Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life Read online

  At Dovedale, John became fast friends with Pete Shotton, a towheaded boy whose family also lived on Vale Road and attended St. Peter’s. Everyone who knew them at Dovedale remembers them as inseparable. Pete, teasing John about his high-toned middle name, called him “Winnie,” which John hated. Lennon tagged Shotton “Snowball” for his blonder-than-blond hair. As they grew closer (“our relationship came to resemble that of Siamese twins”), John referred to them as “Shennon and Lotton.”11

  In the beginning, John, the more aggressive of the two, pushed Pete around. Only after standing up to him did Shotton earn Lennon’s respect. In his memoir, John Lennon: In My Life (written with Nicholas Schaffner in 1983), Shotton describes recognizing that the only way he could stay friends with Lennon and keep his self-respect was to stick up for himself after one of Lennon’s barbs. One day after science lab, when John had ribbed Shotton mercilessly in front of others, Pete confronted him: “If you want to be like that, I’m not fucking playing with you anymore.” Apparently unfazed, Lennon started tapping Shotton on the head with a bicycle pump, asking, “Getting the egg, are you? Getting the egg, then, Shotton?”—roughly translated, “Am I making you angry?” At this point, Shotton realized, he had to make a choice: face up to Lennon’s bullying or forever be bullied by him. So he socked John in the nose.

  Though Shotton never expected that to put an end to it, Lennon let the matter go with a dismissal that left them both smiling, and he never humiliated Shotton again. “I really respected you for that,” Lennon later told Shotton. “I knew you were in awe of me, and yet you had the guts to turn round and say ‘That’s enough!’ The last thing I ever expected you to do was to hit me—that was one of the biggest surprises of my life. . . . I’d really thought I had you sussed.”12

  From early on, Shotton reported, Lennon had more nerve and guile than most kids, so other boys quickly followed his lead. In class, Lennon passed around funny caricatures of the teacher and other students, daring his friends to keep a straight face as his pictures made the rounds. Fooling around one evening on the site of a new housing development being built in the neighborhood, Lennon and Shotton let the nightwatchman chase them into an empty, darkened house. Unable to find them in the dark, the frustrated man planted his feet and called out, commanding the boys to leave at once. Lennon began howling like a ghost, and the poor man fled downstairs, while Lennon and Shotton burst into peals of triumphant laughter.13

  Another local friend, David Ashton, remembers Lennon as “alluring and beguiling, even bewitching to be with or near sometimes, even spellbinding and never boring,” a Liverpudlian Huckleberry Finn. “He knew things or found them out and if he liked you he got you into trouble!” One day Ashton was playing football with Lennon, Shotton, Vaughan, and Walley in a cow field near Woolton Hill when a “posh” boy named Robert Bancroft showed up and started playing rugby. Ashton remembers scrambling to learn the rules, with Lennon instructing him on tackling: “Grab him, pull down his ‘keks’ (trousers) and rub his balls with cowpat.”14

  Lennon moved up to the Dovedale Junior School for boys in 1948. By the time Lennon was ten, Shotton remembers he was talking about “[popular British children’s author] Richmal Crompton, Edgar Allan Poe, James Thurber, Edward Lear, Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lewis Carroll.” Shotton says that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were particular favorites—“like the Bible to us both.” John loved Lewis Carroll’s fantastical gibberish “Jabberwocky.” “John’s ultimate ambition,” Shotton says, “was to one day ‘write an Alice himself.’ ”15

  The Reverend Morris Pryce-Jones, rector of St. Peter’s Church, also took his Sunday-school classes on various school trips. When he took them to Llandudno, a seaside resort on the northern Welsh coast, the boys marveled at the water’s “turquoise-blue” hues: “It was clean!” David Ashton recalls. “We choirboys were used to the grimy, dirty River Mersey water as it was then (it’s much cleaner nowadays). John Lennon’s comment was ‘Shakespeare said “The quality of Mersey is not pure” ’ and I got in to trouble at school later for saying it and had to write out a hundred times the correct Shakespeare quotation ‘The quality of Mercy is not strained.’ ”16

  Lennon took his 11-plus exam at Dovedale in 1952. With the passage of the Education Act of 1944, the British school system began sorting older students using a “tripartite” system: grammar school for the most gifted, secondary school for most kids, and technical college for vocational training. Assignments were based on the 11-plus, an all-important comprehensive exam, named for the age cutoff that determined each child’s intellectual capacities and future prospects. John seems to have passed the test without much preparation or study.

