Filming “Help!” in the Bahamas • Day 8

DONALD ZEC dissects Mr J. Lennon

IT is a lazy day for filming. Ringo is standing under a palm tree and large coconuts are being rhythmically dropped on to his chimney-brush head by a character who appears to be relishing it. So, too, is Ringo — who knows that at a thousand pounds a clonk this is nice work if you can get it. True they are cardboard coconuts, but the large dents in them suggest that even the milky real McCoy would bounce borkenly off that famous shaggy skull.

George and Paul are giggling like monkeys — millionaire monkeys — under a spreading walnut tree, while Eleanor Bron glides ghostlike and barefoot on the hot sand occasionally murmuring: “I have misgivings about it all.”

In short, the second Beatles film is proceeding crazily according to non-plan, and Brian Epstein, as seen through the mosquito mesh of his window, seems a very contented figure — or just very contented with the figures.

This brings me to Mr. John Lennon, whose switchblade mind and abrasive throwaway wit makes him, for me — the most fascinating Beatle of them all. As a songwriter, author and deep-think extrovert, he is the Beatle that bites. That head-shrouding hairdo and the faintly idiotic grin suggestive of the slow if not downright retarded can mislead you.

LONG conversations with him in this Technicolored paradise have revealed him as a very weighty talent indeed. With his slow grin and sadly funny appraisal of the square world around him, he resembles a W. C. Fields of the pop age. Head back, eyes screwed up over his sun-baked contact lenses, he dissected a Beatle for me with particular emphasis upon what goes on inside John Lennon.

And if you have ever wondered what Heaven—or Hell—it is to be a Beatle, this far-flung monologue will tell all.

“I suppose,” John Lennon said, “that if all this had happened overnight“—he indicated the palm trees and the hovering waiters—”it would have knocked us out. But we got broken in gradually. First it was twenty quid, then fifty, then a hundred and, okay, so now I’m a millionaire. But I took to it like a dog takes to water. Born to it I was,” he grinned.

“People said to me, ‘Don’t you find it a problem?’ This gives us a laugh. You trying having the problem — it doesn’t hurt a bit. THE only problem I’ve got is what to do about my son, John Charles Julian Lennon. He’s two and a half and pretty soon he’s going to wake up and find his father is a Beatle and a millionaire. That’s a problem if you like. And ten to one when he’s old enough I’ll still be in the money—I hope. I don’t know whether to send him to a posh school so he won’t turn out an untidy bum like I was, or to send him to the local primary and hope for the best.

“When Ringo got married, I thought ‘Great now he’ll be a kid and there’ll be two Beatles’ sons to sort of help […] face the problems […] Dads. They can be […]illstones,’” he said.

“Funny thing about money. We never carry the stuff now. Everybody knows we’ve got it, so they keep lending it to us. And when we do carry it we sometimes tip like we don’t need the stuff, and a character thinks he’s going to take us on because we’re the Beatles, we don’t leave anything at all. It’s pleasant either way.

“Yesterday I had to jump into the water with my clothes on. That really knocked me out. That was something I always wanted to do.

“Reaction against people who keep telling you you look like a bum. I mean you’ve got money they don’t bother you any more. Not that any of us understand what all this money business is about. You should see us at board meetings. It’s all we can do to stop giggling like idiots. All this ‘I will now read the minutes of the last meeting.’ It’s a real drag. Mind you, George has got an idea. He knows a bit about cash and Ringo is learning.”

“I hear tell,” I said, “that you can all be downright rude — and have been.“

“Of course we’ve been rude—but only rude back,” he exploded. “Have you any clue about the things people say and do to us? There’s this American woman yesterday who said: ‘Could I have your autograph — it’s for my daughter. Personally I couldn’t care less.’ We get a lot of that condescending saliva but we have to take it.“

“ON our American tour, theatre managers kept bringing blind, crippled and deformed children into our dressing room and this boy’s mother would say to us: ‘Go on, kiss him—maybe you’ll bring him back his sight.’ We’ve got as much compassion as the next feller and we’d give anything to help the poor kids. But we’re entertainers, not faith healers, and if you flinch they snarl at you, want to half murder you.

“We’re not cruel,” he said. “We’ve seen enough tragedy on the Merseyside. But when a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch him and maybe he will walk again,’ we want to run, cry, or just empty our pockets. It’s a great emotional drag, and this is where Paul helps out. He’s the diplomat with the soft soap. He can turn on that smile like little May sunshine and we’re out of trouble.”

“We’re a very tight school — the Beatles. We’re like a machine that goes boom boomchick boombooom, each of us with our own little job to do. We’re just like dogs who can hear high-pitched sounds that humans can’t. You can be talking to some character and suddenly, if he becomes a drag, we can all put the antennae up, freeze him out and he would never know. It’s amazing. Like radar. I can pick up Ringo’s mood just by looking at him. It’s our own mutual protection mechanism. If we didn’t have it, we’d fall apart.”

“HOW important is all this screaming to you?” I asked him.

“We need it like a camel needs water or the Black Watch needs the bagpipes. When we don’t get it we mope around like we’re in a condemned cell. But George, good old George, is the optimist. He blames it on the sound of the microphones amplifying us going. That’s why we want to make films and write songs—for the time when the screaming stops.”

“The moment one of us steps out of line, gets too big for his boots, he gets built up so high he’s soon back to being human again. Believe me, we don’t want the Beatles oversold—be we don’t want them sold short either. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.”

End of lesson on the anatomy of a Beatle. And if it leaves you in too thoughtful a mood, I will now tell you of the title they have suggested for this film.

It is simply “High-Heeled Knickers.”

I thought you’d like that.

From Daily Mirror – March 5, 1965