Freddie and Pauline left Kenwood after Christmas, and John soon arranged for Apple to find them a flat in Brighton well away from any harassment by the press. ‘Watch your arse in Brighton,’ was John’s advice in a letter to his father. There were ‘loads of queers’ in Brighton. Then, after a week’s holiday in Morocco with Cynthia, John was quickly back in the studio recording a new song he’d written, ‘Across The Universe’. Once again it utilised the two-tone siren of a police car and he was very proud of it. It was, he told me, ‘one of the best songs I ever wrote . . . It’s good poetry.’
He’d hoped it might be the next single, but the other Beatles weren’t as keen on it as he was, selecting Paul’s ‘Lady Madonna’ instead, which was probably a wise, goodtime rock and roll choice after the bad publicity of the Magical Mystery Tour show. But when a new song by George, ‘The Inner Light’, was chosen as the flip side, John gave up and offered ‘Across The Universe’ to the World Wildlife Fund for a fund-raising charity album. ‘The Beatles didn’t make a good record of it. It was a lousy track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it,’ he would say. He would be even more disappointed when the World Wildlife Fund failed to realise the song’s money-making potential and didn’t promote it.
For John to have written a song so fancifully poetic was out of character, but no more so than his continuing fascination with the Maharishi. He hadn’t stuck to his renunciation of drugs for long after he’d got back from Bangor, but, having thrown himself into his new craze, he was now a keen proselytiser for transcendental meditation. He had more energy because of meditating, he told David Frost in a television interview, and he was happier, too. Nor did he care if, to a sceptical public, the Beatles were becoming figures of fun for what many newspaper pundits saw as their gullibility. All the answers, he insisted, lay with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Acting almost on herd instinct, all four Beatles, with their wives and one fiancée – Paul and Jane having become engaged on Christmas Day – had agreed to fly out to join the yogi at Rishikesh in the Indian Himalayas in the middle of February 1968. But before they did, a meeting was arranged with an assistant to the Maharishi at the Spiritual Regeneration’s London centre. Cynthia went, too. The moment of their arrival would be etched in her memory for the rest of her life. This is how she described it in her autobiography.
‘As we entered the main room I saw, seated in a corner armchair, dressed in black, a small Japanese woman. I guessed immediately that this was Yoko Ono, but what on earth was she doing there? Had John invited her, and, if so, why?’
No explanation was offered. Yoko introduced herself but took no part in the proceedings, sitting silently as John chatted to the Maharishi’s assistant and the other Beatles. John even appeared not to notice her. At the end of the meeting things got even odder, when as John and Cynthia left to go to their car, the door of which was being held open by their driver Les Anthony, Yoko climbed in ahead of them. Even John looked surprised, Cynthia wrote. Then he asked Yoko if they could give her a lift anywhere. ‘Yes, please,’ Yoko said, and gave Anthony her address near Regent’s Park. ‘Hanover Gate.’
The journey then passed in complete silence. ‘Goodbye, thank you,’ said Yoko as she was dropped off.
‘What was all that about?’ Cynthia says she asked John as they set off for home. He told her he didn’t know, and offered no further explanation. She knew better than to push him. Obviously he must have known something.
What he didn’t tell her was that he’d seen Yoko several times, and had in January invited her to a Beatles session at Abbey Road when they’d been recording ‘Hey Bulldog’. She had not, it transpired, been bowled over by what she’d heard. ‘Why do you always use that beat all the time?’ she’d asked. ‘Why don’t you do something more complex?’ John had been embarrassed, and probably a bit peeved, too, but not too peeved to suggest that the two of them go back to Neil’s flat where he’d expected to have sex with her. That was what usually happened when a rock star took a girl back to a flat. But Yoko was different. His approach had seemed crude. She’d turned him down.
The rejection only made her more beguiling and mysterious. By the following month he had decided that when he went to India he would take both Cynthia and Yoko with him, but had lost his nerve at the last minute. ‘I didn’t know how to work it,’ he told an interviewer later. ‘So, I didn’t quite do it.’
Had Yoko still expected to be going to India when she turned up at the Spiritual Regeneration Centre? It would appear so.
A few days later Cynthia came across a typed letter from Yoko among the fan mail at Kenwood, in which Yoko thanked John for his patience, telling him that she was thinking about him and was fearful that she would never see him again. This was more than a fan letter, but, when questioned about it, John again dismissed Yoko as a ‘weirdo artist . . . wanting money for all her avant-garde bullshit’, or with words to that effect.
It’s unlikely that Cynthia was convinced. But for years she’d been believing what she wanted to believe of her husband.
