4 1GT Friday September 11 2020 | the times
cover story
B
y the time John Lennon
had become all things to
all people — renegade,
reprobate, philanderer,
philosopher, deserter,
dissembler and a symbol
of his age, but above all
the most remarkable
and charismatic rock star who
ever lived — he had strayed from
reality and cut himself off from the
outside world.
Driven from a tender age by a
profound sense of destiny, berating
the woman who brought him up, his
maternal aunt Mimi, for discarding his
schoolboy drawings and musings —
“You’ll be sorry when I’m famous’’
— he dragged his heels into
adulthood while clinging to
women all too eager to indulge
the petulant child.
Mother replacement therapy
was his lifelong theme. He
never overcame the damage
wrought by Julia Lennon, who
relinquished him to her sister,
then compounded the fracture by
getting knocked down and killed
outside his home. He was condemned
to the misery of having to draw his
curtains each morning on the site of
her death. The most searing songs of
his oeuvre — Mother, Julia, even Out
the Blue, if you brush Yoko aside —
were cris de coeur to Mummy.
Every relationship of substance
thereafter was with an older woman.
His fellow art student Cynthia Powell,
although only a year older, seemed
middle-aged in comparison to Lennon.
“The effect of his mother’s death
on John’s psyche was profound and
damaging,” Cynthia told me in
1989, while we were working on
a memoir that for legal reasons
never progressed. “He was 17. He
never recovered from it. It disrupted
his ability to have normal
relationships with women.
“He never sat me down and
explained it all in any great detail. I’m
not sure he could have articulated it.
I had to piece the story together from
remarks he and others made. I knew
that his mother was an uninhibited
sort, and that she had given up her
little boy. John never said much about
his dad, who people referred to as
‘Alf’ or ‘Freddie’.”Bisexual, voracious
and unfaithful:
the truth about
Lennon and love
John Lennon, who would have turned 80 this year,
tried to replace his dead mother with every woman
he fell for. Lesley-Ann Jones reveals all in a new book
He idolised his mother. She taught
him to play the banjo and got him his
first guitar. Mimi brought John up
very strictly. She was hard to please
and easily disappointed. Julia had
been nothing like her. She was more
fun, more laid-back. Lennon was
his mother’s son. Although Mimi
worshipped him, he was clearly a
disappointment to her. In her eyes,
he never fulfilled his potential.
“I felt very protective of him,’’
Cynthia admitted. “I was always telling
myself that other people didn’t
understand him. I often felt like his
mother. I was independent and driven.
I worked, I studied, I met my
deadlines. John seemed to have no
motivation, apart from when it
came to music. It was as if his
mother’s death had caused him
to put his own life on hold. I
used to think, ‘He doesn’t care
whether he lives or dies.’ ”
Lennon, true to form, abused
his sweetheart’s devotion. He
was serially unfaithful and even
violent. When she fell pregnant with
his first son, Julian, he married her.
He was 21 going on 12.
His spiteful impersonations of
Britain’s first female pop star, Alma
Cogan, were designed to throw his
wife off the scent that he had fallen for
her. Lennon and Cogan abandoned
themselves to a passionate affair that
Lennon thought Cynthia didn’t know
about, checking into hotels as “Mr
and Mrs Winston” (Lennon’s
middle name).
When Cogan died from ovarian
cancer aged 34 in 1966, the 25-year-
old Lennon disintegrated. He met
Yoko Ono, seven years his senior, on
the rebound, and left Cynthia for the
Japanese artist soon afterwards. They
were married in Gibraltar in 1969. For
the rest of his life he addressed his
second wife as “Mother”.
I have spent my adult life
interviewing rock stars. I can think
of hardly any who didn’t mention
Lennon. He was, for most, the genesis,
the catalyst. He was the reason why
they had picked up a guitar and
played. By the time I left school he
and Ono had fled to America, never to
return. He thus became an object of
fascination. My vivid dreams often
featured him. I knew the ins and outsHe never
learnt
to love
himself
and he
punished
all who
loved him
of his life almost as well as my own.
Did the world need yet another book
about him? Perhaps not. But I did.
What I wanted to know was why.
I couldn’t rely on Lennon himself,
who often went back on his words,
rewriting history and thought
processes constantly.
He was a snarl of contradictions:
hilarious mischief-maker, bitter fool,
vicious brute, snivelling baby.
Overconfident, gauche, phlegmatic,
paranoid, he could be wildly
extravagant and surprisingly
restrained. He was spiteful, but gentle.
Mean, but generous. Uncertain,
although discerning. Remorseless and
self-reproachful in the same breath.
He was sexually voracious and
terminally unfaithful. Infinitely
envious of McCartney’s vast melodic
virtuosity, he was never as
magnificently creative post-Paul as
they were together, as they had been
since their teens. Keeping ’em
guessing was always so Lennon.
David Bowie knew him better than
I had expected. I’d met Bowie when
I was a child. He was our local hero
in Bromley. I became a music writer
thanks to him. More grounded than
he led his fans to believe, he secretly
favoured “people from the old days”,
who had known him “before’’. We took
to having lunch or dinner in New
York, pre-Iman (his second wife),whenever I was there on assignment.
At a memorable early-1990 lunch at
Indochine, a chic French-Vietnamese
joint on Lafayette Street, he had
more to share about Lennon than
he’d said before.
That Bowie worshipped him was
on record. They met in 1974 in Los
Angeles, during Lennon’s “lost
weekend”, Bowie said. Lennon
indulged the inner pansexual he had
suppressed for so long, but with whom,
at long last, he was coming to terms.
They later hooked up.
“There was a whore in the middle,
and it wasn’t either of us,’’ Bowie said
with a smirk. “At some point in
proceedings, she left. I think it
was a she. Not that we minded.”
By the time they made it back to
the east coast, the ambisextrous pair
were “lifelong friends”. It was the
Seventies. Rock’n’roll. Bowie had
Jagger too, remember?
At the height of the Beatles’ fame
Lennon nursed a terrified awareness
of his inner void. He was dogged by a
deep sense of disappointment in his
material wealth. Neither recognition
nor reward provided the answers.
Sickened by a fear that “this is all
there is”, he considered religion, and
implored God to provide a “sign’’.
When none was forthcoming, he
withdrew into his imagination. He still
longed for a theme, a code to live by.his
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The singer Alma
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