Beatles (53 page)

They have five cats. Their names chart the stages in John’s life. There’s Mimi, after his aunt, and Nel and Mal, after their road managers. One kitten, born in the summer of 1967, at the height of their Yogi summer, is called Babidji.

A lot of the regular bills, like gas and electricity, are paid direct by their accountant. Cyn pays the rest.

‘I sometimes open them when they arrive,’ says John. ‘If I don’t like the look of them I put them away and forget about them till they start complaining. Now and again I do query them, but they just go on about “Well, sir, it’s like this, sir.” You never get anywhere.’

All the Beatles receive a weekly sum of £50 in fivers to cover any personal expenses, like staff. They rarely carry any money personally.

‘I don’t know how much money I’ve got,’ says John. ‘I’m not conscious of having a treasure chest full of it at the bottom of the garden. It’s all hypothetical, but I know it’s not as much as some people think.

‘It’s all tied up in things, in various forms. I did ask the accountant once how much it came to. I wrote it down on a bit of paper. But I’ve lost the bit of paper.’

Their little rectangular living room is crammed high with posters, ornaments and photographs. A large notice pinned on one wall says ‘Milk is Harmless.’

They eat in this room, watch telly in this room, and when it’s cold or rainy John spends most of his time, when he’s not recording or writing a song, curled up on a small sofa in this room, doing nothing. The sofa is far too small for him. He would obviously be more comfortable on one of the lush ones from the other room. But he curls his legs round and can lie for hours.

When it’s fine, he opens the sliding glass door and goes out and sits on a step in the garden, looking down at his swimming pool and his English country garden.

Anthony or Dot usually answer the front door, though if he’s in the mood, John does. He rarely answers the telephone. It is almost impossible to get him on the telephone anyway, as he has an answerphone system that takes messages. This in itself puts off most people trying to get through to him. There is a recorded voice that says ‘This is Weybridge Four, Five, Wubbleyoo, Dubbleyoo, please leave your message now.’

His ex-directory number is always being changed, which is supposed to be one way of keeping it secret. It’s a secret from John anyway. He can never remember it.

An ordinary evening at the Lennons is ordinary. This particular ordinary evening, two door-to-door salesmen had come to the door, saying they were Australian students selling magazines. John happened to open the door and let them in. They said they were in a competition to see who could get most subscriptions. The prize would help their studies. That was their story anyway. John said yeh, very good, come on then, what do you want me
to do. They got out the list of magazines and asked John to tick the ones he would like to read. He ticked a lot and the two salesmen-students said it would come to £74. John said OK, hold on till I find some money. He could only find the packet with the £50 housekeeping cash. He gave them that. They said that would do fine. They thanked him very much and left.

Cyn made the evening meal for her family. They started with a slice of melon followed by a plate of cold meat with vegetables. John didn’t have the meat, as he’d become a vegetarian. They all drank cold milk with it.

John had a filling coming out of his tooth, which he constantly played with, making a sluicing noise as he ate his food. He went to the fridge in the kitchen to get some more milk. He drank it ice cold from the bottle. Cyn said that wouldn’t do his tooth any good.

Throughout the meal, the television was on. They all turned their seats to watch it. Now and again Cyn or John would change the station. They never seemed to watch any programme for more than ten minutes. John stared silently at it, lost and abstracted, through his specs. Cyn was reading the
Daily Mirror
at the same time. Julian watched it and chattered. Then he got down from the table and lay on the carpet and started to do a drawing. Cyn got him some coloured biros. They both watched him, asking him what his drawing was. He said it was a bird cage, like the one in the garden. He explained all the things happening in his drawing. John and Cyn smiled at him as he did so.

John then opened the large sliding window, and sat on a step to get some fresh air, looking down upon the pool. On the surface of the pool the automatic filter buzzed round and round, like a spaceship that had just landed. Julian came out and went down to the pool. He threw some oars in, then got them out again and came back to the house. Cynthia cleared up.

Terry Doran arrived and was greeted warmly by all, including Julian who sat on his knee.