And, with that in mind, John and Cynthia packed their bags and set off to join George and Pattie at Heathrow airport and fly to India and the Maharishi. Paul and Jane and Ringo and Maureen would follow a few days later.
John had little idea of what to expect when, after a drive of two hundred miles by taxi from the airport at New Delhi up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the group arrived at the yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh. It was, however, a pleasant surprise. Built on hills that sloped down to the Ganges, while it may have been Third World India outside the walls of the Maharishi’s estate, it was never less than comfortable inside. Famous for centuries among Hindus as a holy place of contemplation, the mood there among the hundred or so other visitors was quietly serene.
Naturally the presence of the Beatles, shortly to be followed by Donovan and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, as well as Hollywood’s Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence – wherever the Beatles went, others were sure to follow – caused some excitement in the surrounding area. But with journalists and photographers locked out of the centre it was, as the Maharishi had promised, the ideal place to relax and reflect. With no phones and newspapers, external aggravations were kept at bay.
Not that there weren’t some internal pressures in what at times would become a kind of spiritual hot-house. One of the first songs that John wrote there was called ‘Dear Prudence’, after he and George were sent to try to get Mia Farrow’s sister to come out of her hut. ‘She seemed to go slightly barmy,’ John would remember, ‘from meditating too long . . . If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away. She’d been locked in for about three weeks [probably much less] and was trying to reach God quicker than anybody else.’
Each one of the Beatles’ party probably had a different reason for being in Rishikesh. Usually John was the leader in any new craze, but in matters spiritual it was George who led the way. ‘The way George is going he’ll be flying on a magic carpet by the time he’s forty,’ John would joke, but he was scarcely less serious himself, having become convinced that the Maharishi knew some kind of cosmic secret that he was determined to learn. Cynthia, on the other hand, just hoped a stay at Rishikesh might wean her husband off the drugs that she believed were destroying her marriage and his talent; while Paul was simply curious enough to give meditation a try. For straight-talking Ringo and his wife Maureen, it was just a pleasant holiday with friends in a beautiful place, with some light meditation thrown in.
Eating was mainly in a canteen, and there would be communal question-and-answer sessions in the evening, where the guests would sit in rows, everyone now garlanded with chains of orange blossom around their necks, with the women wearing saris. Other than the public meetings, or private discussions with the Maharishi, the rest of the time was free, which proved ideal for John and Paul to work on new songs.
For Cynthia, the bucolic surroundings might have kept John away from drugs and alcohol, but they didn’t prove to be the romantic setting that she’d hoped would refresh her marriage. On arrival, she and John had been given a bungalow with a large double bed, but soon John had become increasingly aloof towards her.
‘He would get up early every morning and leave our room,’ she would later write. ‘He spoke to me very little and after a week or two he announced that he wanted to move into a separate room to give himself more space.’ It would help him meditate, he said. From then on, he virtually ignored her. She was hurt and upset.
‘Our love life had definitely disappeared by then,’ she told me. Sex had been replaced by a brother-sister relationship in that, with Cynthia, John was impotent. ‘He was having problems, either because of being so high on drugs or whatever. He found it quite difficult with me,’ Cynthia remembered, ‘although obviously not with someone else. There are many ways of stimulating someone, but I didn’t know the tricks.’
She also didn’t know letters were arriving several times a week from Yoko Ono to be collected in the ashram post office by John. That was why he’d been getting up and going out so early in the morning.
‘Yoko wrote these crazy postcards . . . like “look in the sky. I’m a cloud”,’ John would say. ‘And I’d be looking up trying to see her, and then rushing down to the post office the next morning to get another message. It was driving me mad.’
Yoko kept up the teasing communication throughout the entire time John was in India. She would say later that the idea that she ran after him wasn’t true. Some might say that, although they were continents apart, she never left him alone. He wrote back to her, as he wrote to several friends while in India. But although many of his letters to them have been published, those to Yoko haven’t. Presumably Yoko still has them.
The value of the Maharishi’s lessons in meditating would, for John, ultimately be minimal, but the time in Rishikesh was invaluable to both him and Paul as songwriters. Paul would come home after a couple of weeks with, among others, ‘Martha My Dear’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Back In The USSR’, ‘I Will’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, while John’s Rishikesh songs included ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’, ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Yer Blues’. Then there was ‘I’m So Tired’ with the line ‘and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get’ for introducing tobacco to England in the late sixteenth century. ‘I always liked that. They should have used it for an anti-smoking campaign,’ he told me.
