Cynthia Lennon - DM's Beatles forums

Found this about Cyn's new book:

Home truths from the first rock chick
Cynthia Lennon, airbrushed out of the Beatles legend for so long, tells Bryan Appleyard why she had to tell her side of the story
�
Cynthia Lennon is smoking when I enter the suite of her Chelsea hotel and smoking when I leave. Perhaps she had just one incredibly slow-burning cigarette. On the recording, however, I keep hearing the surreptitious scratch of a lighter. Plainly she had many cigarettes, many more than seems possible.
�Of course, you can�t do it anywhere now,� she explains apologetically. �I�m going to have to wear the patches, I�m going to have to try. I could be an absolute druggy and I could be I don�t know how many feet under by now. But I�ve only this vice and the odd scotch. I�m okay so far.�

Exactly. With enough nicotine to fell an ox coursing through her veins, Cyn, the supreme wronged wife of the pop era, is okay so far. Still standing, surviving, enduring the slings and arrows; it�s what rock chicks do when the chicks are down. And Cynthia Lennon was the first great rock chick. The young could be forgiven for not knowing this because, almost 40 years ago, she was made into an unperson.

�I think the word is �airbrushed� out . . . Totally ignored, well, pushed aside rather than ignored.�

One day, back in the Sixties, when everybody was doing everything for the first time, she came back from a holiday in Greece via Italy to the Surrey mansion she shared with her husband John Lennon and their son Julian. In the �sunroom� she found Lennon cross-legged on the floor opposite the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. Both were dressed in towelling robes.

�Oh, hi,� said John.

�We were all looking forward,� responded suddenly surreal Cyn, �to dinner in London after lunch in Rome and breakfast in Greece. Would you like to come?� �No thanks,� said John.

Why did she say that? �It just seemed right at the time . . . I�ve spoken to Julia, John�s sister, and she said, �Cyn, why didn�t you bop her one, why didn�t you smash her face in?� and I said, �Julia, if you�d been there . . . you had no idea what I was feeling.� I was riveted to the spot. It was in my own home with my own husband. I�d known him for 10 years � what am I supposed to do, go over and kiss him and say, �Oh, darling, how are you? Hello, Yoko, had a nice weekend?� What am I supposed to do?� Cynthia, the Liverpool sweetheart, was at once unpersoned in favour of Yoko, the exotic weirdo. The Beatles broke up soon afterwards, some fans claiming the wiley oriental had put the mockers on the whole enterprise. She had taken to turning up at recording sessions; wives and girlfriends had previously been rigorously excluded. You could tell Ringo didn�t like the look of her one bit. Yoko became the dragon princess and Cynthia . . . well, Cynthia just kind of drifted into a sub-celebrity limbo.

But here she is, back with a book. It is called John, but really it should be called Cynthia. It is her testament, written in a rush in longhand at her home in Spain with the aid of God knows how many fags. Why now? �I think the sands of time are running out, actually . . . And I just wanted to balance the scales.�

She is 65. She was thinking of calling her book Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me When I�m 64? �But I�m 65 now and it was a good title but a bit messy.�

Her hair is blonde and cut tightly round the face in a very Sixties old english sheepdog style. Her softened features, verging on the jowly, betray the intensity of the smoking, though her lips retain something of the sexy memory of that superstar consort in her funny white cap, big glasses, miniskirt and Mary Quant plastic top. Also, when she smiles or laughs, her cheeks plump out like a chipmunk�s. Very scouse, that, must be genetic.

She is dressed in a regal, floppy, fuschia linen suit. I�ve never known quite what espadrilles are, but I think that�s what are on her feet. She is always said not to have a Liverpool accent, coming as she did from quite smart Hoylake across the Mersey. But she does. Key words emerge with a rising, questioning cadence. I�m from Manchester; I notice.

The thing is, of course, she never left Liverpool; it�s in her blood alongside the nicotine. The passages in her book about her childhood and teen years on the banks of the Mersey are vivid and warm.

