He hadn’t planned to say it. When he’d been in Toronto he’d mentioned to Eric Clapton that he was thinking of leaving the Beatles; he’d told Allen Klein, too – only to be asked not to mention it to the other Beatles yet. But when at the meeting Paul had begun outlining his own plans, he just hadn’t been able to stop the words tumbling from his mouth. Paul’s memory of the day was that he was in total shock. Of all four members of the band, he was the biggest Beatles fan. Other than go to school, being a Beatle was all he’d ever done, and, despite all the warning signs in John’s behaviour, he just hadn’t seen this coming. Ringo wasn’t particularly surprised, and when George was told, all he felt was relief that the break was out in the open.
Except that it wasn’t. At Klein’s insistence, John’s decision to leave wasn’t to be made public, not only until after Abbey Road’s release a few days later but until the Let It Be movie and album came out the following spring. To Paul this seemed like a reprieve because, as he knew well, John regularly contradicted himself and changed his mind. There had to be a good chance that he would have second thoughts. After all, why would anybody want to leave the Beatles? It didn’t make sense.
It did to John. Even if no announcement had been made, he was, he now felt, already free of his Beatles responsibilities. And as Paul busied himself promoting Abbey Road and disproving a creepy ‘Paul is dead’ rumour that bubbled up from America and garnered much press coverage, John, with Yoko ever at his side, and working from a large room at Apple, threw himself into a whirlpool of diverse, disconnected and sometimes plainly wrong-headed activities.
There was, for instance, a commission to draw some lithographs depicting Yoko and himself, and overseeing the editing of the film of both his Montreal bed-in and the Toronto peace concert. There was also help to be given to the parents of a man called James Hanratty. Hanratty had been hanged for what had become known as the A6 murder in 1962, and his parents, believing that their son had been innocent, had come to John seeking help in getting an inquiry set up to clear their son’s name. Moved by their despair, John agreed to finance a film about what they believed to have been a terrible miscarriage of justice. He, of course, had no more experience of miscarriages of justice than anyone else – and the film would, in the end, never be made. But his fame and fighting spirit were beginning to make him a magnet for the desperate. He put it another way. As pleas for funding or help rained in on him, he told me: ‘I used to be a performing flea . . . Now I’ve become a crutch for the world’s social lepers.’
It was a role that appealed to the boy who had ‘always wanted to take the side of the underdog’, as Mimi had remarked. But for John to really feel free to play the part, he would, he decided, have to divest himself of one of his establishment credentials. That was the medal that had been presented to him as a Member of the British Empire, along with the other Beatles, by the Queen in 1965. He’d been embarrassed by it at the time. Now he saw getting rid of it as a way of announcing a new John Lennon to the world for the approaching Seventies.
Sending Les Anthony, his driver, down to Sandbanks to retrieve the medal from Mimi’s mantelpiece, he then wrote a short letter to the Queen. It read:
I am returning my MBE as a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.
With love
John Lennon
Then, after instructing Anthony to drive to Buckingham Palace in his Rolls-Royce and deliver the letter and medal, much amused, he rang me at the Evening Standard to report news of his stunt. The story just caught the last edition of the day for commuters to read on their journey home that night.
As John had anticipated on the phone, his protest was not well received. The Queen didn’t comment – she never does – but newspaper pundits railed against the Beatle’s act of disrespect, not just towards the monarch, but towards the honour itself. In truth, it really wasn’t John’s finest moment. To equate, in a bad taste joke, the terrible civil war then raging between Nigeria and its breakaway province of Biafra with the poor sales for his latest record was uncomprehendingly insensitive. Years later he would regret the wording of the letter. But he never regretted sending back his MBE.
There was something else that began during those last months of 1969 that he would come to regret – a burgeoning relationship with a self-proclaimed and, to everyone but John, dubious British Black Power leader. The man’s name was Michael de Freitas, aka Michael Abdul Malik, once known as a pimp and bully-boy for a London slum racketeer but who was now presenting himself as a reformed, saintly character. Going under the protest name of Michael X, de Freitas had a plan to open a black cultural centre, the Black House, in the Holloway Road, a poor area of North London. And John, attracted by what seemed an excellent cause, had money to spare for it. De Freitas, who was a con-man, among much else, played him well, as he had other rich benefactors. John’s intentions were good, but he was gullible and unquestioning. Having decided that he was anti-establishment, he was welcoming of others in whom he saw the romance of the rebel. In the case of Michael de Freitas, it would all end terribly.
As he was already considering the Beatles ‘to be part of history’, a sense reinforced when it became clear that there was no hope of stopping ATV owning Northern Songs, John had little interest in the new Beatles single, ‘Something’. It was the first time that the Lennon–McCartney axis had allowed a George Harrison song to be the A-side of a record. And, although his ‘Come Together’, on the flip side, got equal billing, his focus was on a new John and Yoko experimental album, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With The Lions. The title was a jokey reference to the BBC radio family show that he had enjoyed as a boy. The contents of the album, the sales of which were tiny, included a recording of the heartbeat of the unborn baby that Yoko had miscarried.
It followed a pattern. Everything John and Yoko now did was seen through the window of their mutual self-obsession – although John wouldn’t have seen it that way. To him, he and Yoko were ‘Mr and Mrs Peace’. And, following an appearance at a UNICEF benefit concert alongside Delaney & Bonnie and Friends in London in mid-December, when George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Keith Moon joined him on stage in what was really a supergroup jam session, the couple launched a Christmas ‘War Is Over’ peace campaign. It involved identical large white billboards being posted up in the centres of major cities in twelve countries around the world – all carrying the message in massive black print ‘WAR IS OVER’, and in smaller print ‘Happy Christmas, John and Yoko’.
