Once again, they returned home to a grateful, amused nation like celebrated conquerors, as with every week that passed Britain seemed to become a younger and more fun country to be living in. It was now the mid-Sixties, and the cultural revolution of style, colour and pop music that soon would be described by Time magazine as ‘Swinging London’ could already be seen on the streets. As models’ skirts became ever shorter and photographers turned into stars, and as op-art and pop-art duelled for attention in fashion, the Beatles personified the moment. More than that: by providing the musical accompaniment to the time they had become the locomotive drawing the whole Sixties cavalcade behind them.
And yet Brian couldn’t let his boys rest. Within two weeks they were back on television, and the day after that, off they went on a month’s tour of the UK. Quite why Brian worked them so hard – and the frenetic pace would continue for three more years – has never been clear. Perhaps in his inexperience he didn’t know what else to do other than to ensure their continuous maximum exposure. And the Beatles didn’t complain as they squeezed in enough recording sessions between appearances to finish a second album and fourth new single of the year.
In fact, John would say that those years were the ones he enjoyed most during his Beatles career. London nightlife for rock stars was beginning to flourish, with late-night celebrity clubs like the Bag O’Nails, the Ad-Lib and the Scotch of St James staying open until the early hours. And there, away from the fans, the Beatles would meet and talk with members of other groups, such as the Animals and Rolling Stones. For a year the tabloid newspapers had been trying to create a competition between them and whichever new group came along behind them. At first it had been the Dave Clark Five with their hit ‘(Feeling) Glad All Over’ (which had mischievously become known as ‘feeling Glad all over’) and now it was the bluesy Rolling Stones. But, though John enjoyed their company and their records, he never seriously considered them as arch-rivals. No one was. As he would say: ‘We were like Kings of the Jungle . . . like Caesars.’
By this time the Lennons had given up living in South Kensington. Convenient though it might have been, it was too handy for the fans whose enthusiasm was putting Cynthia and baby Julian under siege. The Lennons needed a house, but somewhere the fans could be kept at a distance.
Never having bought a home before, and knowing little of London, none of the Beatles had any idea where to look, so they asked Brian’s accountants for their recommendations. The result was that John and Cynthia chose Kenwood, a large mock Tudor mansion in the wooded, private St George’s Hill Estate near Weybridge in Surrey. A few months later, Ringo found another, smaller house up the road, while George moved, with girlfriend Pattie Boyd, into a more modern but equally exclusive bungalow a few miles away, near Esher.
For a wealthy family man – an accountant, perhaps, who enjoyed playing golf – Kenwood would have been idyllic. But for a mouthy rock star, aged twenty-four, who enjoyed the urgency of city life, it wasn’t. Although John spent £25,000 buying the property and the same amount again on renovations and having a pool installed, he was never very happy there; and on his days off he would frequently be driven into London for the night life. Paul would make a better choice when he bought an early Victorian detached mansion in the heart of London’s St John’s Wood, just a few minutes’ walk from the Abbey Road studios.
And it was at Abbey Road that the Beatles’ legend continued to be built. Their 1964 Christmas single, ‘I Feel Fine’, a cheery pop song that John put together around a riff and some accidental feedback from his favourite Rickenbacker guitar, was immediately a worldwide hit. But it was a surprising choice, when Paul’s ‘Eight Days A Week’ was ready and waiting and then relegated to being a track on the new, otherwise rather weak, Beatles For Sale album. There had been a disagreement over which song to release and John had won that little battle, although later ‘Eight Days A Week’ would be a number one in the US where Capitol Records released more singles.
A more interesting track than either song was the new album’s opener ‘No Reply’, in which John’s lyrics speak of how a girl the singer loves won’t see him or talk to him. This was John anguishing to himself again. He always did anguish very well.
Not very long before, the Beatles had been outsiders from Liverpool, seeing London’s bright lights like urchins peering in through a frosted window. But now doors were opening for them right across the arts and show business circles. And when John, always restless to try something new, appeared three times with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on the BBC2 programme Not Only . . . But Also, he was flattered to be treated as an equal by the nation’s chief satirists – one Cambridge educated, the other Oxford. For Cynthia it was more difficult. To her, such people seemed ‘so effortlessly perfect’.
