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selenakToday would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. Accordingly, there are galores of articles about Lennon the musician, Lennon the activist, Lennon the human being. My own offering is a post about one of my favourite, if obscure (but for one particular event) episodes in his life, which is the tale of how he celebrated his 21st birthday. It involved acts of generosity, acts of asshattery, backstory tragedy and current day comedy, travelling and making a big issue out of hair: in short, a very John kind of story.
In the autumn of 1961, John Lennon was still the oldest of the Beatles (Ringo not being with them yet), the first who’d turn 21, then still the official age of adulthood. He wasn’t thrilled at the prospect:
“I wasn't too keen on reaching twenty-one. I remember one relative saying to me, 'From now on, it's all downhill,' and I really got a shock. She told me how my skin would be getting older and that kind of jazz.”
Dire warnings of age wasn’t all that he got from the family, however. His aunt Elizabeth, family nickname “Mater”, who lived in Edinburgh, gave him 100 pounds. Actually, that money had another origin, but John never knew about it; biographers didn’t find out until recently, either. As his younger half sister Julia Baird said:
“My mother apparently had an insurance policy that was worth £300 when she died, to be paid out when we were twenty-one, split between her three children. John received £100 when he was twenty-one, though he was never told that it was from his mother. John always believed it was a gift from his auntie. He and Paul went to Paris with the money.”
“Going to Paris” hadn’t been the original plan, and it came about rather spontaneously. Actually, they shouldn’t have gone at all; the band was booked for several gigs. (At this point, after two stints in Hamburg, they were already among the best loved bands in Liverpool.) However, together with official adulthood approaching, John got an early case of success malaise and the need to do something crazy and run away:
“We'd got fed up. We did have bookings, but we just broke them and went off.”
“We” in this case being him and Paul, who was delighted to be asked and subsequently quoted this as an example of John’s generosity, just sharing the biggest sum of money either of them had seen to go on a holiday together:
“I would be impressed. And I was his mate, enough said? 'Let's go on holiday.' - 'You mean me too? With the hundred quid? Great! I'm part of this windfall.'”
Left behind and uninvited were: poor George and Pete Best and John’s girlfriend of three years (and future wife), Cynthia. Cynthia never said what she thought of that, but the other band members were less than thrilled. George even seems to have been afraid he’d been permanently ditched. Stuart Sutcliff, who had already quit the band in favour of staying in Hamburg with his girlfriend Astrid Kircherr and becoming a painter again, heard about it and wrote to his sister:
“Last night I heard that John and Paul have gone to Paris to play together - in other words, the band has broken up! It sounds mad to me, I don't believe it.”
Originally, the idea was hitchhike to Paris only for a brief stop over, as they’d heard one of their Hamburg friends, Jürgen Vollmer, was now living there, and then travel further to Spain.
We planned to hitchhike to Spain. I had done a spot of hitchhiking with George and we knew you had to have a gimmick; we had been turned down so often and we'd seen that guys that had a gimmick (like a Union Jack round them) had always got the lifts. So I said to John, 'Let's get a couple of bowler hats.' It was showbiz creeping in. We still had our leather jackets and drainpipes - we were too proud of them not to wear them, in case we met a girl; and if we did meet a girl, off would come the bowlers. But for lifts we would put the bowlers on. Two guys in bowler hats - a lorry would stop! Sense of humour. This, and the train, is how we got to Paris.
In case you’re wondering, Paul isn’t kidding about the bowler hats:
The flowery curtains you see in the background belong to the not quite hotel where they ended up in. There was that little matter of neither of our heroes speaking the language of the country when they arrived in Paris, which didn’t make finding quarters that easy. However:
”The only French we knew was 'Avez-vous une hotel pour la nuit?' and 'Avez-vous un chambre?' We ended up in Montmartre and by that time it was getting late. Some rather friendly prostitutes kindly took pity on us. They were the only people out. So we say, 'Avez-vous une hotel pour la nuit?' We thought our luck had really changed, we thought, Wow, this is a prostitute, there may be all sorts of bonuses thrown in here, but in fact it was un chambre pour la nuit where the two of us just slept, awaiting great pleasures that didn't come. But we slept, that was the main thing. I remember we ordered something from a French waitress and she said, 'Merci, m'sieur,' and we thought, Ohhhh, Jesus Christ, she's so sexy! It was just the French voice, and she had hair under her arms. 'Ohhhh, my God!' That was wild, that was bawdiness in extreme. I'd just never seen anybody with hair under her arms.”
