Seminal biographers like Ray Coleman and Philip Norman have helped shape our prevailing myth about John Lennon: that we know him intimately. That if he came for tea, we’d serve his favorite sandwich and play him the right modern pop (“Not sold on the U2, mate, but maybe some more Death Cab”).
Yet these and other prevailing Lennon chroniclers weren’t married to him.
First wife Cynthia Lennon, if not overtly hostile to myths about her former husband, has long been fatigued by them. She’s also tired of how books and film tend to portray her: as a mousy, dim Liverpool girl John married because she got pregnant.
In “John,” she asserts her place in Beatles history without embellishing her life beyond it. Conceding that not even she could really know one of the 20th century’s most important pop artists, Cynthia gives us what only she can: a deeper portrait of their life together.
Intimate glimpses
Art school flirtations, furtive sex under the dictatorship of his Aunt Mimi, a wedding punctuated by a pneumatic drill and, much later, Cynthia returning from a trip to find John openly cheating with Yoko Ono. These and other glimpses make “John” an important archive for Beatles fans.
Cynthia, still a middle-class Liverpudlian at heart, is no Betty Friedan, anymore than she was Brigitte Bardot, the French sexpot whom the young Beatles yearned to re-create in their girlfriends. (Flip to the photo of Cynthia with three other made-over blonds from the band’s circle.)
Words like “enabler” and “co-dependent” don’t arise as she recounts John’s infidelities (“I knew that if I tried to confront him he would walk away and I’d end up tormenting myself”) and his drug-fueled destruction of one of her art projects (“With hindsight, I should have spoken up, but, like John, I hated confrontation or arguing”).
His sweet side
As petty and callous as he could be, Cynthia recalls his sweetness just as candidly. The 1963 hit “She Loves You” morphs into the love letter it probably once was: “I loved that song: It reminded me of John’s first Christmas card to me – ‘I love you yes, yes, yes.’ … I know, and John often told me, that many of his songs were for me.” This included “All My Loving”: “John had written it for me during a time when we were often apart, and I loved its tender, romantic lyrics.”
Cynthia regards her main tormentors, Ono and Mimi, like a mum who can no longer tolerate a pair of willful children. She bristles at Mimi’s tough-love image, making a convincing case that John’s aunt subverted rather than supported him. And she uses Ono’s own sentiments to bind the women together: “When in later years, I read comments from Yoko comparing herself to Aunt Mimi I had to smile. She’d got it dead right.”
The role of mum, incidentally, suits Cynthia best. She is never more admirable than when she fights for Julian, the son John all but ignored over the years. (It is Julian who emerges as the book’s most tragic figure: a man endowed with his mother’s sensitivity and just enough of his father’s looks and talent to set the world on notice without setting it afire.)
Surrogate mothers
Still, it often feels like the truth about Cynthia springs from a kind of dishonesty: that passive dignity equals the high ground. Mimi and Ono may have been John’s surrogate mothers, but in the broadest sense, so was Cynthia – a reluctant Madonna who helped conduct him to a destiny she abhorred and never really understood.
John Lennon could no more remain with Cynthia than he could with the Beatles. But in the early 1960s he needed her – to discover him and love him before millions of others clamored to do the same.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
John
By Cynthia Lennon
Crown, 320 pages, $25.95
