October 31, 2012
When a letter from John Lennon dropped through your letter box, you would, if you and he were on good terms, be smiling almost before you opened the envelope. Because, as he would say, everything he wrote was “for laughs or fun”, and his letters would be happily embroidered with jokes and puns and maybe even a little cartoon.
If you weren’t getting on with him, however, while the wordplay would still be there, what he wrote might not make for pleasant reading. Paul McCartney got a few of those letters when the two were falling out when the Beatles broke up.
But that was the way it was with Lennon, a lifetime letter writer, who was quick with words, whether witty or wounding and often both – sometimes in the same sentence.
Apart from the public ones he wrote to pop newspapers, none of Lennon’s letters was intended for publication. But now, over thirty years after his murder, over 250 have been collected by official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies in a book which should go some way to modifying the image of the ex-Beatle as a permanently angry young man.
Because, as the letters show, he was zany and funny more often than he was angry.
Although he had the idea for the book several years ago, Davies (who once received a missive from Lennon asking him to doctor the Beatles biography about his mother’s past so as not to upset the aunt who’d brought him up), had first to gently woo the rock star’s widow, Yoko Ono, to get permission.
Then, locating many of the letters proved trickier than he’d imagined. While I was happy to give him photostats of the letters Lennon wrote to me, many of the other recipients had died and their letters passed on to relatives, sold to unknown collectors or simply lost.
Little by little, however, faded scribbles and doodles from around the world began arriving – and with them revealing details of the day to day thoughts of the enigmatic star.
For instance in four densely written pages to his girl friend Cynthia, who was in Liverpool when he was in Hamburg playing with the pre-fame Beatles, he repeatedly tells her how much he loves her, before betraying a shaft of jealousy when he worries about Paul McCartney’s girl friend of the time moving in with her.
“Imagine having her there all the time when we are in bed,” he wrote, “and imagine Paul coming all the time – and especially when I wasn’t there. I’d hate the idea,” before going on to add that it was a Sunday afternoon and he wished he was on the way to Cynthia’s flat “with the Sunday papers and choccies and a throbber!”
On another occasion he wrote to her, “All I want for Christmas is you, so post early”. And on yet another, “I love you so don’t leave me”, repeated several times, betraying an insecurity rarely seen in public.
From his earliest childhood, Lennon wanted to be a writer. His cleverness in his song lyrics is well known, but in almost every letter he would turn words inside out to make a pithy point. Thus when replying to his favourite cousin, Liela, who in 1975 as a doctor criticised his lifestyle, he managed to conflate his wealth with the fact that fame had its drawbacks.
“The only real privacy I have is at home,” he wrote. “Outside the door I’m public property. I don’t like it…but I made my b(r)ed and must eat it.”
While to his housekeeper in the mid-Sixties he wrote a complaint couched as a cryptic reminder. “You locked dog out. He barked me up in middle night.”
An inner uncertainty arises when he struggles to find the best way to address his father, Alfred Lennon, who, having disappeared when John was five, turned up again when the Beatles were famous. “Dear Alf, Fred, father, pater, whatever…” he began to the man he would privately refer to as “the Ignoble Alf”.
Or what about the sarcastic dismissal to an Indian fan who had written to the rich Beatle asking for money so that he might make a world tour? “All you need is initiative,” he replied with a nod to the Beatles’ recent hit All You Need Is Love, “and if you don’t have this I suggest you try transcendental meditation through which all things are possible.”
Ouch!
Touring the world with the Beatles were, it would seem, the bleakest times, when he wrote a seven page letter to Cynthia, who had now become his wife, feeling guilty about not being with their seven year old son, Julian, more, and “thinking about what a thoughtless bastard I seem to be”.
But things appeared happier a year later, when, just before setting off to film the Magical Mystery Tour, he found time to write by hand a quite long, chatty letter to Stephen Bayley, then a pupil at his old grammar school in Liverpool, now a design critic and writer. “Do say hello to any of those teachers…even Pobjoy who got me into art school so I could fail there as well. I can never thank him enough.”
Three years later with his first marriage and the Beatles both dissolved, and now married to Yoko a new defensiveness and defiance had crept in as he wrote to newspapers vigorously defending attacks on his wife’s avant garde art. It was, however, his former best friend Paul and wife Linda who really got it in the neck.
