The Love You Make Read online

  “Oh, hi,” John said laconically, breaking the silence. He calmly took a sip of tea as Cynthia looked searchingly into his eyes. He looked very stoned, as if he had been up tripping all night and hadn’t been to bed at all. His long, lanky frame was covered in a layer of puffy fat, the results of drug edema and high living. His hair was stringy and matted and he looked generally unwashed. Behind his wire-frame National Health issue spectacles his irises were tiny specks of carbon, his eyelids droopy shutters. There was a long, motionless pause.

  Finally, Yoko turned in her chair to face Cynthia, or rather to confront her. There was no trace of an embarrassed smile, no glimmer of apology or explanation. Inscrutable was truly her perfect description. Cynthia looked at her. What an unlikely victor she was for John’s affections. She was a grim, unsmiling woman, with a pale, oval face. At thirty-six she was eight years older than John and more than a little out of shape. Not what you’d call a sex symbol. To top it off, she was presently married and had a six-year-old daughter. Looking at her sitting there, it suddenly dawned on Cynthia that not only was Yoko in a bathrobe, it was her bathrobe. “Oh, hi,” Yoko said, cool, unruffled.

  An excruciating silence followed as a sardonic smile slowly crossed John’s face. He seemed prepared to wait for Cynthia to speak first, so she decided to act the only way she knew how, the way she had acted through all the years of unexpected madness with the Beatles—as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. In a surreal moment, she heard herself reciting the little speech she had prepared when she was on the plane with her traveling companions, who now stood speechless behind her in the doorway of the kitchen. “We were all thinking of going out for dinner tonight,” Cynthia said softly. “We had breakfast in Greece and lunch in Rome, and we thought it would be lovely to all have dinner in London. Are you coming?”

  Even as the words left her mouth she regretted saying them. John stared hard at her. For a moment she was terrified of him, of his sabersharp tongue that slashed out at her so easily. She prayed he wouldn’t humiliate her any further in front of Yoko. He only murmured, “No thanks.”

  With that she turned and ran from the kitchen. She went from room to room in the house, gathering things to pack, useless things, mementos of a marriage that had never really worked, a photograph she would never want to see again, an invitation to a party she would want to forget. While Jenny and Magic Alex waited for her in the front hall, she raced up the main staircase to the second floor and down the hall to the master bedroom, a room nearly half the size of a tennis court, with floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall closets, his and her dressing rooms, and a bed eight feet wide on which she had waited countless nights for him to come home, only to fall asleep alone. On the way down the hall, she spotted Yoko Ono’s tattered slippers placed neatly outside the door to the guest room, and for the first of many times that day Cynthia burst into tears.

  Well, she told herself, at least they hadn’t used her own bed.

  2

  In her heart, although she could hardly admit it to herself, she knew the marriage had been doomed from the start. From the day they had met, John had struggled with demons and monsters of his own, and there was little she could do to exorcise them. Fame and fortune had turned out to be only ironies in his life. His mother and father had failed him, Paul had failed him, the Maharishi had failed him, and somehow, long ago, she had failed him. She watched as the jet-set leeches came to feed on his energy and money and sapped him dry. She stood by while, during the last few years, he kept himself afloat in a stormy sea of drugs. At twenty-eight he was virtually a drug addict; with very brief exceptions he had been high and drunk almost every day of his life since she had met him. At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbiturates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth. On some of his acid binges he would trip for weeks on end, until all the color had washed out of his vision and he was seeing things in black and white. “As far as I was concerned,” Cynthia wrote, “the rot began to set in the moment cannabis and LSD seeped its unhealthy way into our lives.” But it wasn’t the acid and the pot that finally took John from her; it was another woman.