Whether the billboards had any influence on the promotion of peace was unknowable, but, in John’s mind, like the bed-ins, they set up a conversation that he hoped would be discussed by newspaper columnists and radio and TV presenters in the run-up to Christmas.
He hadn’t known much about Ronnie Hawkins until he’d met him at the Rock and Roll Toronto Peace Festival, other than that he was an early rocker of Elvis’s vintage from Arkansas ‘who used to waggle his arse’, and that, now based in Canada, his band, the Hawks, had eventually become The Band. But that was enough for John, and when Ronnie offered his home for the Lennons to use as their Canadian headquarters, he quickly accepted. Ronnie, his wife Wanda and their children hadn’t realised what would hit them.
There they’d been, ready to celebrate Christmas, with a little spruce tree and a few flashing lights, in their roomy house and grounds out in the snow-covered fields of Ontario. Then, within hours, a van had arrived from Capitol Records and unloaded the biggest, whitest, most synthetic, gingham-draped Christmas tree they’d ever seen, together with a gilded cage bearing two pure white un-cooing doves. Then came the telephone company to install half a dozen new lines, a macrobiotic cook was hired together with his Zen cookbook, and a young woman was chauffeured in to do the extra washing-up.
That was only the beginning. Soon after the arrival of their guests, for whom Ronnie and Wanda vacated their double bed, and who were accompanied by their assistant, art critic Anthony Fawcett and this writer, an art publisher turned up from Paris bearing with him five hundred lithographs in a limited edition recently drawn by former art student John, for personal autographing.
Nor did the interruptions stop there. As posters shouting ‘WAR IS OVER’ appeared on the Hawkins’ sideboards and sofas (and one or two saying ‘BRITAIN KILLED HANRATTY’, which puzzled everyone apart from the guests), next came television producers from both Canadian and American networks, together with their soundmen, cameramen and interviewers, to be followed by radio reporters with their tape recorders and newspaper reporters with their notebooks.
John was in his element. Hour after hour he and Yoko – but mainly John, because he was the one everyone wanted to talk to – would chat to radio shows all over the US and Canada, before breaking off to get something to eat and do a bout of lithograph signing, scribbling his name under drawings he’d made of the sex life of his wife and himself. He’d been working on them for months in the privacy of his home. Now he wanted the world to see them. The intimacy depicted in the prints came as a surprise.
‘Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?’ I asked the artist as I passed him sheet after sheet to sign.
‘Because I like it,’ John grinned merrily.
Standing to one side, Yoko watched without expression.
A few years earlier John had said to Maureen Cleave, ‘I hope I grow out of being sex mad.’ Then, when she pressed him on the joys of marital fidelity, he had added comically: ‘Do you mean to say I might be missing something?’
Now infidelity was never in his mind. ‘We’re not immune to sex, you know,’ he said. ‘We’re always sussing each other out. But you have to weigh up whether or not it’s worth it. There’s a difference between fancying other people and having sexual fantasies about them. We wouldn’t mind going to see a sex show . . . you know, being voyeurs. But we wouldn’t want to join in. Our main trouble is finding people who are like us, who get the same kicks as us.’
‘We’re very jealous people,’ came in Yoko at that point.
‘I’m jealous of the mirror,’ said John.
‘I think I’ll go and change soon,’ said Yoko a few minutes later.
‘Oh good, I’ll come and watch,’ came back John, putting down his signing pen.
As to whether his drawings were good or not, he had no idea. Nor did he care. ‘They won’t be taken seriously anyway,’ he said. He had just read and laughed over an article in the Daily Mirror in which he’d been named as ‘Clown of the Year’. He wasn’t offended. He liked to read about himself, whatever was written.
But watching him that weekend in Canada, when he was away from the down-to-earth teasing retorts of the other Beatles and his Apple colleagues, not to mention the impertinently cynical British press who had known him for a long time, was to see him basking in a reverence that he didn’t get in his own country. While one New York art dealer, who, admittedly, may have had one eye on the marketing of the lithographs, was telling him that he should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a local Toronto rabbi was declaring John and Yoko to be the ‘finest people’ he’d ever met. Then there was comedian Dick Gregory and poet Allen Ginsberg arriving in Canada to offer their support, followed by an invitation to the Toronto home of media intellectual Marshall McLuhan, and, to top it all, an audience with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa.
John had to be flattered. He was certainly in as good a mood as he’d been in months, as, wearing a balaclava and the sergeant’s jacket he’d bought in an Army and Navy store, he even went skidooing across the snow around Ronnie Hawkins’ fields. Being a Beatle had given him the fame to be listened to, but his own country was, for the most part, deaf to anything he had to say. ‘I have the hardest time in Britain,’ he complained to a Canadian reporter. ‘They don’t take anything we do or say seriously. It’s a continual put down.’
But for the best part of a week in Canada, he’d found himself viewed as something quite different – an intelligent, free-thinking advocate of protest; or, as he saw it, ‘an ambassador for peace’. That made him feel good about himself. He wasn’t just thought of as a rock star any more. Perhaps that was why, back at the Hawkins’ house, he decided to let me in on his big secret . . . that he’d left the Beatles. He giggled as he told me.
But I wasn’t laughing. I was dismayed. I was a Beatle fan. Like Paul, I really hoped he’d change his mind.
John and Yoko were back at home at Tittenhurst Park for Christmas in time for John to learn that the heavyweight BBC television programme 24 Hours had chosen him as its ‘Man of the Decade’. He was surprised and pleased. Yet the restlessness in his spirit was digging in again. The Sixties was the past. Whatever happened next was what interested him now.