Jürgen Vollmer, the original reason for choosing Paris as a stopover, was duly located. He met them outside the church of St-Germain-des-Prés. Having established that they had no proper place to stay, he took them to his digs in the nearby Hotel de Beaune. As Jürgen tried to sneak the boys up the stairs of this cheap hotel, he was discovered by his landlady, who threw the Englishmen out. "‘We didn’t like the service here, anyway’, Lennon said with mocking hauteur. ‘Shall we try the Ritz?’ Paul asked his friend, readily falling into a double act.” Then Jürgen showed them around in the city, one tourist tour where everybody had a good time. Quoth Jürgen: “When I pointed out L'Opera, they burst into operatic song and laughed and danced together in the street.”
Aside from playing tourist guide, Jürgen now made his big contribution to Beatles lore. Back in Hamburg, Astrid had already given Stuart her own haircut, modelled after Jean Marais, but the rest of the gang had mocked and balked at the prospect of following suit. Now, however, faced with the fashion conscious Jürgen, John and Paul reconsidered.
Paul: “He had his hair Mod-style. We said, 'Would you do our hair like yours?' We're on holiday - what the hell! We're buying capes and pantaloons, throwing caution to the wind. He said, 'No, boys, no. I like you as Rocker; you look great.' But we begged him enough so he said 'all right'.”
John: ”Jürgen also had bell-bottom trousers, but we thought that would be considered too queer back in Liverpool. We didn't want to appear feminine or anything like that, because our audience in Liverpool still had a lot of fellas. We were playing rock, dressed in leather, though Paul's ballads were bringing in more and more girls. Anyway, Jürgen had a flattened-down hairstyle with a fringe in the front, which we rather took to. We went over to his place and there and then he cut - hacked would be a better word - our hair into the same style.”
(One is tempted to add: “John, your macho attitudes were never very convincing anyway, you might have gone for the bell-bottom trousers as well.”) Jürgen Vollmer and Paul, pre-haircut:
And the hair cut result on John Lennon, back at the hotel.
By now, the whole going to Spain idea had faded into the background. They enjoyed Paris too much to leave:
We would walk miles from our hotel; you do in Paris. We'd go to a place near the Avenue des Anglais and we'd sit in the bars, looking good. I still have some classic photos from there. Linda loves one where I am sitting in a gendarme's mac as a cape and John has got his glasses on askew and his trousers down revealing a bit of Y-front. The photographs are so beautiful, we're really hamming it up. We're looking at the camera like, 'Hey, we are artsy guys, in a café: this is us in Paris,' and we felt like that. We went up to Montmartre because of all the artists, and the Folies Bergères, and we saw guys walking around in short leather jackets and very wide pantaloons. Talk about fashion! This was going to kill them when we got back. This was totally happening. They were tight to the knee and then they flared out; they must have been about fifty inches around the bottom and our drainpipe trousers were something like fifteen or sixteen inches. (Fifteen were the best, but you couldn't really get your foot through at fifteen, so sixteen was acceptable.) We saw these trousers and said, 'Excusez-moi, Monsieur, où did you get them?' It was a cheap little rack down the street so we bought a pair each, went back to the hotel, put them on, went out on the street - and we couldn't handle it: 'Do your feet feel like they are flapping? Feel more comfortable in me drainies, don't you?' So it was back to the hotel at a run, needle and cotton out and we took them in to a nice sixteen with which we were quite happy. (…) For the rest of that week we were like Paris Existentialists. Jean Paul Sartre had nothing on us. This was it. 'Sod them all - I could write a novel from what I learnt this week.' It was all inside us. We could do anything now.”
Meanwhile, the money was running out, which meant those two weeks in Paris inevitably came to an end. First there was John’s actual birthday to celebrate, though. With that very exotic drink to two boys from Liverpool, banana milkshakes:
“He let me have all the banana milkshakes I wanted."
(Whereas the food of the day, according to John, was a burger.) After that, it was time to return to England, face the music (in more than one sense), stroke ruffled feathers of indignant band member and convince everyone that Paris-aquired haircut and fashion were actually a good idea. Ringo, still with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes but good friends with the Beatles already, commented:
”What a sight they looked when they arrived back!”