‘Do you want your dad to put you to bed?’ said Cyn, smiling at John, who grinned back. ‘Or do you want Terry?’ Julian
said he wanted Terry. But she picked up Julian herself and put him to bed.

‘Are you going to roll us a few, then?’ said John to Terry. Terry said yes. John got up and brought out a tin tool box which he opened for Terry. Inside was some tobacco, wrapped in tinfoil, plus some cigarette papers. Terry rolled a couple of cigarettes, which they smoked, sharing them between them. This was during the pot-taking period, which is now over.

Cyn came back. The television was still on. They all sat and watched it, still changing programmes all the time, until about midnight when Cyn made some cocoa. Terry left and John and Cyn went to bed. John said he was going to read a paperback book someone had given them. Cyn said oh, she wanted to read that first.

‘I’m pleased I made it young. Making it young means that I’ve now got the rest of my life to do what I really want. It would have been terrible to spend your whole life before you finally make it, just to find out it’s meaningless. We knew it was anyway, but we had to find out for ourselves.

‘For a long time we always had specific little aims, we never really looked far ahead. It was all a series of goals, to get a record made, to get a number one, to do another one, to do a film and so on. We just sort of glimpsed it all in stages. We never thought about any big things. Now I can. I’m not interested in little stages now. Acting doesn’t interest me any more. It’s a waste of time for me. Writing, I’ve done that. I wanted to do a book and I produced one, so that was it.

‘I suppose now what I’m interested in is a Nirvana, the Buddhist heaven. I don’t know much about it, or really understand it enough to explain it. George knows more.

‘Studying religion has made me try to improve relationships, not to be unpleasant. It’s not a conscious move to change my personality. Perhaps it is. I don’t know. I’m just trying to be how I want to be, and how I’d like others to be.

‘Drugs probably helped the understanding of myself better, but not much. Not pot. That just used to be a harmless giggle.
LSD was the self-knowledge that pointed the way in the first place. I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid. But you’ve got to be looking for it, before you can possibly find it. Perhaps I was looking, without realizing it, and would have found it anyway. It would just have taken longer.

‘That first time we took acid really was an accident. Me and George were at dinner and someone gave it to us when we didn’t know much about it. We’d taken pot, but that was all. We hadn’t heard of the horrors of LSD. And we weren’t supervised, which you should be. We did think we were going barmy.

‘But there are much better ways of getting there. I’ve nothing really against the ideas of Christianity and their ways. I suppose I wouldn’t make that remark about Jesus today. I think about things differently. I think Buddhism is simple and more logical than Christianity, but I’ve nothing against Jesus. I’ll let Julian learn all about Jesus when he goes to school, but I’ll also tell him there have been lots of other Jesuses, I’ll tell him about the Buddhist ones, they’re good men as well.

‘When I made the Jesus remarks, lots of people sent me books about Jesus. I read a lot of them and found out things. I’ve found out for example that the Church of England isn’t very religious. There’s too much politics. You can’t be both. You can’t be powerful and pure. Perhaps I’ll find out that the gurus are like that as well, full of politics. I don’t know. All I know is that I am being made more aware by it all. I just want to be told more.

‘I don’t know if you have to be poor or not. I feel I could give up all this. It does waste a lot of energy. But I have to wait and see what I’d be giving it up for, what I was replacing it for. I might give up all this material stuff in the end. But at the moment I want to find myself.’

Cyn said she had noticed a difference in him. Perhaps he was nicer. He was quieter and more tolerant. But he still didn’t communicate very much. ‘Perhaps I’m being selfish,’ she said. ‘It’s just easier for me if he tells me things.’

John admitted he’d never be one for communicating. He’d read an interview with his chauffeur Anthony in a colour
supplement, in which Anthony had been quoted as saying that he’d driven John for hours and hours across Spain for his film and John had never spoken to him. ‘I hadn’t realized till then that I hadn’t.’

John’s record for not speaking, just doing nothing and not communicating to anyone, is three days. He was doing it long before meditation came along. ‘I’m an expert at it. I can get up and start doing nothing straight away. I just sit on the step and look into space and think until it’s time to go to bed.’

