The true love of his life (no, not Yoko)

Sitting in her new West End restaurant one day in 1989, Cynthia Lennon recalled the secret love life of her late husband. ‘I realised early on that I was going to have to share my husband with the entire world,’ she said. ‘It was the so-called Swinging Sixties. Everyone was doing everything with everyone. John would do as he pleased – I had always known that about him. All that mattered was that he came home to me, and to Julian [both pictured, with John].’ But Cynthia’s most astonishing revelation was her conviction that the real love of John’s life was not Yoko Ono but Alma Cogan, a fading singer eight years his senior. She said John believed Alma somehow to be the reincarnation of his beloved mother Julia, who had died when he was 17. ‘I don’t believe he ever recovered from that,’ said Cynthia. ‘It disrupted his ability to have normal

relationships with women.’ Alma, the highest-paid British female entertainer of the Fifties, shared a bill with The Beatles, and an intense affair ensued. ‘When I first heard about them, I didn’t care,’ said Cynthia. ‘I was deeply in love with John. I have never stopped loving him.’

Cynthia was adamant that, had Alma lived, the affair would have fizzled out naturally, and John would have come home ‘as he had always done’. It was Cogan’s death from ovarian cancer in 1966, aged 34, and the need for a replacement mother figure, Cynthia believed, that threw him into the arms of Yoko Ono, whom he addressed as ‘Mother’.

‘He was complicated,’ said Cynthia. ‘More screwed-up than most people ever knew. I wanted more than anything for John to be happy. I don’t believe he ever was, and that kills me.’