Singer Alma Cogan, who was known as ‘the girl with a laugh in her voice’, had been a big British star when the Beatles had been schoolboys, when John had derided her singing. She was only eight years older than he was, but to him she’d represented everything that was wrong with British music, old-fashioned and unhip, from the voluminously wide skirts she wore to the cute little songs she sang. But after the Beatles met her on Ready Steady Go!, and were then invited, with Brian, to one of her champagne parties at her swish apartment on Kensington High Street, where the famous sat on floor cushions like atolls, he discovered he had some reassessing to do.
As Cynthia would recall, the other guests read like a gossip column of the currently famous, so John, with his built-in prejudices against glitzy London show business, shouldn’t really have fitted in. But he did. Cynthia, on the other hand, was made aware of her own lack of sophistication, seeing herself as ‘a naïve girl who had simply got lucky and didn’t deserve’ to be there.
Nor did it help that, much as she liked the bubbly Alma Cogan, she couldn’t help but wonder if the singer was flirting with her husband. Did the two have an affair, as has been suggested by Alma’s younger sister, Sandra Caron? John never said, and as he usually told someone something, generally his Woolton pal Pete, they probably didn’t. Cynthia never asked.
When it came to other women, she never would, not even when a few months later John brazenly began to sing, in front of her, a new song he was writing that started, ‘I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me . . .’ It was the first line to ‘Norwegian Wood’ and the Lennons were on a skiing holiday in St Moritz with George Martin and his assistant (soon to be his second wife) Judy Lockhart Smith. The producer was astonished, because it was obvious to him that the song was about what John would later describe as ‘a little affair’ he’d been having with the wife of a photographer friend. But, either because Cynthia wasn’t listening to the words or didn’t understand their confessional element, she didn’t react.
Nor did she ask questions when, one evening, photographer Robert Freeman suddenly turned up at Kenwood with his tearful wife, Sonny. Robert was very angry, asking to speak privately to John, and they were taken by him into the dining room. Cynthia was not included in the ensuing conversation. When the couple left about half an hour later, John gave no explanation, but simply went upstairs to the little studio he’d had made at the top of the house. The incident was never mentioned again. When Robert and Sonny later divorced, Cynthia would write that she ‘couldn’t escape the conclusion’ that John and Sonny must have had an affair, ‘although I never had any proof’.
There were other women, too, a journalist friend and an actress, but Cynthia never knew for sure. She didn’t want to know. In her autobiography, she wrote: ‘I knew that John might have had the odd fling with a girl when the Beatles were on tour . . . If any of them [the Beatles] had the odd lapse, well, they were only human and it meant little.’
It wasn’t the odd lapse for John, but that was the way that Cynthia coped with it.
John had never had any real money, but when it arrived he never took the slightest interest in where it came from or where it went to. He’d always been casual about it, going back to when he’d borrowed from friends at art college and forgotten to repay them, and now he was content to let financial experts take care of his wealth for him. He just couldn’t be bothered. ‘Money flows in and it flows out,’ he would tell me, and, rarely carrying much cash, he was usually able to sign for everything.
Mimi’s attitude was that he was naïve about money. ‘He just never had any idea of its worth,’ she would fret, before adding her usual snipe, ‘probably because he never had to work hard for it like some people. He was a soft touch. He would listen to a sob-story and then just give his money away to some hanger-on who had spun him a yarn.’
Once she had been the provider, but now John supported her, despite her still regularly criticising him. He’d never liked Cynthia’s mother, Lil – nor had Mimi, who considered her to be intellectually and socially her inferior. But, anything for a quiet life; John rented his mother-in-law a house near where he and Cynthia lived, and gave her a monthly allowance, too.
Around his new home at Kenwood his behaviour at first was like that of a lottery winner. To go with the grand house he bought a black Rolls-Royce (although it was second hand), then a Ferrari as well as a Mini Cooper, with black windows and black wheels (prompting Paul to tease that he was ‘going to buy a bicycle with black windows’). But even after he passed his driving test in February 1965, John rarely drove any of his cars – or showed much interest in the Volkswagen Beetle he’d bought for Cynthia, or the Porsche that replaced it. With his terrible eyesight, he was hopeless when behind the wheel, and he mainly left the driving to a former Welsh guardsman, Les Anthony. The only cars he did enjoy driving, if only for a little while, were the model ones that he would race around a vastly extended track made up of three Scalextric sets laid out across two empty bedrooms in the attic.
