At Quarry Bank, the boys would indulge in saucy group sessions in the bushes after school. At that time they would have been thirteen or fourteen years old. ‘Our fantasies, at least, were strictly heterosexual,’ recalled Pete Shotton, a little priggishly. ‘“Right boys,” someone would venture, “who should we do it to today?”’ They would then take it in turns to call out the names of famous pin-ups, ‘each name spurring us on to new heights of ecstasy’.
When it came to John’s turn, he liked to enlist the vision of Brigitte Bardot, for whom the term ‘sex kitten’ had recently been coined. The French actress shot to fame in Britain after posing in a bikini at the Cannes Film Festival to publicise her relatively minor role in Act of Love (1953). Her career blossomed during John’s adolescent years: she starred opposite Dirk Bogarde and James Robertson Justice in Doctor at Sea (1955), before going on to play the title role in Naughty Girl (1956), and then ‘a demon driven temptress’ in And God Created Woman (also 1956).1
During one of their unabashed sessions, John suddenly switched his regular call from ‘Brigitte Bardot!’ to ‘Winston Churchill!’ which had the instant effect of pouring cold water on their shared fantasies.2
Around this time, he started collecting a new series of photographs in Weekend magazine. In weekly instalments, the magazine offered a new piece of what would eventually grow into a life-size pin up of Brigitte Bardot in a swimsuit. Having collected the full set, he taped the composite poster onto the ceiling above his bed.
Paul shared John’s passion for the sultry French actress. ‘She was it, she was the first, she was one of the first ones you ever saw nude or semi-nude,’ he recalled. ‘She was a great looker, and she was French, so Brigitte for us, with the long blonde hair and the great figure and the little pouty lips, was the epitome of female beauty … It was the fact that she was thought to have loose morals; we could fantasise that she did anyway.’
John was still entertaining these fantasies about Brigitte Bardot in 1957, when he left school to enrol at the Liverpool College of Art. There he had caught the eye of Cynthia Powell, who had by chance overheard him compare one of their fellow students approvingly to Bardot. Determined to win John’s heart, Cynthia dyed her hair blonde, and started wearing false eyelashes, tight black trousers and clingy sweaters. Sure enough, John began to take an interest, and they soon became a couple.
Just before the Beatles set off on their first trip to Hamburg, Cynthia received a telephone call from John telling her to come over as fast as she could. Aunt Mimi had left to visit her sister Nanny in Birkenhead: the house was free. John’s first impulse was to borrow a camera. ‘He insisted I try out various seductive poses while he snapped away, so I put my hair up, let it down, hitched up my skirt and thrust out my chest in an attempt to do my best Brigitte Bardot. After the photo session, we made love, then lit a fire and lay on the sofa in front of the television, eating anything we could find in the fridge. It was all the more exciting for being so illicit.’
John took these photographs with him to Hamburg. When Cynthia and Paul’s girlfriend Dot visited them there, John and Paul persuaded them both to wear leather skirts, just like Bardot. Many years later, Paul remembered John saying, ‘Yeah, well, the more they look like Brigitte, the better off we are, mate!’ Tony Barrow once went so far as to claim that during John’s marriage to Cynthia ‘John admitted to me that he would metaphorically shut his eyes and think of some movie star, probably Brigitte Bardot.’
Paul and John’s fidelity to Brigitte survived money and fame. An early version of the Sgt. Pepper cover, drafted in pen and ink by Paul, shows the Beatles in their colourful uniforms standing in front of a wall of framed photographs of their idols. To their left is a pin-up of Brigitte Bardot kneeling with her hands behind her head, ten times the size of anyone else. But for reasons lost to time, she failed to make the final cover, her place being filled by Mae West and Diana Dors.
In June 1968, fantasy collided with reality when Brigitte Bardot arrived in London, and sent word to Apple that she would like to meet one or more of the Beatles. John was the sole volunteer. He boasted to Pete Shotton that he would soon be meeting the girl of their schoolboy dreams. ‘Naturally, I begged John to let me tag along, but since Brigitte had specified she wasn’t prepared to meet a crowd of strangers, only Derek [Taylor] was permitted to accompany him.’
Before the big meeting, John popped round to see Taylor at the Apple offices in Wigmore Street, and asked him for some marijuana to calm him down. Taylor only had LSD, so they both took that instead. The two of them then climbed into John’s Rolls-Royce and were driven the short distance to the Mayfair Hotel, where Bardot was staying. Suffering an attack of nerves, John sent Taylor into the hotel while he remained crouched on the floor of the car.
Taylor found Brigitte Bardot dressed all in black leather, surrounded by female companions. When he told her that John Lennon was in the car outside she seemed disappointed that no other Beatles had come. By this time, Taylor’s tabs of LSD were kicking in, causing great waves of paranoia. He and John were in danger, he told Bardot, and they were being watched by mysterious people. Bardot didn’t understand what he was saying, but suggested he ask John to come up.
John duly came to the room, but the twin traumas of LSD and Brigitte Bardot in leather rendered him speechless. With some effort he managed to say ‘Hello,’ but little else. Bardot said that she had booked a table in the hotel restaurant, but neither John nor Taylor were sure they could walk that far. Taylor was nonplussed: ‘Suddenly everyone was standing up, ready to go. This was terrible! For a start, neither of us was capable of eating anything at all; we weren’t even sure we could stand up … “Please don’t think us bourgeois,” we begged, “but we are both married and this is getting out of hand and” … oh Christ! What a mess!’
Brigitte, in Taylor’s words, ‘was not best pleased’. She and her female companions stomped off to the restaurant downstairs, leaving John and Taylor in the hotel suite. When Bardot and her entourage returned from dinner, they were surprised to find the two men still there, Taylor slumped on Bardot’s bed, and John strumming a guitar, playing a selection of songs he had composed in India. Bardot’s indifference quickly turned to irritation; before long she asked them to leave.
John returned to Kenwood, where Pete Shotton was staying. ‘“What happened, what happened?” I said breathlessly. ‘“I can’t bear the suspense another minute!’”
‘Fucking nothing happened,’ said John. ‘I was so fucking nervous that I dropped some acid before we went in and got completely out of me head. The only thing I said to her all night was hello, when we went to shake hands with her. Then she spent the whole time talking in French with her friends, and I could never think of anything to say.’
It had been, he concluded, ‘a fucking terrible evening’.
1 ‘A role that will make you gasp and never forget’, according to the trailer.
2 Though Shotton failed to mention Paul’s participation in this game, Paul certainly included himself when he shared roughly the same story with readers of GQ magazine in 2018: ‘It was just a group of us, and instead of just getting roaring drunk and partying – I don’t even know if we were staying over or anything – we were all just in these chairs, and the lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did. We were just, “Brigitte Bardot! Whoo!” and then everyone would thrash a bit more. I think it was John who sort of said, “Winston Churchill!” … It was quite raunchy when you think about it. There’s so many things like that from when you’re a kid that you look back on and you’re, “Did we do that?” But it was good harmless fun. It didn’t hurt anyone. Not even Brigitte Bardot.’