceivably have led to a different outcome. Or maybe not. The whole idea of the store had been a rich hippy whim that was now haemorrhaging money, and the Beatles had already wearied of being shopkeepers. So on 31 July 1968, just eight months after it had been opened, the Apple shop was closed down – by simply opening the doors and giving away all the stock.
The giveaway was, John would say, Yoko’s idea – a sort of avant-garde shopping event – and although it cost the Beatles somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 to, in the lingo of the time, ‘liberate the shirts and dresses and coats’, he loved it, quickly convincing his colleagues of how cool it was in its wackiness. So, together with their wives and friends, the four Beatles raided the shop the night before the big giveaway and filled their cars with outlandish garments that they would probably never wear, and then watched on the TV news as crowds arrived at what turned into a Beatle feel-good carnival.
John shrugged off the loss. Running a ‘fucking shop’ just wasn’t his thing.
Paul had known Cynthia since his school days and had always liked her. Now he felt sorry for her, and probably more than a little bruised himself, too – Jane Asher having broken off their engagement when, returning home unexpectedly, she’d caught him with another girl. So, at a loose end one day, he drove down to Kenwood to see Cynthia and Julian, finding himself starting to absently sing ‘Hey Jules’ as he went. Cynthia was grateful for his visit. After John left her, she would discover herself dropped by the other Beatles for many years.
Famously Paul’s ‘Hey Jules’ soon turned into ‘Hey Jude’, and would become the next Beatles single – pushing ‘Revolution’, for which John had held so much ambition, on to the flip side. To placate him, the disc was marketed as having two A-sides, but disc jockeys chose to play ‘Hey Jude’ rather than ‘Revolution’, and John didn’t like that.
But nor, a few weeks later, did Paul like John’s insistence that eight minutes and thirty-two seconds of a sound collage of distorted shrieks, fragments of speech, including the unexplained line ‘You become naked’, and bits of reversed music titled ‘Revolution 9’ should be included on the White Album. It had been partly recorded on the night John and Yoko first made love, and then added to in the studio by a helpful, if bemused, George and Ringo.
Exasperated, Paul would privately tell me that he didn’t think a Beatles album was the place for it. He was right. But John was unbending, although even he struggled to fully explain why the track was on the album. ‘It’s not specifically about anything. It’s a set of sounds, like walking down the street is a set of sounds. And I just captured a moment of time, and put it on disc, and it’s about that . . . It was maybe to do with the sounds of a revolution . . . so that’s the vague story behind it. But apart from that, it’s just a set of sounds.’
Which is what it was, a collection of sounds that simply puzzled, then aggravated, the overwhelming majority of fans who bought what was otherwise a dazzling double collection of songs. Perhaps if Brian Epstein had still been alive he could have intervened on the part of common sense. But there was no one who could tell John what to do now . . . other than Yoko.
The marathon recording sessions for the White Album ended on 13 October. John had been expecting a rest then, but Apple got a tip-off, through friendly Daily Mirror journalist Don Short, that the police drugs squad were planning to raid the Montagu Square flat where he and Yoko were living. Frantically he and Yoko cleared everything druggy they could find from their home. ‘I was thinking that Jimi Hendrix had lived there, so God knows what we might find in the carpets,’ he told me.
Then on 18 October, the drugs squad of the Metropolitan Police arrived, banging loudly on the basement door and demanding entrance. ‘We’d been in bed,’ John remembered, ‘and our lower regions were uncovered. Yoko ran to the bathroom to get dressed, with her head poking out, so that they wouldn’t think she was hiding anything . . .’ With his usual panache for melodrama, and probably trying to think of an excuse for his delay in answering the door, John said he told the police: ‘We were scared, we thought it was the Kray Brothers trying to get in’ – the Kray Brothers being a notorious murdering London gang at the time.
The response of the police was to read a warrant for his and Yoko’s arrest through the window and to break open the door so that they could carry out their search, during which their drug-sniffing dog found 200 grams of hashish, a cigarette rolling machine with traces of marijuana, and half a gram of morphine.
The man in charge of the search was Detective Sergeant Pilcher, the same policeman who had arrested Mick Jagger and Keith Richards the previous year, and who was making a name for himself in his targeting of rock stars. He would later nab George and Pattie Harrison on similar charges.
‘JOHN LENNON ARRESTED ON DRUGS CHARGES’ might have made an eye-catching headline in that night’s London Evening Standard, but it was hardly a major drugs bust. Pleading guilty, John’s fine would be a petty £150 when the offence went before the Marylebone Magistrates Court. He would forever claim that he believed the drugs had been planted, and they may well have been. Detective Pilcher was kicked out of the police and imprisoned for four years in 1972 for attempting to pervert the course of justice in another case.
But the drugs conviction was to become a bane of John’s life when a few years later it was used against him in the United States. In one way, however, he’d been very lucky. Without the tip-off he might well have faced a much more serious charge. That of the possession of heroin.
Although amphetamines had become a regular part of his life when the Beatles were in Germany, to be followed by pot when Rubber Soul was recorded and then LSD for Sgt. Pepper, John had never, until this point, used hard drugs. When he and Yoko got together, however, she told him how when he’d been in India she’d gone to Paris and had been offered heroin at a party, which she’d enjoyed. He had become intrigued. As usual, wanting to experience everything that life had to offer, he became determined to try it for himself, and inevitably he found a way – probably during Yoko’s exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery that summer. Fraser, the rich, dandy art dealer who had been arrested with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards but who, unlike them, had gone to prison for six months, was a heroin addict. Pushers gravitated to his gallery. Soon John would be hooked, too.
‘I never injected,’ he would say. ‘Just sniffing, you know.’ But he rarely did anything he liked by halves. As Paul said, ‘he would always go overboard’ on a new craze. Before long, heroin would become a problem for him.