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yes_2dayNext part of AU John's memoir chapter 5...
WARNING: this is FICTION, FICTION, FICTION
Chapter 5-C
My marriage ruined the release of the Beatles’ first record for me. The others were careful to act subdued when I was around, but I’m fairly certain for the rest of them this was a very happy and exciting time. I had sunk into a deep depression, and would spend every minute I wasn’t working hiding under the covers of a bed in the Beatles’ pied a terre. We were keeping the marriage a secret, so Cynthia stayed in Liverpool with her mother, and we didn’t end up living (secretly) together in the same house until after the baby was born.
Although I was married, it certainly did not stop me from behaving like a single man. I dated a young woman named Ida Holly in Liverpool for several months after my marriage, until her father found out that I was secretly married. She slapped me so hard I bit myself on the lip, and had to make up a story for Cynthia about a bar fight that Paul and I supposedly got into at the Cavern to cover the injury. From the department of “oh what a tangled web we weave” Cynthia then asked Paul about “the bar fight” we’d had, and Paul, bless him, without having a clue what was going on, first said ‘bar fight?’ and Cyn said ‘the one where John hurt his lip.’ It took only a second for the penny to drop, and then he said, cool as a cucumber (as I’m dying a thousand deaths next to him), “Oh, that, it was nothing.” How clever (and typical) of him to lie and tell the truth at the same time. He turned to me and added, “You make such a fuss over a little smack on the lip.” So later he said to me, “what was that all about?” I told him the whole story and he said, “next time, John, be sure to tell me what the alibi is before Cyn gets to me.” You really have to value friends like this.
After the Ida Holly incident, with the angry father swearing revenge, I decided to stick to girls who would “put out”, or, I’m ashamed to say, I called them “slags”, and leave the virginal debutantes alone. Paul, too, decided to hang out with “fast birds” from then on (that was his far more delicate description of the more sexually enlightened females that hung around the clubs and bars). This was because one of his one- night stands had gotten pregnant and claimed it was his baby. Paul denied it, although he couldn’t have been sure it wasn’t his at the time. The girl’s father was enraged, and later handed out flyers at Beatles concerts and at the Hard Day’s Nightpremiere, stating Paul was the father of his daughter’s illegitimate son. They’d made a deal with Brian over it when we weren’t making any money, and were very frustrated that Paul later hit the big time.
Thus, sadly, what we had learned was that even the fast girls wanted to get married and have babies with young men who had record contracts and were on their way up in the world. During this time Paul became something of a town bull, cutting quite a swath through the “fast birds” in Liverpool. Brian Epstein paid off about three girls before he finally was able to persuade Paul to use condoms. He pointed out that unless Paul used condoms, he wouldn’t be making any money at all – just paying off pregnant women left and right. Because these were “fast birds” there was no question about getting married to them. Truthfully, the odds are that the babies most likely weren’t his progeny anyway; he was smart enough by then to only be doing one-night stands.
This is a period of his life that Paul is quite ashamed of, and he doesn’t like to talk about it. For the purposes of this book, however, he did say, “I was a total swine. No excuses.”
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“Love Me Do” was released in October 1962. Brian decided to cheat the charts, so – as the owner of a music store – he purchased a huge number of copies of the single (I’ve heard everything from 5,000 to 10,000 copies). There was no way he was going to sell that many from his music store in Liverpool, so this was an “investment” in the Beatles. He tried to keep this knowledge from us, but of course we found out when he started charging back the cost of the records as expenses to the four of us. We used to joke amongst ourselves that we’d be paying off “Love Me Do” for years.
His strategy worked, though. The record made it on to the national charts – something few northern pop music acts had managed to do before in the history of British record charts – even if it did top out at a modest number 43. But it put us on the map – we now had a track record, and the industry insiders were watching us. Most importantly, our record company was thrilled. To pluck complete unknowns out of the hinterlands, pay almost nothing for them and not even have to pay for the song, and then have that act produce a charted single first time out of the chute and draw royalties from both the record and the song was a major accomplishment, and suddenly it was easier for George Martin to book studio time for us.
Of course, we had to go back on the road all over England to help sell the record, and keep it on the charts. The van got a real workout. One thing we noticed this time out was that everywhere we went there were at least some people – always young people – who recognized us and asked us for photos and autographs, and even kisses.
One of the brilliant things Brian Epstein did for us in the summer of 1962 was to arrange for the Beatles to open for our hero, Little Richard, for a number of his shows while he toured England. (We later opened for him in Hamburg one night at the Star-Club, too.)
At our first gig with him, we had scheduled an afternoon rehearsal, and for whatever reason Pete was late. While we awaited his arrival, Paul asked Little Richard questions about how he hit his high notes. For about 10 minutes Little Richard gave Paul a master class on how to do an authentic sounding falsetto. George and I didn’t bother to try. Neither of us had anything close to Paul’s vocal range (he had, according to several recent studies, the widest vocal range both in full voice and falsetto of any other rock ‘n roll singer - even Freddie Mercury surprisingly) so there was no point in us even trying to do it. When Pete finally got there, we ran through a few songs from our repertoire to warm up.