�It was vibrant as far as I was concerned � Liverpool in those days of school and college. I keep thinking of the smell of Kardomah coffee and toast and the hustle and bustle and the taxis � none of these malls. It was just so vibrant and safe.

�The one thing that really fascinated me was the prostitutes. I knew nothing of that until I started school in Liverpool. I was just an ordinary kid.�

She was a belonger, integrated into her world. This has to be understood; her story pivots on this point. At art college, she met the flamboyant anti-belonger, Lennon.
�He was always around, always surrounded by people who were in awe of him. He was such a rebel. He was always somewhere around college, putting on his act, doing his thing and people were having hysterics. He was embarrassingly funny and you couldn�t resist it. I�d never met anybody like this before. I was new to college. I was definitely brought into his orbit when he was moved into my class.�

There�s a contradiction here that she doesn�t resolve in the book. Though a rebel, presenting a hard front to the world, Lennon was terrified of confrontation, downright cowardly in fact.

�He would entertain people with his rebellion but if he actually had to confront anybody on a one to one basis and be aggressive to them, he couldn�t do that � unless he drank. He couldn�t take his drink, it made him very aggressive.�

She remembers �three or four yobs� taking on this super-cool dude with his �killer looks� outside a chip shop. �I had no fear so I went for them. He dragged me out so quickly. He said, �Don�t ever do that again, they�ll kill you. I thought it would have been him confronting them. But he always backed off from real aggression.�

John was effectively an orphan, being brought up by Aunt Mimi, a legendary figure in Beatles lore. Cynthia�s lips curl downwards in a harsh grimace when the name comes up.

�Interesting lady. She was extremely hard on John . . . If you think about what happened and what she did � she took him away from his mother and said her sister was not a fit person to bring up her nephew. So cold, she really was a cold woman. She was very striking when she made an effort, when she didn�t she was like an old tramp.�

Mimi is the first victim of Cynthia�s balancing of the scales. In the book she�s a monster. But the point may be that, in being hard on Mimi she�s being fair to John. He was a messed up kid. He�d lost his family and, in Cynthia�s account, he endured coldness from Mimi. And at art college, even though he may have been the brilliant clown, he was not obviously talented. The star painter of their time was Stuart Sutcliffe, John�s friend and briefly a Beatle before he died in Hamburg. As a result Cynthia rears slightly when I suggest glamorous John was quite a catch for her.

�Catch? When I met him he wasn�t a catch. If he hadn�t been a Beatle he�d have been a bum. Stuart was the brilliant artist but Stuart didn�t have that brilliant humour. They were a good foil for each other . . . John was screwed up from the beginning, so when it came to any pain he had to switch off. He couldn�t take it. That�s when he would disappear into his own world or become cold. He was very selfish in that respect.�

That she loved him passionately, however, cannot be doubted. When they do get together the book becomes a lyrical love story. The first cracks start appearing when Cynthia is left alone with the baby � they get married after she becomes pregnant with Julian � and the early Beatles start doing their famous gigs in Hamburg. There, unknown to the girlfriends back home, they first tasted the rock star life, picking the best looking girls from the front rows and having the roadies bring them up to their rooms.

�I didn�t suspect, none of us did. We only heard about it years later. Now I�ve got to know how many there were and what happened and I�ve thought, �My God, when he was in Hamburg, I could have caught anything off him!� Thank God I was lucky. They must have gone through so many German frauleins while they were there, but we didn�t think about it. They were kids, we didn�t honestly think of it.�

When fame really struck, Cynthia was of course left holding the baby. Brian Epstein, the Beatles� first manager, was convinced it would damage the group�s popularity if one of them was seen to be married with a child, so she was kept out of sight. These days, of course, wives like Victoria Beckham share the limelight with their celeb husbands. But those were different times.

