The John Lennon I knew - DM's Beatles forums

Just found this 3 year old article from The Telegraph, by Maureen Cleeve.

The man who changed the course of pop music would have been 65 this week. Maureen Cleave, who knew the Beatles at the height of their fame - and who relayed Lennon's most notorious quote to the world - recalls his chippy genius, and wonders if he would ever have been friends again with Paul McCartney

For those of us who wasted hundreds of column inches in the 1960s looking for the new Beatles and the new Rolling Stones, it's disconcerting to find them still here 40 years on. Not only here but still (most of them) on tour, cavorting about with their hair dyed in various fetching shades of cigar, from Hamlet to best Havana.

Had he been spared, what would a 65-year-old John Lennon be like? What would he make of Sir Paul and Sir Mick? Pretty short work, I should think. Would he, like Sir Cliff, be having the Prime Minister to stay? Not on your life.

He never wanted to grow old: "The only thing I'm afraid of is growing old - they grow old and they've missed it somehow," he once said, cheerfully dismissing a third of the human race. Charisma rarely survives the ageing process but, killed in the prime of life, Lennon remains a very powerful absence.

Early in l963, Gillian Reynolds tipped me off about this odd group in Liverpool who inspired an unaccountable frenzy in the young. The London Evening Standard sent me to interview them. I wondered then how Lennon, looking so like Henry VIII, could possibly become a pop idol. With a Napoleonic sense of his own destiny and an Olympian disregard for the rest, he didn't have the humility required at the time.

If he hadn't liked me, I wouldn't have dared like him, but I was all right because I had a fringe and a pair of red boots, considered rather daring. The Beatles attached tremendous importance to physical appearance; the dreaded moment in any performance was when they got hot and sweaty and their fringes stuck to their foreheads, making them look slightly like Hitler.

Lennon was the most interesting of them: imperious, unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, arrogant and very good at answering back. Nice enough fellows, said Ted Heath, but they didn't speak the Queen's English. Lennon was on to this in a flash: "And I bet half the people who voted for him didn't speak the Queen's English either."

One could hardly believe the speed with which they became famous. In the beginning of 1963 they were the darlings of Merseyside. By October, they were famous all over Britain. A year later, soon after their appearance in the United States, they were probably the most famous people in the English-speaking world.

Theirs was the fascination of repetitive siblings, the almost sinister attraction of identical quads - how alike they were, how very different.

For two years they were out of breath. They ran to escape screaming mobs of frightening harpies. "Come on Thingy," they'd roar at me as I pelted after them. They were smuggled in and out of food lifts. Once, in America, just like the Marx Brothers, they dashed through a palm court orchestra playing to ladies eating ice cream.

It was exhilarating while the novelty lasted, though Lennon, far from being surprised and grateful, seemed rather nettled he hadn't been famous sooner. "I was always surprised I wasn't a famous painter. I used to look in the paper and half expect to see my photograph there."

He found his own story, the Beatle story, romantic; he liked to talk about the rags and the riches and, by the time they reached the top, fame had so cut them off from real life there wasn't much else to do but talk.

Lennon once said, "The trouble with reality is it leaves a lot to the imagination", and it's almost impossible to exaggerate the destructive force of modern fame. As John Updike said: "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face."

When fantasy becomes reality, when you are rich and famous beyond bounds, when you have to come to expect instant results, how do you keep your feet on the ground? The Royal Family have training and a supportive set-up; modern celebrities are hemmed in by press officers, preventing them from saying anything of the slightest interest.

I last saw Lennon in 1966, when he had moved to an absurd stockbroker Tudor mansion in Weybridge, cut off from the rest of the world except for George and Ringo, who lived in stockbroker Tudor mansions nearby. "What day of the week is it?" he would ask with interest when you rang up.

They saw only each other, driving between houses in their Ferraris and Rolls Royces - all with black windows. ("I'm going to get a bicycle with black windows," said Paul, always better at real life than the others.)

They had swimming pools, but they rarely went outdoors or took any kind of exercise. "Sex is the only kind of exercise I bother with," said Lennon. At two in the morning they might set off for clubs in London. They didn't know day from night; as for mealtimes, they hadn't had those since the early days in Hamburg.

He had everything money could buy but not what he wanted. "Here I am in my Hansel and Gretel house, famous and loaded, and I can't go anywhere. There's something else I'm going to do, only I don't know what it is, but I do know this isn't it for me."

Prophetic words, fulfilled sooner than he might have thought. He'd told me he was reading about religion. "Christianity will go," he said. "It will vanish and shrink� We're more popular than Jesus now - I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity."

With a PR man at his side, the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, where it ended up. As it was, the Evening Standard didn't even put it in the headline. We were used to him sounding off like that and knew it was ironically meant. But the Americans have little sense of irony, and when the article appeared in a magazine called Dateline, all hell broke loose. It was the last time the Beatles ever toured.

Shortly after this, Yoko came to fetch him away, our national treasure. Years later, I came across this in a book she published called Skywriting by Word of Mouth. In 1978 John had written: "My life with the Beatles had become a trap� I always remember to thank Jesus for the end of my touring days; if I hadn't said that the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus' and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus."

So what if he had lived? Would he have made it up with Paul? I doubt it; he didn't have a forgiving nature. When his father Fred turned up, he was shown the door. "It was the second time in my life I'd seen him - I wasn't having him in the house." Would he still be with Yoko? Definitely yes. She loved him and she had the measure of him. Would he have dyed his hair? No, too badly organised.

I once had to cut it for him myself.

Were he still here, I'd start by asking him what he thought of the National Museum of Liverpool buying his old brown suede jacket. There's a worn patch in the lining where his arm moved strumming the guitar. At the auction it was held up by a young curator in white gloves, as though it were a holy relic, and it went for £28,000.

And the second question: "What do you think of Paul's new album?"