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A week after the Beatles’ civic reception in Liverpool Town Hall on 10 July 1964, John bought his first property. From now on, he too had somewhere to rattle his jewellery.

‘Kenwood’ is a mock-Tudor mansion situated on the St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey, bang next to the golf course. It cost the twenty-three-year-old John £20,000, at a time when the average house in Britain sold for £3,400. He added a swimming pool – ‘Nothing like I ordered,’ he complained – and countless luxuries and further embellishments – two eighteen-foot sofas, a marble fireplace, a sunken bathtub, a jacuzzi in the master bathroom. These cost a further £40,000. For all its eccentricities, this was the bourgeois dream.

Each day, vans from the smartest stores delivered unimaginable quantities of merchandise: telephones and tape-recorders, a gorilla fancy-dress costume, a suit of armour, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a vast altar crucifix and five televisions, which John liked to keep turned on, but with the sound down.

He had two large attic rooms knocked together to make room for twenty different Scalextric model racing car sets, complete with landscaping. ‘If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly,’ he told a friend.

He bought books galore, including leather-bound editions of Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde, and the complete Just William series, along with more specialist and unexpected works such as Forty-One Years in India by Field Marshal Lord Roberts and Curiosities of Natural History by Francis T. Buckland.

The dining room, covered in purple velvet wallpaper, sported a long white table surrounded by a dozen antique chairs. The kitchen contained any number of cutting-edge gadgets, none of which John was able to operate. Cynthia was similarly bamboozled, but managed to master the waffle machine. Tired of eating just waffles, John asked his interior designer, Ken Partridge, to send someone down to teach Cynthia how to work the other appliances, though he himself never bothered to learn.

The garden was filled with furniture and statuary, much of it covered in psychedelic colours after John and his friend Terry went wild with the spray paints. Later, a giant boot, eight feet high, from the film Help! stood at the bottom of the garden. Four garages, all in a row, provided shelter for three shiny new cars – a Rolls-Royce, a Mini Cooper and a Ferrari.

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For most of his life, the only space John had had to himself was his cosy little bedroom in Mendips. It is understandable, then, that rather than expanding into Kenwood’s twenty-seven rooms, or parading around its impressive gardens, he spent most his time confined to the modest sunroom, scrunched up like an embryo on a tiny yellow sofa which had, naturally enough, been a gift from Aunt Mimi.

In those days, John only had to imagine more possessions and – Hey presto! – they would appear overnight. A standing order with Hamley’s toy shop supplied him with every new board game the moment it was issued.

He found his staff harder to manage. He liked his amiable daily, Dot Jarlett, but she got on badly with the cook, whose handyman husband wouldn’t stop flirting with the guests. Before long, the cook’s daughter left her husband and moved into the staff flat with her parents, but she then started making passes at John. Meanwhile, household items kept disappearing. The never-ending episodes of pilferage and squabbling upstairs and downstairs gave Kenwood something of a psychedelic Swinging Sixties Downton Abbey feel. In a later episode, Cynthia was informed by a nosy neighbour that John’s smelly, chain-smoking chauffeur Jock was living in the back of the Rolls-Royce. ‘I was hopeless when it came to standing up to people,’ admitted Cynthia. Eventually, Brian Epstein took control, sacking the cook, her husband and the chauffeur.

Though decorated and furnished as a fun palace, Kenwood soon became the setting for an Ibsen drama, forgotten figures emerging from the fog of the past, set on sabotaging the future. By now, John was one of the four richest and most famous and most liberated young men in the world; but he was also a husband, a father, a nephew and a son. And a son-in-law, too: from the start, he was at daggers drawn with his forceful mother-in-law, Lillian, who had moved down from Liverpool to live in nearby Esher. Lillian liked to spend her days busying herself at Kenwood, or rootling around antique shops and auction houses for bits and pieces she judged would contribute to the interior decoration. Though the beneficiary of John’s largesse – he had not only bought her a house, but also paid for its upkeep, and gave her an allowance – Lillian remained convinced that her daughter had married beneath her. For his part, John found it easier to pretend that Lillian wasn’t there. One visitor remembered seeing her ‘flopped on a couch, stuffing glacé fruits into her mouth’, while John ‘passed through without comment’.