�That was how it was in those days, it was amateur and naive. I was walking round Derry and Toms trying to get the cheapest furniture for this flat and pushing Julian round in a pram and, of course, John was not there. Nobody knew what I looked like or who I was. I could have got away with murder.�

Then she was photographed in that white cap and the era of the rock chick wife was inaugurated. It was not, in her case, to last long. John�s infidelities became more blatant and damaging. One marriage was destroyed, the couple coming over to the Lennon house to have it out, though still managing to conceal the whole thing from Cynthia. At one point John does say there had been other girls, but she just carries on.
�There wasn�t a lot I could do about it. I�m not a battler or a fighter. I�m a fighter for justice. But, when it comes to emotions, I�m just trying so hard to make things work. I didn�t think John was being unfaithful to the extent that he would leave me . . . I was hanging on to my hollyhocks, I didn�t want to rock the boat at that point. I�m an old fashioned girl with old fashioned ideals and dreams.�
But then John was into LSD and later heroin. Cynthia had kept up with his pep pills when she had gone to Hamburg and she gamely tried acid to see what all the fuss was about, but she hated it. John, of course, loved it � �He would talk to the wall and the fish in a fish tank� � and drifted off into his own world, a world that was finally annexed by Yoko.

In retrospect, of course, the crisis was inevitable. John was still the wild thing, the non-belonger; Cynthia still the homemaker, the belonger. It worked for a while but then it didn�t.

�I had to be a homemaker. I wasn�t used to servants. I used to clear up before the maid came in. I still do. It�s a mentality you can�t lose, that�s the way you�ve been brought up. But John didn�t care. His imagination had been allowed to run riot, it had to run riot to keep him sane. If he�d really thought about what had happened to him, he would have gone mad. I was happy just to keep it all together. I was never a great dreamer about being successful or famous or wealthy.�

The ensuing crack-ups of the marriage and the Beatles are well documented. And now so is Cynthia�s subsequent life. The book gives a devastating portrayal of Yoko�s behaviour, especially after the murder of John in 1980. Cynthia is simply told by Yoko not to come to New York for the funeral because �It�s not as though you�re an old schoolfriend of mine.� John seemed to have found somebody as cold as Aunt Mimi to look after him.

Cynthia married three more times. I ask her if this was some attempt to find her way back to what she had with John in the beginning. No, she says, it�s just her drive towards stability.

�Instead of living with somebody, I get married. That�s me. I like the solidity of marriage. I think the shadow of John is always there. I�ve had a very interesting married life. I�ve been married longer than most people, but to different men.�

She now lives in Spain with her fourth husband, Noel Charles. She seems happy. Certainly she seems pleased to have put down her side of the story at last, pleased to be repersoned, unairbrushed.

Julian, who has grown into a replica of John, is still at the centre of her life. He lives near them in Spain. He made some successful records in the Nineties but abandoned the effort in disgust after Sean, John�s son by Yoko, brought out an album deliberately to coincide with his own Photograph Smile. But now, Cynthia tells me with pride, he is back in the recording studio. And she still listens to the Beatles.

�I find it very strange when we go out to dinner with someone and they say, �Do you mind if we put on Rubber Soul?� I say, �Please do.� My favourite? I love Sgt Pepper. I love them all except Love Me Do and I didn�t like George's first sitar music. But everything else just got better. My favourite track is a bit sentimental � it�s In My Life.�

I tell her mine is We Can Work It Out because the phrase �fussing and fighting� so exactly describes my own life. She gets excited when I say this, but then wistful. �I know, there�s things in their music that describes everyone�s life. Eleanor Rigby, Paperback Writer. Where did those words come from to these young men? I always felt they were just an instrument, it came through them. Then it was just cut off . . .� Life, as they say in my favourite Beatles song, is very short.

Another excerpt.

