The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  “You feel a clonk on the back of the head,” John says, “and you look and it’s a shoe. Then once one comes they all start thinking, ‘Shoes: that’ll attract their attention. If they get a shoe on the head, they’re bound to look over here.’”

  Beatlemania has intensified to a level that the group’s press man, Brian Sommerville, deems “entirely out of control.”

  Photographer David Magnus, who travels with the band, illustrates the phenomenon. “I had been in one of the back dressing rooms, and one of the female studio staff put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I must touch you—you’ve been in the same room as the Beatles.’”

  “What happened to us in the States was just like Britain,” Ringo says, “only ten times bigger, so I suppose it wasn’t like Britain at all.”

  It was, John later says, “madness from morning to night with not one moment’s peace.”

  America in 1964 is a vastly different place from England. Though John and Cyn are used to encountering some “really weird characters” outside their London flat, they seem more annoying than dangerous. But in America, where armed police are around and a popular president was recently gunned down, things feel more ominous. John wonders if someone out there in the mob of screaming fans is harboring dark thoughts.

  He’s not being paranoid. Right before their shows in Dallas and Las Vegas, the band is told that someone phoned in a bomb threat. Yet when John is performing, the stage is his sanctuary. “I feel safe as long as I’m plugged in,” he tells a reporter. “I don’t feel as though they’ll get me.”

  The Beatles travel with an entourage, including British and American reporters. To pass the time on flights, the boys play poker and Monopoly. Art Schreiber, senior correspondent for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, says “John always got really involved and excited. He always stood up to throw the dice.”

  But Schreiber also picks up on a darker current in John, one that director Richard Lester had observed on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. “I noticed this quality he had of standing outside every situation and noting the vulnerabilities of everyone, including myself,” Lester remarks. “He was always watching.”

  “What really surprised me was what a helluva lot John already knew about this country,” Schreiber—whose longtime beat was politics, not entertainment—later says about Lennon. “The thing he couldn’t understand was the violence…the murder of Kennedy, the police brutality against innocent marchers in the South, the guns he saw being carried everywhere. I could see the soul of an activist building up in him.”

  An activist, yes—but not a diplomat. John especially chafed at expectations that the group appear on behalf of charitable causes. “I always hated all the social things,” John says. “All the horrible events and presentations we had to go to. All false.” At a cocktail party at the British embassy in DC, he became irate over the imperious way the diplomats acted. “These people have no bloody manners,” he groused.

  On August 23, 1964, they play the Hollywood Bowl. Months before, advance tickets had sold out in less than four hours. The amphitheater, with its white shell-shaped roof, dates to the golden age of Hollywood and is one of America’s most important live-music venues.

  John approves of it, noting, “We could be heard in a place like the Hollywood Bowl, even though the crowd was wild: good acoustics.”

  Crowd noise is a very real obstacle for George Martin, who is recording the concert (unreleased until 1977) for Capitol Records. Dealing with the screams from thousands of Beatles fans was like “putting a microphone at the tail end of a 747 jet,” Martin says.

  Ringo develops his own technique. “I just had to hang on to the backbeat all the time to keep everybody together” over the screams. “I used to have to follow their three bums wiggling to see where we were in the song.”

  But while they enjoyed this time in California—“I fell in love with Hollywood then,” said Ringo—it also brought them some bad press. Despite tight controls on the band, when voluptuous blond starlet Jayne Mansfield shows up at the Beatles’ rented mansion, she persuades the group (sans Paul) to accompany her to the Whisky a Go Go on their last night in Los Angeles.

  They caravan to the club, with John, the actress, and journalist Larry Kane sitting together. “Before anyone knew what was happening,” Kane recalls, “John grabbed Mansfield and they started making out like mad.”

  Mansfield had assured the Beatles they would have privacy at the club. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Cameras are everywhere, and the place is in a frenzy.

  She poses between John and George, one of her hands on each of their thighs. Irritated by the crush of people, George throws a drink at photographer Bob Flora—who perfectly captures the shot.

  The next day, George’s image is everywhere. “I remember sitting on the plane, reading the paper and there was the photo of me throwing the water,” he says.

  “When in future days someone would say—and someone often did say it—‘You guys never go out anywhere. Don’t you ever feel shut in?’ We would recall the time we went nightclubbing with Jayne Mansfield and sigh,” manager Derek Taylor recalled.

  The following week, the Beatles return to New York, where John is hoping to meet Bob Dylan. He has asked Al Aronowitz, who covers music for the Saturday Evening Post, to make the introduction.

  Meeting him has been on John’s wish list since the spring of 1964, when a French DJ gave the Beatles The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

  John is a published poet—his first book of drawings and verse, In His Own Write, was released in March of 1964, during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night—and, according to Paul, “the fact that Bob Dylan wrote poetry added to his appeal.”

  The 1963 album—Dylan, now twenty-three, began recording it at age twenty—marked a notable shift, with Dylan joining John and Paul’s ranks as a prolific songwriter. On his eponymous first album, Dylan had written two out of thirteen songs; on Freewheelin’, he wrote twelve of thirteen.

