By his looks alone, with his thick, iron-grey, curly hair and permanent suntan, as shown in the author’s photograph on the back of his book, Arthur Janov, at forty-six, was born to be a West Hollywood psychotherapist. He reminded John of Jeff Chandler, and he had a charismatic, some might say overbearing, personality to match.
Within a couple of phone conversations John was hooked. But, as he was still banned from the US, he couldn’t yet visit Janov in California for a consultation. So Janov, knowing that he had landed the big one, came to him, bringing his wife Vivian, who was also a psychotherapist, and their children. Put up at the swish Inn on the Park hotel on London’s Park Lane, the two were then ferried every day to Tittenhurst Park for sessions, John with Janov in the recording studio that was still being built at the back of the house, and Yoko in their bedroom. Once again, whatever John did, Yoko did too.
Basically, Janov’s technique was to get his patients to regress to childhood to relive the emotional pain, be it of loss, rejection, separation, lack of love or whatever, which his theory said was the cause of neurosis. Therapy like this could have been invented with John in mind. Not only had he been abandoned by his father, and then, in Mimi’s account, asked to choose between his parents, he’d then been given away by his mother, while the uncle whom he’d loved had died. After that had come the death of his mother, to be followed a few years later by that of his best friend Stuart. Then there was his guilt at having introduced Brian Epstein to pills, then watched as his manager had lost control of his life through drugs.
John certainly had a lot to talk to Janov about and, being John, he wouldn’t have held anything back. Did he talk about his sex life, about his confused adolescent sexual feelings about his mother, who behaved like a girlfriend with him, about the bar girls and strippers in Hamburg, the Beatles’ groupies and his affairs after he was married? Did he mention Brian when he talked about sex, or his impotence with Cynthia towards the end of their marriage, or his ferocious jealousies and any conflictions he might have felt when he decided to publish his erotic lithographs of Yoko? Forty pages in Janov’s book were devoted to sex, and we can be sure that John read that chapter very carefully, after which he would have moved on to the sections on ‘Fear and Anger’ and ‘Drugs and Addictions’ that followed. Without ever having met him, Janov had almost come up with the John Lennon Playbook. Little wonder that John gave me a copy. As with all his enthusiasms, he wanted to share it.
The initial treatment in London lasted for just three weeks, but Janov had clients to attend to in Los Angeles and couldn’t neglect them for much longer. John, however, needed more therapy. Fame with money often talks. Through his lawyers, John was able to get a temporary US visa on ‘health grounds’, and, in July 1970, renting a home in Bel Air, he and Yoko flew out to continue the sessions in Janov’s Los Angeles consulting rooms.
Everything continued to go well there at first, but gradually, as the Lennons were asked to take part in group therapy sessions, the gloss on Janov began to fade. And when the psychotherapist requested that the two be filmed during group therapy, John withdrew. The last thing he needed was to be filmed lying on a psychotherapist’s floor screaming his head off.
Like the Maharishi before him, or even Magic Alex, Janov, whom John had believed would resolve his neuroses, was now seen to be yet another false prophet – maybe even ‘a flake’. And with the time limit on his visa having overrun, John, with Yoko at his side, headed back to England. Janov felt that his most famous client needed more months of therapy. John thought he’d had enough. He’d got what he needed.
When he arrived home, John didn’t at first want to talk too much about what had taken place, ‘because everyone will say, “he’s off again, he’s found something else”’, but the Janov influence on him just kept leaking out as he described ‘screaming for hours’ during sessions. It had, he was sure, been a useful experience in that, as Janov had convinced him, he’d grown up blocking his true feelings, and, as that was now no longer the case, he felt freed from his past.
That had to be good, and just as he had used his stay with the Maharishi to write songs for the White Album, he now produced a collection of eleven songs that he’d been writing during and after therapy. He recorded them in the late summer of 1970 at Abbey Road, with Phil Spector as producer.