'Dad tells people to love each other, but he doesn't love me'
When John Lennon moved to America with Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon was frozen out and, she says, the effect on their son Julian was traumatic

Forty years ago, in a letter written on a Beatles tour of the United States, John told me of his love for our son Julian, who was then two.
�I really miss him as a person now,� he wrote. �He�s not so much �the baby� or �my baby� any more, he�s a real living part of me now . . . and I can�t wait to see him, I miss him more than I�ve ever done before � I think it�s been a slow process my feeling like a real father!

�I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I�ve wasted not being with him � and playing with him � you know I keep thinking of those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other mess whilst he�s in the room with me and I�ve decided it�s ALL WRONG!

�He doesn�t see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.�

Three years later, John and I divorced because of his adultery with Yoko Ono. Julian, who was five, didn�t see his father for eight months.

�What�s Dad doing in bed on the telly?� he suddenly asked me one day. He was staring at the pictures of John and Yoko Ono in their famous �bed-in� for peace in Amsterdam. It was the first glimpse he�d had of his father since the divorce.

�Telling everyone it�s very important to have peace,� I answered through gritted teeth. John had found it impossible to allow for peace between us since our divorce and Julian was paying the price.

Anthony, our old chauffeur, told me that John and Yoko had been living in squalor in a flat in Montagu Square in Kensington. �They were doing heroin and other drugs and neither of them knew whether it was day or night,� he said. �The floor was littered with rubbish.�

That was about to change, however. John and Yoko bought Tittenhurst Park, a 26-room mansion near Ascot that we�d once considered turning into a sort of Beatles commune.

Julian was invited over. He came home with the news that Dad and �Hokey-Cokey�, as Julian called her, walked around the house naked, long hair hanging over their faces, which made them look like witches. And they ate funny food, all rice and seeds.

The visits became regular. He liked seeing his dad but he told me he got scared in the night, because he was in a large bedroom by himself in a separate wing of the house, a long way from John and Yoko�s room. It seemed that John sometimes had angry outbursts, shouting at him for the way he ate or being too slow.

John and Yoko continued to make headlines in their quest for world peace. They launched their Plastic Ono Band, whose first single, Give Peace a Chance, was a huge hit. They cut off their hair and auctioned it for peace. John also handed back his MBE in an anti-war, anti-Establishment gesture.

I know that to many people John�s behaviour seemed brave, honest and innovative. But to the mother of his confused small son his actions appeared increasingly self-obsessed.

In September 1971 I learnt from newspaper reports that John had gone to live in the United States with Yoko � without a word to eight-year-old Julian. This was staggering. I had no idea whether he planned to see his son again.

When I tried to get in touch with John, I got a phone call from Yoko. �Hello, Cynthia,� she said. �John and I have decided that if you wish to make contact about Julian, you should talk to me.�

John had just released Imagine, the song that would become an international anthem for peace; yet he couldn�t pick up the phone, make peace with me and arrange to see his own son.

It was three years before Julian saw his father or heard from him again. All he had was newspaper cuttings to tell him where his dad was and what he was up to. Birthday and Christmas presents arrived for Julian each year, but they were sent by John�s London office with no personal note or card.

As time passed with no word, Julian drew his own conclusions. �Dad�s always telling people to love each other,� he said to me one day, �but how come he doesn�t love me?�

Late in 1973 I was stunned to read in the papers that John and Yoko had agreed on a trial separation and he had moved to Los Angeles with May Pang, a young Chinese employee. Would he be willing now to see his son?

George Harrison�s former wife, Patti, introduced me to a record producer who was about to sail to New York on the SS France with Elton John. When I mentioned that I wanted Julian to see his father, he said: �Why not come with us?�

The next day I got John�s number and rang him. He was surprised to hear from me but sounded pleased with the idea of seeing Julian and said he�d pay for first-class tickets for us.

When the ship docked at New York John was waiting for us with a slightly lost-looking May Pang beside him. He was pale and gaunt and clearly nervous. He pecked me on the cheek, then scooped 11-year-old Julian into his arms and hugged him.