  Coincidentally, on Dylan’s first album, released in 1962, one of the songs he’d recorded was “The House of the Rising Sun,” an old folk ballad of unknown provenance. Earlier in 1964, another British band called the Animals relays its own innovative cover, which ends the Beatles’ number-one run in America. “Congratulations from the Beatles (a group),” reads the telegram the Fab Four send the Animals, humbly masking a growing anxiety about losing their top place in the British Invasion. Dylan is so taken with the Animals version, in fact, that it’s credited with inspiring him to pick up an electric guitar.

  Dylan is one of the most distinctive folksingers around. In case he’s not sure of himself, John thinks of Dylan’s lyrics, he makes it double entendre. So therefore he is secure in his Hipness.

  Brian Epstein has arranged a reception in their suite at the Hotel Delmonico, on Park Avenue, where various American folk groups such as the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary—whose 1963 cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a number-two Billboard single—mingle with the Beatles. At one point, the phone rings.

  “That was Mr. Aronowitz,” Brian tells John. “He’s here with Mr. Dylan.”

  “Zimmerman,” John says. “Zimmerman is his name. My name isn’t John Beatle. It’s John Lennon. Just like that.”

  Though Al Aronowitz will later call the introduction “the crowning achievement” of his career, it begins awkwardly, when Dylan’s customary request for “cheap wine” is botched because Brian Epstein has only vintage champagne on hand.

  That’s when talk turns to another mind-altering substance.

  “I really like that line in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’” Dylan tells them. “‘I get high, I get high.’”

  “Actually,” John says, “it’s ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.’”

  They share a laugh, then Dylan adds, “Here I was, thinking you were singing about smoking pot.”

  John and Paul exchange embarrassed glances. “We, ah, haven’t really tried marijuana before,” John sa
ys.

  Dylan’s road manager, Victor Maymudes, rolls a joint for each Beatle.

  “Give it to my royal taster,” John says, pointing to Ringo.

  Ringo takes several hits…and can’t stop laughing.

  John joins in, then Brian.

  As Paul spouts existential philosophy and wanders around hugging people, Ringo and George double over in hysterical laughter, especially when the room phone rings and Dylan answers it with, “This is Beatlemania here.”

  “It was such an amazing night,” George later says. “I felt really good. That was a hell of a night.”

  “Paul came up to me and hugged me for ten minutes,” Maymudes recalls, “and said, ‘It was so great, and it’s all your fault because I love this pot!’”

  “I don’t remember much of what we talked about. We were smoking dope, drinking wine, and generally being rock ’n’ rollers and having a laugh, you know, and surrealism,” John said. “It was party time.”

  Chapter 23

  I hope I die before I get old.

  —“My Generation”

  Paul’s the only one left in London.

  It’s March of 1965. Last month, as the Beatles started work on their second feature film (the working title, Eight Arms to Hold You, eventually becomes Help!), Ringo married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Maureen Cox, a hairdresser from Liverpool, and moved into the same St. George’s Hill estate where John lives with Cyn, their two-year-old son, Julian, and a cat named Mimi, after John’s aunt. George is living at the Claremont estate, in nearby Esher, with his girlfriend, model Pattie Boyd (whom he’d met when she was an extra on A Hard Day’s Night).

  Although a former assistant claims that “John was basically a lazy bastard” who “was quite happy to stay down in Weybridge, doing fuck-all,” John counters, “I wanted to live in London…but I wouldn’t risk it until it’s quietened down.”

  There’s no sense of anything quieting down anytime soon, however. The Beatles have been on a tremendous roll—“I Feel Fine,” their next single after “A Hard Day’s Night,” hits number 1 in both America and Britain, where it knocks the Rolling Stones’ cover of the Howlin’ Wolf classic “Little Red Rooster” from the top slot. Lennon and McCartney have coauthored seven number-one hits that year (in addition to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Love Me Do,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “I Feel Fine,” there’s “A World Without Love,” a song they wrote but deemed not good enough for the Beatles, so they passed it along to the British duo Peter and Gordon—Peter being Peter Asher, brother of Paul’s girlfriend, Jane), giving them the all-time songwriting record for most songs to top the US charts in a calendar year.

  Bachelor Paul usually drives his own sporty Aston Martin to songwriting sessions at John’s home in St. George’s Hill, in Weybridge, but one morning he decides to have a car take him.

  The chauffeur looks exhausted, offering a metaphorical description of his work schedule.

  Eight days a week.

  Like Ringo’s “a hard day’s night,” the phrase resonates with the band, though John says, “We struggled to record it and struggled to make it into a song.” They end up releasing it in December of 1964, on their album Beatles for Sale, and in February of 1965 as a single in the United States, where it becomes their seventh US number-one hit. All this success has a punishing pace, however.

  “The band,” the BBC says in a review, referring to the album’s cover photo, “looks, frankly, knackered” from two years of nearly nonstop recording, touring, and filming.