He doesn’t consider this frittering his time away. He frittered it away even more, immediately after they stopped touring, when he never got out of bed till three in the afternoon. Now at least he tries to get up and see a bit of daylight. He says if he’s doing nothing he might as well be doing it when there’s some sun around.

Even when he is trying to communicate, Cyn, like his aunt Mimi, often finds it difficult to know what he’s on about, although he makes more of an effort these days, since Maharishi arrived, taking over from the Buddhism.

‘I do find it hard to pass the time of day with people. There’s no point in that sort of talk. Now and again I do it, as a game, to see if I can. How are you? What’s the time? How are we getting on? Those sort of pointless things.

‘The main thing is, there’s nothing to talk about any more. I
think
communication all the time like mad, but putting it into words is a waste of time.

‘We talk in code to each other as Beatles. We always did that, when we had so many strangers round us on tours. We never really communicated with other people. Now that we don’t meet strangers at all, there is no need for any communication. We understand each other. It doesn’t matter about the rest.

‘Now and again, even though we feel each other, we do have a talking communication session, when we have to say things out loud, or otherwise we forget what we know we’ve decided amongst ourselves.

‘I do daydream a lot. That’s in the same class as idle conversation, so I suppose I shouldn’t really condemn idle conversation.
Just the normal daydreams, what am I going to do today, shall I get up or not, shall I write that song or not, no I’m not going to answer that phone.

‘Talking is the slowest form of communicating anyway. Music is much better. We’re communicating to the outside world through our music. The office in America say they listen to
Sergeant Pepper
over and over so that they know what we’re thinking in London.

‘I do have little spasms of talking. I go and chat to Dot or Anthony, or the gardener, just to see if I can do it. It surprises them.’

The biggest change in John is the decline in his aggression. All his close friends have noticed. They all believe it has been brought about by success.

‘It took a long long time,’ says Ivan Vaughan, his friend from school. ‘Even a couple of years ago, the old animosities were still there, refusing to talk to anybody, being rude, slamming the door. Now he’s just as likely to say to people come in, sit down.’

Pete Shotton, the other boyhood friend who opened the Apple Boutique, agrees that all the chips have been smoothed down.

‘The good I always saw in him is now at the top. It was only people like schoolmasters who thought he was all bad. No one would ever believe what I saw in him at the time.

‘It’s great that he’s so happy. He spent his whole childhood and all his youth trying all the time to be number one. He had to be the leader at all times, either by fighting everyone or, if they were big, by undermining them by abuse or sarcasm.

‘Today John is not trying to prove anything, he doesn’t have to be number one, that’s why he’s happy. You can even
see
the change. He used to walk like this at school and at the Art College, all hunched up, his eyes and head down, like a scared rabbit, driven into a corner, but ready to lash out. You can see it in all the old pictures of him. Now he can smile in pictures. He’s now learning because he wants to learn. At school you are forced to learn because you have to fit into society.

‘But John hasn’t changed in some things. He’s not bigheaded or vain, and he’s as generous as ever. When John had a dozen sweets in a bag and there were three of us round him, he’d share them all out, three sweets each. He made me more generous, just by being with him.’

John doesn’t see why success should have made him bigheaded or changed him in any way. Apart from thinking that success is meaningless, he also thinks anybody can do it, which is what Paul also thinks.

Both he and Paul feel that the most important thing about success is willpower. ‘Everyone can be a success. If you keep saying that enough times to yourself you can be. We’re no better than anybody else. We’re all the same. We’re as good as Beethoven. Everyone’s the same inside.

‘You need the desire and the right circumstances, but it’s nothing to do with talent, or with training or education. You get primitive painters, and writers, don’t you? Nobody told them how to do it. They told themselves they could do it and just did it.

‘What’s talent? I don’t know. Are you born with it, do you discover you have it later on? The basic talent is believing you can do something. Me and Paul were always drawing, but George wouldn’t even try because he said he couldn’t draw. It took us a long time to persuade him anyone could draw. Now he’s drawing all the time. And he’s getting better.