John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

John's pursuit of The Answer had led to a new possible source. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a comical little Indian with lank shoulder-length hair and a giggly falsetto voice, suddenly seemed to offer what he had been seeking.
All four Beatles, kaftaned and beaded, sat at the yogi's feet to listen to his Buddhist wisdom. This was mysticism in an easily digested, tabloid form, instantly appealing to young earthly gods for whom real self-denial was unthinkable.
His route to spiritual regeneration involved no special training, no memorising of complex prayers or incantations, and next to no personal inconvenience. It was bliss without effort.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Amsterdam in 1969 where they held a honeymoon 'bed-in' for peace
They travelled to his ashram in India in a huge gang of celebrities, including the folk singer Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys and American film actress Mia Farrow.
John wanted to take Yoko, but since the pilgrimage included wives, he hadno choice but to take Cynthia.
They stayed in a village on the banks of the River Ganges, looking towards the snow-flecked Himalayas, though their living conditions were far from spartan. Their bungalows had hot water and western plumbing, and a handful of two-rupee notes bought extra home comforts, from chocolate bars to booze and hash.
For all the Beatles, it was an enforced slowdown from the lunatic pace that had not let up for seven years, since they left Liverpool for Hamburg and their careers suddenly took off. Day after day, there was nothing to do but sit and think.
John seemed happy, strumming guitars with Paul and George in the balmy sunshine and even holding hands with Cynthia. She was convinced their difficult marriage was entering a new phase of companionship and mutual tolerance.
What she didn't know was that John was all the time receiving postcards from Yoko, which his minders had strict orders to forward to him in plain brown envelopes so she would suspect nothing. Often they consisted of a single thought, in Yoko's tiny, arty script: 'Watch for me - I'm a cloud in the sky.'
What kept him at the ashram for aeons beyond his normal attention span was his expectation that, from the Maharishi, he would finally receive that magic key to understanding. But time passed, and still the Maharishi uttered only vague, benign generalities.
Finally John decided to act. One day, a helicopter landed at the ashram to fly the Maharishi to Delhi for a meeting. One of the Beatles could go with him and John insisted it was him.
Paul McCartney remembers asking him later why he was so keen to go with the Maharishi. 'I was hoping he might slip me The Answer,' John replied.
But the guru didn't and, increasingly, in his mind, John realised that what he was seeking in life was waiting for him back in England. As he recalled: 'Although I'd had numerous interesting affairs, I'd never met anyone worth breaking up a happily married state of boredom for.' But in Yoko he saw 'escape, at last!' She was to transform the rest of his life.

When the world found out about John and Yoko, the unanimous public response was blank incomprehension. John lived a life that was the envy of millions. With clothes and cars and mansions and beautiful dolly birds at his disposal, what could he possibly want with a fiercely unglamorous Japanese woman from the art world's lunatic fringe?
John was later to maintain that Yoko saved his life. 'The king is always killed by his courtiers, not his enemies. The king is over-fed, over-drugged, overindulged.
'Most people in that position never wake up. They die mentally or physically or both. Yoko liberated me. She didn't fall in love with the Beatle, she didn't fall in love with my fame. She fell in love with me for myself.'
They were, of course, not quite the runaway orphans of the storm, living on love alone, that such imagery might suggest.
Whatever John's triumph at having finally 'broken out of the palace', he still had courtiers waiting to fulfil his slightest whim, a seemingly bottomless bank account and a chauffeur-driven Rolls.
The real change was in the attitudes imbued in him by his north-country upbringing and hardened by years of veneration as an earthly demigod.
He was used to being served by women, whether it was Mimi, the aunt who had brought him up in the absence of his runaway parents, or any of the subsequent girlfriends and hangers-on.
Yoko didn't buy into that. She was, as he put it, 'the only woman I'd ever met who was my equal in every way imaginable. My better, actually'.
But Yoko also had to do her share of adjusting. No man - and certainly neither of her two husbands - had ever impinged on her consuming preoccupation with her career.
Now here she was with someone who wanted - demanded - to spend every minute of every day with her, to be involved in every aspect of her life and to involve her in every aspect of his.
He asked her to write out a list of everyone she'd ever slept with. He was deadly serious. He regarded every man who crossed their combined path as an active and dangerous rival for her affections, and methodically set about cutting her off from all her existing male friends in avant-garde art and music, however elderly or gay.
Yoko was only beginning to learn what insecurity, even timidity, co-existed with John's rock-star egotism. Anything that took her attention away from him, even for a moment, counted as a threat.
He hated it when she spoke to Japanese compatriots on the telephone because it was a part of her he could not share.
'He'd always be saying: "What are you thinking? Why aren't you looking at me?"
I always had to look at him in the right way, straight into the middle of his eyes, or he'd get upset.'