George seems to have gotten over the Parisian escapade pretty quickly. The hair, however, was another matter:
“When we got back to Liverpool it was all, 'Eh, your hair's gone funny.' - 'No, this is the new style.'
We nearly tried to change it back but it wouldn't go, it kept flapping forward. And that just caught on. We weren't really into the coiffure. It was like Mo's out of the Three Stooges. It fell forward in a fringe. But it was great for us because we never had to style it or anything - wash it, towel it, turn upside down and give it a shake, and that was it. Everyone thought we had started it, so it became 'the Beatle hairdo'.”
And now flash forward several decades. In 2007, Paul McCartney released an album named “Memory Almost Full”, which includes two straightforwardly autobiographical songs, the rocker That Was Me (which is my favourite in the album – the version I linked is him singing it in concert in Paris, btw) and the ballad The End of the End. The later is a straightforward reflection on his own death (let’s face it, at 68, which he’s now, you’re aware you don’t have that many years left in all likelihood); leave it to Paul McCartney to write optimistically about age and mortality, though, as the song can be summed up with “Well, I’m due, it’ll work out, though, and please throw me an Irish wake, not one of those godawful gloomy affairs.” That year, he was interviewed at length on French TV by Antoine des Caunes. He talked about both the Beatles' first French concert and his trip with John in 1961. Much later in the interview, he was asked about the song “The End of the End” and the opening lines “At the end of the end, it’s the start of a journey to a much better place, and this wasn’t bad, so a much better place would have to be special…” The interviewer wanted to know how he imagined that journey and the better place. Whereupon he replied he imagines it as a trip originally meant to go to Spain, but ending up in Paris instead.
In the autumn of 1961, John Lennon was still the oldest of the Beatles (Ringo not being with them yet), the first who’d turn 21, then still the official age of adulthood. He wasn’t thrilled at the prospect:
“I wasn't too keen on reaching twenty-one. I remember one relative saying to me, 'From now on, it's all downhill,' and I really got a shock. She told me how my skin would be getting older and that kind of jazz.”
Dire warnings of age wasn’t all that he got from the family, however. His aunt Elizabeth, family nickname “Mater”, who lived in Edinburgh, gave him 100 pounds. Actually, that money had another origin, but John never knew about it; biographers didn’t find out until recently, either. As his younger half sister Julia Baird said:
“My mother apparently had an insurance policy that was worth £300 when she died, to be paid out when we were twenty-one, split between her three children. John received £100 when he was twenty-one, though he was never told that it was from his mother. John always believed it was a gift from his auntie. He and Paul went to Paris with the money.”
“Going to Paris” hadn’t been the original plan, and it came about rather spontaneously. Actually, they shouldn’t have gone at all; the band was booked for several gigs. (At this point, after two stints in Hamburg, they were already among the best loved bands in Liverpool.) However, together with official adulthood approaching, John got an early case of success malaise and the need to do something crazy and run away:
“We'd got fed up. We did have bookings, but we just broke them and went off.”
“We” in this case being him and Paul, who was delighted to be asked and subsequently quoted this as an example of John’s generosity, just sharing the biggest sum of money either of them had seen to go on a holiday together:
“I would be impressed. And I was his mate, enough said? 'Let's go on holiday.' - 'You mean me too? With the hundred quid? Great! I'm part of this windfall.'”
Left behind and uninvited were: poor George and Pete Best and John’s girlfriend of three years (and future wife), Cynthia. Cynthia never said what she thought of that, but the other band members were less than thrilled. George even seems to have been afraid he’d been permanently ditched. Stuart Sutcliff, who had already quit the band in favour of staying in Hamburg with his girlfriend Astrid Kircherr and becoming a painter again, heard about it and wrote to his sister:
“Last night I heard that John and Paul have gone to Paris to play together - in other words, the band has broken up! It sounds mad to me, I don't believe it.”
Originally, the idea was hitchhike to Paris only for a brief stop over, as they’d heard one of their Hamburg friends, Jürgen Vollmer, was now living there, and then travel further to Spain.