Rishikesh had been intended as a spiritual retreat for the Beatles, but for John it proved mainly to be a place to write. ‘The experience was worth it, if only for the songs that came out of it,’ he would say. ‘But it could have been the desert or Ben Nevis . . . It was nice and secure and everyone always smiling . . . up a mountain . . . with baboons stealing your breakfast.
‘The funny thing was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth. In “Yer Blues”, when I wrote “I’m lonely, want to die”, I wasn’t kidding, that’s how I felt. Up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal.’ He was kidding a little, obviously. That was just the italicised way he always talked.
Ringo and Maureen were the first to leave, setting off home after just ten days, missing the children, they said, and not liking the food or the flies. The ashram, Ringo told me on arriving home, ‘was just like Butlin’s’, the holiday camp where he used to play with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. That was probably a slight exaggeration too.
Paul and Jane left after a month, to be replaced by Magic Alex, after which the serenity of the camp began to fall apart. To Alex, the Maharishi was basically a con-man who was milking the Beatles for fame by association, which was a bit rich, coming from him – the Greek television repairman who had latched on to the tripping and impressionable John with impossible schemes and inventions that never worked.
But when a rumour swept around the camp a few days later saying that the Maharishi had made a sexual pass at an American girl, Magic Alex jumped on it as proof that the yogi wasn’t quite the saintly little man he professed to be.
The Maharishi may or may not have been as pure in thought, word and deed as some of his Beatles followers had believed. But no evidence was offered to corroborate the rumour. Not that it mattered. In this now overheated and slightly hysterical closed community, evidence wasn’t necessary. Like a scene in the E. M. Forster novel A Passage To India, rumour, gossip and possibly cultural differences quickly took over.
Cynthia would later say that, after nine weeks in the ashram, John had told her that he’d already become disenchanted with the Maharishi. For a spiritual man, the yogi was, he’d decided, too interested in money, fame and celebrities – all the charges that had been jokily levelled at the Maharishi by the British press when the Beatles had become so publicly besotted. The possibility that he might be both a good, spiritual man and commercially minded at one and the same time doesn’t appear to have been entertained.
George was torn. ‘But,’ said John, ‘when George started thinking it might be true, I thought, “Well, if George is doubting him there must be something in it.”’ So he decided to leave the ashram, and, as usual in Beatle matters, it became a case of follow-my-leader.
‘Why are you going?’ the Maharishi asked.
‘If you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why,’ John snapped back.
With that, amid some irrational and unfounded paranoia that the Maharishi might take steps to prevent them from getting out of the ashram, John’s adventure with the ‘little fakir’ came to an end.
Well, almost . . . The taxi taking John and Cynthia to New Delhi broke down, and when the driver went to try to get help for his vehicle, John stood at the roadside and thumbed a lift from an astonished stranger who, recognising him, then kindly drove the couple to their hotel in New Delhi.
Writers often find ways of wreaking revenge on those they believe to have betrayed them. John’s method was that of a songwriter, and already a kind of public revenge on his guru was taking root in his mind. ‘Maharishi, what have you done, You made a fool of everyone,’ the lines began, until George, who had been most upset by the experience, managed to convince him to disguise the subject of his attack. So, out went the Maharishi and in came Sexy Sadie. ‘Sexy Sadie, oh yes, you’ll get yours yet.’ It was spiteful stuff.
Whether anything untoward did happen to the unknown American girl while she was in Rishikesh, no one ever found out, which leads to the suspicion that it probably didn’t. George would always feel bad about the way the Maharishi was treated and would later be reconciled with him and the transcendental movement. But the nearest John ever came to an apology was an admission some years after the event that ‘We made a mistake there . . . We were waiting for a guru, and along he came . . .’
It’s a long flight home from India to London and there are two versions of what happened during it. One tells that John, after weeks of sobriety in Rishikesh, got drunk and made a full confession to Cynthia of the hundreds of girls he’d had sex with before and during their marriage, even naming women she knew, some of whom she’d regarded as good friends.
Cynthia’s account of the journey was that she was tearful and upset about the way the Maharishi had been treated, and that the conversation about sex took place a few days after they arrived home, when they were in the kitchen at Kenwood.
‘There have been other women, you know, Cyn,’ John suddenly said out of the blue. According to her memoir, her response was that she was touched by his honesty. ‘That’s okay,’ she said. At which point he put his arms around her, and told her he still loved her, and asked her if she’d ever had any affairs of her own. She’d told him she hadn’t. Nothing had ever gone further than flirting.
Accounts of the chronology of any relationship by the couple involved rarely match completely. But this was how John and Cynthia would remember, or choose to remember, a pivotal moment towards the end of theirs.