  “I do remember him at Dovedale as not making a lot of effort,” said Michael Isaacson, another classmate. “But he had obvious talent, because getting through the 11-plus in those days wasn’t an easy task. Only the minority passed.”17 Lennon may not have been especially studious, but he was an avid reader, according to his aunt. “I had twenty volumes of the world’s best short stories and we had a love of books in common,” claimed Mimi Smith. “John used to go back and read them over and over again, particularly Balzac. I thought there was a lot of Balzac in his song writing later on. Anyway, he’d read most of the classics by the time he was ten. He had such imagination and built up the stories himself when he and I talked them over.”18

  By the time he was eleven or twelve, Lennon had developed a passion for drawing, and soon he was churning out savagely funny cartoons and precocious political satire. Lennon’s jokes, puns, and cartoons soon leapt from his notebook into a stapled flyer he edited called the Daily Howl.19 The headlines whir past in Lennon’s mock-authoritative voice, many of them nonsensical, inscrutable, yet irresistible: QUEENE ANNE IS DEAD reads a typical headline from 1950 (the year of Princess Anne’s birth, on August 15) surrounded by musical notes dancing to and fro. STOP PRESS: DAVID NIXON IS GETTING A TONY CURTIS, reads another, referring to a then-famous children’s TV magician getting either a haircut or a movie career. ARE YOU A CATYLIST . . . OR A PRETESTANT, OR A CHRISTIAN? a third headline asks provocatively. Throughout this absurdist wordplay, with jumbled names and spellings and wacky rhymes, Lennon illustrated people with swollen heads, dogs with spectacles, and wide-eyed figures twisted into pretzel poses. His publication circulated around the class as much to baffle as to entertain his schoolmates.

  Crude yet compelling, the Howl window-frames Lennon’s careening adolescent mind. An acutely engaged personality already in full-tilt rebellion, Lennon ridicules the emphatic irrationality of grown-ups and casts politics as so much light entertainment. His adults are the type only kids can see: wearing funny costumes and making ridiculous pronouncements in their overserious voices. It was the Liverpool Echo and the mighty BBC News tossed about like pies in a food fight, celebrity pretense deflated with affectionate disdain.

  Passing his 11-plus exam qualified Lennon to enroll at one of the preferred grammar schools, and Mimi selected the Quarry Bank High School, even though it was considered less prestigious academically than other secondary schools in the area—such as Prescot, Liverpool Collegiate, and the Liverpool Institute. But it had a reputation for discipline, and John, she thought, needed that. The other boys called it “the Army.”

  When he entered Quarry Bank in 1952 at age eleven, Lennon was primed to rebel against the school’s conservative style. In response to Quarry Bank’s rote method of teaching, Lennon made it his mission to disrupt and disobey. Pete Shotton remembered John tying string on the doors of old ladies’ houses to keep them shut,20 setting alarm clocks to go off during lectures, rigging blackboards to collapse when a master turned to write on them, filling bicycle pumps with ink,21 and cadging unused lunch tickets to turn into cash.22 Lennon later reported, with some pride, that “most of the masters hated me like shit.” Former schoolmates remember him as a troublemaker, the ringleader in planning pranks, with a cruel streak. His
caricatures were particularly abusive to cripples and the mentally retarded; he had a troubling impulse to strike out at people weaker than him.

