Cynthia Lennon (2005)

One day in 1965 John and Cynthia Lennon took their son Julian, then aged three, to visit John's Aunt Mimi at the seaside bungalow John had bought her in Dorset. It was hot and sunny so in the afternoon the young couple went to the beach, where they had a picnic, paddled in the sea and sunbathed. It was, in every respect, a very normal day.
          Except that for the Lennons there was nothing normal about it. Beatlemania was still at its height, and if John Lennon hadn't been hidden under a very large sunhat, there probably wasn't a person on that crowded beach who wouldn't have recognised, and inevitably, mobbed him.
"It was heaven," remembers Cynthia, now a cuddly 66, and back in Britain from her home in Spain for a week to promote a new autobiography. "Beautiful. The one occasion when we sat as a little family and made sand castle with Julian's buckets and spades. We planned to do it again. But we never did."
          That this one day should be the most telling anecdote in her increasingly sad story gives some indication of the state of a marriage which was never to survive the demands, temptations and exhaustions of an impossible fame.
          Yet Cynthia still can't help but defend the memory of the boy she fell in love with at art college in Liverpool, though he would eventually cast her and their son aside with the totally untrue comment: "Julian was born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night."
          How John could say that when they'd been together for four years when she became pregnant and would remain together for a further six she can't understand. "That was so cruel," she says. "Inhuman." But then almost immediately retreats slightly saying: "No, John wasn't the best, but he wasn’t the worst," as though still eternally patient with his memory.
          These events all happened forty years or more ago but so regularly has the Beatles' phenomenon been re-interpreted it's small wonder that someone who has been portrayed so often as a victim should want a final stab at putting her side of the story.
          Variously described as a "spaniel", a "frightened mouse" and a "doormat", always by those who didn't know her, she is now claiming the spoils of the survivor. "I know my role in the history of the Beatles is only a part of it and lots of other people have their histories. But at least I was there and right from the beginning."
          Indeed she was. She and Lennon met at Liverpool Art College in 1958. She was a goody goody who wanted to do well. He was a free spirit, with no O-levels, a class nuisance who didn't seem to care about anything apart from the group he'd just formed. She was eighteen, he was seventeen. There's was an attraction of opposites.
          "I fell in love with a bad boy whom I knew to be a bad boy," she chuckles now. "My father had died when I was seventeen. If he'd still been alive he wouldn't have let John get past the front door."
Soon she and Lennon became lovers, an earlier local boy friend being summarily dropped. And quickly, too, as the schoolboy Paul McCartney regularly met Lennon for lunchtime rehearsals, she saw the ambition of the boy most people at college thought would amount to nothing.
          She was there from the Beatles' earliest songs together, just about their first fan, taking on the jealous wrath of Lennon's guardian, the formidable Aunt Mimi who'd brought him up.
Mimi, Lennon's name for his mother's elder sister Mary Elizabeth Smith, has generally fared well as a well meaning, worried aunt in the Beatles' history. Now Cynthia paints another picture completely. When Mimi was dying a few years ago, she was said to have told a care worker that she was afraid of death because she'd been a "wicked women". Was she?
          "She was not a good woman, let’s put it that way," says Cynthia. "She could be very wicked with me and with John, with his friends and his family. She was such a cold, cold lady. She didn't ever show any affection. She just couldn't. She must have loved John in her own way, but she hounded and oppressed him. She wanted to possess him."
          All Mimi cared about, John told Cynthia, was money and cats. On one occasion when John had finally earned some money as a Beatle playing in Germany he bought Cynthia a new coat for eighteen pounds on his return to Liverpool.
          To celebrate they went to Mimi's house with a cooked chicken for dinner. But on seeing the new coat and discovering John had bought it, Mimi threw the chicken at Cynthia and, screaming at them, called her a gangster's moll, which, as it's just about the least appropriate description of Cynthia you could imagine, is almost funny.
          Not to John. Even when he was successful Mimi didn't allow him to play his guitar in the house, banishing him to the porch outside, while his Beatle friends with their common accents were never welcome. She didn’t attend the wedding of John and Cynthia, didn't send a message when Julian was born and when the film A Hard Day's Night had its Liverpool premiere, and was followed by a grand dinner, Mimi stayed away.
          All this may sound merely stubborn and eccentric now, but Cynthia is convinced there was also a callous selfishness to the woman who, in Mimi's account, took John in at five when his parents had separated and he was unwanted.
