Dead at 75, wife Lennon treated so cruelly
You will go a long way before you meet anyone who knew her who won’t have a kind word to say about Cynthia Lennon, the first wife of John Lennon, who died, aged 75, in Majorca yesterday. Because she was just a very, very nice person who, as a teenager, fell in love with a mercurial, talented boy, despite the fact that few thought he would ever go anywhere in life.
A pretty girl who then watched from the sidelines as the boy some thought was a layabout became one of the most famous and artistically celebrated young men in the world.
Later, she lived through all the excitement of Beatlemania and seeing her husband being adored by millions, while she had to hide in the background and endure the pain of having to deny being his wife — it being an unspoken rule that rock stars were unmarried in those days to protect their image as a teen idol.
And she never complained, not publicly anyway, and only in a very small voice to him.
I liked John Lennon a lot. But I liked Cynthia, too. And it seemed that John treated her badly and was unnecessarily cruel to her, denying after their marriage was over that he had ever been in love with her, when his love letters had told the exact opposite.
He wouldn’t have married her, he used to say, if she hadn’t got pregnant. ‘Julian,’ he told an American magazine in 1970, ‘was born out of a bottle of whiskey on a Saturday night.’
‘That was cruel,’ Cynthia would say years later. ‘Inhuman.’ Before adding wryly: ‘The question should be: “Would I have married him?” She smiled at that, adding: ‘No. He wasn’t the best husband. But he wasn’t the worst.’
But Lennon did have a habit of making dramatic over-statements.
They’d met at Liverpool Art College in 1957 in their first term, when she was 18 and John 17. Some students thought Cynthia Powell, as she then was, must be posh because she came from Hoylake, which was ‘over the water’, Liverpudlian slang for the middle-class Wirral.
Actually, she wasn’t any posher than John Lennon, who also had a middle-class upbringing with his Aunt Mimi, but she was certainly more reserved, and felt intimidated by his endless bravado, tight jeans and long, greasy hair.
They weren’t in the same class, but he was quickly smitten, telling his friends that she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and making jokes about her, determined to catch her attention. Secretly, she would hang around him, dazzled by his rebellious charisma.
They got together after a Christmas party during their second year in 1958. Her widowed mother was not best pleased at her choice, Cynthia having dropped a Hoylake boyfriend of two years for John.
Cynthia was now watching the birth of The Beatles as Paul McCartney and George Harrison, who were at the school next door, would join John at lunchtimes in the college for rehearsals.
It had to be exciting, as were John’s passionate, not say erotic, love letters to her when he dropped out of college to go to Hamburg with The Beatles.
He WAS, the letters made clear (as did several of The Beatles’ early songs which were about letter-writing) desperate that she would stay faithful to him while he was away. The reverse, however, never seemed to apply, to John. ‘It was all “love, love, love” and, of course, other things which are unprintable,’ she would remember. ‘I suppose I fell in love with a bad boy, whom I knew to be a bad boy. My father had died a couple of years earlier. If he’d still been alive, he wouldn’t have let John get past the front door.’
Altogether, John was a jealous, suspicious, unfaithful, bohemian boyfriend. She was a lower middleclass, very reasonable, faithful girl, and she waited for him.
Soon he was back in Liverpool, playing at the Cavern Club, when, almost on the brink of The Beatles’ first recording session, Cynthia discovered she was pregnant. It was August 1962. ‘There’s only thing for it, Cyn. We’ll have to get married,’ John said as soon as she told him. Aunt Mimi was furious. She and Cynthia never got on.
Manager Brian epstein arranged a very quiet wedding, and the happy couple moved into a little flat in Liverpool where Cynthia, and then baby Julian, would stay a secret, as The Beatles became the biggest act in the world.
‘The more successful The Beatles became, the further away from me John seemed to be,’ she told me.
After a year of her reclusive existence, the truth eventually leaked out and she and Julian joined John in London, first in a flat in Kensington and then, as the money poured in, in a grand house in Surrey’s stockbroker belt.
But the nature of their relationship had changed. The very nice, friendly girl from Hoylake was no longer as erotically exciting as she’d once seemed. John had affairs, usually with clever, upmarket women.
‘I wasn’t passive or a dimwit. I think it was more a case of being patient. But I was beginning to be aware that these women could be dangerous. Most people now know about sex, drugs and rock and roll, but I don’t think I was aware so much then. I thought he was working all the time.’
Cynthia once told me that the only normal family day out she can remember they ever had when Julian was a little boy was in 1965. John had bought his Aunt Mimi a seaside home in Dorset and John, Cynthia and Julian went to see her and spent the day on the beach, John hiding under a large sunhat. ‘It was heaven,’ she told me. ‘We made sandcastles for Julian with his buckets and spades. And planned to do it again. But we never did’
Most of the time John was touring, filming or recording. They had a beautiful house, with lots of staff, but he was bored, and then irritated when Cynthia’s mother came to stay. He saw himself increasingly as an avant-garde artist and Cynthia as just a housewife. She did her best to keep the peace in the house.
‘But little by little, John’s personality began to change as drugs became an important part of his life,’ she told me, ‘leading him to the destruction of so much that he valued. At home, he would be lost in a daydream . . . present, but absent. I’d talk to him, but he wouldn’t hear me.’
once she had been a secret. Now she was feeling left behind.
When The Beatles suddenly became interested in transcendental meditation and rushed off to see the Maharishi in Bangor, North Wales, she missed the train and was left on the platform as it pulled out. The end came when John met Yoko ono, who sent him letters while The Beatles were staying in Rishikesh in the Himalayas studying meditation in 1968.
During all the time they were there, John refused to have sex with Cynthia, who had joined him, insisting that he slept in a separate room, as he looked forward to Yoko’s letters arriving at the post office at the ashram where they were staying.
The end of the marriage came shortly afterwards, when, upset by his indifference towards her, Cynthia took a short holiday in Greece.
ON RETURNING, she found John and Yoko in the kitchen, John in his dressing gown, Yoko wearing Cynthia’s. They’d obviously only just got up. What hurt most was that John knew that she was on her way home. ‘It was vicious,’ she told me.
The divorce was swift and unpleasant. John, normally the most generous of men, showed a vindictive side to his character.
‘ My final offer is £ 75,000,’ he shouted at her. ‘That’s like winning the pools for you, so what are you moaning about. You’re not worth any more.’ Finally, in 1970, she accepted £100,000 for her and Julian. The family home was sold. For a time, she lived in Kensington and saw old friends, though she was hurt that the other Beatles didn’t stay in touch with her.
She didn’t stay single for long, first marrying Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini, and then a very nice engineer called John Twist.
But once again, that didn’t work out. It was impossible for her not to be associated with John, and probably difficult for her second and third husbands, too.
It can’t have been easy following in Lennon’s footsteps.
Then, in 2002, she married Noel Charles, a friend of Julian, a former nightclub owner. They lived happily together until Noel died in 2013.
Julian was at her bedside for her last moments. In a tribute, he said: ‘You gave your life for me, you gave your life for love. The love you left will carry on.’
Some have said Cynthia should have fought to keep John Lennon. I think that she was a terrific woman, calm and quiet, who did her best under very trying circumstances.
She and John Lennon were opposites. She knew that when she began going out with him. That was probably why she fell in love with him.
I like to think that, in the final years, she was finally happy.