Getting Yoko appreciated as an artist, making her famous for what he saw as her genius, and presenting her as the other half of his own new personality had by late 1968 become John’s paramount aim in life. But how could he best do that? What would be certain to generate the most public attention?
Then he had an idea. It would be cheap and easy to do. Inviting Apple’s Tony Bramwell to the Montagu Square flat, he asked him to set up lighting and a camera on a tripod with a time-delay mechanism, and then to leave while he and Yoko took some photographs. The film was then developed in the utmost secrecy.
The resulting black and white photographs, one showing John and Yoko standing together, completely naked, facing the camera, and the other a naked rear view of the couple looking back over their shoulders, would be the images, front and back, of their first LP together, officially titled Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.
Gasps emanated from the other Beatles and staff and friends when the photographs were shown – to be followed by much shaking of heads and not a few giggles. Even John had pause for thought. ‘I must admit I was a bit shocked when we got the pictures back,’ he said. ‘I’d never seen my prick on an album or even in a photograph before. I thought, “What on earth! There’s a fella with his prick out.”’
It was, though, worth it ‘for the howl of protest that went up. It really blew their minds . . . Paul gave me long lectures about it and said, “Is there really any need for this?”’ In fact, Paul saw the photographs as another inexplicable act of sabotage of the Beatles’ image. But, loyal to the Beatles, he never said that in public.
Of course, most newspapers immediately blamed Yoko, but she had her own explanation as she told me one night at Abbey Road in October 1968, while in the next suite John and George Martin were busy mixing ‘Cry Baby Cry’.
‘I know some people may think, “Ah, the bottoms girl, Yoko, has persuaded John into it,”’ she said, ‘but that wasn’t how it was. I don’t think my Bottoms film inspired him either. I know some people may think I have a bottoms fetish, but when we made the film I was so embarrassed that I was never in the same room as the filming.’
In fact, she didn’t think John had even seen the Bottoms film. ‘He heard one of the tapes of my voice pieces and said, “This should be an LP record”, and that if it were made it should have a picture of me naked on the cover. I don’t know why he said that. I suppose he just thought it would be effective. He didn’t even know me that well at the time.
‘Anyway, he sent me a drawing of me naked and I was terribly embarrassed. But when we decided to make a record, we decided that we should both be naked on the sleeve . . . And it’s nice. The picture isn’t lewd or anything like that. Basically, we’re very shy and square people. We’d be the first to be embarrassed if anyone was to invite us to a nude party.’
John can’t have been surprised by the general reaction – only perhaps by the ferocity it generated, when Sir Edward Lockwood, the record company chairman, angrily declared that EMI, to whom John with the Beatles was under contract, would absolutely not be releasing or distributing the record with that cover. Lockwood did see it as lewd. As for Mimi, she was furious to read how her nephew was ‘making an exhibition of himself’.
To those who knew John, the most surprising aspect of it all wasn’t so much that he was showing himself naked, but that the sleeve also showed Yoko nude. Because, despite what he might have got up to with many women, sexual jealousy had always governed his serious relationships.
When he and Yoko had first got together, he had made her write down a list of all the men she had slept with before they met. Then, as he told me, he made a list for her of all the serious affairs he’d had, going back to the girls in Liverpool about whom Cynthia had never known.
There was more. ‘John wanted me with him all the time,’ Yoko told me, even making her go with him to the bathroom at Abbey Road. ‘John was scared that if I stayed out in the studio with a lot of other men, I might run off with one of them,’ she joked. Others have suggested there may have been another explanation as to why the two would disappear to the bathroom together during recording sessions. But, be that as it may, why would a man who was by nature jealous and insecure publish a photograph of his lover naked for all the world to see?
Equally puzzling is how he appears not to have anticipated, or even understood, the degree of ill feeling that Yoko was beginning to generate among fans and the general public. To him, ‘lost in the glow of love’, as he would put it, Yoko was the saviour who had taken him away from the prison that had become his marriage and the Beatles. But to the public she was a disruptive element, a view that was only strengthened when it was admitted in October that, although both were still married to other people, she was pregnant with John’s child.
For much of the Sixties the Beatles had reflected a sunny image. They were Britain’s most famous export, and millions, from all generations, loved them. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was already on its way to becoming an anthem in care homes for the elderly, and ‘Yellow Submarine’ had become a nursery rhyme in kindergartens. Nor were they just any rock group. There were lots of those around. By 1968 they had become the pivot around which much contemporary cultural activity rotated, and the prism through which a whole generation of young Brits saw themselves.
But now they were growing up and growing apart and John had introduced a strange-looking woman into the group, a ‘mysterious, crazy, unreadable Japanese lady’ who said she was an artist and did things in bags, who had made a film about bottoms and who had stolen John from his wife . . . The fans didn’t like what they were reading in the papers and they didn’t like Yoko. But, John being John, that meant only one thing. He would now become more resolute than ever in his championing of her.