          There is an alternative account, says Cynthia in her book, citing John's half sister Julia Baird. John had been wanted by his mother, but as she was living with a man to whom she wasn't married, Mimi had badgered the social services so much that the child had been put into her care.
Whatever the truth, Cynthia is convinced that John spent his life trying to show Mimi that he wasn't worthless.
          Obviously he wasn't but he was consumed by jealousy and insecurity. At art college he once hit her across the face when he thought she was flirting with someone else. And when after two years of going out together he went to Hamburg for the Beatles first regular work, he wrote on an almost daily basis begging her to be faithful, telling her repeatedly how much he loved her.
"It was all love, love, love," she says. "And, of course, lots of other things which are unprintable." Another chuckle.
          Not, as he was to admit many years later, that that prevented him from playing around. Did it cross her mind that he might be unfaithful?
"No, I was so blooming naïve. And when I went to see him in Hamburg I didn't see any other types of girls I thought he would go for. I could easily have stayed with him there, but I really wanted to finish my college work, to get something out of what my mum and dad had done for me."
Back in Liverpool those plans went awry in the summer of 1962. Just as the Beatles, now huge local stars at the Cavern Club, made their first record she discovered that she had both failed her finals and was pregnant. To Mimi's fury, John immediately said he would marry her. He loved her.
Would he have married her if she hadn't been pregnant?
          She smiles. "Would I have married him? Who knows? I was a student. I had no dreams of marriage, neither had he."
          But at that moment, as if by magic, she became invisible. The Beatles roller coaster had started and their manager Brian Epstein was convinced that for one of them to admit that he was married, and his wife expecting, would have been bad for their image.
So for over a year as the Beatles shot to world fame and instant wealth Cynthia and her baby hid in the background, at first with Mimi, and then when she could stand no more, in a little Liverpool bed sitter she rented for five pounds a week.
          She'd already been left behind, denying to suspecting fans that she even knew John Lennon. In her book she writes: "The more successful the boys became, the further away John seemed from me."
Eventually word leaked out and she moved to London to join the generally absentee husband who had overnight become one of the most famous people in the world. Soon, to escape the fans, they settled into a stockbroker type of mansion in Surrey.
          The Beatles had always worked hard, but by the mid-Sixties the pressures on them were dizzying, with an expectation of two albums a year and four singles, all written by Lennon and McCartney. The there were films, dozens of TV and radio appearances and months of touring around the world. While John rarely stopped working, Cynthia made a home for him and Julian.
Both felt unsophisticated and out of their depth in London show-biz society and before very long Cynthia began to wonder, if not exactly worry, about other women in John's life. Did he have an affair with the late singer Alma Cogan? She still doesn't know for sure. "But there was a chemistry between them."
          Then there were others. An actress, a writer, the model wife of a friend, about whom he wrote the song Norwegian Wood. Cynthia smiles now. "I wasn't passive or a dimwit. I think it was more a case of being patient. But I was beginning to be aware that these women could be dangerous. Most people know about sex, drugs and rock and roll today, but I don't think I was aware so much then. I thought he was working all the time."
All the same she thinks she and John got on well during those years of hysteria. "We had no problems at home. We were two people living in the best way we could under the circumstances. We really didn't have a cross word. I'd go to the studio, usually when recording was finished. And the other Beatles and their girl friends and wives were like a second family, because only we knew what it was like to be at the centre of it all.
          "The only time I remember seeing John lose his temper was when he lambasted Julian at breakfast because as a little boy he didn't use his knife and fork and was making a mess. But John had just come back touring and he didn't now how to handle a child."
          All the same she made sure to keep Julian out of her husband's way when he was in a mood. But little by little, she says, John's personality changed as drugs became an increasingly important part of his life, leading him "towards the destruction of so much that he valued. At home he would be lost in a daydream, present but absent. I’d talk to him, but he wouldn’t hear me."
          Did she ever wonder if drugs had temporarily tilted the mind of her husband? "I think he was definitely on a different planet," she says bluntly of the months around the making of the album Sergeant Pepper. "Although for a time they were a part of it, the drugs destroyed a lot of his creativity. Later on he lost his muse, though it was getting better again just before he died."
In the spring of 1968 in an effort to get off drugs and to begin a more spiritual life the Beatles, their wives and friends decamped to an ashram in the Himalayas to learn about meditation. Cynthia had been excited by the idea, but it was far from a second honeymoon as on the second week John went off to sleep in a separate room.