The new album was, as he put it, ‘my insight into myself’. With no catchy hit single on it, the songs were sometimes angry, self-pitying and accusatory, and accompanied only by Ringo, Klaus Voorman on bass and sometimes either Spector or Billy Preston on piano, the sound was harsh and spare. Simply titled Plastic Ono Band, John was as proud of it as anything he would ever record, because it was so autobiographical. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a bloody variety show,’ he told me when he first played it to me.
The very first track was called ‘Mother’, and straight away his parents got it in the neck for what he now perceived to have been their neglect of him as a little boy. ‘Mother, you had me, but I never had you . . .’ he sang of the once-worshipped Julia, before in the second line he turned the anger on his father.
‘I’m writing this way now because it’s the way I feel,’ he said as we listened together. ‘I used to say I wouldn’t be singing “She Loves You” when I was thirty, but I didn’t know I’d be singing about my mother . . . I was going through my life in therapy and so I wrote about the most important things that happened . . . Just like any artist. When I was a teenager I wrote poetry, a lot of which was gobbledegook, because I was hiding it from Mimi or perhaps hiding my emotions from myself.’
Another song was given the ironic title of ‘Working Class Hero’, which was how, now unshaven and usually wearing a working man’s bibbed denim dungarees, he liked to see himself. With his menacing acoustic guitar throbbing as he sang, he attacked the very stairway to success that he had followed. ‘As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,’ he began. And the struggle through life could only get worse, he explained.
I was thinking about all the pain and torture that you go through on stage to get love from the audience. You go up there like Aunt Sally having things thrown at you . . . I might just as well have been a comedian getting egg thrown in my face . . . How often do you think the Beatles enjoyed a show? All this about gigs and clubs is a dream . . . Actually, more like a nightmare. One show in thirty would give us any real satisfaction and you’d go through all kinds of hell to get that.
I know I perform of my own choice, but that’s the game. I set myself up to get knocked down . . . It’s like performing for your parents all the time. All people like me start off with this appalling need for love . . .
It was now over a year since, in his mind, the Beatles had ceased to exist, and it was time to say goodbye to them in music. So, to (almost) end the album was a song called ‘God’, in which he renounced all idols and myths in a litany that went from the Bible to Buddha, and on to I-Ching, Kennedy, Elvis, Dylan . . . ending with ‘I don’t believe in Beatles . . . Yoko and me, that’s reality . . .’ The dream, he said, was over. He’d been the dream weaver and the Walrus, but now he was just John.
‘I’m not a tough guy,’ he explained. ‘I’ve had a facade of being tough to protect me from whatever was going on as a kid or a teenager or a Beatle. But I’m not like that. I’m not going to waste my life as I was before . . . which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn how not to do that, because I don’t want to die when I’m forty.’
Arthur Janov’s primal therapy had, it seemed, helped him close a door on a part of his past. It had, however, savagely wrenched open another.
For the past two years John’s father, Freddie, had been living with his young wife Pauline and their eighteen-month-old son David in a town house in Brighton. Pauline worked as a translator and John paid for the rent on the house and gave a stipend to his father. Although John hadn’t been in touch recently, Freddie had no reason to believe that they were not still on the good terms they’d been when his son had cheered him on to Gretna Green with Pauline.
So, with this in mind, and hoping to raise some money of his own, Freddie wrote to John wondering how he would feel if he were to write his autobiography. A reply from a secretary at Tittenhurst Park came within days, summoning Freddie and Pauline to a meeting.
It was the first time the two had been invited to the house, and, as it was on John’s thirtieth birthday, they’d bought a birthday card and a bottle of aftershave as a present.
John, however, hadn’t been planning a birthday party. Having kept them waiting in the kitchen, sitting at the large wooden table there, John suddenly hurried down the spiral staircase and, as Pauline would narrate in her book Daddy, Come Home, sat down facing his now puzzled father.