Throughout the next few weeks of a hypocritical little tabloid morality storm, during which Yoko miscarried the baby she was carrying, John displayed, in a series of interviews, a lofty above-it-all attitude towards the Two Virgins cover. ‘What we did,’ he said, ‘was to purposely not have a pretty photograph, not have it lighted so that we looked sexy or good . . . We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human . . . We felt like two virgins because we were in love . . .’
As for the personal attacks on him, he just didn’t care. ‘People think I’m a perverted crank now, just because of the nude bit. There’s no shame in appearing nude . . . I suppose the trouble is I’ve spoiled my image . . . People just want me to be lovable. But I was never that. Even at school I was just “Lennon!” Nobody ever thought of me as cuddly.’
Despite the fuss, the Two Virgins album was on sale in time for Christmas, to some amusement, but not many sales. The independent company Track Records issued it in the UK and a small label called Tetragrammaton put it out in the US, where, although the nude covers were hidden inside brown paper envelopes, twenty thousand copies were seized as ‘obscene material’ by police in New Jersey. By then, as was his nature, John had pretty well forgotten it.
Once again, EMI had worried that negative publicity about John might hurt sales of the White Album. It didn’t. Nothing could yet puncture the demand for the Beatles and their music.
Nor was there anything that could temper John’s determination to merge his rock and roll career with that of Yoko’s avant-garde happenings. The opportunity soon arose when John was asked to appear in mid-December on stage in the Rolling Stones’ film Rock And Roll Circus. He would only sing, he said, if Yoko could sing too. And so it was agreed. Playing with musicians other than the Beatles for the first time ever in a scratch band of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell and Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis, John sang ‘Yer Blues’, before Yoko made a howling, wailing and incomprehensible rock debut with a song called ‘Whole Lotta Yoko’. To those of us in the audience, it was difficult to see the point of the performance.
A week later at an Arts Lab celebration, John joined Yoko inside a large white bag for thirty minutes at the Royal Albert Hall in a piece titled ‘The Alchemical Wedding’. If the audience there was equally baffled, they were probably too polite to say so. This was John Lennon, after all. Whatever he did had to be interesting, hadn’t it?
By Christmas 1968 the Apple organisation had moved into a splendid Queen Anne house in London’s very smart Savile Row. Just five minutes from Piccadilly Circus, it couldn’t have been more central – although that was, perhaps, not always to its advantage.
Everyone likes a house-warming celebration, so that was what the Beatles combined with a Christmas party for themselves, their staff and friends and children on 23 December. It was the season of good cheer and, putting quarrels aside, everyone was there, George and Pattie, Ringo and Maureen and children, and Paul with Linda Eastman and her five-year-old daughter Heather. They had both come to live with him during the making of the White Album, and Linda was now entrenched as part of the Beatles family. Divorced, and the daughter of a successful New York show business lawyer, Lee Eastman, Linda had brought a new stability to Paul’s life. She was friendly, family-oriented and determinedly unglamorous, and Paul and she had become inseparable too – providing a kind of counterbalance to the weight and influence of John and Yoko.
Not that John and Yoko turned up without family support. Julian, aged five, was there in a rare outing with his father, while Yoko brought with her both Kyoko, also five, and her estranged husband, Tony Cox.
As might be expected, it was an extravagant affair, with a set time for eating dinner, before which John and Yoko, to everyone’s astonishment, suddenly appeared as Father Christmas and Mother Christmas and began handing out gifts.
Unfortunately, a couple of the guests were feeling pangs of hunger rather than the warmth of goodwill, as they waited to be fed. They were two members of the Oakland Chapter of Hells Angels, Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed – aka Sweet William, who, having bumped into George Harrison in San Francisco, had accepted his invitation to visit Apple if they were ever in London.
Together with their Harley-Davidsons they’d taken the invitation seriously and were now roaming around the new green-carpeted Apple offices wondering oafishly and drunkenly when the food was going to be served ‘at this fuckin’ party’, and getting into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the bespectacled fellow dressed in a red coat and hood with a cotton wool beard stuck on his face.
‘What the fuck’s goin’ on in this place?’ Frisco Pete is said to have demanded. ‘We wanna eat . . . And those two fuckin’ broads upstairs [presumably the cordon bleu chefs] tell me I’ve gotta wait until seven . . . There’s a forty-three-pound turkey in that fuckin’ kitchen and I fuckin’ want some of it now!’ he stormed at Father Christmas. And, with that, he punched the innocently interceding and peace-making editor of the New Musical Express in the face.
For once in his life, hidden behind his Father Christmas disguise, John Lennon was stuck for words.