Whenever John got a craze he would throw himself completely into it, before suddenly forgetting it and moving on. When Ringo came to live nearby, the drummer had a go-kart track built in his garden as well as a pool room in his house, so John would go there occasionally. As the drummer so eloquently told me: ‘Sometimes I go to John’s house to play with his toys, and sometimes he comes to my house to play with mine.’
It was inevitable that at that time the Beatles’ closest friends would be their colleagues in the band. Apart from Neil Aspinall, who was now their assistant, and Mal Evans, who was his, nearly everyone else they knew would by now have been awkward in their company. Brian was close, of course, but, at his lavish new apartment in Belgravia, he was a manager first and a friend second. He with his companions, and the Beatles with each other.
It might have been better for Brian had the Beatles been closer to him. Because, alone in London, without a regular partner, he was prone to not always mixing with the safest people, and would get into trouble. But, whatever scrapes he found himself in with badly chosen boys and his newfound interest in drugs, he tried very hard to make sure the Beatles didn’t find out.
Since, musically, John and Paul were so closely linked as songwriters it might have been expected that they would have been the closest of friends. They weren’t. John always got on with Ringo. Everyone did. He was something of a cheery melding factor in the group. And he usually got on with George, too. His relationship with Paul, however, could be edgier. Paul wouldn’t just turn up at Kenwood, as once he would cycle round to Mendips. His visits were professional. Driving down the A3 to Surrey in his Aston Martin, he would wait while John had his Rice Krispies breakfast while reading the newspapers, and then they would spend three hours working together.
‘All those songs, like “Help!”, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Norwegian Wood”, came directly out of the collaboration,’ Paul would later reminisce to me. ‘And never once did we come away empty-handed. We were both good. If he got stuck, I could always help him. Always. I never failed to help him. And if I got stuck he never failed to help me.’ Most of the songs for the film Help! were written face-to-face in this way. And when that wasn’t possible, they would do it over the phone, John with a guitar in his hands, Paul, perhaps, at his piano.
The Lennons had fled London to get away from the fans and the press, but, although they had a housekeeper in Dot Jarlett, and a driver and gardener, they were still just a young married couple with a little boy who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Occasionally Cynthia might go up to London to meet John and the other Beatles after a recording session, and go on to a club. But the general rule was that, as rebuilding work on the house went on around them, they didn’t go out to dinner together very often, and ate and drank pretty much the same things they would have done when they were living in Brian’s flat in Liverpool. That meant nothing ‘fancy’ for John, as he liked steak and chips and chip butties, and glasses of milk or beer rather than wine.
Very occasionally they would have guests, with Bob Dylan inviting himself on one occasion and Joan Baez on another, but the most regular caller was John’s old friend Pete Shotton, whose career in the police hadn’t prospered. Now the owner of a small supermarket in Hayling Island, Sussex, which had been financed for him by John, Pete was only just over an hour’s drive away. Mimi would tell John that his friend was a ‘cadger’, but John knew better. He insisted on helping Pete in any way he could. Pete knew him better than anyone else, much better than Cynthia, and didn’t see him as a famous Beatle. On his own, John could be lonely. When not working with the Beatles and at home with his family at Kenwood, there was a hole in his life that needed to be filled. Pete was always made welcome. Cynthia might have been a wife, but she wasn’t a pal who could share in his zany ideas.
And nor would she be at John’s side when he was driven into London in his black Mini Cooper, where he would sometimes get wasted, see what turned up, and be driven home in the early hours. Cynthia might have wanted to be there with him, but John was King of the Home as well as a King of the Jungle, and if he didn’t want his wife with him, he would have an excuse, and she wouldn’t go. So she and Julian would go to bed in their big millionaire’s home and John would come back when he felt like it, and then lie in bed all the following morning.
Cynthia might have been living a privileged, luxurious life with money to buy whatever she wanted and to pay the cosmetic surgeon to fix the bump in her nose that she’d always hated, but she was hardly enjoying a normal family life. And though John might sometimes hate himself and wish he could be more of a family man and not get cross with Julian when the little boy splashed his food around the room, he couldn’t. He was the way he was and domestic life bored him.
