Albert Goldman - The Lives of John Lennon (Lennon Special Part 1)
London: Bantam Press, 1988
About the Author: Albert Goldman was an academic and biographer whose writings on American pop culture appeared in a number of leading publications. A widely-praised biography of Lenny Bruce was eventually followed by a notorious biography of Elvis Presley, in which critics saw reflected Goldman’s apparent dislike of his subject. At the time of his death in 1994, Goldman was working on a biography of late Doors lead singer Jim Morrison, which was unpublished. He taught at numerous universities in New York during his life, finishing his life as an associate professor at Columbia University.
Plot: Without a shadow of a doubt, the most controversial biography of any figure in popular culture, let alone a Beatle, which has ever been published. The Lives of John Lennon tore apart the image of the sainted John Lennon, who had been murdered eight years previously. Goldman had to defend his researches and claims immediately, and the book continues to enrage friends and commentators alike.
Review: Sometime in early 1967, the pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Howarth were given a brief to design an album cover. Though the concept of the record was rather loose, based around a made-up working mens’ band, Blake’s suggestion was that the group, having just played their concert in the local bandstand, would be stood in front of their audience, the mass of people comprised of personalities and celebrities the real musicians were influenced by, admired or even merely imagined.
One member of that real group, ever prone to spikiness and absurdity, chose for his part a writer, a footballer, an occultist and two polar opposites: Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ. The completed cover went on to sheath the most celebrated album of the counterculture, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by The Beatles. And the member who chose the most written-about figures in history? Of course, it could only have been John Lennon.
Lennon allegedly once called a meeting to inform the other members of the band that he was Jesus Christ, and for Apple, their organisation, to prepare a press release informing the world of the fact. Lennon had form for deity-baiting, having to apologise years earlier for his “we’re bigger than Jesus now” quote, which had led to mass protests in the American Bible Belt prior to The Beatles’ second US tour.
Whether The Beatles were really bigger than Jesus or Lennon the Second Coming is open for debate, but what is not in question is the fascination he and the group hold over the world to this day. It’s entirely possible that in terms of biographical word count, John Lennon features in a high placing behind his Pepper choices (sadly, neither made the cut), and perhaps only Elvis Presley can compete with Lennon in terms of rock n’ roll canonisation.
But, and this is probably the only time the point will be made, there is a crossover between the three twentieth-century icons mentioned above: all came from nowhere to, for a brief time, capture the attention of the entire world. A failed artist from Braunau-am-Inn, a truck driver from Tupelo, and a student from sleepy Woolton Village in one of Liverpool’s leafier suburbs are in part directly responsible for the world we live in today, and certainly there is an essay to be written at length about their impact on celebrity and of celebrity on them.
It is the unlikeliness of each’s rise which fascinates. We look at humble beginnings and try to follow the steps to work out why things were different for these men. In Lennon’s case, why did The Beatles capture the imagination in the way that, say, Billy J. Kramer didn’t? What made that famous front porch in Menlove Avenue, with its distinct echo, such a divine proving ground for his songwriting talent?
Of course, there are no easy answers to this, unless you choose the easiest one of all, which is to proclaim John Lennon to be a genius. This is as likely a claim as him actually being Jesus, since a read of even the most hagiographic Beatles biography will disabuse you of the notion that he had a spark of the divine. An autodidact from his earliest days, Lennon’s rebellious nature led him towards anything which horrified his guardian (the ferocious Aunt Mimi), including art college, The Goon Show and eventually a guitar. Having decided music was the career for him, John formed a band, which led to a link with Paul McCartney, and world stardom via Hamburg, The Cavern, Abbey Road and Shea Stadium. But as much as The Beatles’ early smashes were the product of a peculiarly English tint on soul, country and R&B, and a keen competition between musically-gifted partners, their later triumphs were slow burns borne of endless studio experimentation, many of which were painfully teased out on inadequate equipment.
But nobody likes that version, and by now we know so much about The Beatles and Lennon that we have a handle on his life from his conception as a “Saturday-night special” to the bullet which clipped off his rib and severed his aorta. Thus Lennon’s life has been tooled into the acts we know: angry young man mourning the death of his mother; Hamburg roustabout; Beatlemania; LSD voyager; Yoko; going solo; the Lost Weekend; house-husband; murder victim and finally secular saint. Above that, only sky.