We planned to hitchhike to Spain. I had done a spot of hitchhiking with George and we knew you had to have a gimmick; we had been turned down so often and we'd seen that guys that had a gimmick (like a Union Jack round them) had always got the lifts. So I said to John, 'Let's get a couple of bowler hats.' It was showbiz creeping in. We still had our leather jackets and drainpipes - we were too proud of them not to wear them, in case we met a girl; and if we did meet a girl, off would come the bowlers. But for lifts we would put the bowlers on. Two guys in bowler hats - a lorry would stop! Sense of humour. This, and the train, is how we got to Paris.
In case you’re wondering, Paul isn’t kidding about the bowler hats:
The flowery curtains you see in the background belong to the not quite hotel where they ended up in. There was that little matter of neither of our heroes speaking the language of the country when they arrived in Paris, which didn’t make finding quarters that easy. However:
”The only French we knew was 'Avez-vous une hotel pour la nuit?' and 'Avez-vous un chambre?' We ended up in Montmartre and by that time it was getting late. Some rather friendly prostitutes kindly took pity on us. They were the only people out. So we say, 'Avez-vous une hotel pour la nuit?' We thought our luck had really changed, we thought, Wow, this is a prostitute, there may be all sorts of bonuses thrown in here, but in fact it was un chambre pour la nuit where the two of us just slept, awaiting great pleasures that didn't come. But we slept, that was the main thing. I remember we ordered something from a French waitress and she said, 'Merci, m'sieur,' and we thought, Ohhhh, Jesus Christ, she's so sexy! It was just the French voice, and she had hair under her arms. 'Ohhhh, my God!' That was wild, that was bawdiness in extreme. I'd just never seen anybody with hair under her arms.”
Jürgen Vollmer, the original reason for choosing Paris as a stopover, was duly located. He met them outside the church of St-Germain-des-Prés. Having established that they had no proper place to stay, he took them to his digs in the nearby Hotel de Beaune. As Jürgen tried to sneak the boys up the stairs of this cheap hotel, he was discovered by his landlady, who threw the Englishmen out. "‘We didn’t like the service here, anyway’, Lennon said with mocking hauteur. ‘Shall we try the Ritz?’ Paul asked his friend, readily falling into a double act.” Then Jürgen showed them around in the city, one tourist tour where everybody had a good time. Quoth Jürgen: “When I pointed out L'Opera, they burst into operatic song and laughed and danced together in the street.”
Aside from playing tourist guide, Jürgen now made his big contribution to Beatles lore. Back in Hamburg, Astrid had already given Stuart her own haircut, modelled after Jean Marais, but the rest of the gang had mocked and balked at the prospect of following suit. Now, however, faced with the fashion conscious Jürgen, John and Paul reconsidered.
Paul: “He had his hair Mod-style. We said, 'Would you do our hair like yours?' We're on holiday - what the hell! We're buying capes and pantaloons, throwing caution to the wind. He said, 'No, boys, no. I like you as Rocker; you look great.' But we begged him enough so he said 'all right'.”
John: ”Jürgen also had bell-bottom trousers, but we thought that would be considered too queer back in Liverpool. We didn't want to appear feminine or anything like that, because our audience in Liverpool still had a lot of fellas. We were playing rock, dressed in leather, though Paul's ballads were bringing in more and more girls. Anyway, Jürgen had a flattened-down hairstyle with a fringe in the front, which we rather took to. We went over to his place and there and then he cut - hacked would be a better word - our hair into the same style.”
(One is tempted to add: “John, your macho attitudes were never very convincing anyway, you might have gone for the bell-bottom trousers as well.”) Jürgen Vollmer and Paul, pre-haircut:
And the hair cut result on John Lennon, back at the hotel.