And ghostlier figures than Lillian would also come knocking. One day, when Cynthia was alone in Kenwood, she opened the door to a stranger, ‘a tiny man with lank grey hair, balding on top’. The man introduced himself as John’s long-lost father, Fred, a claim confirmed at first sight: ‘He looked as unkempt and down-at-heel as a tramp – but, alarmingly, with John’s face.’

Cynthia said she was expecting John back in an hour or two. She told Fred he was welcome to wait, introduced him to his grandson, Julian, and gave him a cup of tea and cheese on toast. Their conversation proved stilted, but they soon found a shared pursuit: when the fifty-two-year-old Fred mentioned that his hair was a mess, Cynthia offered to cut it for him.

For some reason John had failed to tell Cynthia that, just a few weeks before, he had met his father for the first time in seventeen years. John had been six years old when Fred had tussled with Julia over which of them would look after him. Fred had been gone to sea for four years, working as a ship’s steward. On his return to England he had smashed a shop window and stolen a mannequin. Having been arrested while waltzing with the mannequin, he had been imprisoned for six months.

From prison he wrote to Julia’s sister, John’s Aunt Mimi, asking her to help him regain a role in John’s life. Mimi’s response had been severe: ‘You have made an absolute shambles of your life and have brought shame and scandal upon your family. If you have a shred of decency left in you I advise you to go to New Zealand alone and put your past life behind you. Surely you don’t want your son to know you’ve been in jail?’

By 1963, Fred was working as an itinerant washer-up in hotels and restaurants. He had given up any hope of seeing his son again until a fellow worker at the Moore Place Hotel in Esher pointed out that the leader of the Beatles was called Lennon, and looked just like Fred.

Fred despatched a series of letters to John, but they went un-answered. In time he contacted a reporter from the Daily Sketch, who, sensing a cracking story, engaged in negotiations with Brian Epstein for a meeting between long-lost father and famous son. At last, on 1 April 1964, the two met at the NEMS offices in Monmouth Street.

John’s first words to Fred were testy, to say the least: ‘What do you want, then?’

Fred replied that he didn’t want anything. ‘I told him that he got his talent from me,’ he told the Daily Sketch, adding, with familial tactlessness, ‘I don’t want to sound boastful, but I was doing what John is doing twenty-five years ago – and better!’ In his seafaring days, Fred had entertained his fellow crew members with selections from the musicals: for his showpiece, he would black up his face to deliver a tearful rendering of Al Jolson’s ‘Little Pal’.

After fifteen minutes or so, Fred and John were interrupted by Epstein, on the pretext of an engagement at the BBC. The meeting had been awkward, but not disastrous.

John can surely be forgiven for harbouring mixed feelings towards his father. From that moment on, his relationship with Fred would swing between love and hate, interspersed by long periods of surliness. He seems to have recognised similarities in their characters which, had providence worked in a different way, might have set him on a similar path. ‘I don’t really hate him now, the way I used to,’ he told Hunter Davies. ‘It was probably Julia’s fault as much as his that they parted. If it hadn’t been for the Beatles, I would probably have ended up like Freddie.’ At the time, Davies thought this an unlikely scenario, but he came to recognise the truth in it: ‘It is hard to imagine John fitting in with a proper job, or office hierarchy, or even managing to make a living as an artist or designer, not of course that he had passed any of his art college exams. He would have become bored far too quickly. So he might well have ended up as a bum.’

Fred managed to establish some sort of patchy relationship with John, who appreciated his cocky, rackety, rebellious side, and recognised in his more forgiving moments that Fred – who had himself been brought up in an orphanage – was the victim of circumstances. ‘He’s all right. He’s a bit wacky – just like me,’ John told Cynthia; and he said much the same to Pete Shotton: ‘He’s good news. A real funny guy – a loony just like me.’