Little Richard was absolutely entranced by Paul’s version of his record, “Long, Tall Sally” and also Paul’s version of “Kansas City”. That’s not all about Paul that Little Richard was entranced by. After the rehearsal was over, and as we waited for the gig, Little Richard approached me out in the street where I was having a ciggie and asked if he could have one too. I gladly pulled out a ciggie and gave it to him. As he lit it he said, “I really like your group.” I was dumbfounded and beginning to feel big headed about it when Little Richard next lowered his voice to a whisper, looked over his shoulder to ensure we were alone, and asked me:
“May I borrow your lover for a tryst?”
I stood there blinking in absolute mystification, trying to understand not only why Little Richard wanted to “borrow” Cynthia, but how on earth did he even know she existed? And what the fuck was a tryst? Little Richard took my silence to be indecision.
“He really is too beautiful; it is almost hard to look at him. It’s like staring at the sun.” Little Richard continued.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘he?’ It hadn’t escaped our notice that Little Richard was flamboyantly homosexual. So the comment was not completely surprising. But at this point I couldn’t figure out whether he was talking about Paul, George or Ringo – all of who had their contingent of rabid female (and presumably gay) fans. Nor could I understand why be would think any of them was my lover; I was fairly certain no one knew about Paul and me. Before I could answer, Paul showed up and joined us, poking me on my arm for a ciggie, and allowing me to light it for him. Paul was a huge fan of Little Richard’s, and so as he blew out the smoke from his first puff, Paul favored Little Richard with one of his breath-taking smiles. I watched while Little Richard melted - he was literally simpering and flapping his eyelashes. Little by little it sunk in – he had the hots for Paul and he had cottoned to the fact that Paul was my lover! I almost laughed out loud in equal amounts of surprise and distress, but then decided to save my meltdown over it for later. I decided to have a little mischief with Paul first.
“Little Richard says he would like to borrow you, Paul,” I said casually. I knew Paul’s innocent mind would go straight to the stage, and maybe he would be singing up front with the great Little Richard!
Before Paul could respond, Little Richard grabbed him by the upper arm and, with a peremptory order: “Come with me!” he pulled Paul off in the direction of his dressing room. I was left with a vision of Paul looking over his shoulder at me with this “what the hell?” look on his face. I just about bust a gut laughing. I couldn’t wait until I saw him again.
Not five minutes later he was back, shaking his head and chuckling.
“What’s so funny?” I asked Paul, although of course I knew.
“Would you believe, Little Richard thinks I’m a poofter? He wanted to give me a blowjob!”
“No!” I shouted, laughing uproariously. “You didn’t let him do it, did you?” For that remark I had my foot stomped.
“He thinks you’re a poofter too, you know,” Paul added, laughing. “He thinks you and I are ‘together’; I wonder how he sussed that out?” He shook his head and laughed. “I sure hope it isn’t obvious to everyone,” he added, still chuckling cheerfully.
I, too, wondered where Little Richard got that idea, only it wasn’t funny to me. The episode with Little Richard seriously shook me. I began to worry that my sexual longings for Paul were showing on me fuckin’ face. How did Little Richard suss that out? I could ask him, but there was no talking to him. He didn’t make any sense at all. I tried to find out by interviewing him for this book, but we ended up talking about Martians! I think like a lot of loony people he could see through people’s surfaces to their naked insides. And my naked insides were getting hard for even me to ignore.
Still, I’ve always thought Little Richard was a true gentleman, because he had the good manners to ask my permission first.
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Of course, this wasn’t the last time Little Richard focused on one of the Beatles. A few months later, in November, when we opened for him in Hamburg at the Star-Club one night, he had figured out Paul was a no go, and so he set his cap on Ringo. Apparently in American homosexual circles at the time if a bloke wore rings on certain fingers it meant he was open for a man-on-man fling, and so Little Richard thought Ringo - with rings on all of his fingers - was leaving some kind of open invitation for him. One evening Little Richard joined us in our dressing room, and he kept sitting so close to Ringo that it made him uncomfortable. Ringo would get up and move somewhere else, and soon Little Richard would move too. So Ringo would get up and stand somewhere, and Little Richard would go stand right next to him. Although we later joked that Little Richard chased Ringo around a table, we were only exaggerating. But suffice to say, it was obvious to all of us that Little Richard was coming on to Ringo, and so the three of us - Paul, George and I - ran interference for Ringo for the remainder of the evening.
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Hamburg Finale
We played the Star-Club for two weeks in November 1962, just as our record Love Me Do was coming out. It was during this two-week residency that the Little Richard/Ringo episode happened. By the end of the two weeks, our record Love Me Dowas making its way up the charts in England, and we were very excited. Brian had booked us at the Star-Club for two more weeks in December, and we were quite pissed off about that. With the success of our record, we wanted to move on to bigger and better things. Brian put his foot down, however, and insisted that we live up to our commitment. It was a very grumpy group of young men who showed up in Hamburg for our fifth - and last - club dates there.
