For everybody else in rock music there never was a year like 1966. From the Mamas & the Papas’ ‘California Dreaming’ and ‘Monday, Monday’ to Simon and Garfunkel and ‘The Sounds Of Silence’ and the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’ and on to so many others, all year long the radio stations of the world were ablaze with melody.
So it was almost ironic that at this point the four Beatles, who had led the music like Pied Pipers for the past three years, should all decide to give rock a rest and go off in four different directions when they got back from America. George took Pattie to India to stay with Ravi Shankar, immerse himself in Indian culture and create a new identity for himself, Paul turned to composing the theme music for the British movie The Family Way, and Ringo took a holiday.
John could have done any number of things, because publishers were offering him contracts to write his autobiography, the National Theatre was after him to help adapt In His Own Write for the stage, while a greetings card company had an eye on his cartoons. What he chose to do, however, was something that wouldn’t involve him as the leading creator.
When the Beatles had been touring, Brian had insisted that they make no public comments on the Vietnam War in case it compromised their popularity. It was a conflict in which Britain wasn’t involved, he insisted, so Beatle lips should be buttoned. The Beatles hadn’t liked that. It had seemed wrong that they couldn’t discuss publicly the foremost talking point of the day. But, with the last note played at Candlestick Park, Brian’s stricture had ceased to be relevant. And, just three days after arriving home, John flew off to Germany to begin filming the anti-war black comedy How I Won The War for the director of both A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, Richard Lester. That there was so little time between touring and filming might have been due to a shooting schedule beyond his control, but it was typical of John to always race on to the next thing. Neil went, too. John always had to have a pal with him.
On the face of it, the movie’s plot, about an absurdist plan to install a cricket pitch behind German enemy lines in the North African desert during the Second World War, was pretty far from the subject of Vietnam. In fact, the movie was really a satire about the jingoism of British war films that John’s generation had grown up watching. But, in his role as Musketeer Gripweed, one of the ‘poor bloody infantry’ whose fate was inevitably to be one of senseless sacrifice, the parallels in futility were there for him to see. From this point forward, he would become an increasingly vocal supporter of anti-war movements.
Lester had flattered him while making Help! by telling him he was the most natural actor among the Beatles, so, although his part was rather small, he enthusiastically immersed himself in it. For the first time in his life he was going to pretend to be somebody other than the leader of his gang. Kitted out in an army uniform, given a pair of National Health Service type, round, wire-framed glasses to wear, and his longish wavy hair cut into a 1940s short back and sides style, he looked quite different. Going to Paris for a weekend with Neil, he was thrilled when he found he could go on a bus and wander around a flea market without being recognised. He hadn’t been able to do that for years.
As shooting moved from Germany to Almeria in Spain, he took a house with actor Michael Crawford and his wife Gabrielle away from the film crew, from where he would be driven to the location every day in his Rolls-Royce, which had arrived in Spain well stocked with LSD and the other assorted drugs he thought he needed. Soon Cynthia and Julian joined him, together with Ringo and Maureen.
Filming in Spain took six weeks, during which everyone played a lot of Monopoly, and John became not a bad bowler when playing cricket with Michael Crawford – a sport he had mostly avoided when he’d been at school. Most important, though, were the weeks spent sitting cross-legged in his bedroom with his guitar working on a new song. This one didn’t come quickly, as had so many of his early hits. It was inspired by the wrought iron gates outside the Spanish mansion where he was living which reminded him of the gates at the entrance to Strawberry Field, the children’s home around the corner from Mendips. So, he added an ‘s’ and called the song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Movie making being a slow, incremental process which involves many hours every day of waiting around, it was not surprising that long before the filming was complete he’d decided that this was not the new direction he’d wondered about. When asked one day by director Lester why he wasn’t enjoying himself, he replied with his usual bluntness: ‘It’s stupid, isn’t it . . . boring.’
As a movie, How I Won The War wouldn’t turn out to be either critically or commercially successful. But there was one aspect for which John would be forever grateful – the little round glasses that he’d worn as Musketeer Gripweed. He’d been wearing contact lenses for three years while on stage, although not always successfully, as he had a habit of dropping them in the dressing room and having to go on stage without them. ‘Can you imagine what it’s like hearing all that noise and playing and singing and not seeing a bloody thing? It’s frightening,’ he would say.
But now, at the start of his post-touring days, he no longer believed he had to try to look handsome. He could leave that to Paul and George. It would be far better for him to appear slightly bookish and cerebral. Besides, he rather liked the shape of the wire-framed glasses. They suited him, and he would wear that style happily for the rest of his life. So, from an interesting film, albeit a flop, a new fashion in granny glasses was born.
In later years John would be unable to place exactly the moment when he first heard or read the name Yoko Ono. Was it on a flyer sent to him from the Indica Gallery by John Dunbar? Or had it been that Dunbar had phoned him to mention that a Japanese avant-garde artist from New York called Yoko Ono, who allegedly ‘did things in bags which might or might not have included having sex’, was putting on an exhibition of her work at the Indica, and John had thought that sounded erotic? Or had John just popped into the Indica, which was next door to the Scotch of St James nightclub, wondering whether he and John Dunbar might amuse themselves by dropping some acid together – and had instead run into Yoko?
John, who had just got back from Spain, couldn’t say. What he did remember was that when driver Les Anthony dropped him and a friend, Terry Doran, off at the Indica, he found what he thought at first must be a con as he looked at the items on display and their prices. ‘A hundred pounds for a bag of nails? Are you kidding?’ he would laugh. ‘How much is that apple? Two hundred pounds! Ha!’