  The fact that this seemingly wacky Japanese woman turned out to be the one was a stunning revelation to Cynthia. For as long as she could remember there was always some woman after him, or his wallet or his fame. The women ran the gamut from archetypical sleazy groupies to movie stars and writers. Only a few weeks before, John had confessed to dozens of infidelities committed during the eight years of their marriage, none of which she had suspected. He claimed in his list of conquests the American folk singer Joan Baez, the English actress Eleanor Bron, the Evening Standard journalist Maureen Cleave, and American pop singer Jackie De Shannon, along with what he estimated at three hundred other girls in towns and cities around the world. Yet it seemed that none of them had been capable of capturing his attention. Until Yoko.

  Yoko Ono was different, so it seemed. Yoko Ono had something that all the others did not: perseverance that bordered on obsession. It was a mixture of guts and gall that went beyond chutzpah into the range of something spooky. By now everyone in the household was a little wary of her. After meeting John at an art exhibit she had been unshakeable. Cynthia always thought that John’s first mistake was supporting Yoko’s art and giving her money; that would only keep her coming round for more. In the beginning she showed up at the Apple business offices and demanded to see him. When she was told that John rarely went to the office she came on to the Beatles’ loyal friend and road manager, Neil Aspinall. And when Neil rejected her, she managed to collar Ringo Starr, but Ringo couldn’t understand a word the cryptic poet/artist was going on about and soon fled. The security guards at the Abbey Road EMI recording studios, where the boys recorded their albums, used to joke that she was part of the fence, and once she threatened to chain herself to the gates in an attempt to get in to see John. Then came a long-distance assault on Kenwood. It began with a barrage of phone calls, and then, when John’s telephone number was changed three or four times, Yoko sent dozens of letters. The letters first insisted, then demanded, John’s support for her art projects. Cynthia intercepted many of the letters and began to save them when they turned dark and despairing, in case Yoko ever followed through on the threats to kill herself. She had already tried to do herself in once in Japan, and the letters sounded sincere. According to Cynthia, Yoko wrote: “I can’t carry on. You’re my last hope. If you don’t support me, that’s it, I’ll kill myself.”

  Very much alive, Yoko began to appear at Kenwood in person, waiting in the driveway of the house for John to come and go. She stood there from early in the morning until late at night, no matter what the weather, wearing the same scruffy black sweater and beat-up shoes, so intense and scowling that the housekeeper, Dorothy Jarlett, was afraid to go near her. One day Cynthia’s mother took pity on the forlorn figure and let her into the house to make a phone call and have a glass of water. But Yoko only used the occasion to leave her ring behind, which gave her a pretense to return the next day and demand to be let inside. One morning a package arrived from Yoko which Cynthia and her mother opened; it contained a Kotex box in which Yoko had buried a broken china cup painted blood red. John had a laugh about it, but Cynthia and Lillian Powell didn’t find it one bit funny.

  Eventually, Yoko’s dogged pursuit of John became so blatant that it developed into something of a private joke between the married couple. Yoko’s grande atrocité occurred one night when she turned up at a Transcendental Meditation lecture John and Cynthia were attending in London. When it was over she followed them out of the lecture hall and into the backseat of John’s psychedelically hand-painted Rolls-Royce limousine and sat herself down between them. Cynthia and John exchanged embarrassed smiles over her head until the c
hauffeur dropped her off at Park Row, where she was living with her husband. By the time Yoko got out of the car, Cynthia had become thoroughly disheartened by the woman’s apparent ability to entertain John with her crazy schemes. “Maybe Yoko’s the one for you?” she asked John apprehensively.

  John laughed that short, nasty laugh of his. “Her? She’s daft. She’s not the one for me. She’s amusing is all. I don’t fancy her.”

  Yet there she was, six months later, sipping tea in the kitchen of Kenwood, looking very much like she was the lady of the house. While Jenny and Magic Alex waited with the taxi, Cynthia packed whatever she could into a single bag and rushed downstairs to the driveway and loaded her suitcase in the trunk of the taxi with the rest of her vacation luggage. Jenny and Magic Alex piled into the backseat with her, sitting on cither side. They had offered to put her up for a few days at the flat they platonically shared in Victoria, so that Cynthia could have a few days to sort things out. The three of them sat in silence as the taxi moved down Kenwood’s long, paved drive for what Cynthia imagined would be the last time. At the front gate she lighted a cigarette and then covered her eyes with a fluttering hand, weeping silently as she smoked.