To pass the time between shows, Paul and I went back to work trying to write new songs. I remember us sitting together and polishing up Ask Me Why, There’s a Place, and P.S. I Love You. We also worked up a song for George to sing, Do You Want to Know a Secret.
However, our first number one hit was inspired by something I said to Paul one night while we were there; we were having a lover’s quarrel because Paul wasn’t interested in sex for some reason. That never happened, so I immediately assumed that he’d already had sex that night with some girl, and I became very jealous. So I said to him, “please please me”. As soon as I said it we both laughed at the pun, and then we both lit up like light bulbs. All else was forgotten as we grabbed our guitars and started playing with the words. While the main verses were mostly mine, Paul solved the timing problem in the chorus, and developed a counter melody. The song was fully written in less than 30 minutes. Sometimes it just happens that way.
This was the first time Paul and I changed some words in one of our song lyrics in order to camouflage its true meaning:
Please Please Me
Last night I said these words to my love,
I know you never even try love,
C'mon (C'mon) C'mon (C'mon) C'mon (C'mon) C'mon
Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
I don't wanna sound complaining,
But you know there's always rain in my heart (in my heart).
I do all the pleasing with you it's so hard to reason
With you, whoa yeah, why do you make me blue?
Paul suggested we change “love” to “girl” in the first few lines. Thinking about it now I realize our guilty consciences must have been working over time that night. What would it have mattered if we’d left it as is? “Love” is gender neutral. I can’t remember now why we thought it was so important to change that word, although I suspect it was because we had just both sat there and openly written a song about our own sexual relationship, and we wanted to quickly put some distance between the song and us.
What’s especially interesting about this song is that it is so blatantly about sex, and yet no one seemed to notice it! The censors never questioned its meaning. I never heard a DJ or reporter suggest that it was about a couple arguing over whether to have sex. I do think that it is possible that the word “girl” actually helped to neutralize the sexuality in the song, whereas the word “love” might have accentuated it. Perhaps there was more than guilty consciences at work when we decided to change that word – some sub-conscious desire to write an innocent pop song rather than a raunchy R & B song, which is exactly what “Please Please Me” is when you strip it down to basics. Oh, and as long as we’re stripping down to basics, and in case you’re wondering, I did get pleased that night – very, very pleased - after we finished writing the song.
(By the way, years later, in the ‘70s, I was asked to explain the genesis of this song. I lied. I told the reporter that I wrote it entirely on my own in my Aunt Mimi’s house. It sounded so much more innocent that way. I didn’t lie about this song to exclude Paul from getting credit; I did it to protect both him and me from speculation and exposure. I lied about such things frequently during that period for that reason.)
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Please Please Me went straight to Number One in England in January of 1963. We were all surprised by this, especially our record company. Suddenly we began to get the pressure from the suits to increase the rate of songs we wrote and recorded, and hits they could hawk. Paul and I were quite willing to produce those songs, and we used to joke about being an assembly line. To motivate ourselves, we used to ask each other, “What will we write today?” and then answer, “A swimming pool!” “No - a Rolls Royce!” “No – a mansion in the suburbs!”
Sadly, we thought this was a big joke. We didn’t know that soon this would be literally what was driving us. We were still enthralled with this new heady thing called ‘success’. Although we knew that is what we had been working towards for years, I believe that deep inside a part of us didn’t believe it would actually ever happen. We were so amazed that it actually happened, that for a while we all were susceptible to the “sell out.” So we planned to move to London. We started getting our suits from personal tailors on Bond Street. Our shirts were handmade, and we had silk ties. I remember all four of us spent a great deal of time searching out the best and coolest cuff links. Was this what we had been working towards? Rank materialism?
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Life on the road with the Beatles in the Beatlemania years was at turns relentless and exciting. We didn’t have much time to just sit around and do nothing; we were always on some kind of conveyance traveling to a gig or press conference or photo shoot, or at the gig, press conference or photo shoot itself, or partying at some club after the gig, press conference or photo shoot, or collapsing in exhausted heaps back at the hotel after the clubbing. In 1963 we didn’t get as much groupie action as we later received starting in 1964. Of the four of us Paul was the only one getting almost constant female action in 1963. He brought a series of women back to our hotel, night after night. Sometimes I would too, but most of the time he’d be humping like crazy in the next room, and I’d be lying in the neighboring room (while George snored in the other bed) feeling miserable and alone. I had suggested to Paul that he share rooms with Ringo on nights he brought women back, and I’d share with George on those nights. I didn’t mind George having sex with a woman in the bed next to me. I don’t know what Ringo thought of all this; at that point I think he was still trying to find his footing in the band, and he didn’t argue with my decrees.
