Shout! (65 page)

He did make one outright move on Yoko in this period, though unfortunately it had about as little finesse as propositioning a groupie in his Beatles touring days. “John had invited me to the recording studio,” Yoko remembers. “He suddenly said, “You look tired. Would you like to rest?” I thought he was taking me to another room, but instead we went off to this flat—I think it belonged to Neil [Aspinall]. When we got there, Neil started to fold this sofa down into a bed. Maybe John thought we were two adults: we didn’t have to pretend. But it was so sudden, so crude, I just rejected it. I slept on the divan, I think, and John went into another room.”

He considered asking Yoko to join the pilgrimage to Rishikesh, but couldn’t pluck up courage enough to do it. Instead, she went off to Paris, feeling—as she now says—“like we’d never get started.” He wrote to her there from India—long, rambling letters like the ones he used to
send to Stu Sutcliffe. Yoko replied with further message cards. “I’m a cloud,” one card said. “Watch for me in the sky.”

It was at Rishikesh, ironically, that Cynthia felt a small revival of hope for her marriage. She, at least, remained convinced that the Maharishi was a power for good and that only envious whispers were turning the Beatles against him. In India, John seemed calmer and happier than Cyn had ever known him. He began writing songs, about childhood and his mother, Julia, that Cyn could again understand. Then, on the plane back to England—still half-fearful of the Maharishi’s revenge—he told Cyn something that caused her vast astonishment. He told her that, over the years, he had not been completely faithful to her.

Back in Weybridge, their estrangement deepened. Cynthia even suggested, rather wildly, that John would be better off with someone like Yoko Ono than with her. She begged to go with him to New York for the Apple launching, but he refused. In May, he packed her away on vacation to Greece with Jennie Boyd and Magic Alex. His old school crony Pete Shotton came down to Weybridge to keep him company.

“We were just sitting round together one night.” Pete says. “John suddenly asked me, ‘Don’t you feel like having a woman around again?’ Then he said, ‘I’ve met this woman called Yoko. She’s Japanese.’ Yoko came over and John took her off to listen to his tapes. I just went to bed.

“When I got up the next morning John was sitting in the kitchen, eating boiled eggs. He said he hadn’t been to bed. Then he said, ‘Will you do us a favor? Would you get us a house?’ I said, ‘What do you want a house for?’ ‘To live in,’ he said. “With Yoko. This is it.’”

When Cyn walked in to Kenwood unexpectedly a few days later, she found John and Yoko seated together, with the curtains drawn, in a sea of dirty cups and plates. Both looked nonchalantly up at her and said: “Oh, hi…” A pair of Japanese slippers, standing neatly on an upstairs landing, opened the gentle, nearsighted girl’s eyes at long last.

The Beatles first became aware of Yoko at Abbey Road studios. They could hardly do otherwise. She did not stay, as was proper—as was womanly—in the control room. She came down onto the sacred floor of the studio, where none but Beatles and their closest male aides were allowed, and settled herself down at John’s side. Paul, George, and Ringo exchanged eloquent glances but—for the moment—said nothing. They could not have survived so long as Beatles without a deep tolerance of
one another’s fancies and blind spots. They expected John to tire of this soon, the way he tired of everything. They tried not to notice Yoko, and referred to her obliquely as “Flavor of the Month.”

She was still there, however, as Apple grew and its divisions multiplied. She had now left Tony Cox and her daughter, Kyoko, to live with John, at Kenwood first, then in London, at Ringo Starr’s Montagu Square flat. Pete Shotton drove them around, glad to have been superseded as John’s personal assistant. Such was Yoko’s introduction to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the EMI chairman, at a boardroom lunch with all four Beatles, Neil Aspinall, and Apple executive Ron Kass. In the visitor’s book after her name, John wrote “female.” “This little white figure followed the Beatles in,” Sir Joseph said. “She sat further down the table with my assistant, but hardly said a word all through the meal. Afterward, my assistant told me she’d had a tape recorder running all the time.”

Her first night with John at Kenwood had begun an artistic partnership that was to perplex and enrage the world. When Yoko first arrived John played her all the experimental tapes he had made, knowing they were useless for Beatles albums. After the final tape Yoko said, “Let’s make one of our own.” It was only as dawn broke that they got around to first making love.