The man himself once claimed that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, but what is perhaps more true for John Lennon is that life is what happened after The Beatles stopped having them. Although determined to be the one who left first, Lennon had been blindsided by McCartney’s velvet-gloved sucker-punch that he and Lennon were no longer going to work together in a press release for his home-recorded solo debut. Barring over a decade of torturous litigation and possible reconciliations, The Beatles as a group were dead, and what stretched out in front of John Lennon was a life which had peaked unimaginably before he even turned thirty.
However, Lennon, who had had to bear the sudden deaths of three parental figures early in life too (Mimi’s husband Norman Smith, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and of course his mother Julia), was himself convinced that he would live a short life. In hindsight Lennon was the ex-Beatle with the highest profile - perhaps not in terms of sales, tours and chart success, but certainly in terms of ideas, experiences and infamy. Every biography since John Lennon’s death groans with material about his lost decade: associations with peace, radical politics, affairs, drinking in LA, heroin and Holstein cattle.
Of course, being interested and involved in different things in no way suggests John Lennon made an acceptable target for a madman’s gun barrel, but there is no denying his post-Beatles life was lived restlessly and largely in pursuit of either distraction or oblivion. The frustration within him was barely assuaged with a non-stop round of sex, drugs, Brandy Alexanders and a thousand new hobbies, and it is easy to imagine in those dark hours a yearning for it all to stop. Lennon was not the only member to suffer - Ringo Starr had documented battles with alcohol - but from his earliest days Lennon was too fidgety to settle on the faux-domesticity which saved McCartney or not self-possessed enough to buy into the faith which entranced George Harrison. Lennon publicly renounced Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and God, declaiming, “I just believe in me”, but that was the paradox at John Lennon’s heart - the man he believed in didn’t believe anything.
Well, maybe for a time, he did. No John Lennon tale is truly complete without including Yoko Ono. In the forty years since her husband’s death Ono has been rehabilitated, becoming a respected and admired figure for her philanthropy and the dignity in which she absorbed the grief of the entire world. She retains a spikiness (the battle with McCartney over the order of the credits on the Anthology version of 'Yesterday' being a prime example), and not everybody is in love with the selling of John as icon, but by and large the image is of a grand dame, overseeing her late husband’s half of an estate which is worth billions.
This battle was won in multiple exhausting skirmishes. Long considered the original Woman Who Broke Up The Band, Yoko was an outsider from the start, having to contend with the ire of Beatles fans, press hostility, racism, taunts, laughter and rumour. Because of bed-ins and naked album covers, there’s a strong belief that Yoko Ono somehow bewitched Lennon into renouncing his kinship with old friends, turning him onto drugs and weirdo art and forcing him to prize his solo ambitions over the collective. When she’d done that, she pushed her own agenda, even squeezing her own terrible songs onto Double Fantasy, the album Mark Chapman asked Lennon to sign a few hours before they met again.
As with John himself, the ballad of Yoko Ono isn’t quite that simple, and it’s not quite that complicated. Ono is undoubtedly a shrewd and relentless self-promoter, but then circumstances encouraged this: born of one of Japan’s richest families, she survived the firebombings of Tokyo and eschewed rigid convention to enter the art world, which was about as open to a shy and unknown Oriental as the tabloid press. In most accounts (certainly of her formative period) Yoko doesn’t come across as particularly humble or talented other than for being a hustler, but perhaps this says more about attitudes to gender roles than it does about likeability. After all, didn’t Elvis himself turn up at Sun to make a birthday recording for his mother hoping to be discovered?
It’s now impossible at this remove to separate art from artist, though writers will keep trying. There’s more to solo Lennon than ‘Imagine’ and more to Ono than curator of an increasingly drier well, but now we have the image of John Lennon we collectively craved in response to his murder: a truth-seeker, aware of his faults (and not afraid to point them out in others), and above all a warrior for peace gunned down at the start of his second life. Anybody who claims otherwise is merely looking for trouble.
Right on cue, enter Albert Goldman. A former journalist and professor of English at Columbia, Goldman also had two decades of music criticism under his belt at the time of the publication of The Lives of John Lennon. Lives was the result of six years of research and over 1200 interviews by Goldman and his team of researchers, and attempted to shed new light on Lennon’s early years, his relationship with Yoko and what really happened in the gap between his affair with May Pang and his untimely death.
