John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

From the Publisher

Philip Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the definitive portrait of John Lennon.

This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.

Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions—tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure—and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.

Publishers Weekly

Graeme Malcolm does an excellent job reading Norman's studious biography of the most beloved Beatle. Beginning with Lennon's parents' roots in working-class Liverpool, and continuing through his enormous success as part of the world's most popular band and as a solo artist, Norman's biography covers all the bases of an already-well-thumbed life. Malcolm does a particularly superb job of capturing the inimitable Liverpudlian accents of the Fab Four, and Lennon in particular. Stately, but studded with flashes of good humor and a storyteller's sensibility for rhythm, Malcolm's reading is good enough to keep listeners hooked, as if they were listening to "I Want to Hold Your Hand," or "Let It Be." An Ecco hardcover (Reviews, July 7). (Nov.)

Douglas King - Library Journal

This extensive, thoroughly researched biography traces the life of John Lennon, who, nearly 30 years after his murder, remains one of the most intriguing and respected figures in popular music. Novelist and biographer Norman, who recounted the story of the Beatles in Shout!, focuses here on Lennon's life outside his legendary band, with particular emphasis on his subject's tumultuous, unconventional childhood, his strange and sometimes shocking relationships with and attitudes toward his parents, and his two very different marriages. Lennon's treatment of his discarded first wife and long-suffering, seafaring father are examined in rich detail, shedding new light on his complex personality. Norman investigates both Lennon the public figure and, more interestingly, Lennon the private man, revealing a uniquely talented and influential artist and activist who suffered from sometimes debilitating insecurity and abandonment issues that haunted him throughout his life. Exclusive new commentary from Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and sundry confidants and family members provides fresh insight to this accessible albeit lengthy work of popular biography. A highly recommended addition to any public library's music or biography collection. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Comprehensive biography of the Beatles' most outspoken and controversial member, whose murder by a demented fan in 1980 only added to his legacy. Norman wrote one of the first and still one of the best Beatles histories (Shout!, 1981), and though he claims to have corrected many "inaccuracies and misjudgments" from that earlier work, there just isn't much new to say about the group's historic, hysterical popularity or John Lennon's role in it. The author, who is also a veteran novelist (Everyone's Gone to the Moon, 1996, etc.), tries to compensate by giving an in-depth account of Lennon's early years, stressing the lifelong rage and fear of abandonment instilled by familial instability. He was raised by his Aunt Mimi after his father left, while his mother Julia lived nearby with her lover. Lennon was traumatized by Julia's death in 1958, when he was 17. Norman takes a long time to get to the formation of the Beatles; the extraordinary songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney (who gets kinder assessment here than in Shout!); the group's seasoning in the tawdry clubs of Hamburg; their first taste of the mania they inspired in female fans when they played Liverpool's Cavern club in 1961; their breakthrough into national stardom thanks to manager Brian Epstein's and record producer George Martin's nurturing of their talent; the paradigm-shattering American tour of 1964; and the rest of the familiar tale, retold here with care but little passion. The author is frank enough about Lennon's insecurities and capacity for cruelty to have alienated his widow, Yoko Ono, who initially cooperated with Norman but withdrew her endorsement after reading the manuscript, concluding it was "mean toJohn." It isn't. Norman's fully three-dimensional portrait has no evident axe to grind, but it's also hard to tell why he bothered. He's particularly perfunctory with the post-Beatle years, evincing respect but no real affinity for Lennon's political radicalism and avant-garde adventures with Ono. Intelligent and sympathetic, but overlong and unfocused. Agent: Michael Sissons/PFD

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

John Lennon: The Life

Chapter One

War Baby

I was never really wanted.

John Lennon was born with a gift for music and comedy that would carry him further from his roots than he ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he was lured away from the British Isles by the seemingly boundless glamour and opportunity to be found across the Atlantic. He achieved that rare feat for a British performer of taking American music to the Americans and playing it as convincingly as any homegrown practitioner, or even more so. For several years, his group toured the country, delighting audiences in city after city with their garish suits, funny hair, and contagiously happy grins.

This, of course, was not Beatle John Lennon but his namesake paternal grandfather, more commonly known as Jack, born in 1855. Lennon is an Irish surname...from O'Leannain or O'Lonain...and Jack habitually gave his birthplace as Dublin, though there is evidence that his family had already crossed the Irish Sea to become part of Liverpool's extensive Hibernian community some time previously. He began his working life as a clerk, but in the 1880s followed a common impulse among his compatriots and emigrated to New York. Whereas the city turned other immigrant Irishmen into laborers or police officers, Jack wound up as a member of Andrew Roberton's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels.