  Again and again she wondered to herself that John could be so cruel to her, and yet she could still be in love with him and willing to forgive him. Anybody else would have given up long ago. But that was the promise that Cynthia had made from the beginning, to always be there, no matter what, to never desert him no matter how bad he was to her. She knew this was a self-defeating and masochistic promise, yet there was no way to force herself to break it. She believed that she and John were destined to be together through life by a higher force, and that they would always be together, into death and after, for eternity. She still believes it to this day.

  But that night, after finding him with Yoko, there was little faith left. She sat up with Magic Alex most of the night, drinking wine and talking at a candlelit table in his apartment. She had never trusted Magic Alex before, but she desperately needed someone to talk to this night, and she poured her heart out to him. Many bottles of wine were finished by dawn, when she crawled into bed with Alex and made love to John’s best friend. Symbolically, it was a way of ending her relationship with John forever. Cynthia says that Alex practiced black magic and that he hypnotized her into doing it; probably she was just drunk.

  3

  Alternating between love and hate was always what it was like with John from the very start. It scared Cynthia just to be around him when she first got to know him at Liverpool Art College. She was nineteen years old, he was eighteen and a freshman, and in just one year everybody in the school knew what a rotten egg he was. In art school in 1958 when everybody wanted to look “bohemian” and emulate the American “Beatniks,” with black turtleneck sweaters and duffle jackets, John Lennon played the hood, a tough and incorrigible Teddy Boy, the current British brand of juvenile delinquent. Cynthia watched him from the corner of her eye as he breezed through the back door of lettering class on Thursday afternoons in his long tweed overcoat, battered guitar slung over his back, myopically scowling at the world from behind thick, black-framed eyeglasses. He was tall and long-legged in a clumsy sort of way, and his unwashed drainpipe trousers were so tight that he had to snake each ankle into them to get dressed in the morning. He wore his hair in a greasy, molded wave above his forehead in lame imitation of Elvis Presley, his idol. He had a quick and witty, but very, very mean, tongue. He could lay someone to waste with a few of his barbs, and no one, teachers and students alike, was safe from his lethal wit. Unfortunately for Cynthia, he sat directly behind her during lettering class, and there was no escape. He did no schoolwork, and every other word out of his mouth was “fuck.” He wasted his time drawing cartoons of deformed babies and cripples, his fingers calloused from the guitar and stained from nicotine. The only time he ever spoke civilly to Cynthia was when he borrowed her ruler and pens, which he never returned and for which she was too frightened to ask. More often than not he had liquor or beer on his breath, and although he chain-smoked cigarettes, they were rarely his own, and it seemed his constant mission to bum one.

  Cynthia Powell neither smoked nor drank. She was a proper girl with beautiful pale skin, blond hair, and limpid blue eyes, a girl so innocent she did not even listen to dirty jokes. She had been brought up in Hoylake, a comparatively posh Liverpool suburb across the Mersey, in a terraced house by the sea. She and her two older brothers had a strict but warm and protective upbringing. She developed into a sweet and demure teenager with a kind smile and soft voice. She dressed in prim coordinated skirt and sweater outfits and had dated the same boy every weekend for three years without ever venturing past the necking-on-the-doorstep stage. When he temporarily broke up with her for another girl, she spent six months pining for him until she got him back by walking her dog past his house late at night, staring wistfully at his windows. Her father died of cancer when she was seventeen, and the following year she entered Liverpool Art College.