It’s fair to say that the glow created by the book’s publication in 1988 was a fiery red. Immediately denounced by the remaining Beatles and threatened with legal action from an incandescent Ono, Goldman’s work was immediately controversial because of a number of revelations about Lennon’s life, and his unashamed hostility towards his widow.
Among the wow moments smeared across each one of the book’s seven hundred pages are the following assertions: that John Lennon may have killed a man in his Hamburg days and also felt he was responsible for the death of former bassist Stuart Sutcliffe; that Lennon and Brian Epstein had a full-blown physical relationship; that Epstein’s death was not caused by an accidental overdose but as the result of sado-masochistic asphyxiation; that Lennon caused Yoko to miscarry after beating her severely; that he was a hermit confined to a single bedroom, distributing his whims by note to unseen helpers; that he wasted millions of dollars on fortune tellers, psychics and art dealers; that Yoko arranged for Paul McCartney to be busted by Japanese customs agents; that she maintained a habit under John’s nose while he was spiralling into anorexia. All this, plus tales of statutory rape, domestic violence, public disorder, numerologists, ancient Egyptian curses and seven feet tall Columbian witches.
If Albert Goldman had set out to write a more lurid account of John Lennon’s life and career it’s difficult to imagine how he could have topped Lives. A sensation which instantly became a lightning rod for music lovers everywhere, Goldman stood by his research, even if he admitted some of the claims were interpretations of things he had been told. Almost immediately his publishers had to issue a statement standing behind their writer, and Rolling Stone rebutted the evidence for a lot of the new material, finding either unreliable witnesses or coercive interview tactics. The authors of that article, David Fricke and Jeffrey Ressner, firmly stated, “the book is riddled with factual inaccuracies, embroidered accounts of true events that border on fiction and suspect information provided by tainted sources. Goldman provides only vague documentation for some of his most serious allegations, and he has drawn considerably from previously published works on Lennon and the Beatles, sometimes without sufficient credit.” And from such a takedown, The Lives of John Lennon has never recovered.
So, what’s it like? Paul McCartney called it “trash”, and that’s entirely the right word for The Lives of John Lennon. One the one hand, you have a book which is literally as thick as a house brick, and on the other, a work containing some of the most salacious material ever committed to a print run. At times you wonder in whose fevered imagination some of these claims were concocted, for some of them are so incredible you’d expect to see them in a supermarket tabloid. In some cases the chapter is based around the germ of an idea and the sources fitted around it rather than the other way around.
Now, when dealing with biography it’s important to remember that distaste is no reason to omit fact, but even the most ardent Beatle-hater wouldn’t have thought of much of this stuff. Goldman claimed that he started the project out of admiration for Lennon and grew more dismayed the more he discovered, but only rarely does he stray into the positive, spending much of his time painting his subject in the worst possible light. There’s little dispute that John Lennon was a complicated and volatile man, but it took Mark Chapman five bullets to kill John Lennon the man; Goldman took six years and seven hundred pages trying to kill John Lennon the myth.
Let’s take a look at some of these allegations. Lennon the murderer? No evidence, other than a conversation with a drinking buddy. Lennon and Epstein? There have been conflicting claims about their ‘affair’ for decades, but no real consistency to the how or why, but Goldman embroiders what threads there are by making their relationship as master and servant, with Lennon using his sexual hold over Epstein to control the manager. Again, it’s hearsay and second hand evidence injected with steroids. Almost entirely, the revelations (for what they are) are not based on direct quotes or a reliable source, and as such lack a veneer of credibility. Many of Goldman’s stories about life in the Dakota building comes from Marlene Hair, whom he treats as an oracle but who others, Ono included, maintain was no confidante. Another source was handed five years’ probation for stealing Lennon’s diaries and effects.
There is also a startling difference in the treatment of Lennon’s post-Beatles life and the one that led there. Lives is split roughly fifty-fifty between the two but it’s clear Goldman feels far more confident with his sources once Lennon settles in the States. In large part The Beatles’ actual career is skated over, Goldman finding it far more interesting to probe for scandal or tension. So instead of exploring, say, the sacking of Pete Best or the writing of the classics, Goldman concentrates on Epstein’s ineptitude as a manager or Lennon’s volcanic outbursts at the Abbey Road engineers. He makes you wonder if The Beatles really did have the career we know, and if they did, whether any of it was actually worth it.