‘I want you out of the house and I’m cutting off your money,’ he spat at Freddie. ‘Get out of my life and get off my back.’ He was, Pauline wrote, unrecognisable from the friendly Beatle she’d last seen two Christmases ago.
Trying to defend himself, Freddie pointed out that he hadn’t asked for any money, that it was John who had insisted on giving it to him, at which point John erupted at the way Freddie had abandoned him twenty-five years earlier. Hardly letting Freddie in again, he screamed that both his father and mother had abandoned him, even calling his mother, Julia, ‘a whore’.
Then, reaching across the table, he grabbed his father by the lapels and told him that he was never to write anything without his approval. ‘And if you tell anyone what happened here today, I’ll have you killed . . . I’ll have you cased up in a box and dumped out at sea right in the middle of the ocean . . . twenty, fifty, or, perhaps, you’d prefer a hundred fathoms deep.’
Anyone who knew John well would have recognised that he was out of control on a rant that was almost certainly fuelled by whatever drug he’d chosen to take that day, and that his mouth was running away with him. When he got in a state like this, there was no telling what he might say.
But Freddie didn’t know his son very well and he was frightened and upset. In his anger, John said that he was insane, and, witnessing his son’s behaviour, Freddie thought it quite possible. So, when Freddie received a letter from Allen Klein’s new regime at Apple telling him to get out of his home or start paying rent to John, he went to see a solicitor. There he lodged an account of the meeting with his son, detailing the threats that John had made, and including melodramatic instructions that, were he to ‘disappear or die an unnatural death’, it should be made public.
He would never attempt to see John again.
A few days after John’s tirade I happened to be down at Tittenhurst Park and, knowing nothing of the meeting, wondered aloud whether John thought his father might be upset at the lyrics about him on the forthcoming album.
John fixed me with an uncompromising glare. ‘If he is, too bad. What did he do for me? He didn’t turn up until I was famous. I should get upset. The first time I saw him was on the front page of the Daily Express and he was washing dishes. He left me. I didn’t leave him. Anyway, he was down here last week. I showed him the door.’
The album was released in December 1970 to good reviews, but, for an ex-Beatle, not record-breaking sales. George Harrison’s three-disc solo album All Things Must Pass – which partly comprised new recordings of songs that John and Paul had turned down for the Beatles, and included the huge hit ‘My Sweet Lord’ – had been released two weeks earlier and sold better. Not altogether surprisingly, John couldn’t hide a little shard of jealousy that the reviewer in Time had called George a ‘philosopher’. That was the role he thought he should play. Nor did he like it that George had been complaining in interviews that he and Paul had kept him in the background. ‘I never stopped encouraging George,’ he insisted incredulously to me in late 1970. ‘When we began he could hardly open his mouth to sing. I kept telling him, “Open your fucking mouth . . .” And the reason we didn’t do more of his songs is because they just weren’t good enough. When they got better later on, we did them . . . So he must have learned something working all those years with Paul and me.’
He might have got his divorce from the Beatles, but, as in any marriage, what his former partners – and in this marriage there had been three – did or said, or what was even written about them, could quickly touch an unguarded nerve.
Yoko had recently suffered another miscarriage and John was showing a caring side to his nature. At the time, several newspaper writers and some of the Apple staff, not to mention millions of fans, struggled to see what he could see ‘in this crazy Japanese woman’. She had bewitched him with her mysterious Oriental ways, went one theory. But, really, it was much more basic than that. She was a pal, and they amused and supported each other.
One afternoon, John contrasted, probably without realising it, the relationship he had with Yoko with the one he’d had with Cynthia. ‘Normally an artist has someone from whom he can suck completely,’ he said. ‘He says, “I’m the artist. Where’s my dinner?” And the other person has to be passive and quiet. But Yoko’s an artist, too, so she helps me in another way.’
She was unconventional, intelligent, egotistical and just plain different. But she didn’t mind being teased, and she made him laugh. They shared drugs, too. And then there was the sex – and other people to cook the dinner.