I don’t think I was just jealous of the women for having sex with Paul. I think I was jealous of anyone other than me having his attention at any time for any reason. I felt as though he belonged to me, and no one else should receive his smiles, or his special looks, or certainly his touches. It would be a few more years before I found myself able to articulate this to Paul. In the early days I just suffered in silence. I was confused, however. I craved our physical relationship, and when we had sex I felt that Paul did too. But then he could go days, weeks, and I think even months (I never had the patience to test out that theory) without having sex with me, while fucking virtually every female in sight. I didn’t understand it, and it hurt like hell. This is when it started – Paul hurting me without meaning to hurt me, and without even knowing it.
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Also during this period we started doing press conferences and interviews - hundreds of them, wherever we went. By the end of 1963 we were pros at the give-and-take of these interviews. But we all felt a little self-conscious about them that first year. They would give us these little questionnaires to fill out: what’s your favorite color? (Paul and I both always said “black”. It was our little revolt.) When did you first meet Paul? John? George? Ringo? How did you come up with ‘Beatles’ for a name? One time I got to Paul’s questionnaire before he did, and filled in my name in all the important places (your most important musical influence? John; what are you going to do when the Beatles end? John. Paul came in later and scratched these out and wrote ‘He put that in himself!’) All of us started filling in made up answers after a while, even taking turns using each other’s previous answers, trying to see if the press or fans would even notice that our answers to the same questions changed. They didn’t. Who is your favorite singer / group / actor/ actress? It was endless and bewildering. “Why does anyone want to know any of this?” each of us would ask the others every so often – it was always a rhetorical question, because we all knew the answer – “because they’re all daft.”
Suddenly, we felt that we were the only normal ones left in the whole world. Everyone around us had gone daft. Paul came home from a weekend in Liverpool and told me that some of his relatives had started referring to him in the third person, as ‘Beatle Paul’. “It’s like I’m not the same person to them any more. But I am! I am! It’s really still me!” He was quite spooked by that experience, and I knew exactly what he meant, because the last time I’d seen a few of the old Quarrymen, they treated me as if I was the second coming of Christ. The same EMI blokes who had treated us like dirt tracked in from the outside just a year earlier were now bowing and scraping. I was “Mr. Lennon”, and Paul was “Mr. McCartney.” The first time someone addressed Paul as “Mr. McCartney” he looked over his shoulder and around the room before realizing that “they weren’t talking to me Dad, they were talking to me!”
People on the street would stop and sometimes even scream joyfully but loudly right in our faces. “Unnerving,” I remember Ringo snarling after one such occurrence. “You’d think we all looked like Frankenstein,” Paul added. The women were coming on to us – all four of us – and we all handled this differently. George was all for it, and never expressed the slightest hesitation about it. Ringo found it intrusive. He was in love with his Liverpudlian girlfriend, and of the four of us he tried the hardest to remain faithful. I, of course, would much rather have spent every night getting my brains fucked out by Paul, but if that wasn’t in the offing, why I’d be willing to take on a bird or two (even though I was married.) Paul found it strange, but was more than willing to take full advantage of it. I remember him announcing to the rest of us one day in the cafeteria at EMI, “Last year at this time none of us could get arrested, and now the girls are literally throwing themselves at us!” His point was that it seemed pretty shady that wealth and fame could have that dramatic of an effect on the way one was treated by the world. Of all four of us I believe Paul struggled with this dichotomy the most. Even before he was famous, he never could trust new people in his life; he was always looking for their angle, or their real motivation. Now it wasn’t paranoia anymore, because they really did have hidden agendas!
Fame affected each of us differently. I think Ringo took it the best. He saw it as a lucky break, and he never psychoanalyzed it, or tried to get to the bottom of it. He still has fairly positive things to say about being famous. Things that bothered the rest of us just didn’t bother him. In later years he coined what I think was the truest thing ever said about the Beatles and how the four of us made it out of that craziness more or less intact:
“I’d be looking in the mirror, primping, and I would think I was a god. A living god! Then I’d go to work and there would be these three spoilsports going, ‘No, you’re not a god – you’re from Liverpool!’” In other words: we kept each other sane. Neither Elvis nor Michael Jackson had the luxury of equal partners who would not let them get away with living in a fantasy world.
George was always a suspicious person. He just didn’t trust outsiders and never did. So being famous didn’t create that in him – he already had it. What fame did to George, though, was to bring him out of his shell. Suddenly we were seeing sides to George that we didn’t know existed. He began expressing his opinions, and making jokes at my expense – which he never would have had the nerve to do before. I have to admit that at first I wasn’t enamored of this change. The other thing that we learned about George was that he was a womanizer. He had never been one before. It just happened overnight, probably because he had been too shy to make the first move, and now the women were making all the first moves – left and right!