By now, the whole going to Spain idea had faded into the background. They enjoyed Paris too much to leave:
We would walk miles from our hotel; you do in Paris. We'd go to a place near the Avenue des Anglais and we'd sit in the bars, looking good. I still have some classic photos from there. Linda loves one where I am sitting in a gendarme's mac as a cape and John has got his glasses on askew and his trousers down revealing a bit of Y-front. The photographs are so beautiful, we're really hamming it up. We're looking at the camera like, 'Hey, we are artsy guys, in a café: this is us in Paris,' and we felt like that. We went up to Montmartre because of all the artists, and the Folies Bergères, and we saw guys walking around in short leather jackets and very wide pantaloons. Talk about fashion! This was going to kill them when we got back. This was totally happening. They were tight to the knee and then they flared out; they must have been about fifty inches around the bottom and our drainpipe trousers were something like fifteen or sixteen inches. (Fifteen were the best, but you couldn't really get your foot through at fifteen, so sixteen was acceptable.) We saw these trousers and said, 'Excusez-moi, Monsieur, où did you get them?' It was a cheap little rack down the street so we bought a pair each, went back to the hotel, put them on, went out on the street - and we couldn't handle it: 'Do your feet feel like they are flapping? Feel more comfortable in me drainies, don't you?' So it was back to the hotel at a run, needle and cotton out and we took them in to a nice sixteen with which we were quite happy. (…) For the rest of that week we were like Paris Existentialists. Jean Paul Sartre had nothing on us. This was it. 'Sod them all - I could write a novel from what I learnt this week.' It was all inside us. We could do anything now.”
Meanwhile, the money was running out, which meant those two weeks in Paris inevitably came to an end. First there was John’s actual birthday to celebrate, though. With that very exotic drink to two boys from Liverpool, banana milkshakes:
“He let me have all the banana milkshakes I wanted."
(Whereas the food of the day, according to John, was a burger.) After that, it was time to return to England, face the music (in more than one sense), stroke ruffled feathers of indignant band member and convince everyone that Paris-aquired haircut and fashion were actually a good idea. Ringo, still with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes but good friends with the Beatles already, commented:
”What a sight they looked when they arrived back!”
George seems to have gotten over the Parisian escapade pretty quickly. The hair, however, was another matter:
“When we got back to Liverpool it was all, 'Eh, your hair's gone funny.' - 'No, this is the new style.'
We nearly tried to change it back but it wouldn't go, it kept flapping forward. And that just caught on. We weren't really into the coiffure. It was like Mo's out of the Three Stooges. It fell forward in a fringe. But it was great for us because we never had to style it or anything - wash it, towel it, turn upside down and give it a shake, and that was it. Everyone thought we had started it, so it became 'the Beatle hairdo'.”
And now flash forward several decades. In 2007, Paul McCartney released an album named “Memory Almost Full”, which includes two straightforwardly autobiographical songs, the rocker That Was Me (which is my favourite in the album – the version I linked is him singing it in concert in Paris, btw) and the ballad The End of the End. The later is a straightforward reflection on his own death (let’s face it, at 68, which he’s now, you’re aware you don’t have that many years left in all likelihood); leave it to Paul McCartney to write optimistically about age and mortality, though, as the song can be summed up with “Well, I’m due, it’ll work out, though, and please throw me an Irish wake, not one of those godawful gloomy affairs.” That year, he was interviewed at length on French TV by Antoine des Caunes. He talked about both the Beatles' first French concert and his trip with John in 1961. Much later in the interview, he was asked about the song “The End of the End” and the opening lines “At the end of the end, it’s the start of a journey to a much better place, and this wasn’t bad, so a much better place would have to be special…” The interviewer wanted to know how he imagined that journey and the better place. Whereupon he replied he imagines it as a trip originally meant to go to Spain, but ending up in Paris instead.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 03:01 pm (UTC)The anecdote about the trousers : went out on the street - and we couldn't handle it: 'Do your feet feel like they are flapping? was so funny. We called those ' pantalons pattes d'éléphants.
And the stunning discovery : Ohhhh, Jesus Christ, she's so sexy! It was just the French voice, and she had hair under her arms. Ah Ah Ah.:D
I agree with A. de Caunes saying in his interview of Paul that we could say that French slightly contributed to the Beatle's myth with the haircut inspired by Jean Marais in a Cocteau's movie.;)
Wonderful celebration of John's birthday anniversary.
I've enjoyed it a lot and it made me smile. There is straightforwardness in their tale that went to my heart in a refreshing way.
(I'm home , I had to spend some time at the hospital today for cortisone injection -back problems- and they didn't keep me as long as they said they would , so online sooner than expected. Not sure I'm going to post something about John today though but I've read a few French articles that were nice too)
no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 03:51 pm (UTC)Sorry to hear about the hback problems but glad that I made you smile regardless!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-11 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-11 05:02 am (UTC)