  Lennon and his friends also enjoyed rafting in the pond at Foster’s Field, which was adjacent to the Strawberry Field home, and to fool Aunt Mimi they’d build a bonfire and dry their clothes before returning home, “a process we found so amusing that we began setting fires just for the sake of it,” said Pete Shotton.23 Also common were ongoing rivalries with groups of Catholic kids, who went to Sunday school next door to St. Peter’s, at St. Anne’s, and carried on the battles of their Irish ancestors. “We called [the Protestant kids] the ‘Orange Protties,’ ” one Catholic resident remembered, “and there were very real pockets of prejudice in some households.”24

  At grammar school, Lennon’s reputation for daring spread. Every year on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, the Woolton Tip, a former pond that had been filled in after the war, was the site of a community bonfire. Hanging out on the day before the event with Pete Shotton, Ivan Vaughan, Len Garry, Bill Turner, and another friend, Lennon had a brainstorm. The wood was all piled up for the bonfire—why not light it a day early? That would turn some heads! The others quickly agreed. Shotton ran home to retrieve some matches, which they then “applied to the great heap of combustibles.” Once the fire was set, the boys retreated to the embankment across Menlove Avenue and waited for the commotion.

  Suddenly, the whole of young Woolton emerged from their houses, attracted by the blaze, some with buckets of water, trying to put it out. Celebration quickly turned to panic, and Lennon and his mates streaked across the Allerton Golf Course for fear of catching the blame. But the gods were smiling. “The next day, to his horror,” Shotton wrote, “Bill Turner was accosted in his schoolyard by Brian Halliday, the local bully. ‘If I ever find out who it was that lit our fucking bonfire,’ ” Shotton recalled him saying to Turner, “ ‘I’m gonna fucking KILL ’em!’ ‘Right, Bri,’ Bill agreed, expecting his own voice to betray him any second. ‘That was a really rotten trick, wasn’t it, Bri?’ Fortunately for us, we all managed to keep our cool (and our secret).”25

  To distinguish himself from his peers, Lennon adopted the trendy “Teddy Boy” garb, named for its satiric use of Edwardian jackets over flagrantly colorful shirts and tight jeans (“drainpipes”)—think of Elvis’s pink shirts and greased-back hair filtered through turn-of-the-century British dandies. One of Lennon’s Quarry Bank classmates, Michael Hill, remembers that Lennon “managed to look like a Teddy Boy even in uniform.”26 Peter Blake’s famous Self-Portrait with Badges, from 1961, depicts a typical British youth in his backyard who looks at the viewer with aghast silence, wearing a fruit salad of buttons on his denim jacket, holding an Elvis movie magazine, pledging his undying visual devotion to American culture—as if by adopting the insignia of the prevailing postwar power, he might adopt some of its confidence for himself. Blake’s subtext is Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy ravaged by American wealth.

  The “Teddies” fused their own cultural heritage with the American Beats. The word “beatnik” was a derogatory term coined by the reactionary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen in 1958, the “nik” suffix tacked onto the root word to echo “Sputnik” and brand the scene as un-American. Poet Allen Ginsberg, the author of Howl, responded to Caen’s meretricious term in the New York Times: “The foul word beatnik,” Ginsberg wrote, was already media simplification of a thriving counterculture. “If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man.”27

  Lennon encountered the Beat sensibility through movies like The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando and, later, books like Jack Keruoac’s On the Road (1957)—both of which Shotton mentions as Lennon favorites. Of course, Hollywood quickly reduced “beatniks” to a series of clichés: goatees, shades, black turtlenecks, coffee houses, “crazy, man” jargon, and the like. Maynard G. Krebs, the goofball Dobie Gillis TV character played by Bob Denver, before he became Gilligan, typified this beatnik stereotype. But cultural historian Ray Carney writes how false this idea was: “Beat culture was a state of mind, not a matter of how you dressed or talked or where you lived. In fact, Beat culture was far from monolithic. It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind.”28

  For British youth, this attitude—the cool persona in ironic, turn-of-the-century Edwardian clothes—overlapped with the notion of a rising class of “angry young men,” first depicted in John Osborne’s fearsome play Look Back in Anger (1956). Jimmy Porter, Osborne’s hero, voiced underclass resentments about the limited opportunities and the constraints of life in cash-strapped, post-Empire Britain. While much of the rhetoric in Osborne’s play sounds dated now, at the time its language splashed cold water on polite British society’s façade.

