Unable to express, let alone share, his feelings, he turned to Liverpool’s well-tried method of anesthetizing them. Most afternoons, he would stagger back to college from Ye Cracke with Jeff Mohammed, helplessly drunk and bent on ever more mindless disruption and devilment. One day, Arthur Ballard found him trying to urinate into the elevator shaft. The verbal cruelty he had always used on even his best friends seemed to grow still sharper and more unpredictable as he sensed their pity and confusion. “He tried it on with me,” Bill Harry says. “But I came from a tough background; I told him to fuck off, and never had any trouble with him again. Stu Sutcliffe was different, though. John admired his work, but he could be terrible to him on a personal level. He’d make fun of Stu for being small…go on and on about it. And Stu never seemed to answer back.”
The truth was that Stu possessed a maturity and wisdom beyond his eighteen years. He recognized that the price of John’s friendship were these occasional venomous outbursts, and decided that it was a price worth paying. “John came to rely on that,” says Stu’s sister Pauline. “He knew Stuart could be pushed, but that he’d never be pushed away.”
Almost everyone Stu met ended up being drawn or painted by him, and John was a subject he seemed to find more fascinating than most. A pencil sketch, made not long after they first met, shows John hunkered down with what looked like a skiffler’s washboard—faceless yet still unmistakable. In a Sutcliffe oil painting of the student crowd at Ye Cracke, he dominates the foreground, seated on a bar-stool in a tan sweater and blue (suede?) shoes, clutching his pint glass, and staring off into the distance, lost in his own acrid thoughts.
The experience of knowing John also inspired Stu temporarily to forsake paint and charcoal for prose. In late 1958, he began writing a novel whose central character was named John and was very obviously drawn from life: “capricious, incalculable and self-centred, yet at the same time…a loyal friend.” The novel seems never to have had a title, and it petered out after a few hundred words in Stu’s meticulous italic handwriting. The surviving fragments read less like fiction than a case study of its hero and the “terrible change” that comes over him nine months after the narrator meets him. (It was about nine months after Stu first encountered the real-life John that Julia was killed.)
Even Aunt Mimi, never one given to idle praise, would later call Stu the best and truest friend John ever had.
The first steady girlfriend he had found at college was Thelma Pickles, a stunningly attractive Intermediate student whom he met through Helen Anderson. Thelma was as much of an individualist as he, and their relationship, while it lasted, was often stormy. “He could be very unbearable at times,” she would remember. “He was never violent…but he would say things to hurt you. I think it was a defence thing, because he could be vulnerable at times [like] when you talked about his mother. He would become almost dreamy and very quiet. It was his weak spot….” She also had a tongue every bit as sharp as John’s, and did not hesitate to use it if ever he tried to vent his anger and anguish on her. “Don’t blame me,” she once lashed back at him, “just because your mother’s dead!”
Of all possible successors to Thelma, Cynthia Powell seemed the least likely. A year older than John, she was a mildly pretty, bespectacled girl of the hardworking and conformist type he termed “spaniels.” At college she had impinged on his notice only as an object of ridicule, thanks to her school head-prefecty Christian name and the fact that she came from Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, a supposed bastion of suburban gentility and decorum. “No dirty jokes please, it’s Cynthia,” he would admonish his cronies sarcastically when she approached, seldom failing to make her blush to the roots of her mousy, permed hair.
She was not in John’s workgroup but in Geoff Mohammed’s and thus shared a classroom with him only in a few general activities such as Lettering. For this detested but unavoidable weekly penance, he would slouch in late, his guitar slung troubadour-style on his back, and, somehow, always take the seat immediately behind her. He never had any of the proper equipment, so would have to borrow her meticulously kept pencils and brushes, usually going off with them afterwards and not bothering to return them.