  There has hardly been a moment to pause and reflect, yet ironically it was during this busy songwriting time that “I started thinking about my own emotions,” John later says, pinpointing the subsequent change in his songwriting to a darker, more personal style.

  Though in the past the band had relied “on pills”—like the “Prellies” (phenmetrazine) that got them through twelve-hour performances in Hamburg—to endure grueling performance schedules, it’s later revealed that during Help! the Beatles were instead “on pot,” on what director Dick Lester called “a happy high.”

  According to Ringo, they have all been “smoking pot for breakfast.” To avoid arousing suspicion when they go through customs, the Beatles roadies devise an ingenious concealment: they buy a carton of cigarettes, fill each pack with joints, then use an iron to reseal the cellophane.

  “I’ve always needed a drug to survive,” John admits, adding, “The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.”

  And in the spring of 1965, he and George are introduced to yet another mind-bending substance: LSD.

  * * *

  “Let’s go,” George Harrison says to his wife, Pattie. The two of them, along with John and Cynthia Lennon, have just finished a nice meal as the dinner guests of London dentist John Riley. They have plans to meet Ringo at a club and catch some new musical acts Brian Epstein is promoting, including their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann’s new band.

  “You haven’t had any coffee yet. It’s ready, I’ve made it—and it’s delicious,” their host’s girlfriend protests as the group rises to leave.

  They agree, but after drinking the coffee, John says they really do have to leave. “These friends of ours are going to be on soon. It’s their first night.”

  “I advise you not to leave,” Riley tells them, revealing that he’s secretly dosed them with LSD. “It was in the coffee.”

  John is furious. “How dare you fucking do this to us!”

  Despite the dentist’s attempts to get the foursome to stay—“I think he thought that there was going to be a big gang bang, and that he was going to shag everybody. I really think that was his motive,” says George—the four of them take off in Pattie’s orange Mini Cooper.

  “All the way the car felt smaller and smaller, and by the time we arrived we were completely out of it,” Pattie remembers. Cyn is frightened by her altered perceptions, later saying, “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film.”

  John, on the other hand, is rather enjoying himself. “We were cackling in the streets, and people were shouting ‘Let’s break a window,’ you know, it was just insane. We were just out of our heads.” George finds himself undergoing something transcendental: “It was as if I had never tasted, talked, seen, thought or heard properly before.”

  Eventually they make it to the Ad Lib Club, on Leicester Place, where they pile into an elevator. It has a small red light.

  Cyn screams, succumbing to panic. “We all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light,” John says. “We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical.”

  When the door opens, they rush to tell Ringo about the fire they’ve hallucinated.

  The whole experience feels like something out of John’s favorite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Later, “going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand,” John remembers, George somehow manages to steer the Mini back to the house. John and Cyn decide to stay the night.

  John decides that George’s house resembles “a big submarine” that seems “to float above his wall, which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it.” He stays up late, making drawings “of four faces saying, ‘We all agree with you!’”

  “God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic.”

  Chapter 24

  Hello, darkness, my old friend.

  —“The Sound of Silence”

  As work on the Help! sound track continues, no one close to John realizes how much the title track mirrors his fraught emotional state. “I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest,” when really, John says, “it was my fat Elvis period.”

  John’s not himself lately—and he has put on weight. It’s stress. John’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, is to be published in June of 1965, and he hasn’t yet finished it, complaining that t
he writing feels like schoolwork.

  During composition of the sound track, the ever-present Lennon-McCartney musical rivalry bubbles over, in part because of the rigors of their contractual obligations to EMI. As John later tells Rolling Stone, “They would say well, you’re going to make an album and get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”

  Paul remembers “Ticket to Ride”—the first Beatles song to run over three minutes—as a collaboration that took shape during a February 1965 afternoon session at John’s house. “We wrote the melody together,” he says. “Because John sang it, you might have to give him 60 percent of it.”

  Although in interviews, John stakes a greater claim, telling Playboy, “That’s me, one of the earliest heavy-metal records,” and that “Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums,” the two collaborate as well as ever. Even if their disagreements got to the level of name-calling, Paul recalls, “he’d let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said, ‘It’s only me…’” and put his glasses back on again. “Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade,” Paul says, “the John Lennon he was frightened to reveal to the world.”

  But John is itching to move on. He sees the strictures of touring as the artistic death of the Beatles. “That’s why we never improved as musicians; we killed ourselves then to make it. And that was the end of it.”

  John has a point, but still, the band does put out good songs—crowd-pleasing pop songs, yes, but isn’t it their job to give the fans what they want? Songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” made them international superstars. “Eight Days a Week” is full of energy. Makes you feel good.

  Is it mainstream? Sure. But Paul likes mainstream, enjoys being a commercial songwriter. He’s so open to inspiration that when a song comes to him in a dream, he wakes himself up. “I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th—and that leads you through then to B and E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically.” Paul finds his musical epiphany “the most magic thing.”