I had a love/hate relationship with fame. I loved it when I was on the stage and it was going good; I loved it when I was working with Paul and writing songs and able to record them, and then watching them sell like hotcakes. I loved it when I later read my words in interviews, or when I made particularly witty comebacks during press conferences. But I hated it when I was home after a tour and everything was all quiet, and the thoughts started rushing in about who am I, and why do I feel so bad? I hated the press almost as much as I loved it; I hated when they misquoted me, or when they quoted me correctly but out of context. I hated when huge big nobodies who knew nothing wrote criticisms about my work, as if they were qualified to do so! Sometimes I loved being recognized and treated in a special way; most of the time I just wanted to be invisible again, and to be able to hide behind my anonymity.
Paul struggled with fame in a big way, and he still does. As I mentioned before, I believe he struggled with it more than the rest of us did. I know the conventional wisdom is the opposite – that Paul craved the Beatles fame and tried to recreate it with Wings. All people do when they say this is to expose their ignorance. The answer to why Paul is so misunderstood is the same answer to why his interviews never relayed anything of real substance: Paul didn’t ever get comfortable with sharing his private life and his private thoughts and feelings with complete strangers. He has a hard time doing this with his closest friends. Paul will do almost anything not to shed a tear in front of another person. He has cried with me, and with Linda and a few other intimates, but even then it is like it is a last resort for him: something that happens to him after all else fails.
To deal with this dread of personal exposure, Paul quickly (almost instantaneously with the first big press conference) created an ‘alter ego’ – a persona to trot out whenever he was around strangers or the public. Soon, the press and the public thought this persona was the real Paul. Even now, that is the impression held of him by most people the world over. The “cute” Beatle, the “nice” Beatle, the “sweet” Beatle, the “soft” Beatle, the “charming” Beatle.
Paul’s alter ego pissed me off big time. I knew that these qualities were part of who Paul was, but they were only a small part. In my opinion, they paled in significance to the qualities that I had always associated with Paul: passionate, intense, deeply committed to his music and art, fiercely –even idealistically – loyal to his friends, sharp as a tack with a photographic memory, hilariously funny in a dark, irreverent way, and serious as a heart attack underneath it all. He was relentless when pursuing a goal, and nothing and no one could stop him from a course of action once he had committed to it. And he was intensely protective of me. He always had my back. He never let me hang in the wind. He would scan the horizon for bad things that might happen to me, and then cut them off at the pass. Half the time I didn’t even know the things Paul did to protect me, mainly from myself. This is an accurate description of the person I loved, and it seemed a desecration to me to have people see him as this pretty but lightweight and amenable guy who was apparently clueless. Paul was not clueless about most things. About most things he understood all the clues, even when the rest of us didn’t.
So I began a subconscious campaign to undermine the Paul alter ego. Throughout our interview years, until the beginning of 1966, you will see that I am constantly fucking with Paul in these interviews. Whenever I felt he was going too far into Beatle Paul-land, I would tickle his ear, jab him in the arm/stomach/chest, make faces at him, say something insulting about him to the interviewer, answer his question for him, throw things at him, or imitate him. I went through all of our taped interviews from the 1963 through 1965 period while writing this chapter, and I only found a few where I didn’t fuck with Paul in some way. This was all about me telling him, ‘you may be fooling them, but you’re not fooling me.’
So fame changed us all inside, with the possible exception of Ringo. It brought things out in George that he never would have developed but for fame, and it pushed things further back in Paul, distorting his public persona. And in the whirlwind years of the Beatles, I was a truly lost individual, in that I had no clue who it was that I wanted to be, where I was going, or what I really wanted out of life. I just allowed myself to be carried away by the tide, knowing the whole time that there had to be a day of reckoning looming somewhere just beyond the bright blue horizon.
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She Was Just Seventeen
In the very early spring of 1963, the four of us were invited to appear on the popular BBC 1 show, “Jukebox Jury” after our third single, “She Loves You” was released. We performed our songs before a “jury” made up of teenaged British celebrities, who would “vote” whether it was a hit or not a hit. One of the people on that “jury” was a stunning redhead, the 17-year-old actress, Jane Asher. She was well known to us as a child actress and teen TV star. On television, which was black and white in those days, Jane Asher appeared to be a brunette. When we saw her hair we were all amazed. It was genuine, too, nothing out of a bottle. The most vibrant head of long red hair any of us had ever seen. I remember looking over to Paul to share the thought, only to find him absolutely gobsmacked by her. He was totally smitten. I remember I felt a throb of jealousy while I watched him watching her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He certainly never looked at me like that!
I immediately sensed trouble, and for the first time in the almost six years I had known Paul, I was seriously jealous of a particular female. At first, I just swallowed it, thinking it would run its course. But there was something in the way these two looked at each other (excuse me for the borrowing George) that led me to believe that she was going to be a serious challenge to my relationship with Paul. Unfortunately, George Harrison was smitten, too. And he went full out on the charm offensive. He didn’t have too many smooth moves at the time. Paul played it cool. He sat back in the weeds while George made his run, and Jane was clearly having none of it. She kept looking past George to Paul, who was busy studying his fingernails. She agreed to go back to our London pied a terre with all four of us, where, eaten up with jealousy, I mercilessly grilled her, even asking her if she was a virgin. She blushed a very pretty pink and admitted she was a virgin. I looked over at Paul victoriously (thinking he wasn’t going to sleep with her because she wasn’t “fast”), but to my dismay he seemed to be all the more enchanted by her – and irritated with me. My bad.