Cynthia’s future at this point seemed as neatly laid out as the materials on her desk. She had a steady boyfriend named Barry, whom she planned to marry before pursuing her chosen career of art teacher. She was not in the market for any new beau, least of all one whose ways were so turbulently and distastefully unlike the ways of Hoylake. Yet John had a powerful, half-fearful fascination for her. On a couple of occasions, she watched him perch on a desk and play his guitar, and was stirred by the very different look this brought to the usually hard, mocking face. “It softened…. All the aggression lifted,” she would recall. “At last there was something I had seen in John that I could understand.”
Her feelings clicked into focus one day in the college lecture theater when she was seated a few places away from John, and saw the attractive Helen Anderson suddenly start to stroke his hair. There was nothing between Helen and him; she was simply bewailing his greasy Teddy Boy locks and urging him to have them shampooed and cut shorter. Nonetheless, Cynthia felt a sudden, irrational surge of jealousy.
From that moment, rather than avoiding John’s eye, she set out to catch it. She grew her hair down to her shoulders in the fashionable bohemian manner and exchanged her mumsy woolens and tweed skirt for the white duffle jacket and black velvet slacks favored by college sirens like Thelma Pickles. She also gave up wearing the glasses, which, as she thought, most condemned her as a swot and spaniel to John. Since she was extremely nearsighted and could not afford contact lenses, then still an expensive novelty, this aspect of her makeover brought its problems. In the morning, her bus regularly carried her far beyond the art college stop when she failed to recognize it in time.
One day she and John were in a group of students who began a game of testing one another’s vision. To her amazement, Cynthia discovered that he was as myopic as she was, and equally self-conscious about wearing glasses. He in turn discovered that, only a year earlier, Cynthia’s father had died of lung cancer, leaving her as devastated as he now was himself. Better than all the clear-sighted people around, this shy, prim Hoylake girl knew just what he was feeling.
The end of the 1958 winter term was celebrated by a midday get-together in one of the lecture rooms. A gramophone was playing, and, egged on by Jeff Mohammed, John asked Cynthia to dance. Thrown into confusion by this unexpected move, she blurted out that she was engaged to a fellow in Hoylake. “I didn’t ask you to fuckin’ marry me, did I?” John snapped back. After the party came a drinking session at Ye Cracke, which John persuaded the usually abstemious Cynthia to join. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon alone together at Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s flat in Percy Street.
Among their fellow students—the female ones at least—there was no doubt as to who had the better bargain. “Cynthia was a catch for John,” Ann Mason says. “She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.”
She was different indeed from the strong-willed, caustic females who had hitherto dominated John’s life. She was soft, gentle, and tranquil (although secretly prone to bouts of paralyzing nerves). She also possessed the notions of male superiority shared by many young women in the late fifties, which could have won them unconditional employment in a geisha house. She deferred to John in everything, never questioning or arguing, always complying with what she later called his “rampant” demand for sex. Normally, he might quickly have tired of such a companion, but in the desolation of Julia’s death, Cynthia answered his deepest unspoken needs. “I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,” the former Thelma Pickles says. “She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.”
The two began dating in a manner reflecting their suburban backgrounds as much as
their bohemian student life. Since both of them still lived at home, they had nowhere to be together in private, unless Stu and Rod Murray both tactfully absented themselves from the Percy Street flat. Their trysts therefore consisted mainly of cinemagoing or sitting for hour after hour in a coffee bar, holding hands over their foam-flecked glass cups. At John’s insistence, Cynthia stayed in town until the latest possible moment each night, catching the last train from Lime Street to Hoylake amid homegoing drunks and hooligans “[for] the longest 20 minutes of my life,” then walking unaccompanied through the dark streets to her home.
Everything he asked, she gave unstintingly. Her eight-shilling (40p) daily subsistence allowance kept him in coffees, fish-and-chips, Capstan Full-Strength cigarettes, and replacement guitar strings. She did his college work for him when he could not be bothered to finish—or begin—it and neglected her own whenever he demanded attention. To please him, she changed her whole appearance into one hopefully resembling his ultimate fantasy woman, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings with garter belts. Waiting for John in such attire at their usual rendezvous, outside Lewis’s department store, she would dread being mistaken for a totty, or Liverpool tart.