          "It was cruel, yes, but under the circumstances it was difficult for two people to meditate in the same room, and there wasn't much else going on. Our love life had definitely disappeared by then. He was having problems, either because of being so high on drugs or whatever. He found it quite difficult with me, although obviously not with someone else. There are many ways of stimulating someone, but I didn't know the tricks."
          Although Cynthia knew that by then he'd met Yoko Ono, she didn’t know that every day John would hurry to the post office in the ashram to see if there was a letter from her. There usually was.
A few weeks after they returned from India she took a holiday in Greece. Phoning him from Rome when she changed planes, she told him what time she would be home.
          But when she entered the house in the afternoon she found the curtains still drawn with John sitting in his dressing gown. Yoko was facing him wearing Cynthia's dressing gown. It was a betrayal of such considered callousness that it still shocks. "You had to be in the situation to realise the horror of it. It was vicious. He knew I'd be coming."
          The marriage was just about over, but the cruelty was just beginning. And for a man known for his careless, happy generosity he suddenly, inexplicably, became mean. "My final offer is seventy five thousand pounds," he shouted when they discussed divorce terms. "That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth any more." In the settlement she accepted just £100,000 out of his millions for her and Julian. Their home was sold.
Almost simultaneously the other Beatles and their retinue cut her adrift, too. She'd known Paul McCartney since she'd been at college. After a single visit she did not see him again for seventeen years.
          She's very forgiving. "You have to remember Paul was going though his own problems with the break up of the Beatles, and then the end of his relationship with Jane Asher. Everything was chaos at the time. And when John got with Yoko I think no-one knew how to handle it, because their magic unit of success had suddenly been torn asunder by someone who'd walked into the studio and taken over."
          Now suddenly she would read about a man she didn’t recognise as John dived into what looked like a nonsense filled pool of conceptual art. "I couldn’t believe all the love-ins and the bag-ins he did with Yoko. This was overwhelmingly a takeover of John's mind and creativity. I think he left his brain behind. It was between his legs for a time."
          Hardest of all for her to accept was John's apparent lack of interest in Julian. In 1965 he'd written a loving letter from a tour saying how sorry he was that he couldn't spend more time with his son. Now, after the Beatles break up and when he had time, he withdrew from the boy.
          "He let me down in so many ways," Julian writes in an introduction to his mother's book. He's right. From the age of eight to eleven the only contact Julian had with his father were the cards and presents at birthdays and Christmas, bought and sent from the Beatles' London office.
Again Cynthia leavens the criticism. "By that time John was living in America with Yoko and he was under all kinds of pressures that none of us really knew about."
          All the same knowing how John himself had always felt himself an outsider in his mother's home where his two younger step-sisters lived when he'd been growing up with Mimi, he made few attempts when he was with Yoko for Julian to be part of his new family and second son Sean. On his occasional visits to New York to see his father, the love and boundless gifts bestowed on the second Lennon son couldn't help but be noticed by the first, now an uncertain teenager.
          Then suddenly in December 1980 John was dead, shot by a fan. Cynthia was staying with Ringo Starr's ex-wife Maureen at the time. Ringo called with the news. "John cared about people," Cynthia says, despite everything. "That was why he stopped to autograph the album of the guy who shot him, why he turned back when he heard his name called out."
          That all happened twenty five years ago, but it took sixteen years for John's will to be settled and for Julian to begin to get a percentage of his father's royalties. No other details of the agreement with Yoko Ono may be published.
          The years since John left her have been a roller coaster for Cynthia. Her second and third marriages failed and a long relationship of over seventeen years ended when her partner went off with a friend. She was devastated.
          Then six years ago she met a friend of Julian's called Noel Charles, a former nightclub owner who lived in Barbados. They were married in 2002. "Noel is rich in every possible way," she says, and smiles cryptically.
          There have been suggestions that she only wrote her book for the money, but she denies this. Now is the first time since her divorce from John that she feels financially comfortable.
She's very happy. Julian lives near her and Noel in Spain, where he has built a collection of his father's possessions, many bought through auctions, and where he's working on a new album.
Cynthia has no idea whether Yoko Ono has read her book. One suspects Yoko won't like it. "But I've only written what's true," she says.
          In his time John Lennon was an iconoclast. He didn't believe in idols. He tried to smash the myth of the Beatles after he broke them up. Some might read Cynthia's book as a destruction of the sanctified Lennon image which has grown steadily since his death.         
          She would disagree. Their ten year relationship shaped her life and created her son. There's no bitterness when she speaks of John. And when she remembers him it's the John of the early, happy, loving days she likes to think about most, the John from the days before the whirlwind.

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