About this time he gave us “the look”. This was the look that meant that we were to get lost, and let him have the field. We left the room, and Paul went into overdrive. Being the gallant person he is, he refused to tell me what happened except to say, “We really liked each other, from the start.” I believe that. “Like”. Huh!
Anyway, the beginning of the Jane Asher affair was my first big heartbreak in my sexual relationship with Paul. My troubles were just beginning in that regard. It was the first time the reality of my situation was revealed – he was always going to want a woman, and I was always going to want him. I buried that thought, and tried to move on, hoping she would be the latest in a long line of lovely ladies to catch his eye for a time, but only for a time.
Meanwhile, our next big single ‘She Loves You’ shot to number one in Britain almost as soon as it came out. And shortly thereafter, also in the spring of 1963 our first album, ‘The Beatles”, was released. We had recorded it at the end of 1962, with a few songs being finished while we were in Hamburg and in early 1963. We hadn’t had much time to write very many new songs in the months that had preceded the studio dates, so we decided to record some of our favorite standards from our club sets instead. It kept the record company bigwigs off our backs for a few months. They had wanted to capitalize on the Please Please Me phenomenon. (Throughout the Beatles’ successful years, pundits and industry experts believed we would fizzle out after 6 months. As each 6-month period passed and we were still on top, they’d say, ‘well it can’t last another 6 months.’ We were always in this place where we had to prove ourselves, and the powers- that-be were always in a rush to exploit whatever song was our latest hit, before the “bubble burst”. Hence the pace at which we had to write and record songs was relentless.)
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Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher was heating up so fast that I couldn’t keep track of it. Suddenly Paul became secretive with me, and protective of her with me, in much the same way Stu had become when he first fell in love with Astrid. This memory did not give me much confidence in my hope that Paul was only passing through a phase with Jane. If I made any thing less than a glowing comment about her, he would become angry and protective. This was new territory for me. I kept putting my foot wrong. A slighting remark or a passing joke that he used to just let go, suddenly he was challenging. You would think I would learn from this, and back off on the smart-ass remarks about his ladylove, but no, that would have been the rational way to behave, and who said I was ever rational? Instead, I would answer him back, and we would get into rows about it. I recall one argument especially, because it was very hurtful to me, although of course I didn’t let him know. I was basically calling him the 1963 equivalent of “pussy whipped”, and he responded sharply, “Not all men treat their women like trash, John.” He was referring to my treatment of Cynthia and other women. This hit home, because it was a guilty secret of mine.
I used to hit my girlfriends when I was angry and frustrated. I hit Cynthia on a number of occasions. The last time I hit her, she got a huge black eye. This was in late-1961, and Cyn tried to stay in hiding until her eye healed, but I wanted her to come to the Cavern one night, and she came, but with dark glasses on. Paul saw her sitting in the club at night with dark glasses on, and teasing her, grabbed them off. When they came off he saw her black eye. He knew immediately that I had done it. He had suspected me of hitting her for a long time, but I lied to him about it, and so did Cyn. The black eye was evidence to him that I was hitting her. Cyn kept trying to excuse me and dismiss it, but Paul was enraged. He found me backstage where I was goofing around with a group of friends, grabbed me by the collar, whirled me around to face him, and shouted at me, “Does it make you feel like a big man?” and then he smacked me right in my face with his fist. I went down like a ton of bricks. He stood over me and shouted, “If you lay a hand on Cyn again, I’ll cripple you!” and he stormed out.
I’d like to say that I felt bad about what I had done to Cynthia after that. But no: I was only worried that I had lost Paul. I chased after him, and later that night kept throwing pebbles at his window at Forthlin Road until he agreed to come downstairs and talk to me. He made me promise never to hit a woman again. He said he could never be the friend of a bloke who hit women; it was against everything he believed in.
I’d also like to say that Paul’s intervention kept me from hitting other women. It didn’t. I never hit Cynthia again, but I did sometimes hit women I was dating, but only women he didn’t know. This would happen when I was very drunk and in a dark or sullen mood; with my wide mood swings, this happened more than a few times. For fear of public disclosure, and because of so much external scrutiny, I stopped hitting women by 1963, although I did slap a female reporter when she asked me a nasty question about my wife in 1964. I always felt horrible afterwards, apologized sloppily, and then, within a few hours, I would successfully bury the guilt. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties and early thirties that I became haunted by guilt over it. And it was not until my late forties that I finally dealt with this abhorrent behavior in therapy.
But back in the early ‘60s, Paul did not find out about the other women I hit. I was paranoid he would find out, because I feared he meant it when he said he could not be my friend anymore if I kept it up.