On bus journeys, he would choose a seat behind some balding elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming overparody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. “John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,” she would remember. “Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.”
The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in the hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.
As “going out with” moved into its next phrase, “going steady,” the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away forever.
Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knickknacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.
Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat, and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, “in tears.”
This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights with him in town. Fortuitously, Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s landlady at 9 Percy Street had rented the whole ground floor to a new tenant who in turn sublet its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.
Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. “I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.”
In these days, it was still considered quite normal for men of every stamp—and northern Englishmen above all—to keep “their” women in line by physical chastisement if and when they saw fit. “As a teenager all I saw were films where men beat up women,” John would recall. “That was tough, that was the thing to do, slap them in the face, treat them rough, Humphrey Bogart and all that jazz….” Cynthia’s autobiography, A Twist of Lennon, published in 1977, made no mention of having suffered physical abuse from him. Some twenty years later in a BBC documentary, she recounted how, one night when she was not seeing John, she and Phyllis McKenzie had gone to an out-of-town club and afterwards been given a lift home by two boys they had met. Next day at college, she mentioned the innocent episode to John. Phyllis then described finding her in tears after he’d “slapped her face.”
Cynthia’s second autobiography, published in 2005, had a harsher story to relate. One evening at a party, John “went mad” after someone told him she was dancing with Stu Sutcliffe. They stopped as soon as they saw the look on his face, and Cyn hastened to mollify him. The next day, however, he followed her down to the ladies’ toilets in the college basement. When she came out, he hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall, then walked off without a word. As a result, she chucked him, and they stayed apart for three months until John persuaded her to take him back. Even according to this score-settling account, he was never again physically violent to her.
Summer of 1959 brought the multipart examination that Intermediate students had to pass before moving on to their chosen specialty. Despite his dismal past performance in almost all the areas covered by the exam, John managed to scrape through. Well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers alike rallied round to help him make up the deficiencies of the past five terms. Stu Sutcliffe gave him a crash course in basic painting skills, devoting night after night to the task in an empty lecture room, while Cynthia waited pat
iently at an adjacent desk.
As well as taking the examination, he was required to submit course work in the form of paintings or drawings. “The trouble was, he hadn’t done anything like enough,” Ann Mason remembers. One day, while I was going through my stuff with Arthur Ballard, I saw John standing there, looking a bit despondent. So I offered him some of my drawings to put in for the exam. I wondered if I’d get one of his tongue-lashings, but he just said ‘Oh, yeah…great!’” Both Cynthia and Thelma Pickles would also later recall making similar contributions to his portfolio.
The college had just inaugurated a Department of Commercial Design, for which the polymathic Bill Harry was already bound. To Ballard, it seemed the obvious place to develop John’s talent for cartooning and satire. Because of his reputation as a troublemaker, however, the department head, Roy Sharpe, refused to accept him. A fuming Ballard retorted that Sharpe would be better off “teaching in a Sunday school.”
The college’s only alternative was to put John into the Painting School alongside Stu Sutcliffe, tacitly hoping that over the next two years Stu’s talent, energy, and dedication might prove to be contagious.
In March 1958, Elvis Presley had been drafted into the U.S. Army, the glorious inky billows of his hair planed to the scalp, his blue suede shoes traded for heavy-duty boots, the inimitable name rendered down to a mere serial number, the insolent flaunt of his crotch replaced by a stiff-backed salute.
“The King” was the greatest but by no means only loss to rock-’n’-roll’s barely erected pantheon. In February 1959, Buddy Holly was killed when his chartered plane crashed on a tour of the snow-bound American Midwest, so leaving thousands of British boys—John among them—bereft of a friend whose speaking voice they had never heard, wondering where their next lesson in how to play rock music would come from. Yet just before his death, Holly, too, had apparently decided to move on from rock ’n’ roll; his final recordings were thoughtful ballads, with his backing group, the Crickets, replaced by a string orchestra.