The next day we flew to Los Angeles, where after a day at Disneyland, John told me: �Julian�s a lovely boy. I can�t believe how grown-up he is, Cyn. He�s not a little boy any more, I can really talk to him now.�

At Christmas he invited Julian over on his own. By this time he and May had moved into an apartment overlooking the Hudson River in New York. Things seemed set for a much more positive future until we heard that John had gone back to Yoko. On his 35th birthday, October 9 1975, she gave birth to their son, Sean.

Ever since our divorce I had paid Julian�s school fees from interest on the �100,000 trust fund John had set up for him. The fund was now cut in half so that Sean could share it. I found it hard, as John was worth many millions of pounds, that he didn�t leave Julian�s fund intact and set up a new one for Sean.

Relations took a dip again, but in the spring of 1979 John sent Julian a motorbike for his 16th birthday and invited him to the States for the Easter holidays. He returned home with bleak reports of the eccentric life John and Yoko led in the Dakota building, their New York home overlooking Central Park.

Yoko ran their business empire from an apartment downstairs (they owned five in the building). She hardly ever appeared in the family apartment, and often slept in her office. Sean was looked after by a nanny, while John spent much of his time in bed. There were periods when Sean saw little of either parent.

Julian saw no evidence that John was a devoted househusband or Sean�s carer, as legend has it. Far from baking bread or playing with him, John seemed to live in his own small world in the bedroom. He had relinquished all power to Yoko who, he told Julian, �knows best�, and he appeared to have little interest in making music or anything else.

John�s behaviour around Julian was erratic � fun one moment and violent anger the next. And he could be like this with Sean, too, reducing the little boy to tears of terror.

One incident in particular did Julian lasting damage. The whole family had been having fun, making Mickey Mouse pancakes and fooling around, when Julian giggled. John turned on him and screamed: �I can�t stand the way you f****** laugh! Never let me hear your f****** horrible laugh again.� Julian fled to his room in tears. To this day he seldom laughs.

By late 1980 Julian began to feel that there was a genuine breakthrough in his relationship with his father. John was at last making a new album, Double Fantasy. He began to call Julian more often. It was as though, with his creative juices flowing, he had woken up and realised his son needed him. He even played Julian tracks from the album and asked his opinion, something he had never done before and which gave Julian�s confidence an enormous boost.

Then, just as it looked as though they might be forging a closer relationship, I received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was early December 1980. I was visiting my friend Mo Starkey � Ringo Starr�s former wife.

Mo and I had been friends since 1962, when I was John�s girlfriend and she was the teenage fan who fell in love with Ringo at the Cavern. When Mo and Ringo parted in 1974 she had been so heartbroken that she got on a motorbike and drove it straight into a brick wall, badly injuring herself.

She had plastic surgery on her injured face, which she felt made her look better than she had before. Gradually she�d begun to get over Ringo, and she even had a brief fling with George Harrison.

The evening I arrived � December 8 � Mo had her usual houseful of people at her home in Maida Vale, west London. I wanted a good night�s sleep as I had to get up early in the morning to catch the train home to Ruthin, in north Wales, where I ran a bistro. I was asleep in the spare room in the early hours of December 9 when screams woke me. It took me a few seconds to realise that they were Mo�s.

At that moment she burst into my room: �Cyn, John�s been shot. Ringo�s on the phone � he wants to talk to you.�

Ringo�s tearful voice crackled over the transatlantic line: �Cyn, I�m so sorry, John�s dead.�

He had been shot outside the Dakota building by a supposed fan, Mark Chapman, who hit him twice in the back and twice in the shoulder.

I had only one clear thought. Julian was at home in bed: I had to get back so that I could tell him about his father�s death.