However brief or casual his involvement, this made him part of the first transatlantic popular music industry. American minstrel troupes, in which white men blackened their faces, put on outsize collars and stripey pantaloons, and sang sentimental choruses about the SwaneeRiver, "coons," and "darkies," were hugely popular in the late nineteenth century, both as performers and creators of hit songs. When Roberton's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels toured Ireland in 1897, the Limerick Chronicle called them "the world's acknowledged masters of refined minstrelsy," while the Dublin Chronicle thought them the best it had ever seen. A contemporary handbook records that the troupe was about thirty-strong, that it featured some genuinely black artistes among the cosmetic ones, and that it made a specialty of parading through the streets of every town where it was to appear.

For this John Lennon, unlike the grandson he would never see, music did not bring worldwide fame but was merely an exotic interlude, most details of which were never known to his descendants. Around the turn of the century, he came off the road for good, returned to Liverpool, and resumed his old life as a clerk, this time with the Booth shipping line. With him came his daughter, Mary, only child of a first marriage that had not survived his temporary immersion in burnt-cork makeup, banjo music, and applause.

When Mary left him to work in domestic service, a solitary old age seemed in prospect for Jack. His remedy was to marry his housekeeper, a young Liverpool Irishwoman with the happily coincidental name of Mary Maguire. Although twenty years his junior, and illiterate, Mary...better known as Polly...proved an ideal Victorian wife, practical, hardworking, and selfless. Their home was a tiny terrace house in Copperfield Street, Toxteth, a part of the city nicknamed "Dickens Land," so numerous were the streets named after Dickens characters. Rather like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, Jack sometimes talked about returning to his former life as a minstrel and earning fortunes enough for his young wife, as he put it, to be "farting against silk." But from here on, his music making would be confined to local pubs and his own family circle.

Jack's marriage to Polly gave him a second family of eight children. Two died in infancy, a fact that the superstitious Polly attributed to their Catholic baptism. The next six therefore received Protestant christenings, and all survived: five boys, George, Herbert, Sydney, Alfred, and Charles, and a girl, Edith. Polly did a heroic job of feeding them all on Jack's modest wage. But their diet of mainly bread, margarine, strong tea, and lobscouse...a meat-and-biscuit stew from which Liverpudlians acquired the nickname Scouses...was chronically lacking in essential nutrients. This had its worst effect on the fourth boy, Alfred, born in 1912, who as a toddler developed rickets that stunted the growth of his legs. The only remedy known to pediatrics in those days was to encase both of them in iron braces, hoping the ponderous extra weight would promote growth and strength. Despite years burdened by the braces, Alf's legs remained puny and foreshortened, and he failed to grow any taller than five feet four inches. He was, even so, a good-looking lad, with luxuriant dark hair, merry eyes, and the distinctive Lennon family nose, a thin, plunging beak with sharply defined clefts over the nostrils.

Jack's musical talents were passed on to his children in varying measure. George, Herbert, Sydney, Charles, and Edith all had passable singing voices, and the boys played mouth organ, the only instrument young people in their circumstances could afford. Alf, however, showed ability of an altogether higher order, allied to what his brother Charlie (born in 1918) called "that show-off spirit." He could sing all the music-hall and light operatic songs that made up the World War I hit parade; he could recite ballads, tell jokes, and do impressions. His specialty was Charlie Chaplin, the anarchic little tramp whose film comedies had created the unprecedented phenomenon of an entertainer famous all over the world. At family gatherings, Alf would sit on his father's knee in his Tiny Tim leg irons, and the two would sing "Ave Maria" together, with sentimental tears streaming down their faces.

Jack died from liver disease, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1921. Unable to survive on the state widow's allowance of five shillings per child per week, Polly had no choice but to take in washing. It meant backbreaking, hand-scalding work from four a.m. to dusk, scrubbing other people's soiled linen on a washboard, then squeezing out the sodden coils through a heavy iron mangle. Even so, as her granddaughter Joyce Lennon remembers, the cramped little house remained always spotless with "floors you could eat your dinner from," the kitchen range cleaned with graphite religiously every Monday morning, the front step scoured almost white, then edged in red with a chip of sandstone. Polly ruled her five sons like Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations, not hesitating to chastise them with a leather strap even when they were nearly grown men. Like many Liverpudlians of the most down-to-earth kind, she had her mystical side, believing herself a psychic, able to read the future in spread-out playing cards or the pattern of tea leaves in an empty cup.