Nowhere Boy: Maureen Cleave remembers John Lennon

Listen to the Nowhere Boys (from the film's original sound track) play Maggie May

We’ve just had another year of the Beatles. Who would have thought it? Two of them, John and George are dead, Ringo and Paul in their late sixties. First there was the BBC documentary about their visit to the United States in 1964, the nation still tapping its feet to their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show 45 years later. Then their albums were digitally remastered and re-released. And now artist Sam Taylor-Wood has made a feature film about the young Lennon, called Nowhere Boy.

He’s played by a tall handsome young actor called Aaron Johnson, not at all like the original Lennon whose looks were against him – that long pointed nose, long upper lip, those small narrow eyes. How could someone who looked like Henry VIII become a pop idol? And his clothes were all wrong: “Look at these trousers,” he’d say, “must’ve sat in something.”

What mattered to the Beatles was their hair. “Get your hair down,” was the first thing they said to Ringo when he joined them. The writer Jonathan Miller thought theirs was the fascination of repetitive siblings, the almost uncanny attraction of identical quads. How different they were, yet strangely alike. Shaking their heads was a signal to the audience to scream even louder. They used to worry they would get too sweaty and their hair would stick to their foreheads, making them look like Hitler. They were accused of wearing wigs. “In that case,” Lennon said, “mine’s the only wig with real dandruff.”

I first met him in 1963, put on to the Beatles by an Oxford friend who came from Liverpool, the journalist Gillian Reynolds (now The Daily Telegraph’s radio critic). They wore boots, she said, and their appearance inspired frenzy. “They look beat up and depraved in the nicest possible way.” I was writing a column in the London Evening Standard called – horrors! – “Disc Date”. But I had a fringe and red boots which was a good start. When they went to the US for The Ed Sullivan Show, I suggested to my editor I go, too. He was scathing. Take rock’n’roll to America? “Coals to Newcastle?” But I went.

Two days later I had a telegram from him: BEATLES POSTERS STOLEN ALL OVER LONDON. They soon became the most famous people in the English-speaking world. For two years they were out of breath: they had to run everywhere to escape screaming mobs of which they were understandably frightened. I used to wonder what would happen if one of them fell over. Would he be torn to pieces? Ringo used to say the only place he felt safe was in the lavatory; the Standard once took a photograph of them all there, with Paul sitting on the washbasin.

People sometimes ask what they were like and the answer is – more fun than anyone else and terrible teases. The interviewer was outnumbered four to one: they might put your coat in the wastepaper basket, offer to marry you, seize your notebook and pencil, pick you up and put you somewhere else, demand you cut their hair. In hotel rooms, John’s favourite game was shuffling his feet on the carpet, then touching you on the cheek to give you a mild electric shock. On the other hand they were kindly disposed, offering you cigarettes or a swig from their bottles of Coke, making sure you never got left behind. “Come on, Thingy,” they’d bawl when it was time to move. They’d get you a taxi. Once I thought the driver was taking an odd way home, hardly surprising as they’d told him, “10 Downing Street”.

What actor Aaron Johnson does catch on screen is the Lennon who was always the difficult boy in the back row, imperious, unpredictable, indolent, playful, charming and quick-witted but nervy, too. When they asked him to speak at the Cambridge Union, he refused on the grounds that he was a born heckler. He used to read the Just William books by Richmal Crompton. Like William, he battled against the odds and dreamed of empire.

One day I picked John up in a taxi and took him to Abbey Road for a recording session. The tune to the song A Hard Day’s Night was in his head, the words scrawled on a birthday card from a fan to his little son Julian: “When I get home to you,” it said, “I find my tiredness is through…” Rather a feeble line about tiredness, I said. “OK,” he said cheerfully and, borrowing my pen, instantly changed it to the slightly suggestive: “When I get home to you/I find the things that you do/Will make me feel all right.” The other Beatles were there in the studio and, of course, the wonderful George Martin. John sort of hummed the tune to the others – they had no copies of the words or anything else. Three hours later I was none the wiser about how they’d done it but the record was made – and you can see the birthday card in the British Library.