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Their future relationship was fitful and explosive, their reconciliations often ending in arguments, requiring fresh reconciliations. When things were going swimmingly, Fred made a habit of putting his foot in it. Chatting about music one day, John asked Fred which of his own compositions was his favourite. ‘I think all your songs are bloody great,’ he said. ‘But I’ve always had a special affection for “Penny Lane”.’

Fred’s interest in John was not wholly paternal. ‘Now, it’s back to finding some work. John has his thousands and I’ve got four shillings,’ he told a reporter after their first meeting. ‘But I’m still the happiest bloke alive.’ But the temptation to capitalise on their relationship proved irresistible. First, he sold his life story to Titbits magazine for £200, and then in 1965 he recorded a dreadful single, half-sung, half-spoken, ‘That’s My Life’. ‘I’ve been an entertainer all my life,’ he explained to the press.

He had high hopes for the song, but it failed to sell. Like many unsuccessful artistes before him, Fred looked around for someone to blame, and found Brian Epstein. There may even have been some truth in this: in her autobiography, Cynthia says that John ‘was furious at his father’s blatant jump on the bandwagon of his own success’, and ‘asked Brian to do anything he could to stop it. Whether Brian did or not I don’t know, but the record never made it into the charts.’ Together with his new-found manager, Fred dropped round at Kenwood at eleven o’clock one evening, ready to demand an explanation, but John was not in a welcoming mood. ‘Fuck off!’ he shouted, before slamming the door in his father’s face.

Yet the two continued to keep in touch, and John financed Fred’s existence, albeit on a modest level, giving him a one-bedroom flat in Kew and £10 a week. While employed washing dishes at the Toby Jug Hotel in Tolworth, Surrey, Fred became engaged to a student called Pauline, thirty-five years his junior. He then turned up at the door of Kenwood with Pauline, asking if John and Cynthia might give her a job and somewhere to live. Once again, Kenwood became a setting for family melodrama. ‘She lived with us for a few months, but it was a nightmare,’ recalled Cynthia. ‘She was constantly in tears and arguing with her mother over Alf [Fred]. She slept in the attic, and we’d hear her screaming down the phone and sobbing up there.’

For her part, Pauline did not take to John: ‘His table manners were the most atrocious I had ever witnessed. He said little, but as he munched I noticed him sizing me up with those penetratingly suspicious eyes that were to become quite familiar to me during my stay at Kenwood.’

One evening, Pauline and Fred went out to a nightclub in Kew, where they bumped into Cynthia, all by herself. According to Pauline, ‘Freddie was deeply shocked to find John’s wife clubbing without a suitable escort, and he treated her to a lecture on the subject of wifely duties … I was furious with him for offending Cynthia.’ But perhaps he had also offended Cynthia in another, less seemly way. Pete Shotton remembered that ‘Freddie exhausted the limits of even John’s tolerance when he attempted to seduce his daughter-in-law. Cyn was so distraught that John threw his father out of the house, and refused ever to see him again.’1

With so much drama going on, it is perhaps not surprising that John sought refuge in ‘Sunny Heights’, just down the hill.

1 John’s relationship with his father finally came to an end in 1970, when Fred wrote to him mentioning that he was planning to write his autobiography. An Apple secretary asked Fred and Pauline to come to Tittenhurst Park on John’s thirtieth birthday, 9 October. Kept waiting in the kitchen, they were greeted by an irate John, saying, ‘I’m cutting off your money and kicking you out of the house … Get out of my life – get off my back!’

It emerged that John’s post-Beatles ‘primal scream’ therapy had triggered violent feelings against his father. ‘Have you any idea of what I’ve been through because of you? Day after day in therapy, screaming for my daddy, sobbing for you to come home!’ According to Pauline, John also repeatedly described his mother as a ‘whore’. Grabbing his father’s lapel, he said, ‘As for your life story, you’re never to write anything without my approval. And if you tell anyone what happened here today … I’ll have you killed.’ This threat worried Fred so much that he gave a statement of their conversation to a solicitor, with instructions that it be made public if he should ‘disappear or die an unnatural death’.