The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  In the morning, the tune still fresh in his mind, Paul gives it the offbeat title of “Scrambled Eggs.”

  On set, Paul works at the song constantly, much to director Richard Lester’s annoyance. The budget is much bigger this time around, thanks to the massive success of A Hard Day’s Night, and the film will be released in color, but they’ve only got four weeks to shoot it. Lester tells Paul to finish the bloody song or he’ll have the piano on the set removed.

  “Blimey, he’s always talking about [that song],” George remarks. “You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody!”

  On vacation in Portugal in June of 1965, Paul and his girlfriend, Jane Asher, take a long drive. As Jane naps, Paul sings to himself, “Da-da-da…yes-ter-day…sud-den-ly…fun-ni-ly…mer-ri-ly…” until he has the lyrics.

  “The song was around for months and months,” John remembers, but Paul couldn’t settle on a title. “Every time we got together to write songs or for a recording session, this would come up,” he says. “Then, one morning, Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there. Completed! I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but it is the plain truth. I was sorry, in a way, because we had so many laughs about it.”

  The recording session is on for later that month, right before Paul’s twenty-third birthday. When George Martin hears the completed song, he doesn’t think it has the Beatles sound. He preps Paul to sing it solo, replacing the band with a classical string quartet.

  When they break for lunch, Paul approaches cellist Francisco Gabarro. “We have a winner with that ‘Yesterday,’” he predicts.

  Not immediately. Though “Yesterday” makes the Help! sound track, it’s not played in the film, nor is it released as a single in the UK, though it hits number 1 in the United States.

  When asked about his involvement in the song, John is explicit. “‘Yesterday,’” he says, “I had nothing to do with.”

  Chapter 25

  I know what it’s like to be dead.

  —“She Said She Said”

  Stop worrying!” United Artists’ movie posters commanded. “Help! is on the way.”

  Not so for law enforcement assigned to cover the American tour in support of the sound track. “The Beatles may sing rock ’n’ roll, but they’ve got the cops moaning the blues,” the Long Island Star-Journal had reported on the Beatles’ August 1964 tour stop in New York.

  One year later, there are heightened procedures in place.

  The Beatles are in a helicopter transporting them from Manhattan to the grounds of the World’s Fair, in Queens, where they’ll be whisked into an armored truck flanked by sixty officers and onto a stage built specially for tonight’s show at Shea Stadium.

  As the copter flies over Shea, John listens to the roar of the fans, which can be heard all the way up here, over the noise of the helicopter’s engine. PAUL, THROW US A KISS, RINGO, THROW US A RING, one banner pleads. Flashbulbs pop like machine-gun fire.

  The American promoter of the concert, Sid Bernstein, marvels at the sight.

  “It’s the top of the mountain, Sid,” John says.

  * * *

  At the Olympic-size swimming pool on the grounds of the Beatles’ rented mansion in Los Angeles, John and Paul are on a secret mission.

  “There were good nights and bad nights on the tours,” Ringo says. “But they were all the same. The only fun part was the hotels in the evening, smoking pot and that.”

  That is what John and George want to share with Paul and Ringo. On LSD, George recalls, “I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in twelve hours.”

  Deeper experience, too. John has always treated George, the youngest Beatle, as “a kid who played guitar.”

  “After taking acid [we] had a very interesting relationship,” George says. “I felt closer to him than all the others…just by the look in his eyes, I felt we were connected.”

  John agrees. “We are probably the most cracked,” he says of himself and George, while “Paul is a bit more stable than George and I.”

  And though John and George make it clear that “we couldn’t relate” to the uninitiated, Paul isn’t swayed, though he “felt very left out,” George later says. Still, while Ringo is willing to experiment, Paul holds back. “It was the way I’d been brought up,” he explains. “‘Beware the demon drug.’” But George admits, “We were all slightly cruel to him,” taunting Paul, “We’re taking it and you’re not.” The other three all drop acid, along with musicians David Crosby and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda.

  Fonda points up at a helicopter flying far too close to the mansion. It’s a familiar sight. “They come over to the house with telephoto lenses and take pictures to see if I’m smoking pot or taking LSD,” Fonda later tells Esquire magazine. “Hello, fellas, you dirty bastards!”

  “You have to be a bastard to make it. That’s a fact,” John later says. “And the Beatles were the biggest bastards of all.”

  Now, only George is distressed.

  To ease his thoughts, Fonda tells George a story about when he was ten years old and did something dangerous—he accidentally shot himself in the stomach. It must be true. Fonda has a four-inch scar across his midsection.

  Fonda keeps whispering, “I know what it’s like to be dead, man.”

  * * *

  Alone, John writes a letter to Cyn, filled with longing and regret.

  “We gave the whole of our youth to the Beatles,” he laments, reflecting on his family—Cyn and Julian, who is now two and a half.

  “I’ve missed years of Julian’s life.”

  Back in 1963, he’d insisted that “touring was a relief, just to get out of Liverpool and break new ground.” Now the pressures of that life are weighing on him.

