Philip Norman first met the Beatles in 1965 and since then has had an enviable
degree of access to its members. His unforgiving assessment of Paul
McCartney in Shout!: The true story of the Beatles (1981) was particularly
vivid, and Norman’s critics accused him of being as partisan as a teenage
fan. But in taking sides, Norman rescued his version of the Beatles’ story
from the managed tone that characterizes other accounts. Strategically it
paid off too, for in alienating the McCartney camp he endeared himself to
the Lennon camp, winning the blessing of Yoko Ono, which made this biography
– the one it feels like he really wanted to write – possible. To the
author’s credit, Yoko Ono, having seen the result, has now, apparently,
withdrawn that blessing.
John Lennon: The Life is long, detailed, and goes very steadily after its
subject. Lennon was born in Liverpool, during an air raid, and something of
that city’s perennial unsettledness, as well as the tribulations of the
moment, endured throughout his life. His father, Alf, was a merchant seaman,
away from home more often than not during John’s infancy, and more or less
permanently from 1943, when he went AWOL. His mother, unable to cope, farmed
him out to his aunt Mimi. His relationship with his mother was complex.
Norman rather presses a suggestion that there may have been a sexual aspect
to it, anticipating a discussion of the widely known rumour that there was a
sexual component to Lennon’s relationship with Brian Epstein, consummated on
a mysterious holiday in Barcelona in 1963. Lennon denied the latter, but in
a very laid back way, and the former he talked about quite openly, recalling
a sexual thrill when he accidentally brushed against his mother’s breast
when he was fourteen. Norman’s pedantic note that she was at the time
wearing an “angora (or maybe cashmere)” top does little to allay the
suspicion that these attention-grabbing details are carefully placed. The
really significant detail, however, is that his mother was killed in a car
accident when Lennon was seventeen. His uncle George, more of a father to
him than Alf, died when Lennon was fourteen, and these bereavements fall
like rain across a landscape of church fetes, skiffle and Just William.
The Beatles were formed, or forged, in Hamburg, playing four-hour sets night
after night in seedy dives, living like migrant workers in even seedier
digs. There is something of the Reeperbahn in even their sweetest songs and
they certainly acquired a formidable live technique; but the damage and
disruption Lennon suffered in adolescence also equipped him for the
extraordinary events to come. Accounts of the Beatles’ transformation from
jobbing band to global phenomenon sometimes leave readers thinking they have
skipped a chapter, for it happens so suddenly and extravagantly. But Norman
maintains the steady pace, resisting the temptation to gush or editorialize,
and his focus on the life of one of the Beatles’ protagonists preserves
Lennon from triumph’s distorting effects. It is not the John Lennon
wisecracking at news conferences or posing on the Ed Sullivan Show who holds
our interest, but the John Lennon at a loose end in his stockbroker mansion,
sniping at his wife, rowing with Paul McCartney and playing Scalextric with
old school friends.
It is astonishing that the Beatles ever managed to record anything, so fraught
were their relationships with one another, especially that of Lennon and
McCartney. Even their unflappable producer, George Martin, struggled to get
any work out of them. It was not that they couldn’t come up with material –
they were remarkably productive – more that the tensions generated by their
turbocharged rise to fame made their relationships increasingly
unmanageable. Lennon was volatile, particularly with McCartney, in a
song-writing relationship which was destructive in proportion to its
creativity. That volatility was evident too in the relationships Lennon
struck up with Martin and Epstein and a number of other older men,
simultaneously objects of filial longing and Oedipal impulses. One of the
riskier aspects of pop stardom is that the normal restraints and conventions
that bind others fall away. One is deferred to like a prince, but without
any of a prince’s reciprocal duties; noblesse but no oblige. John Lennon’s
pre-Beatles life could hardly be characterized as restrained, so when the
world fell at his feet he helped himself to whatever he wanted whenever he
wanted. This must have been very irksome for Cynthia, his first wife, whom
Lennon treated like an item of furniture as he indulged his appetites for
drugs, weekend benders and other women.
