Lennon grabbed his dad’s lapels and shouted ‘If you tell anyone what happened today I’ll kill you’
On July 10, 1964, John Lennon bought his first property, ‘Kenwood’, a mock-Tudor mansion on the St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey, bang next to the golf course.
It cost the 23-year-old John £20,000, at a time when the average house in Britain sold for £3,400. He added a swimming pool, two 18ft sofas, a marble fireplace, a sunken bath-tub and a jacuzzi in the master bathroom. These cost a further £40,000.
Each day, vans from the smartest stores delivered unimaginable quantities of merchandise: a gorilla fancy-dress costume, a suit of armour, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a vast altar crucifix and five televisions, which John liked to keep turned on, but with the sound down.
He had two large attic rooms knocked together to make room for 20 different Scalextric model racing car sets, complete with landscaping. ‘If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly,’ he told a friend.
The kitchen contained any number of cutting-edge gadgets, none of which John was able to operate. His wife Cynthia was similarly bamboozled, but managed to master the waffle machine. Tired of eating just waffles, John asked his interior designer to send someone to teach Cynthia how to work the other appliances.
The garden was filled with statuary, much of it covered in psychedelic colours after John and his friend Terry went wild with the spray paints. Later, a giant boot, eight feet high, from the film stood at the bottom of the garden. Four garages, all in a row, provided shelter for three shiny new cars – a Rolls-Royce, a Mini Cooper and a Ferrari.
For most of his life, the only space John had had to himself was his cosy little bedroom in Mendips, the house where he’d spent most of his childhood. It is understandable, then, that rather than expanding into Kenwood’s 27 rooms, he spent most his time confined to the modest sunroom, scrunched up like an embryo on a tiny yellow sofa which had, naturally enough, been a gift from his Aunt Mimi, who had raised him after his parents split up.
He also found his staff hard to manage. He liked his amiable cleaner, Dot, but she got on badly with the cook, whose handyman husband wouldn’t stop flirting with the guests. Before long, the cook’s daughter started making passes at John.
Meanwhile, household items kept disappearing and Cynthia was informed by a nosy neighbour that John’s smelly, chain-smoking chauffeur was living in the back of the Rolls-Royce.
‘I was hopeless when it came to standing up to people,’ admitted Cynthia. Eventually, Brian Epstein took control, sacking the cook, her husband and the chauffeur.
One day, when Cynthia was alone in Kenwood, she opened the door to ‘a tiny man with lank grey hair, balding on top’. He introduced himself as
John’s long-lost father, Fred, a claim confirmed at first sight: ‘He looked as unkempt and down-at-heel as a tramp – but, alarmingly, with John’s face.’
For some reason John had failed to tell Cynthia that, just a few weeks before, he had met his father for the first time in 17 years. He had been six years old when Fred had tussled with John’s mother Julia over which of them would look after him.
Fred had gone to sea for four years, working as a ship’s steward. On his return to England he had smashed a shop window and was arrested while waltzing with a mannequin. He had been imprisoned for six months.
By 1963, Fred was working as an itinerant washer-up in hotels. He had given up any hope of seeing his son again until a fellow worker pointed out that the leader of The Beatles was called Lennon, and looked just
VANS BROUGHT THINGS... LIKE A GORILLA SUIT, ARMOUR, 5 TVS, A LARGE CRUCIFIX
like him.
Fred despatched a series of letters to John, but they went unanswered. In time he contacted the Daily Sketch, which, sensing a cracking story, engaged in negotiations with Brian Epstein for a meeting between long-lost father and famous son. At last, on April 1, 1964, the two met at Epstein’s offices.
John’s first words to Fred were testy, to say the least: ‘What do you want, then?’
Fred replied that he didn’t want anything. ‘I told him that he got his talent from me,’ he told the Daily Sketch, adding, with familial tactlessness, ‘I don’t want to sound boastful, but I was doing what John is doing 25 years ago – and better!’ In his seafaring days, Fred had entertained his fellow crew members with selections from the musicals.
From that moment on, John’s relationship with Fred would swing between love and hate, their reconciliations often ending in arguments requiring fresh reconciliations. Yet John financed Fred’s existence, albeit on a modest level, giving him a one-bedroom flat in Kew and £10 a week.
While employed washing dishes at the Toby Jug Hotel in Tolworth, Surrey, Fred became engaged to a student called Pauline, 35 years his junior. He then turned up at Kenwood with Pauline, asking if John and Cynthia might give her a job and somewhere to live. ‘She lived with us for a few months, but it was a nightmare,’ recalled Cynthia. ‘She was constantly in tears and arguing with her mother over Alf [Fred]. She slept in the attic, and we’d hear her screaming down the phone and sobbing up there.’
For her part, Pauline did not take to John: ‘His table manners were the most atrocious I had ever witnessed. He said little, but as he munched I noticed him sizing me up with those penetratingly suspicious eyes.’
Finally, remembers Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton, ‘Freddie exhausted the limits of even John’s tolerance when he attempted to seduce his daughter-in-law. Cyn was so distraught that John threw his father out of the house, and refused ever to see him again.’
John’s relationship with his father finally came to an end in 1970, when Fred mentioned that he was planning to write his autobiography. An irate John said, ‘I’m cutting off your money… Get out of my life – get off my back!’
It emerged that John’s post-Beatles ‘primal scream’ therapy had triggered violent feelings against his father. ‘Have you any idea of what I’ve been through because of you? Day after day in therapy, screaming for my daddy, sobbing for you to come home!’
Grabbing his father’s lapel, he added, ‘If you tell anyone what happened here today… I’ll have you killed.’
This threat worried Fred so much that he gave a statement of their conversation to a solicitor, with instructions that it be made public if he should ‘disappear or die an unnatural death’.
JOHN’S TOLERANCE WAS EXHAUSTED WHEN HIS DAD TRIED TO SEDUCE HISWIFE CYNTHIA