But once Lennon is in America, Goldman’s tongue loosens, and extended quotes abound, particularly during his infamous “Long Weekend” living in Los Angeles with his assistant May Pang. Presumably based on material Pang had already written about in her own memoirs, a great chunk of the book is devoted to Lennon’s drunken debauchery, in which he comes across as a tedious and hateful bum. While not sympathetic to Lennon’s search for a purpose by spending all of his money, it gets to a point where you wonder why so much time is devoted to this, because as he and his circle barrel into one bar after another, their scent leaves little to recommend it, and behind the scenes the man is losing all of his money and a paranoid Phil Spector has impounded an entire album of his in a fortress-like house. I mean, yes, around this time, Lennon was a shit - you didn’t need to include every voice telling you so.
Obviously, a great deal of the rest of the book is devoted to the hated Yoko, who refused to be interviewed for the book and is almost constantly criticised. In fact, if one were inclined, you could make a case for the book being a double bluff, because there’s no way you could finish Lives and have anything but the utmost sympathy for her in the face of such vitriol. Long-used to hearing clichés about her, it is still a shock to read Goldman describe her as “simian-looking”, and while he largely concentrates on matters of taste rather than race, there’s very little overtly positive he has to say. His Ono veers between cold to clingy, from talentless to totally deluded, from spendaholic to stingy and from streetwise to spoiled. Filling Apartment 72 with frauds and fakirs, Goldman has Yoko tug poor John from country to country in search of lost treasures and high art, filling his head with air and mummery while wasting his ever-dwindling royalties.
Well, it could all be true. Or it could be absolute twaddle. One thing that you can say about Lives is that research was definitely undertaken, but then you look at the sources supplied for the book, and of that huge weight, a handful of pages are devoted to his evidence. Goldman has split his sources into sections, such as childhood or New York, but then by and large crams lists of names together, giving them all an equal place and therefore an equal weight as an insight. In what biography would a subject’s guardian or ex-wife be given an equal footing to a session musician or a tarot reader? No serious one I can think of. Finally, for a rock critic, there are too many errors of basic fact that even I, a novice in the world of Beatles minutiae, started to wonder if Goldman was talking about another band with another iconic singer.
This is before you discuss the style of the book itself. Goldman is a natural gossip but not up to snuff as a writer. That’s fine; there are plenty of biographers who are researchers first and writers second. Goldman uses a certain approach to try and enliven the mounds of research, but Lives is riddled with absurd similies, unwarranted exclamation marks and annoying typos. Brian Epstein is described as “a typical mama’s boy of the pet lamb variety”; of later Beatles manager Allen Klein Goldman says, “compared with the gleaming Jack Kennedy style of [Paul McCartney’s manager and father-in-law] John Eastman, Allen Klein came across as a fuckin’ working-class hero!”; of the first meeting between Auntie Mimi and Yoko, Goldman bafflingly says thus: “Only Mimi wasn’t just saying it. She was as serious as a heart attack.” If it’s supposed to be funny, it grates; if it’s supposed to be serious, heaven help Goldman’s former English students.
I have no particular axe to grind with an alternative view of John Lennon. To me, he’s never been a saint and I’m sure the idea of being around him was preferable to actually spending time with him. In large part that’s due to the warping effects of excessive fame and money, but it can’t be denied that he was partly or wholly responsible for some of my very favourite music and therefore helped to shape my life. You never want your heroes to have feet of clay, but Lennon was human, and thank God for that.
Albert Goldman, however, doesn’t have much to recommend him as a biographer, and I’m happy that this book has become a queer footnote in the Lennon archive. Goldman passed away in 1994 and as far as I am aware, stood by this work. Twenty years later Beatles biographer Philip Norman published an authoritative and similarly-sized work on Lennon, with none of the sensationalism but all of the credibility lacking in The Lives of John Lennon, and the one described therein is the one you need. As for this, maybe Goldman should have tried being a paperback writer, since I took it entirely as a fiction.
Will this book stay on the bedroom floor?: It’s huge, and it stinks like one of the many cat turds Goldman claims were dotted all over the apartments of the Dakota. So no, I don’t have the space in my house or my mind to leave it there.
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