It cannot have been easy for those to whom Lennon entrusted his professional
and business interests. But at least Brian Epstein had a wider sense of
Lennon’s best interests than some who came after him. Pop stars tend to have
a poor grasp of finance. If you have only ever had to manage the change in
your trouser pocket how can you possibly begin to manage the enormous sums
generated by huge international sales, rolling in like freak tides? Offers
of help soon arrived and one wonders if Lennon noticed that he was
surrounded by people living on a percentage of his income who all seemed to
be richer than him. There is no suggestion that he did, which may be
evidence of an indifference to wealth or inexperience in business. He liked
spending money; but he also liked redistributing his wealth. Apple, the
Beatles’ chaotic company, was a kind of alternative Arts Council, barely
regulated until City accountants took it in hand.
Lennon, too, was being taken in hand. One day Cynthia returned from an
enforced holiday in Greece to find Yoko Ono in a bathrobe making herself at
home with her husband. “Oh . . . hi”, said Lennon, too much even for the
forbearing Cynthia, and divorce proceedings followed. Yoko Ono was descended
on her father’s side from the Japanese Emperor and on her mother’s from the
founder of the Yasuda banking dynasty. Some have attributed to this pedigree
her hauteur and financial acumen, but more decisive than her genes was the
collapse of Japan in 1945. Her family was reduced to near penury, and
although its fortunes were eventually restored, the experience marked her
for life. Beatles fans seem to find her appeal mystifying, but Norman shows
that the subtlest Nakodo could not have found a better match. There was a
marked affinity – both had disrupted childhoods, both were at odds with
their milieux, both were self-made. Unlike Lennon, Ono was cosmopolitan,
highly educated, and had an instinctive grasp of business matters. She was
also an aristocrat and unfazed by Lennon’s celebrity; indeed, according to
her version of their first meeting, she did not know who he was. Genuine or
not, this apparent indifference to his prestige appealed to him. Lennon had
always been a charismatic figure and this was multiplied enormously by the
Beatles success. Such powerful feelings provoke a proprietorial instinct in
those whom they afflict, and it seems to have been wearying for Lennon to be
surrounded by people all of whom thought they had a claim on him, a claim he
had neither invited nor negotiated. Indeed, Lennon found any kind of claim
on his loyalty or commitment unbearable, as Cynthia and his neglected son
and Paul McCartney and a host of others had discovered. In Yoko Ono he
discovered a claim that was not only bearable but irresistible. John, once
available to everyone, suddenly was no longer, and they didn’t like it.
Norman reproduces a photograph of Yoko Ono having her hair viciously pulled by
a Beatles fan. This kind of reaction merely served to stiffen her resolve.
Ono started turning up at recording sessions and the other band members were
expected to defer to her as they would to John. “Musical differences”
followed as inexorably as Lennon’s divorce from Cynthia. What would have
been bad news for Beatles fans was undoubtedly the saving of Lennon. Norman
doesn’t quite say that Lennon carried Yoko over the threshold of the Dakota
building in New York, but their arrival in 1973 reads like a happy ending.
The narrative loses impetus at this point, although there was plenty going
on: Lennon and Ono’s relationship did not stabilize until the birth of their
son Sean in 1975. Norman’s account picks up power, tragically, in 1980 when
Lennon was shot dead on that same threshold by an obsessive fan.
The book ends with an interview with Sean Ono Lennon, who is now in his
thirties. He was five years old and in bed when his father was murdered
seven floors below. His mother told him what had happened the next morning,
as the apartment filled with sombre visitors. A crowd gathered on West 72nd
Street. It took Sean some time to connect the iconic figure with the man who
slouched around the apartment in flip-flops and taught him how to use his
knife and fork. He appears still not to have come to terms with the tragedy:
“the experience of someone that you can get through their work is not
comparable to the experience you can get from just sitting on someone’s
lap”. Philip Norman’s book is the best attempt yet to restore human
dimensions to Sean Lennon’s transfigured father.
Philip Norman
JOHN LENNON
The Life
853pp. HarperCollins. £25.
978 0 00 719741 5
RICHARD COLES is Curate at St Paul’s Knightsbridge and a former member
of the pop group The Communards.