  “I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I’ve wasted not being with him…of those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit whilst he’s in the room with me and I’ve decided it’s ALL WRONG! He doesn’t see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know me and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.…”

  Chapter 26

  A working class hero is something to be.

  —“Working Class Hero”

  It’s October 26, 1965, and the police at Buckingham Palace are unprepared for the heaving crowd of thousands, including an intrepid few who even climb the palace gates. But it’s not Queen Elizabeth they’re hoping for a glimpse of—it’s the Fab Four, who are among 189 individuals due to be receiving honors from Her Majesty that morning.

  A few months earlier, each of the Beatles had received a nondescript brown envelope at his home address, alerting him to this news. The rest of the world found out on June 12, when the Beatles’ names were included on the thirty-nine-year-old queen’s annual “Birthday Honours List.” The Beatles are to be distinguished as Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), which—though lowest among the five classes of appointment to the order—is an honor never before given to a pop band. In fact, an MBE has never before been given to anyone under the age of twenty-five.

  Many esteemed MBE recipients don’t want to share their honors with the boys from Liverpool. Some go so far as to return their awards to Buckingham Palace in protest. One of them, Colonel Frederick Wagg, declares, “Decorating the Beatles has made a mockery of everything this country stands for. I’ve heard them sing and play, and I think they’re terrible.”

  Most attitudes are a little more tempered, however. While one Liverpool man interviewed says that “in some respects” he agrees with the argument that giving the award to the Beatles is debasing it, he also says, “I think they’ve done a lot of good. Nobody’s had a bad word to say for them at all. They’ve not been a bad example to anybody.” And unsurprisingly, the response from a female fan is that the award is simply “smashing! They should have got it and I th
ink they’re great!”

  Among themselves, the band pronounces the MBE “daft,” then decides “it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play.”

  Although none of their families is present at Buckingham Palace—or Buck House, as John calls it—to watch the Beatles’ investiture ceremony in the Great Throne Room that day, the four of them are accompanied by a proud and glowing Brian Epstein. And no matter how much they might want to downplay it, the truth is that they’re all more than a bit overwhelmed to be in this situation.

  “To start with,” John says, “we wanted to laugh. But when it happens to you, when you are being decorated, you don’t laugh anymore”—though they did have a smoke in a palace washroom. “Although we didn’t believe in the Royal Family, you can’t help being impressed when you’re in the palace, when you know you’re standing in front of the Queen,” John adds. “It was like in a dream. It was beautiful.”

  John takes his medal, tucked inside its small presentation box, to Mendips, Aunt Mimi’s home. Playing the role of the queen, he pins the medal on Mimi’s chest and tells her she deserves it more than he does.

  * * *

  But if meeting the queen was something the Beatles hadn’t initially cared much about one way or the other, meeting the King is a different story.

  While they’d been on tour in Los Angeles, they’d had the evening of August 27 off from performing, and the opportunity arose to meet their hero: Elvis Presley. They’d all leaped at the chance to go to visit him at his home in Bel Air.

  “We just idolized the guy so much,” John says.

  “We were all major fans, so it was hero worship of a high degree,” Paul says in agreement.

  George voices the band’s sole condition. “If this is going to be another dirty big publicity circus, let’s forget it.”

  Though Brian Epstein and Elvis’s manager both agree to a photo- and recording-free secret event, fans and media catch wind of it anyway and tail the Beatles’ limousines all the way from their rented mansion, in Benedict Canyon, to Elvis’s, in Bel Air. But a few joints smoked en route calm the Beatles down over the unwanted intrusion.

  Even so, John recalls that they were all “terrified” at the sight of Elvis Presley in the circular room where he receives guests. John’s heart is pounding. It’s Elvis! It’s Elvis!

  In addition to Elvis, his then girlfriend, Priscilla, is there, as are half a dozen or so members of his entourage, a.k.a. the Memphis Mafia. But after introductions are made, there’s an awkward silence. No one knows exactly what to say.

  Now what?

  Elvis finally breaks the ice. “If you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me, I’m goin’ to bed.…I didn’t mean for this to be like subjects calling on the King. I thought we’d sit and talk about music and maybe jam a little.”

  Everyone laughs, and the King starts picking out notes on a Fender bass and calls for someone to bring in some guitars.

  John picks up a guitar, and Paul gives Elvis a few bass tips while Ringo “[taps] out the backbeat with his fingers on the nearest bits of wooden furniture” to the tune of “I Feel Fine.” George plays for a while, then wanders around a bit. “I spent most of the party trying to suss out from the gang if anybody had any reefers,” he later said, but he didn’t have much luck. “They were ‘uppers and whiskey’ people.”

  Several hours later, around two in the morning, as the music carries them out of the house and onto the street, John has an observation to share. “Elvis was stoned.”

  To George, the answer is obvious. “Aren’t we all?”

  Chapter 27

  Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

  —“Eve of Destruction”

  The Beatles have run out of songs.

  Yet the band is contractually obligated to put out its sixth studio album in time for Christmas.

  And all the songs have to be great. Lennon-McCartney originals, not covers.

  There is reason to worry. Rivals on two continents are spoiling for a takedown.