  Britain’s Teds echoed their American Beat counterparts with a ritualized dress code to look cool; but Teddy Boys were strictly a teenage phenomenon, and more about style than either art or politics. Lennon’s Teddy-Boy image served several purposes. It set him apart as an outsider, rebelling against his school, his aunt, and the establishment tastes and values they represented, although his actual rebellions were pretty minor. “The sort of gang I [ran with] went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls’ knickers down,” Lennon said years later. “I was scared at the time, but Mimi was the only parent who never found out.” Emboldened by their Guy Fawkes Day triumph, Lennon and his buddies became more daring, and moved on from shoplifting candy to stealing things they could sell, such as cigarettes.

  Taking on the image of a Teddy Boy also allowed Lennon to express a creative exuberance in his dress that monotonous school uniforms never allowed. Most of all, it made him look tough—which his insecurities made him desperate to do. Lennon needed his Teddy-Boy image, he later told his first wife, Cynthia, precisely because he didn’t feel strong at all on the inside. He believed he had a better chance of avoiding a run-in with genuinely tough kids if he simply looked fierce enough. “If he was really pushed,” however, she reported, “he could fight as dirty as his attackers and frequently did in the old days. . . . [But] John was a self-confessed coward [and] he would use every trick in the book to avoid a confrontation.”29 Lennon was so successful at creating a tough image for himself that he became notorious for it. Paul McCartney remembers hearing about Lennon before actually meeting him: “John was the local Ted. You saw him rather than met him.”30

  According to Quarry Bank’s conservative headmaster of the early 1950s, E. R. Taylor, Lennon was easily the most unruly student he had to deal with in his career. Taylor’s replacement, William Ernest Pobjoy, who took over in Lennon’s second year—and famously abolished corporal punishment at the school—adopted a more progressive outlook. “John was a very talented lad, but from junior school he had taken a delight in mischief,” Pobjoy later recalled. “Things were different in those days, and I remember one of the remarks on his report was a complaint from a teacher about John, who had been caught gambling on the cricket field during a house match. Cricket was taken very seriously in those days. I remember that the last thing written on his final report was that he could go far.”31 Busy with his personal and stylistic rebellion, Lennon brushed off classes and, at sixteen, failed the next round of exams in the British diagnostic pyramid, the O-levels.

  Lennon’s early pranks had conceptual flair. One term Lennon was miffed to learn that his friends Garry and Turner, students at the Liverpool Institute, would get a day off for “teachers’ training” while Quarry Bank was still in session. Taking Lennon’s dare, the two of them showed up at Lennon’s art class in their Institute uniforms, claiming to be new students who’d just enrolled and whose parents had bought them the wrong clothes. As the instructor, a man named Martin, started writing down their names, in walked Pete Shotton, anxious to see how the ruse was going. He told Martin he was retrieving his pen from Lennon, who protested with mock self-righteo
usness: “I haven’t seen your pen. Furthermore I strongly object to you coming in and disturbing me working. And I am sure I speak on behalf of Mr. Martin as well.” “I must say I agree with Lennon on this occasion,” Martin responded. “Shotton, you will write out 500 lines saying ‘I must not interrupt Mr. Martin’s Art Class,’ and let me have them in the morning.” “A week later,” Len Garry recalled, “in our morning assembly at the Institute, the headmaster . . . mentioned in passing about an incident in which Quarry Bank had been ‘infiltrated by the enemy.’ We were later given a sharp reprimand by the head—but we got knowing smiles from the other teachers. For the rest of that term, we were heroes in the school.”32

  Rod Davis remembers how many teachers made a distinction between their admiration for Lennon’s talent and their role as his superiors. “These stories would get around the teachers’ staff room, but I don’t think Lennon appreciated that the teachers really thought a lot of him. The last thing they could possibly do is admit it!”33

  Shotton remembered another teacher, Mr. McDermott, who could never be bothered to read student essays; he simply put a red check mark in the margin and handed them back. For an assignment on St. Paul’s journey to Damascus, Lennon wrote, “On the road to Damascus, a burning pie flew out of the window and hit St. Paul right between the eyes and when he came to he was blind forever.” McDermott returned the essay with his usual mark.