Lennon said that he'd always been very macho and had never questioned his chauvinistic attitudes towards women until he met Ono. Lennon was always distant with his first son (Julian) but was very close to his second son (Sean), and called him "my pride". Near the end of his life, he had embraced the role of househusband and even said that he had taken on the role of wife and mother in their relationship.
Cynthia Powell met Lennon at the Liverpool Art College in 1957. After hearing Lennon comment favourably about another girl who looked like Brigitte Bardot, Powell changed the colour of her hair to blonde. Their relationship started after a college party before the summer holidays when Lennon asked Cynthia to go a pub with him and some friends.
At this point Cynthia was already engaged to another man, a fact which she brought up when Lennon asked her to dance. Lennon replied, "I didn't ask you to fucking marry me, did I?" and stormed off.
Although Lennon ignored her for the rest of the party, he talked to her as she was ready to leave, and then grabbed her hand and took her to a room Stuart Sutcliffe was renting, where they had sex. If Sutcliffe's room was not available, they often had sex in alleyways or shop doorways, but Cynthia didn't enjoy those "snatched encounters". Lennon's jealousy could manifest itself in cruel and aggressive behaviour towards Cynthia, as when Lennon slapped her across the face (knocking her head against the wall) the day after he saw her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe.
Cynthia broke up with Lennon for three months, but resumed their relationship after Lennon's profuse apology. Cynthia visited Lennon in Hamburg for two weeks in 1960, but in 1961 Lennon left her at home and went to Paris with McCartney for a holiday. In mid-1962, Cynthia discovered she was pregnant.
Lennon proposed marriage, but when he told Mimi she screamed and raged at Lennon to stop him from going through with it. Lennon and Cynthia were married on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register office in Liverpool. Mimi did not attend.
On April 8, 1963, John Charles Julian Lennon was born in Sefton General Hospital. John did not see Julian until a week after he was born because of commitments with the Beatles. The birth of John's son and his marriage to Cynthia was kept secret from the public, due to Brian Epstein's insistence that it would harm John's image with the Beatles' female fans.
According to Cynthia, in a 1995 interview, there were problems throughout their marriage because of the pressures of the Beatles' fame and rigorous touring, and because of Lennon's increasing use of drugs. Their marriage all but came to an end when Cynthia came back from a holiday in Greece with friends to find that John and Yoko had been in bed together. John did not deny the fact but when Cynthia left for a while he phoned her and said "I can't understand why you went off".
Cynthia found out about the definite end of their marriage when John refused to go on a family holiday with them and was later shown in a newspaper making his affair with Yoko public. To make matters worse Lennon sent a mutual friend to Italy to inform her that he was going to take their child and force her to leave their home. He also arranged for divorce, stating that she was the one who had committed adultery, not him.
. In the ensuing court case Lennon refused to give his wife anymore than £75,000, telling her "What have you done to deserve it? Christ, it's like winning the bloody pools".
In the end, she got £100,000 plus £2,400 a year, custody of Julian and the house. Lennon was distant to his son, Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to him. The younger Lennon later said, "I've never really wanted to know the truth about how dad was with me.
There was some very negative stuff talked about me ...
like when he said I'd come out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night. You think, where's the love in that? Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit .
.. more than dad and I did.
We had a great friendship going and there seems to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and my dad." When Lennon moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see him until 1973. After encouragement from May Pang, it was finally arranged for Julian to visit John and her in Los Angeles.
Lennon was said to be very nervous beforehand but the visit went well. After this point, Julian started to see his father more regularly, and played drums on "Ya Ya" from Lennon's 1974 album, Walls and Bridges. Lennon also bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar for his eleventh birthday in 1974 and encouraged his growing interest in music.
Lennon was quoted as saying: "Sean was a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days.
He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." Lennon said that he'd always been very macho and had never questioned his chauvinistic attitudes towards women until he met Ono.
News RSS