Three years went by, the novelty wore off, the Beatles were fed up. “Here I am,” said John, “famous and loaded and I can’t go anywhere.” It was time for Rolls-Royces with black windows and lots of shopping at Asprey. Paul, always better at ordinary life than the others, stayed in London; John, George and Ringo, with wives and children, moved to daft stockbroker Tudor houses in the Weybridge-Esher area. They were in and out of each other’s houses all the time, watching television, playing rowdy games of Buccaneer, making mad tapes. At midnight, they might set off, plus chauffeur, in Rolls-Royces or Ferraris for London. Paul would come to see John to write songs.

You might get invited to stay. “We’ve got a pool,” he would say, “so bring your body.” This was after he’d asked with interest which day of the week it was. There was all day to chat. I’d just got married. He was disappointed in my engagement ring, which was a ruby that glowed rather than glittered. (He was interested in my husband. I’d never introduced them – he was too tall. The Beatles didn’t like men taller than they were.) I put forward a case for marital fidelity and he was interested in this as he was in all ideas. “Do you mean to say I might be missing something? I hope I grow out of being so sex mad. Sex is the only physical exercise I bother with.”

He would show you around the house, little Julian panting along behind clutching a large porcelain cat. The house was full of winking lights, there since Christmas eight months earlier. There was a suit of armour called Sidney, a large crucifix, a pair of crutches (a present from George), a gorilla suit… “I thought I’d put it on and drive round in the Ferrari.” He said it was the only suit that fitted him.

John talked a lot about the past. Nowhere Boy is set in his teens when – having been brought up by his strict and starchy Aunt Mimi – he rediscovered his mother, Julia. Julia was quite the opposite, exciting and huge fun, and he spoke bitterly about the off-duty drunk policeman who ran her over and killed her.

Shortly after he’d brought his grand house in Weybridge, he’d had a visit from Fred Lennon, the father who’d abandoned him. “I showed him the door,” he said cheerfully, “only seen him twice in my life.” No sentimental nonsense, no reconciliation.

He talked of other things too. “I used to read ads for guitars in Reveille and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted. 'Please God, give me a guitar.’ Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We used to go to this boy’s house after school and listen to Elvis on 78s; we’d buy five Senior Service loose and some chips and go along. Then this boy said he’d got a new record. He’d been to Holland. This record was by somebody called Little Richard, who was bigger than Elvis. It was called Long Tall Sally. When I heard it, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis.”

Elvis was, by all accounts, a pretty moderate fellow but he could sing and, above all, he could move. His movements came from imitating the bumps and grinds of burlesque strippers but in photographs they were a stance that was wild, free and fearless. That was how he looked in penny-pinching England where you wore clothes until they wore out. His was the torch the Beatles carried.

The last time I visited John, he had been reading about religion and – typically John – had strong views about it. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock’n’roll or Christianity.”

It was March 1966 and the quote appeared, not in the headline but well down the page. Only John Grigg in The Guardian picked it up. “God is not mocked,” he wrote. Months went by until July when an American magazine called Datebook printed it and all hell broke loose. Radio stations banned the Beatles, shares in Northern Song plummeted, the Beatles finished their last US tour and never played in public again.

In 1986, Yoko Ono published a little book by John called Skywriting by Word of Mouth, written two years before he was murdered in 1980. He never wanted to grow old but he was only 40 when he died. In an autobiographical fragment, he writes: “I always remember to thank Jesus for the end of my touring days; if I hadn’t said the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus’ and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas. God Bless America. Thank you, Jesus.” And thank you, John, for writing that.

John might well have been jealous of the handsome actor who plays him in the film. As someone who could only afford to buy cigarettes loose and in fives, he would certainly have envied the number of cigarettes he gets to smoke. But he wouldn’t have minded. He hadn’t much time for reality. As he once said: “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”

• 'Nowhere Boy’ is out on Boxing Day. "Nowhere Boy: The Original Soundtrack" is released by Sony Music on December14th