  She kept John Lennon at arm’s length with great apprehension for the first six months she knew him. She probably never would have bothered to get to know him any better if it hadn’t been for his guitar. One day, in the noisy basement dining hall of the art college, Cynthia had just finished a bag lunch that her mother had made for her when she noticed a small knot of students forming around the edge of the stage on the far side of the cafeteria. She went over with her girlfriends to see what was happening and found John sitting on the stage apron, playing his guitar and singing. He was singing “Ain’t She Sweet,” and he looked positively beatific. His glasses were off, and she could see his eyes for the first time. He relaxed as he sang, and all the anger and malice in his face were gone. His voice was lovely but most peculiar, a kind of nasal croon with a distinctly Liverpudlian accent called “scouse.” Some indefinable quality made it sound not so much sweet as poignant. Unable to tear herself away, Cynthia stood there in the enlarging crowd, listening to song after song, transfixed by the John Lennon emerging from underneath the tough shell.

  She didn’t admit to herself that her feelings for him had changed drastically until one morning several weeks later when Cynthia was sitting several rows behind him in the school auditorium and noticed Helen Anderson put her hand on John’s head and affectionately begin to stroke his hair. Cynthia was so crazed with jealousy she almost jumped out of her seat. She sat through the rest of the auditorium period near tears, not even certain why. Was she losing her mind? Certainly she couldn’t have fallen for this lout, this vulgar brute, without even realizing it. But when, this time after lettering class, John again took out his guitar and began to play, she knew as she watched him sing that she was in love with him.

  “Lettering class became my fix,” she later wrote in her autobiography. Now she couldn’t sit close enough to him or find enough reasons to run into him “accidentally” in the hallway. “I was spending miserable, agonizing hours wandering the drafty college corridors just in the hope of a glimpse.” It was only their mutual myopia that finally broke the ice. On one of those Thursday afternoons in lettering class, the students were paired off and told to give each other eye tests. Cynthia situated herself so she would become John’s partner. To Cynthia’s great delight, the results of the test proved that, without their glasses, they were each almost as blind as the other. John confessed how terribly self-conscious he was about his glasses and that sometimes he even refused to wear them in the cinema. By the end of the class they were friendly enough to nod hello to each other in the hallway.

  When Cynthia heard through the grapevine that John’s big crush of the moment was Brigitte Bardot, she began to alter her appearance to please him. Her hair took on a brassy highlight and puffed up into a new, bouffant bubble. She traded in her demure sweater sets and calf-length skirts for tight black velvet trousers and revealing sweaters. At Woolworth’s she bought a pair of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings. By the end of a few months she even su
rprised herself with how tarted up she looked, sometimes so much so that the drunks on the bus going home at night would mistake her for a “toddie” and proposition her with money. Still, John paid little or no attention to her until an end-of-term Christmas party. Cynthia arrived at the party early, hoping John would be there. She put her glasses in her pocketbook and stood at the side of the room, squinting to make him out in the crowd. John didn’t arrive until the party was almost over. He made his way slowly around the room, talking to all the girls, joking with his friends. Cynthia hoped he would come toward her.

  By the time John reached her she was limp from anticipation. Then he shocked her by asking her to dance. To her own surprise, she acted cool and calm with him on the dance floor. She seemed almost aloof. When John casually suggested they might go to a party together, Cynthia blurted out, “I’m awfully sorry, I’m engaged to this fellow in Hoylake.” She couldn’t believe she had said it. She could have kicked herself on the spot.

  John’s face fell. “I didn’t ask you to marry me!” he snapped and walked away, leaving her on the dance floor.

  Later that day, however, John had recovered enough to ask Cynthia to join him and his friends at the local student pub, Ye Cracke, on a street adjacent to the school. Cynthia took her best girlfriend, Phyllis McKenzie, along with her for “protection.” The tiny pub was swollen with rowdy students celebrating the end of semester, and caught up in the good spirits, Cynthia found herself buying John and the boys a few rounds of beer. Soon she was a little tipsy herself and laughing and talking, and John was teasing Cynthia about how proper she was. “No dirty words and no dirty jokes in front of Miss Powell, if you please,” he admonished them with mock sternness. “Didn’t you know Miss Powell was a nun, then?” It was at that moment, in the pub, that she realized she would be hopelessly in love with him for the rest of her life.