Driver of Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls took stars on cross-country acid trips
While riding in the back of his customised Rolls-Royce, John Lennon might have been picturing himself on a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. All the while, the man behind the wheel stoically kept his eyes on the road and his mouth shut.
In 1964 the former Welsh Guardsman Les Anthony, who has died aged 87, was working as a chauffeur, washing his car while waiting for a client at the St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, southwest of London. Suddenly a car pulled up. A slim, well-spoken, modishly suited man emerged and asked ‘‘Are you looking for a job?’’ It was the
Beatles’ manager
Brian Epstein.
Minutes later, and feeling somewhat bamboozled, Anthony walked into Lennon’s Kenwood mansion alongside Epstein, who said: ‘‘Let’s meet the boys.’’ Having been summoned like teenage children to the dinner table, the Beatles duly came down the stairs. They looked at Anthony in his peaked chauffeur’s cap and one of them said ‘‘You’ll do.’’ Then, as one, they shot back up the stairs.
Anthony had been hired on the spot. He was detailed to work for Lennon, who even when he acquired a licence the following year hated driving because of his poor eyesight.
The son of a coalminer from the Welsh Valleys, the 1.93-metre, 115-kilogram Anthony had the additional asset of doubling up as a bodyguard for the Beatles. When Lennon embarked on drug-fuelled excursions with his rock star friends, Anthony would turn a blind eye and answer his boss’s every whim, although he never quite mastered the right expression for when Lennon opened the door to him naked, as he often did.
The job required resourcefulness, not least when Lennon wanted to customise the black Rolls-Royce Phantom V that he had acquired in 1964. In early 1967, just as the Beatles were finishing recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lennon decided that he wanted a colour scheme to match his chromatic thought patterns. Anthony was asked to commission a new paint job by a local artist, Steve Weaver, of gypsy patterns and the scales of Libra on the roof, for Lennon’s star sign.
The black leather upholstered back seat could be converted, Austin Powers style, into a double bed. It was one of the first vehicles in Britain to have one-way tinted windows. Guests would have a choice of tipples from the cocktail cabinet, or champagne kept chilled by the refrigeration system in the boot.
There was a television and a radio telephone. Music played on a floating record player with a needle that did not jump. There was even a writing desk if Lennon felt inspired to compose a song.
Among the pop celebrities to ‘‘turn on, tune in and drop out’’ in the back seat of Lennon’s Rolls were the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Bob Dylan, the Who, the Monkees and the Moody Blues. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalled one ‘‘epic acid-fuelled’’ magical mystery tour with Lennon and Anthony as ‘‘an episode of such extremes that I can barely piece together a fragment. It took in, I thought, Torquay and Lyme Regis over what seemed like a two or three-day period. Johnny and I were so out there that years later, in New York, he would ask, ‘What happened on that trip?’ ’’
Despite all these distractions, Lennon often sat in the front seat with Anthony and chatted amiably. The chauffeur also had time for Ringo, with whom he remained friends in the Seventies, and described George Harrison as a ‘‘gentleman’’. He was less keen on Paul McCartney, because he thought he was ‘‘tight with money’’.
Lennon asked him to buy other vehicles on his behalf, including a hearse, which Anthony found a little morbid. When, at Lennon’s behest, Anthony brought a Ferrari to the house as a prospective purchase, he could not get his employer out of bed.
When Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York in 1971, Anthony’s job came to an end. He felt a tinge of relief, having tired of being called out at all hours.
Lennon took the car with him and later donated it to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York as part of a tax settlement. The Phantom V now sits in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada.
Anthony never saw Lennon again, but he received a generous letter of reference, which helped him to gain his next job as chauffeur to the Conservative politician Geoffrey Rippon. Anthony worked for him for the next 15 years.
William Lesley Anthony was born in the South Wales mining village of Abertysswg. His father was a coalminer. After attending the local school, Anthony decided to join the Welsh Guards. He served in Germany and also at the army training barracks in Pirbright, Surrey. Attending the local church in Pirbright, he met Joyce Rolls, a sewing machinist. They married in 1954. He is survived by two of their three children.
One recalled how his classmates did not believe him when he said that his father worked for John Lennon. From the day he was driven to school in the multicoloured Rolls and proceeded to hand out signed photos of the Beatles, there was no further conjecture. – The Times