Meanwhile the business of being the Beatles had to go on. New songs for the next Beatles film, Help!, were needed, as well as a new single – for which John wrote ‘Ticket To Ride’. It was a miserable piece that not everyone thought was strong enough, and that included Mimi, who still always had an opinion on everything. John’s own criticism was of the flip side, ‘Yes It Is’. A lament for a previous lover, against whom the current one couldn’t compare, ‘Yes It Is’ received some thoughtful reviews when released. John, however, seemed to delight in trashing his own work, especially when he thought it had been the subject of undeserved genuflection by the growing number of Beatles cognoscenti. Casually, he would later dismiss it to me as him ‘trying to write “This Boy” again. Same harmony, same chords and double-dutch words. It’s embarrassing. “If you wear red tonight . . .” Jesus Christ!’
Nor did his derision end there. Another of his songs on the Help! album was ‘It’s Only Love’. ‘That was the most embarrassing song I ever wrote,’ he told me. ‘Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics . . . Even then I was so ashamed of the lyrics I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written above all else.’ Then he paused. ‘Well, you can say that about a few of them.’ At the other extreme, he was proud of ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, which, with only acoustic instruments, was almost folkie. It was, he would say, his ‘Afro-Dylan days’, a singing style that annoyed Paul. ‘Why are you trying to sound like Dylan?’ McCartney asked during the session.
When it was released, various theories would be gossiped about the lyrics of ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ – that it was a song about homosexuality, and perhaps a message of understanding to Brian Epstein. But if it was, that was something John doesn’t seem to have ever mentioned, and it’s likely that he would have done.
The movie Help! was shot during March and April 1965 in, for tax reasons, the Bahamas, and then Austria. The use of black and white film had given A Hard Day’s Night a topical newsreel reality feel, but, with more money to spend this time, Help! was filmed in the glamorous unreality of Technicolor and Cinemascope. And with a silly script that relied mainly on visual gags, it wasn’t nearly as good . . . nor were the Beatles as well behaved on the set. There was a reason for this. In the six months since Bob Dylan introduced them to pot it had become a mainstay in their daily lives.
‘We were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period,’ John said. ‘Nobody could communicate with us. It was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time.’
Paul confirmed that: ‘We showed up a bit stoned, smiled a lot and hoped we’d get through it.’
They did get through it, sort of, and the film was another huge hit, but it’s the title song that is best remembered. When John wrote it, with Paul’s help for the tempo and the counter melody, he believed he was just writing a bouncy rock and roll number, which is how it was received by the rest of the group and the public. Only five years later, when he went into therapy and was encouraged to read through the lyrics to all his songs, did he reach the conclusion that ‘won’t you please, please help me’ had been more personal than he’d known.
‘That was my “fat Elvis” period,’ he would tell me. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time . . . but later, I knew that I was crying out for help. The real meaning of the song was lost because we needed a single and it had to be fast. I get very emotional when I’m singing the lyrics . . . Whatever I’m singing, I don’t piss about . . . It was a bit poetic. I was in a hell of a state when I wrote it . . .’ Then, by way of explanation, he added: ‘The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. I was eating and drinking like a pig, and I was as fat as a pig . . . dissatisfied with myself.’
That would be hindsight. At the Help! stage in his life, John never admitted to any weaknesses. Paul put it very well when interviewed for The Beatles Anthology: ‘The thing about John was that he was all upfront. You never saw [the real] John. Only through a few chinks in his armour did I ever see him, because his armour was so tough. On the surface, John was tough, tough, tough.’
Whatever its shortcomings, Help! was released to worldwide delight and box office success in the summer of 1965 just a few days after John’s second book A Spaniard In The Works was published, to rather less excitement. Having run out of his Mersey Beat archive he’d been forced to work harder this time, and had even bought James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and a book by Edward Lear, to discover what it was that, according to some critics of In His Own Write, had influenced him. ‘I couldn’t see any resemblance to any of them,’ he told a BBC literary interviewer, Wilfred De’Ath. He’d never even heard of Edward Lear.
For his new book, once again the critics had much praise, if not quite so effusive. But when asked why he wrote such short mini-pieces, his reply was scornful. ‘To you they’re mini-pieces,’ he said. ‘To me they’re marathons.’