In the jumble of thoughts whirring round my mind on the car journey home, two kept recurring. The first was that nine had always been a significant number for John. He was born on October 9 and so was Sean. His mother had lived at number nine. Brian Epstein had first heard the Beatles play on the ninth of the month, they had got their first record contract on the ninth and John had met Yoko on the ninth. The number had cropped up in John�s life in numerous other ways, so much so that he had written three songs around it � One After 909, Revolution 9 and #9 Dream. Now he had died on the ninth. He had been shot in New York at 10.50pm on December 8; but in Britain it was 3.50am on December 9.

My second thought was that for the past 14 years John had lived with the fear that he would be shot. In 1966 he�d received a letter from a psychic, warning that he would be shot while he was in the States. From then on it seemed that he was looking over his shoulder, waiting for the gunman to appear. He often used to say, �I�ll be shot one day.�

I reached Ruthin in mid-morning. Dozens of photographers and reporters filled the square. My mother was peering anxiously at the crowd from behind a drawn curtain. Julian came running down and sobbed on my shoulder. He had realised something must have happened to his father as soon as he saw the reporters.

�I want to go to New York, Mum,� he said. �I want to be where Dad was.�

We rang Yoko and she said she would organise a flight for him that afternoon. But she made it clear that I was not welcome.

�It�s not as though you�re an old schoolfriend of mine, Cynthia,� she said.

At Manchester airport I watched Julian being led off by a flight attendant, his shoulders bowed, his face white. He had begun to look uncannily like John, the same aquiline profile, the same slim build. Julian wore his hair long, and in his leather jacket and jeans he could almost have been the young John. I knew he would sit on the plane surrounded by people reading headlines about his father�s death.

The next day Julian rang to tell me that as soon he had emerged from the car at the Dakota building he had been mobbed by fans and press, wild with excitement at the sight of John�s son. Unprepared for this he had put his hands in front of his face and was hustled through the crowd.

Inside there was no sign of Yoko or Sean, who had been taken off by his nanny. At one point Fred Seaman, who had been John�s personal assistant, drew Julian aside and told him to be prepared for the fact that Yoko was not going to include him in any arrangements.

�She will do anything to keep you in your place,� he said. �Sean is the only person who matters to her. There�s simply no place for you in her world.�

Eventually Julian was invited to see Yoko, who was in bed. �I don�t know how to tell Sean,� she admitted in a rare moment of vulnerability. Julian advised her to tell him straight, and she asked if he would do it with her.

The next day they sat down together with Sean. �In the end we both talked to him,� Julian told me. �We told him Daddy was dead and when he finally understood he burst into tears and I cuddled him.

�I told him the man who killed our dad would go to court. Sean said, �Do you mean a tennis court or a basketball court?� I said, �No, it�s a different kind of court�.�

Yoko later issued a press statement saying: �I told Sean what happened. I showed him the picture of his father on the cover of the paper and explained the situation. I took Sean to the spot where John lay after he was shot. Sean wanted to know why the person shot John � if he liked John. I explained that he was probably a confused person.

�Sean said we should find out if he was confused or if he really had meant to kill John. I said that was up to the court. He asked what court � a tennis court or a basketball court?� This statement, published in newspapers around the world, summed up so much of what Julian had had to go through. Yoko even quoted Julian�s words as her own. But there was no mention of his being there with Yoko when she told Sean. He was not mentioned at all.

The next morning Julian was asked to go to Yoko�s room. �Would you like to touch it?� she said, indicating an urn that stood over the fireplace. Julian stared in horror. Almost on autopilot he did as he was told. It was still warm. It was just over 48 hours since John had died and, although Julian had known there would be no funeral, he wasn�t ready to be presented with a jar and told it contained the remains of his father.

After a week or two Julian wanted to come home, but Yoko asked him to stay on to join her at the groundbreaking ceremony for Strawberry Fields, the section of Central Park dedicated to John�s memory. The ceremony would take place in front of a gathering of the world�s press. Yoko urged Julian to be there, for the sake of family unity, and even asked him to wear John�s cap and scarf.