Amused, he went downstairs into the basement where he was sure that Dunbar was trying to hustle him into buying something. ‘He thinks, “The Millionaire Beatle’s coming to buy,”’ he was telling himself.
At which point Dunbar introduced him to a very small Japanese lady wearing a black sweater and black trousers, who was peering out from between two curtain folds of long black hair. It was the artist herself, busily preparing her exhibition, ‘Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono’, which would open the following day. Visiting London with her husband and child, Kyoko, to participate in a symposium called ‘The Destruction of Art’, she was taking the opportunity to publicise her own work. And few were as single-minded as Yoko when it came to publicity.
To John, it all seemed very silly at first. But he liked silliness, so he went along with it. ‘I didn’t end up in a bag. I was expecting an orgy, but we met and it was all quiet,’ he would often jokily remember. ‘Anyway, I’m looking for the action, and I see this thing called Hammer A Nail. It’s a board with a chain and a hammer hanging on it, and a bunch of nails at the bottom, and I said, “Can I hammer a nail into it?” She said “No”, and walked away.’
According to Yoko, she hadn’t recognised John. That’s possible, although she had, it is believed, insisted to Dunbar that a Beatle be invited. Whatever the explanation, when Dunbar told her who John was, she came back and asked for five shillings. John replied that he didn’t have five shillings because he never carried money, but then said: ‘What if I give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail. Would that be all right?’
Yoko agreed that it would indeed be all right.
John was next intrigued by a ladder leading up to the ceiling with a spyglass hanging there. ‘So I went up the ladder and looked through the spyglass at some tiny little writing on the ceiling, and it said “Yes”,’ he would say. ‘At this time all the usual avant-garde bullshit was negative . . . “smash the piano with a hammer” stuff . . . But “Yes” was positive.’
If this scene of the first meeting of John and Yoko was written as a movie script it would almost certainly be acted as a long mutual flirtation and would be a prelude to something else. It was a prelude to very much more, but the story wasn’t to be continued for over a year. Shortly afterwards John left the gallery and didn’t attend the official opening of the exhibition the next day. The next time he saw Yoko was at a Claes Oldenburg opening, where the two simply made eye-contact but didn’t speak.
He didn’t know he had met the woman who would change his life. He didn’t know anything about her, other than the story of how she was making a short movie, Bottoms (Film No. 4), having put an advertisement in The Stage theatrical newspaper for ‘intelligent looking bottoms’ and then filmed 365 of them. But her zaniness and the idea of the film appealed to him, and when she later contacted him asking for an original music score, he sent her the lyrics of the Beatles song ‘The Word’. She had door-stepped Paul first and asked for something, but he’d refused her request.
Yoko had broken into the orbit of the Beatles. She has always claimed that it was purely by accident, and John always gallantly agreed with that. Her detractors, however, and there are many, point to some clever plotting and attention-seeking behaviour on her behalf. What can be said is that, like John, Yoko always had an unwavering belief in herself and her art, as well as an iron will. And in 1966 a little-known avant-garde artist who was wishing to make a name for herself in a new country could do no better than by finding a way of associating with the Beatles, and especially John Lennon, whose every action was newsworthy and who was now rich enough to be a very important patron.
One morning a few weeks after the meeting at the Indica, Yoko arrived without an appointment at the Beatles’ office in Mayfair – presumably having been given their address by John Dunbar – and asked to speak to John. She was turned away, but not before she had fallen into conversation with Neil Aspinall and Ringo. What she needed, she explained to the drummer, was financial backing to wrap the huge statues of the lions in Trafalgar Square in canvas. Ringo was nonplussed and told Peter Brown, Brian’s assistant, of the meeting, adding the comment that she might just as well have been speaking in Japanese for the little he understood of her plan.
Undeterred, Yoko then sent John a copy of a book of ‘instructional poems’ she had self-published in Tokyo. It was in Japanese with English translations alongside, and was called Grapefruit – of which she had brought a handy boxful from America as a kind of calling card. Everyone she thought might be useful to her was given a signed copy. From the very beginning of her career, she understood the power of networking and self-promotion; especially self-promotion.
Cynthia would say she remembered John reading Grapefruit while lying in bed one night. When she asked about it, he dismissed it as something sent by ‘that weird artist woman’. But, at the same time, the one-time writer of ‘The Daily Howl’ couldn’t fail to be amused by some of the book’s suggestions. For instance: ‘Stir inside of your brains with a penis until things are mixed up. Take a walk.’ And then: ‘Smoke everything you can, including your pubic hair.’ These weren’t the sort of ideas that Cynthia came up with.
John always liked intelligent, educated women – Eleanor Bron, with whom he had been friendly when she had appeared in Help!, had studied at Cambridge and Maureen Cleave had been at Oxford. And Yoko was obviously very bright. He liked older women, too, and Yoko was thirty-three when they met, to his twenty-five. She was also already on to her second marriage. It’s unlikely his thoughts about her were, at that point, romantic, or even sexual. If they had been she would have known about it, because he wasn’t shy in making his intentions clear. So, if it wasn’t sex that first impressed him, what was it? It had to be something altogether less palpable.
This odd little Japanese woman dressed in her black intellectual’s uniform, like a pint-sized Juliette Greco, might seem half crazy, but her ideas were unusual. In her presence he felt that she was the star and he the audience. He hadn’t felt that way in quite a while. She was an enigma. He’d never met anyone like her before.
But on that day at the Indica that was all he thought. Putting thoughts of her aside, he rejoined Terry Doran, left the gallery and got on with his life.