As for the lower sales, he really didn’t care. ‘Okay, it didn’t do as well as the first, but then what follow-up book ever does?’ he would later tell Rolling Stone. ‘I had a lot of the stories bottled up in my system and it did me good to get rid of them . . . The plain, unvarnished fact is that I like writing, and I’d go on writing even if there wasn’t any publisher daft enough to publish them.’
What he did care about, although he would try to conceal it for several years, was his reaction to the penultimate track on the Help! album. It was ‘Yesterday’, a song Paul had been playing on the piano for over a year, having woken up one morning with it running through his head. Had he dreamed it? He didn’t know, and he would go around playing the melody to friends to see if they recognised it, in case he was accidentally copying something he might have heard somewhere. Only when he was convinced that it was a true McCartney original, and had settled on some lyrics – which concern loss, and which some believe to have been a reflection on the death of his mother when he was fourteen, did he think about recording it.
This presented two problems. One was that George Martin couldn’t see how a rock and roll band like the Beatles could back Paul without spoiling the song. So he suggested a string quartet as an accompaniment. It was the first time any of the Beatles had sung on record without the others providing the backing, and the first time that John had found himself left out. He had to give his permission. That was the easy bit. The problem was that John hadn’t contributed to any of the lyrics either, meaning that ‘Yesterday’ was a 100 per cent McCartney original. Someone at EMI suggested that it should perhaps be released as a Paul McCartney solo, but no one wanted that. In the end, ‘Yesterday’ went on to the Help! album as a Beatles track and wasn’t even released in the UK as a single – although it became a number one hit in America.
Reflecting on this, John suggested that Paul should hang on to all the royalties for the song instead of sharing them. Paul thanked him for the thought, and refused. That would have been against the spirit of the songwriting relationship they’d always had. So, everything was amicably agreed.
The difficulty for John was coming to terms with the fact that Paul had come up with a classic. No matter how much he admired the shape and lyrics of the song, and he did, that familiar little itch of jealousy couldn’t help but nag at him, as over the years and everywhere in the world he would hear it – probably the most loved Beatles song of them all – and know that he’d had nothing to do with it.
He was always vague about many things, like dates and times and money, but he would have perfect recall for some details of his life, and one of those was the first time he took LSD. It was one evening around the time of the filming of Help! and he and Cynthia had been invited out to dinner along with George and Pattie. ‘It was at the flat of some trendy, swinger dentist, you know the sort of people who George hangs out with . . .’ he would recall disparagingly to me. ‘His wife chose the bunnies for the Playboy Club or something . . . Anyway, we’re all there and he slipped it into our coffee without telling us.’
John had heard about LSD, how its full name was lysergic acid diethylamide, and how it was commonly known as ‘acid’, a psychedelic consciousness-distorting, laboratory-made narcotic. George, at the time, was less informed. Quickly John realised that the coffee had been spiked and became angry. He liked to be the one to decide when he took drugs and to know what he was taking. As soon as they realised what had happened the four guests wanted to go.
Aware that the drug might take thirty minutes to take effect, and not knowing what its effects might be, the dentist kept saying, ‘I advise you not to leave.’
But, John would tell me, ‘We thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy or something in his house and we didn’t want to know.’ So they got into George’s car and set off to see their friend from Hamburg, Klaus Voorman, who was appearing in the trio Paddy, Klaus and Gibson at the Pickwick Club. By the time they got there, however, the hallucinogenic effects of the LSD had begun, and, going on from there to another club, the Ad Lib, where very bright lights were flashing, they emerged into the club shouting, ‘The lift’s on fire.’
‘It was insane, terrifying, but exciting,’ was John’s verdict. Cynthia hated it and would later say that she thought she was going mad as everything was changing into nonsensical shapes around her. Pattie, meanwhile, found herself banging on shop windows for no apparent reason.
With George driving very slowly they made their way home to his house in Esher, where eventually they fell asleep. It took Cynthia all night to come down. John, however, was intrigued by the experience. Soon he would be taking LSD again and again. The Preludin and alcohol that had fortified him during the long Hamburg club nights had recently been replaced by pot. But now he’d tried a drug of an altogether different dimension, and he’d enjoyed what it did for him with its Alice In Wonderland perception-changing distortions. It would take a little while, but over the following year, LSD would become a potent new diversion. And it would irritate and disappoint that Cynthia, who wouldn’t take it again, would regret that it had ever entered their lives.