The Paul and Jane relationship, however, burned me to the soul. I was floundering emotionally, and much of the fun of our newfound success was spoiled for me from then on. Again,
I turned to songwriting to aerate my feelings without actually disclosing them to anyone.
“I Call Your Name” is an example of me putting it all out there in a song lyric – and no one seeing it:
I call your name
But you're not there
Was I to blame
For being unfair?
Oh, I can't sleep at night
Since you've been gone
I never weep at night
I can't go on
Don't you know I can't take it?
I don't know who can
I'm not gonna make it
I'm not that kind of man
Oh, I can't sleep at night
But just the same
I never weep at night
I call your name
As you can tell, this song is about unrequited love. It captures pretty clearly what I was going through at the time.
As Paul’s relationship with Jane became more serious (and it was one of those thunderbolt type things) I felt more and more helpless. It was at this time that I started to gain weight. I would be at home with Cynthia, eating, thinking about Paul, eating, worrying about losing him, eating, listening to the new baby cry, eating, and rooting through the refrigerator, while eating.
Paul’s recollections of these early days with Jane will, for the most part, probably always remain private. He and Jane made a pact never to discuss their relationship with anyone else when they broke up in 1968, and they have both kept that pact. He has never even spoken to me about it, and believe me - I’ve asked!
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My son Julian was born on April 13, 1963. I was on tour when he was born, but Paul drove me from the gig (at about 80 miles per hour) to get to the hospital as soon as possible. He was far more excited about me having a son than I was. Paul and babies and children have always had a mutual admiration society going on, so he spent most of our time in the hospital making faces in the nursery window, while I sat with Cynthia and her mother in a little private room. Cyn’s mother was lecturing me about what a lousy husband I was, never around, never helping out. I made some snide remarks about how the money I earned appeared to be “helping out” with the household expenses, if the brand new coat, shoes and purse she was sporting were anything to go by. Our bickering distressed Cyn, but I was not yet 23, and very immature at that, so I wasn’t about to stop first. Fortunately for all of us, Paul came in momentarily from the hall to urge me to come look at the baby (“He’s adorable! You have to come see!”) As I followed him out I heard Cyn’s mother grumbling under her breath, “you should have married Paul. He’s much better husband material.” I had to laugh at that, as an image of the never-ending line of nubile women passing through Paul’s bed danced through my head, not to mention the other, more intimate images of the two of us.
John Charles Julian Lennon: A long name for such a tiny bit of humanity, I thought. John for me, Charles for Cynthia’s deceased father, and Julian for my deceased mother. I was not prepared to be a father, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to be one. But it is impossible to hold your newborn child in your arms and not feel a strong biological pull. I had never been around babies, and was thoroughly intimidated by Julian. Fortunately, Cynthia was a natural mother, a fantastic mother, who was calm and patient with me as I hovered around the edges of the baby nervously. I felt as though I would break him or something if I touched him wrong.
I had to go right back on tour in a few weeks, and Brian had planned a holiday for the Beatles before that happened. I knew that from now on I’d be living with Cynthia and Julian in our own flat. Brian scheduled a 12-day vacation for all of us to an island off the coast of Africa, in Tenerife, where Klaus Voorman’s family had a holiday rental. Originally, all four of us were to go, with Brian there to provide adult supervision.
But then Brian noticed that I was suffering from a pretty severe depression in the wake of the birth of my son. I was now living with Cyn and the baby, and after having a bachelor’s life so long, this was an adjustment for me, and not a good one.
It sounds crass now, (I don’t mean it that way), but Brian used my confusion and depression as a way to forward his personal relationship with me. He knew (because I had mentioned it to him once) how much I had always wanted to go to Barcelona, and had never made it there. He told me he was very familiar with the city, and we had chatted about it for some time. So his great idea was that he would take me to Barcelona as a kind of consolation prize for falling on the marriage sword. He would send Astrid Kirchherr as adult supervision with the other three to Tenerife. (Why he thought 4 adults needed “supervision” I don’t know. We didn’t question him in those days. I suspect he knew our individual and group propensity for mischief and trouble and wanted to protect us from our own carelessness now that we were becoming household names in British homes.)
I didn’t think about it as long as I should have before I agreed to go. When I was in one of those depressions, I would jump at anything to distract me from it. I also wanted to solidify my leadership role in the band. I had been jolted by George Martin’s preference for Paul’s singing, and the assumption around EMI that Paul was the real talent in the band. As much as I loved Paul, I was also very threatened by his many gifts and talents. I spent a great deal of time in the Beatle years worrying about my relative standing in the group, and working to maintain what I thought was my rightful place at the top. As a grown adult looking back, I see that this insecurity was foolish. But at the time it was dead serious stuff to me.
There were huge downsides to going to Spain with Brian. Obvious ones. I never considered them and responded on impulse. Had I consulted Paul, he would have pointed out that the rumors triggered by this trip would be long lasting, and that I’d probably be explaining why I did it for the rest of my life. He would have counseled me to bring Cyn along too, or go with a group of friends. Had I insisted upon this, Brian would have agreed to it. I just didn’t think of it. That was Paul’s job, damn it, to think of the unforeseen consequences and to plan around them!