“Dear Paul and Linda, I was reading your letter and wondering what middle-aged, cranky Beatle fan wrote it,” he said in a letter, which may or may not have been sent, but, which reads like an iconoclastic attack on what he perceived to be McCartney’s inflated view of the Beatles’ importance.
“Do you really think that most of today’s art came about the because of the Beatles?” he asks. “I don’t believe you’re that insane, Paul… When you stop believing it you might wake up. Didn’t we always say we were part of the movement – not all of it. Of course we changed the world – but try and follow it through. Get off your gold disc and fly!”
Time heals, but, although he and McCartney got back on speaking terms in later years, they never worked together again.
As the book shows, everything written in Lennon’s younger days was in a hurried scrawl, complete with crossings out and mis-spellings. By the mid-Seventies, however, and now living in New York, he’d taught himself to type. For a time letters flowed from him – via his new hobby.
As a friendly journalist I’d spent a lot of good times with the Lennons in the late Sixties and early Seventies, here in England and then being their guest in New York and Canada, so when, in 1975, Yoko Ono sent me postcard telling me she was pregnant, I sent her my congratulations.
John replied. “This is her husband speaking…I guess you must look pretty old now,” he teased, “what with the depression and all that worrying about the Common or Garden Market. It’s weird sitting here watching me hard earned pounds turning into Italians…”
He was, of course, referring jokily to Britain’s entry into the EEC, then usually referred to as the Common Market, and amusing himself at the widespread suspicion that his millions would end up bailing out other countries across the channel!
As always, he ended with a joke. “‘Ah, well”, as Toulouse Lautrec used to say, ‘It’s a small world’, Love to you and yours, frae the fab two, John and Yoko.”
Meanwhile he and Yoko were wondering what name to give their baby. “How does Dylan Ono Lennon grab ya…?” he asked his friend and publicist Derek Taylor. “It’s a pity the Big Zim (Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman) copped the name…”
Sean Lennon must be eternally grateful that in the end his parents chose differently.
Being a father again when Sean was a baby was a quiet, pensive time for the previously noisy star who retired from recording for five years, and in 1979 he wrote fondly of his own Christmas memories in post-war England to cousin Liela. “I thought of you a lot this Xmas – the cottage, the record player…the shadows on the ceiling as the cars went past at night – putting up the paper chains.”
Interestingly there is one surprising omission to this collection. Though the Beatle spent two decades shouting his love for Yoko, no letters to her are printed. That, says Davies, is because the two were nearly always together, and, when apart, would speak on the phone up to twenty times a day – so letters or notes weren’t necessary.
Maybe. But it has to be possible that Yoko just didn’t want any of them published. Equally only one scrap of a note to May Pang, Lennon’s lover in the mid-Seventies, has turned up. I’m sure she had more, too.
What are almost as revealing as the letters, are the long lists of demands that Lennon left for the domestic staff when he was a rich househusband in New York and Yoko was running his business interests. Many are filled with the mundane, shopping requests for more corn flakes, anti-acid pills for Yoko, croissants and …”next batch of ‘cat food’- include more tuna egg in sauce (they like it)”.
But then the old rocker re-emerges with intricate demands for his home hi-fi to be repaired, a copy of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls Of Fire for the juke box in the kitchen to be bought and requests for nails to be hammered into the wall behind his bed so that he could hang his guitars from them. And, oh yes, a demand that his assistant buy him the latest album by Paul McCartney and Wings.
Then from 1980 comes a curt note to the staff at a summer home he and Yoko owned: “Explain to me why we are sleeping here with a front door that any nut can open (it doesn’t lock).”
A few months later a homicidal nut would shoot him to death outside his New York home.
FOOTNOTE: This may upset some fans, but, like many other recipients of Lennon’s letters, I sold mine several years ago. They’d been in an old box in my study and unread for years. Should I keep them, I asked my three grown up children who had never even seen them before? “Well, Dad,” one came back one. “Do you think John Lennon saved your letters to him?”
I phoned Christie’s the following day, who kindly made photostats of them before they auctioned them. John, I know, would have approved. He always said he didn’t believe in idols.
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The John Lennon Letters is edited by Hunter Davies and published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (£25.00).
