The obituaries of his first wife served only to remind us of John Lennon’s deeply unpleasant and criminal behaviour, says Simon Heffer.
London - The sight of John Lennon’s picture in last week’s Daily Mail, illustrating stories marking the death of his first wife, Cynthia, was a stark reminder that there were tin-pot idols long before the advent of Russell Brand.
Some of us had hoped, more than 50 years after Beatlemania and 35 years after Lennon’s murder by a deranged fan, that the world would be over this poseur by now.
The way he treated the apparently nice, decent Cynthia so abominably - not just through his womanising, but by subjecting her to occasional physical violence, bullying her with tirades of verbal abuse and forcing her to take LSD - would be reason enough on its own to consign him to oblivion.
Of course, Lennon is still worshipped by legions of adoring Beatles fans, and held up as someone who transformed Western popular music for ever.
Millions still enjoy his work, although it’s worth noting that critics agree its quality declined rapidly once the Beatles broke up in 1970 and when he lost the apparently superior talent of Paul McCartney as his songwriting partner. Nevertheless, as far as the international army of Beatles fans are concerned, their hero could do no wrong.
However, the justifiably respectful obituaries of Cynthia Lennon served only to remind us of the deeply unpleasant and criminal behaviour of this insanely over-praised man.
It’s not just that he overlooked his tedious mantra about peace and love when it came to poor Cynthia. For other aspects of Lennon were in some ways worse. And they should be more than enough to persuade the world to tone down its adulation of a man who, far from being a Bach or Beethoven, was simply someone with a useful knack of helping to write a short, memorable tune.
In the 1960s Lennon liked to pose as a revolutionary - he fancied himself as a Scouse Che Guevara - going out of his way to be as offensive as possible.
An early sign of his chippiness came at the 1963 Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen Mother and a well-heeled audience. “For our last number,’ he said into the microphone, ‘I’d like to ask your help. Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery. . .”
He far exceeded that by insulting the entire Christian faith in 1966, by opining that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” and that “Christianity will vanish and shrink” - an idiotic remark that did the band huge commercial damage in America.
The fact is, he hated this country and supported itsenemies.
Despite being awarded the MBE in 1965 along with the rest of the Beatles, he bragged later that he had smoked cannabis at the palace. Then, four years later, he made a fatuous gesture of returning his MBE to the Queen, because he argued it meant he had sold out to the Establishment - something he seems not to have thought of at the time, despite being such a genius.
Far worse was his support of IRA terrorists. After Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when British troops fired on Catholic protesters in Londonderry, Lennon met a representative of the Provisional IRA in New York to explore how he could help the Republican movement.
The man who met him - Gerry O’Hare, who later became a journalist - revealed 25 years after Lennon’s death that the singer suggested playing a benefit concert for the IRA.
According to O’Hare, Lennon was regularly ‘briefed’ in New York by IRA sympathisers. Yet for all his desire to cultivate an image as a sophisticated political intellectual, Lennon couldn’t even grasp the basics of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
When he met O’Hare, he offered to play for working-class Protestants in the Province - the very people hated by the IRA - not the Catholics by whose deaths he was supposedly so appalled.
The charitably minded might put this down to confusion caused by his own family background. His great-grandparents were Catholics from County Londonderry but he was raised as an Anglican by his mother’s family, who were of Welsh descent.
Whatever the case, Lennon eventually understood the gist of the Republican cause, and during the 1970s the Provisional IRA leadership regarded him as gold-dust - a “useful idiot”, in Stalin’s phrase - because of his international celebrity.
Lennon’s help for the IRA manifested itself through his songs, with titles such as Sunday Bloody Sunday and Luck Of The Irish, royalties from which went to charities supporting IRA prisoners.
He also donated money to the civil rights movement in the Province, some of which may have found its way into Republican coffers, and in 1971 took part in an anti-internment march holding a placard that read “Victory for the IRA Against British Imperialism”.
Indeed, the former MI5 spy David Shayler said Lennon had given money to the Provos - he said he had seen the evidence in MI5 files - and claimed Lennon had also given £46 000 to the Trotskyite Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Both Sinn Fein and Hunter Davies, the Beatles’ official biographer, have said they believe the IRA donation story to be true.
Yet Lennon’s martyrdom to the Republican cause only went so far. His promised concert in Northern Ireland never came off because, as he explained, the problem with going to Ulster to perform was that his history of drugs and involvement with the anti-Vietnam War movement meant American authorities might not let him back into the US, where he now lived.
The Nixon and Ford administrations tried for nearly four years to have Lennon deported, until a court ruled that the deportation would have been “political” - even though Lennon’s entry to America had, because of an undeclared 1968 drugs conviction in Britain, been technically illegal.
It was also reported a decade ago that the British security services spied on Lennon in the 1970s because of his links with IRA terrorists. This caused outrage when it was made known, but, given the level of contact with senior Provos, it would have been far more outrageous if he had not been under surveillance.
Lennon claimed that much of his loyalty to the IRA came from his commitment to “working-class values” - another of his dreary songs is called Working Class Hero.
But this, too, was a pose, since although some working-class boys might have been lucky enough to get into his grammar school, Lennon’s aunt Mimi provided him with a pleasant middle-class home after his parents divorced in the 1940s. Aunt Mimi telephoned him when she heard rumours of the IRA connection and, according to his cousin Stanley Parkes, “tore him off a strip”.
Here, after all, was the man who made such an issue of espousing “peace and love” providing support and funds for Republican bombers and torturers. Lennon’s second wife, Yoko Ono, for whom he deserted Cynthia, remains in absolute denial about the extent of his complicity with the IRA.
It is true that many great musicians have had deplorable private lives and political opinions, yet their music is still cherished and revered.
Wagner despised Jews. Benjamin Britten had questionable relationships with small boys. Sergei Prokofiev spent years sucking up to Stalin.
I would contend, though, that the cultural achievement of these men was a thousand times that of John Winston Lennon.
For much of the last 15 years of his life Lennon was either drugged up to his eyeballs or going cold turkey. He became an absurd exhibitionist, staying in bed in public with Yoko Ono for days and welcoming visitors to his New York flat stark naked.
Sadly, too many Britons now in their 60s and 70s identify Lennon with a golden age of liberation, permissive modernity and “fun”, and suspend all rational judgment about him.
The truth is that Lennon was a man whose reputation was holed below the waterline even before the Beatles broke up, and won’t stop sinking.
He should serve as a warning to younger generations that accord ridiculous respect to shallow, egotistical, self-regarding celebrities who have many years ahead of them in which to diminish, wither and become entirely irrelevant.
And, as ought to have happened with Lennon, we should stop revering them before they do.
Daily Mail