Brian no doubt nurtured hopes that I would seduce him on this trip. He still saw me as the “teddy boy” type and didn’t realize that in the Beatles I was the more dependent one, and Paul was the more decisive one. It would be a few more years before he figured this out. (In the first few years of his relationship with Paul, Brian thought Paul was oppositional. He wasn’t looking at the situation through Paul’s eyes: Paul knew that Brian was in love with me, and was favoring me in all of his decisions, so naturally he was distrustful of and argumentative with Brian.)
I had no intention of seducing Brian Epstein then, or ever. I eventually came to love Brian as a person. I identified with his fragility, since I was emotionally fragile myself. He was a dedicated manager and a very loyal and trustworthy friend. He wasn’t the best business head, and made some serious financial mistakes with the Beatles, but none of us ever held this against him because we did not doubt his integrity, his loyalty and his devotion. Had he not died so young, the Beatles probably would have lasted longer, because none of us challenged his business leadership or would ever have challenged it.
But I was never sexually attracted to Brian Epstein. He was far too effeminate for me. Everyone else looks at Paul and thinks he is cute, or “feline” is a word I hear a lot from people who are trying to describe Paul. But to me Paul is incredibly masculine, and he always was, in the way a jaguar on the prowl in the jungle, while still a feline, is extremely masculine. It was that aspect of Paul’s sexuality that I was attracted to. Brian simply could not compete with Paul. It was absolutely no contest.
What did we do in Spain? We went to the museums I wanted to see, and also took a tour of the city’s great architecture. We went to cafes and Brian took me to gay bars. I was fascinated by the gay bars, and the men there left me alone, probably because they thought I was with Brian. We talked about the band and it’s future, of course we did, and I gave him my opinion that there should be one credits tag for Paul and me, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Rodgers and Hart. Ignoring the fact that Rodgers was the composer and got first billing in his two partnerships over the lyricists, I persuaded Brian that my name should go first: Lennon & McCartney. I had been concerned that the first song we had recorded, ‘Love Me Do’, was credited ‘McCartney/Lennon,’ and although ‘Please Please Me’ had been credited Lennon/McCartney, and quite appropriately so, ‘She Loves You’ had also given me top billing although both of us contributed equally to that song. Paul had been miffed that my name had gone first, and had demanded to know what we were going to do when we wrote a song ‘eyeball-to-eyeball.’ His opinion was that we would switch off getting credit for those songs, so that the next mutual hit should put his name first. For whatever reason, I had decided to myself that I should come first on every song credit. In my mind I justified it as being easier on the tongue, alphabetically in order, and also in order of our individual ages. To Brian I sold it as a ‘brand’, although I didn’t use that word and didn’t realize it was an advertising concept. Brian liked the idea of a ‘brand’, and not having Paul there to disagree, he said he would fix it with the song publication company that my name would always go first. I am positive he made this promise in the hope that it would endear him to me; in other words, it was a rather outrageous conflict of interest vis a vis Paul, since he claimed to be the one looking out for both of our interests equally.
After Brian had made this promise, I felt as though I had to reward him in some way. So that night, which was near the end of the week, I deliberately drank too much, and I allowed him to cuddle with me. It is difficult for me to write about, because Brian is dead and can’t defend himself, but speaking entirely for myself, I found this very awkward. I wasn’t attracted to him, but I felt indebted to him. I asked him if he wanted to fuck me up the ass and he demurred, saying, “We don’t really do that,” which I knew was not true of the gay community. Instead he suggested he would toss me off, and I agreed.
Afterwards, I was so embarrassed and disgusted by it - and I felt compromised - that I hurled unforgivable insults at Brian. That next evening he had been patting my leg and I jumped up and started calling him names, and telling him it gave me the creeps when he touched me or looked at me adoringly. I told him to “leave off”, because I would never feel “that way” about him. He was reduced to tears, and filled with apologies. Because of his proclivities, this probably made him love me more, because I was treating him so badly. Poor soul.
So, I guess you could say I “used” Brian, just as he had been trying to “use” me. Brian almost encouraged young men to “use” him, by being willing to take humiliation and rejection from them. In my case, he paid for my air tickets, my hotel bills, my food – everything. He also promised to make sure my name went first in all the song credits. And what he got in exchange was a moody, cranky, distracted travel companion, who was secretly pining for his one and only true love who was off on an exotic vacation of his own. The whole time my head had been full of: Whom was Paul meeting there? Whom was Paul sleeping with? What was Paul doing and thinking? I was sarcastic and mean to Brian much of the time, and when I wasn’t being that way I was refusing to come out of my room, buried in blankets and missing Paul. I am ashamed of the way I treated Brian on this trip, which is the real reason why I never wanted to talk about it in any detail.