Julian hated every moment of it and couldn�t wait to get inside and tear off the cap and scarf. Wearing his father�s things in public was too painful for him and he felt that Yoko was not only wanting him to look like John but was also trying to make it appear that she and Julian were close. This was far from true � in fact, he felt she had little interest in him.

Before Julian left, Yoko offered him one of John�s guitars. Julian asked for one he had always loved, a black Yamaha inlaid with a pearl dragon. He remembered John playing Sean songs on it.

Yoko told him he couldn�t have that one and gave him two others instead, which sadly he didn�t recognise and which therefore had no meaning for him. These were the only possessions of John�s Julian was ever given, yet when he returned to the Dakota building on another occasion he saw that Sean had the full use of all John�s musical equipment, including the guitar Julian had wanted.

In the new year we received a surprising visitor: Fred Seaman. He had travelled from New York to tell us that John had kept detailed diaries for the last six years before he died. Apparently a few months earlier he had said that if anything ever happened to him he wanted Fred to pass the diaries to Julian.

Fred had taken them from the Dakota building and given them into what he had thought was the safe keeping of a �friend� in New York. This person had promised to copy them so that Fred could return the originals to Yoko but had then realised their value and refused to hand them back to him. Fred was still trying to retrieve them, and hoped to be able to pass them on eventually to Julian.

Julian was terribly excited and touched that John had wanted him to have something so personal. He hoped the diaries would help him understand the father he�d never really had the chance to know.

Sadly, though, he never read them because Fred never got them back. They were returned, for a fee, to Yoko, who had Fred arrested on a charge of grand larceny. In 1983 he was sentenced to five years� probation, later reduced to three. The diaries remain in Yoko�s possession but Julian has the comfort of knowing that John intended them for him.

We knew that John had left a will. Although we had no idea of its terms, I was certain that he would have left Julian a financial legacy. Whatever his faults as a father, he had loved Julian and would have wanted to ensure that he was recognised as his son and provided for.

It was inconceivable to me that he would neglect this duty. My only worry was that, because John had had no interest in legal matters and always left them to others, he might not have made sure that things were as straightforward as possible.

Eventually we were told that John had left his fortune, then considered to be well in excess of �100m (and subsequently increased to several hundred million) to Yoko and the issue of John and Yoko: Julian, Sean and Kyoko, who was Yoko�s daughter by her first marriage.

We expected that it would take some time for the terms of the will to be fulfilled. But when, after a year or more, nothing had happened, we asked our lawyers to investigate.

They advised us that, despite the fact that John�s wealth would have been enough to run a small country, the decision on whether or not Julian got any money was in the hands of Yoko and her lawyers, because they were the trustees of the fund.

When nothing had been forthcoming after six years, the matter was put in the hands of lawyers. It took another 10 years for Yoko to reach a settlement. I was glad that in the meantime Julian had been a success in his own right as a musician and had earned his own money. He was never dependent on his father�s legacy, but it was a point of principle that he should receive it.

John once said to Julian: �If anything ever happens to me, look for a white feather and you�ll know I�m there, looking out for you.�

I think of John every time I see a white feather. He was an extraordinary man: talented, flawed, a creative genius who sang movingly about love while often wounding those closest to him.

I never stopped loving John, but the cost of that love has been enormous. If I�d known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to, I would have turned round and walked away.

�MOTHER� YOKO

Two New York friends of John�s � Jim Keltner, a drummer, and his wife � once confided in me that he seemed dominated by Yoko. He was constantly concerned that he�d be in trouble with her. His nickname for her was Mother, and they said he seemed to have a love-hate relationship with her, unable to tear himself away yet angry and resentful towards her.

Apparently, Yoko had engineered his relationship with May Pang. For whatever reason � boredom with John, irritation, the need for space � she had decided they should be apart but that she would choose the woman he was to be with.

If it was true, John had given Yoko a vast amount of power over him. He was playing the naughty child to her controlling parent. It made me shudder. What had happened to the free-spirited independent John I�d known?

� Cynthia Lennon 2005