In the character that everyone believed so uninhibited and audacious, Yoko found bottomless wells of shyness and self-doubt, exacerbated by years of having to keep his mouth shut as a cuddly mop top. “He was a genius, but he had this huge inferiority complex. He was brilliant as an artist, but he didn’t think he was capable of it. Like, when someone wanted to do an exhibition of his lithographs, he was just too scared to get started on the drawings. We both took mescaline, and then he tried. I told him, ‘That’s brilliant, it’s beautiful.’ John said, ‘But it’s only a circle, like a child would do.’ I said ‘Maybe it’s childish, but it’s still beautiful.’”

“It was the same when he was asked to write a sketch for
Oh! Calcutta!
[a soft porn stage show compiled by drama critic Kenneth Tynan]. ‘What am I going to write?’ John kept saying. I said, ‘Write that thing you told me about when you were a boy and you used to masturbate.’ He and his friends all used to masturbate, shouting out the names of sexy actresses—then suddenly John or one of them would shout, ‘Frank Sinatra!’ So he made that the sketch and it was marvelous.”

The obsessive jealousy with which John used to guard Cynthia from other men was now passed on to Yoko. “Jealous! My God! He wrote a song, ‘Jealous Guy,’ that said it all,” Yoko remembers now. “After we got together, he made me write out a list of all the men I’d slept with before we met. I started to do it quite casually—then I realized how serious it was to John. He didn’t even like me knowing the Japanese language because that was a part of my mind that shut him out. He wouldn’t let me read any Japanese books or newspapers.”

Despite her seemingly unquenchable self-belief, Yoko had her insecurities, too. “When I met John I was self-conscious about my appearance. I thought my legs were the wrong shape, and I used to try to cover my face with my hair. He told me, ‘No, you’re beautiful, your legs are perfect, tie your hair back and let people see your face.’”

At other times, the compliments seemed more backhanded, although he seriously wanted to convey to Yoko he’d met no one with her toughness and audacity since the Teds at Garston’s Blood Baths. “I used to tell him, ‘I think you’re a closet fag, you know.’ Because he often said, ‘Do you know why I like you? Because you look like a man in drag. You’re like a mate.’”

In June 1968, their first collaboration went on public show. It was a sculpture consisting of two acorns, one labeled “John by Yoko Ono,” the other “Yoko by John Lennon, Sometime in May 1968.” The acorns, symbolizing peace and simplicity, were to be buried as an event at the National Sculpture Exhibition in the grounds of Coventry Cathedral.

John and Yoko, both dressed in white, drove to Coventry in John’s white Rolls, accompanied by their newly appointed art adviser, Anthony Fawcett. Outside the cathedral they were met by a canon, who informed them that objects could not be buried in consecrated ground and that, in any case, acorns were “not sculpture.” Yoko flew into an impressive rage, demanding that leading British sculptors be instantly telephoned to vouch for her artistic integrity. Someone actually got through to Henry Moore’s house, but he was out. As a compromise, the acorns were buried on unhallowed ground, under an iron garden seat. Within a week, they had been dug up and taken by Beatles fans as souvenirs. Two more acorns were buried; a security firm mounted twenty-four-hour guard on the seat that marked the spot.

On July 18, a stage adaptation of John’s book
In His Own Write
opened at the London Old Vic theater. The play had been heavily censored
by the lord chamberlain’s office for its blasphemous reference to “Almighty Griff” and disrespect to such world statesmen as “Pregnant De Gaulle” and “Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom.” Fleet Street, by now perceiving a still racier story, were out in force in the summer downpour. When John arrived with Yoko and Neil Aspinall, he was surrounded by press raincoats and challenging cries of “Where’s your wife?”

The girls who stood outside Abbey Road studios—and now also outside 3 Savile Row—made no secret of their instant hatred of Yoko. “Every time we saw her, we shouted awful things,” Margo says. “‘Yellow!’ ‘Chink!’ Subtle things like that. We all felt so sorry for Cynthia. Once, outside Abbey Road, we’d got this bunch of yellow roses to give Yoko. We handed them to her thorns first. Yoko took them and backed all the way down the stairs, thanking us. She hadn’t realized they were meant to be an insult. Nor did John. He turned back and said, ‘Well, it’s about
time
someone did something decent to her.’”

In July, John’s first art exhibition opened in London, at the fashionable Robert Fraser Gallery. Its title, inspired by the hackneyed message on British street maps, was “You Are Here”: It acknowledged its motive force with a dedication “To Yoko from John with love.” It began with the release of 360 white balloons into the sky above Mayfair. Each balloon bore the printed message: “You are here. Please write to John Lennon, c/o the Robert Fraser Gallery.”