  The Rolling Stones jokingly criticized the Beatles for the rigid, Liverpudlian way the band positions their guitars, high up on their chests. “No wonder you can only rock,” Keith Richards tells John. “No wonder you can’t roll.”

  In the summer of 1965, the Rolling Stones’ single “Satisfaction” surpasses the Beatles’ “Help!” on the charts en route to becoming the Stones’ first number-one hit in America.

  Keith Richards and Mick Jagger had even upped the ante on songwriting. If the melody for “Scrambled Eggs” came to Paul in a dream, “I wrote ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep,” Richards says. “I pushed rewind”—on the cassette player he kept next to his bed—“and there was ‘Satisfaction.’”

  * * *

  John lies on the king-size bed inside his mansion. Five hours later, he’s still empty of ideas, until suddenly:

  …a Nowhere Man…

  He writes the song in minutes.

  Paul remembers polishing up the chorus. “He’d say, ‘Nowhere land,’ and I’d say, ‘For nobody.’ It was a two-way thing.”

  In one week, the Beatles come up with seven songs.

  George Martin is always with them in the studio, listening and watching, giving advice, perplexed as ever that “John couldn’t be bothered even to tune his guitar. He was a completely impractical man.”

  One night, when they’re recording late, the control room intercom switches on, and John hears Brian’s voice. He snaps into focus.

  “Something doesn’t sound quite right,” Brian says.

  An uncomfortable silence follows. Brian is clearly drunk. Just as clear is the fact that he’s trying to impress his male companion.

  Not for the first time, John reminds Brian who does what. “You just take care of your percentage and leave us to worry about the music.”

  Four weeks later, on November 12, the album is finished.

  Now it needs a title. John says, “We should call it the Pot Album.”

  They share a laugh about all the times they’ve “shared a laugh” during this recording.

  Paul mentions something an old blues guy said of the Rolling Stones: “Mick Jagger, man. Well, you know they’re good—but it’s plastic soul.”

  John likes the wordplay of Rubber Soul. Rubber soles are very popular in Britain. The cobbler glues them to the bottom of people’s shoes to fight the damp.

  But when a dark piece of John’s past resurfaces, it’s not as easy to repair.

  Chapter 28

  Turn off your mind relax and float downstream.

  —“Tomorrow Never Knows”

  There’s been an unexpected development on the home front.

  Alfred (called “Alf” or “Freddie”) Lennon, John’s long-absent father, has emerged and told his life story to Tit-Bits, a weekly magazine that features scantily clad girls on the cover and eye-grabbing headlines such as HOW WOMEN TURN MEN INTO POOR LOVERS.

  Alf, it seems, has ambitions to become a recording artist, just like his son. His single, “That’s My Life (My Love and My Home),” is released at the same time as Rubber Soul.

  “Rubber Soul broke everything open,” Steve Winwood, then frontman of the Spencer Davis Group, says. “It crossed music into a whole new dimension and was responsible for kicking off the sixties rock era as we know it.”

  Alf’s recording career, on the other hand, spans a single day. His record tanks—and he’s not too pleased about it. Nor is John pleased to learn that kind Cyn has invited his father into their home when “the ignoble Alf” turned up unannounced one day.

  He’d first resurfaced in John’s life on April 1, 1964, when Brian had phoned to tell John that the elder Lennon was in his office. With a journalist.

  John headed over to NEMS Enterprises in London to see his father—for the first time in seventeen years. “I don’t feel as if I owe him anything,” John’s always said. “He never helped me. I got here by myself, and this is the longest I’ve ever done anythi
ng, except being at school.”

  “It wasn’t what you would call a happy reunion,” a witness said. “It was very tense.”

  “What do you want, then?” John asked coldly.

  Alf gave John his side of the story, describing how Julia Lennon left him for another man while he was out working at sea, how Mimi and the other Stanley girls were dead set against him from the very beginning, how they forced him to give up any sort of right to custody. John felt himself thaw a bit. He knew all about how tough Mimi and his aunts could be.

  “The world deserves to know the truth,” Alf said.

  Alf has no idea he’s being used.

  Behind his father’s approach is British tabloid the Daily Sketch, which offered to forgo printing Alf’s story in exchange for exclusive interviews with John and the other Beatles.

  And there it is.

  Brian refused, and the story eventually went to Tit-Bits.

  The next time Alf stops by the house, John is home—and his father’s not alone. He’s brought along his manager.

  Alf, John notices, has also had extensive dental work done.

  The record company “made me get my teeth seen to,” Alf explains. “It cost £109. I’m still paying it up, £10 a month.”

  “It was only the second time in my life I’d seen him,” John said later, describing the scene. “I showed him the door. I wasn’t having him in the house.”

  “I know you’re behind pulling my record,” Alf accuses his celebrity son—an accusation Alf’s manager later repeats to the Daily Mail—but John isn’t having it.

  “I had too many father figures,” John later says, but that doesn’t make his own struggle to be a father to Julian any easier.

  Admittedly, “I’m not the greatest dad on earth; I’m doing me best. But I’m a very irritable guy, and I get depressed. I’m up and down, up and down.”