To reach the exhibition one had to walk through a display of charity street collection boxes in the shapes of pandas, puppets, and disabled children. The only other items were a circular piece of white canvas, lettered “You are here” and John’s hat lying on the floor, its upturned brim inscribed: “For the artist. Thank You.” When some art students sarcastically contributed a rusty bicycle, John immediately put that on show also.

The critics were scornful. They said what was to be many times repeated: that if John had not been a Beatle, he would not have dared put such rubbish on show. In this, at least, the critics erred. So long as he was a Beatle, he never dared do
anything
.

Many people who picked up the white balloons responded to John’s invitation to write to him. Their letters, for the most part, combined racial slurs against Yoko with advice concerning the sanctity of wedlock. “I suppose I’ve spoiled me image,” John said. “People want me to stay in their own bag. They want me to be lovable, but I was never that. Even at school I was just ‘Lennon.’”

Cynthia, meanwhile, had found herself ruthlessly cauterized from his life. Magic Alex was deputed to travel to Italy, where Cyn, her mother, and Julian were staying, and announce that John intended to divorce her. “Alex was waiting for me one night when I got back to the hotel. He told me John was going to take Julian off me and send me back to my mother in Hoylake.

“When I got back to England, I tried to have a meeting with him and discuss things. The only way I could get in touch with John was to make an appointment with him through Peter Brown at Apple. And when I finally did meet him, Yoko was there. He insisted she should stay while we were talking.”

John, at the outset, intended to divorce Cynthia for adultery supposedly committed in Italy. Despite his own countless infidelities, he was still mortified—as he told his aunt Mimi—that Cynthia should have slept with someone else. The petition was dropped when it became clear that Yoko had become pregnant. Cynthia sued for adultery, and was granted a decree nisi in November 1968.

A few weeks earlier, as Cyn was alone and helplessly contemplating the future, Paul had paid her a surprise visit. With him he brought a song he had written on his way in the car—it was for Julian, he said, although the title was “Hey Jude.” He gave Cynthia a single red rose, then said, in the old carefree Liverpool way, “Well, how about it, Cyn? How about you and me getting married now?” She was moved that Paul should think of her, and grateful for his gesture of friendship and encouragement.

Sometimes, in a surge of ecstasy, the girls on watch outside 7 Cavendish Avenue would approach the black security gates and buzz the intercom. As a rule, the voice that answered would belong to Jane Asher, Paul’s longtime girlfriend. The voice was serious but tolerant and always polite. So Jane was, too, on the hundreds of occasions when she answered the front door. The girls appreciated that civility and patience. Far from resenting Jane, they felt their angelic Beatle was in deserving hands. They were Jane’s admirers in a small way, as well as Paul’s. They grew their hair long like hers, washing it only in Breck shampoo, because that was the brand Jane advertised on television, pressing it out straight on their mother’s ironing boards.

Everyone close to Paul liked Jane and acknowledged her beneficial
influence. For, in her clear-voiced way, she was as down-to-earth as any Liverpool girl. Alone of almost the entire female race she refused to pamper and worship Paul. If Jane disagreed or disapproved, she said so. She could curb his ego, his use of charm as a weapon—rather as John curbed the syrup in his music—and yet do it in a way that commanded respect and a maturing love.

That the relationship had lasted five years was due principally to Jane’s skill in avoiding the worst of the Beatles madness, and her insistence on following her own successful film and stage career. When Paul and she met, it was with the freshness and appreciativeness of new lovers. Paul’s farm, near Campbeltown, Argyllshire, was their usual retreat. Paul had done the painting and decorating, even threw together some rudimentary furniture. There, in the uncurious hills, they walked and rode; they talked and read by lamplight and washed in the kitchen sink, and Jane cooked appetizing vegetarian dishes. Each time they left she would pack the leftovers thriftily away in plastic bags.

For Paul, it was the best of two highly pleasurable worlds. His life with Jane provided domesticity, and the refinement and social standing he craved. In her absence, his life reverted to that of Britain’s most hotly pursued bachelor. His casual affairs were conducted with such diplomacy and discretion that Jane never suspected anything. So it might have continued but for a theater tour that ended prematurely, and a witness who suddenly found herself with a legitimate reason to press Paul’s intercom.