John and Yoko's early years could not have been more different. She grew up in luxury in Japan while he lived in post-war Liverpool
She had her own hang-ups. 'I was self conscious about my appearance. I was too short, my legs were the wrong shape, and I used to cover my face with my hair and hide my hands because my fingers were so stringy.
'But John said to me: "You're beautiful. You don't have to hide your hands, your legs are perfect, tie your hair back and let people see your face."'
She was startled by the quantity and variety of drugs in his possession. 'Next to his bed, he had a huge glass jar of pills, acid, Mandrax. He used to grab a handful at random.'
She could do nothing about this nor his heavy consumption of French Gitanes cigarettes.
She was more successful against the junk food he mainly lived on and put him on a macrobiotic diet. Cutting out sugar and preservatives gave him a surge of energy and well-being. He could not get over how 'brown rice and a cuppa tea are the biggest high I ever had'.
He was completely open and uninhibited with her, as she learned to be with him, owning up to his deepest sexual fantasies - like making love to a woman in her 80s whose veined and wrinkled hands would be covered in diamonds.
If this took some getting used to, then so, too, did his style of backhanded compliment. 'Do you know why I like you?' he remarked on one occasion to Yoko. 'It's because you look like a bloke in drag. You're like a mate.'
Yoko laughingly inquired if he was 'a closet fag', but what he meant was that she was replacing the old mates in his life he used to knock around with. With her in his life, he no longer had any need for them.
The old gang, however, were slow to cotton on to this. To Paul, George and Ringo, Yoko seemed just another of John's passing fancies. And whatever John's inner thoughts, he remained a fully paid-up Beatle, subject to the remorseless manufacturing cycle that summoned them back to Abbey Road studios every year to make a new album.
This time, though, he brought Yoko with him. In the studio, John settled himself on his stool with his guitar, and there beside him on a matching stool, in matching all-over black, sat Yoko.
That all came from him, she insists. 'He wanted me to be part of the group,' she says. 'He created the group, so he thought the others should accept that. I didn't particularly want to be part of them. But he had got all the avant-garde friends of mine out of my life, so I had nobody else to play music with.
'I couldn't see how I would fit in, but John persuaded me. He was certain I would, and that the other Beatles would go for it.'
To begin with, the other three were relatively unfazed. But if they were reserving judgment, the British public's resentment of her for having abducted one of its four favourite sons grew daily more virulent and racist.
There was real animosity from female fans. Yoko was greeted by screams of 'Chink!' or 'Yellow!'. One day, a bunch of yellow roses was thrust at her, stems first so the thorns would prick her hands.
John, normally the one to be protected, had to shield her from the mobbing, the name-calling, the ill-natured jostling, the voyeuristic leering.
Back in the studio, it quickly became clear that having Yoko with him was no passing fad of John's. She was at his side for every minute of every session, throughout every related conference, conversation, tryout and playback, every meal and cigarette-break.
Even when he went to the toilet, Yoko went, too - proof to incredulous onlookers of how deeply she had her hooks into him.
But, according to Yoko, this was really just another manifestation of John's jealousy and insecurity.
'People said I - followed him to the men's room, but he made me go with him. He thought that if he left me alone with the other Beatles even for a minute, I might go off with one of them.'
It was not until The Beatles split up that she fully grasped what she had taken on in John Lennon.

Yoko fist met John in an art gallery that was exhibiting her work
The final business meeting descended into much bitterness between the old song-writing team of Lennon and McCartney as a wounded John accused Paul of always having overshadowed him. He took a swipe at what he termed Paul's 'granny music'.
At first this seemed more like the airing of mutual grievances before a marriage counsellor, and Paul was all for burying hatchets and pressing forward.
He was convinced all would be well if they could free themselves from wrangles over money and office politics and return to a relationship that - he almost pleaded with John to remember - had not always been so fraught.
'When we get in a studio, even on the worst day, I'm still playing bass, Ringo's still drumming, we're still there, you know ...' It was the cue for the bombshell John had been contemplating for a long while.
'He hadn't even told me he was going to do it,' Yoko remembers. 'Paul was saying: "Why don't we do it this way and that way . . ." John said: "You don't seem to understand, do you? I'm leaving. The group is over." '
John himself would explain that: 'I started the band and I disbanded it. It's as simple as that. I felt guilty at springing it on them at such short notice. After all, I had Yoko; they only had each other.'
Yoko recalls leaving the meeting with him. 'We went off in the car, and he turned to me and said: "That's it with The Beatles. From now on, it's just you - OK?"'
She was a little horrified. 'I thought: "My God, those three guys were the ones keeping him entertained for so long - ever since they had first got together as a group. Now I have to take all the load." '
As she was to discover, it would at times be a heavy one indeed.

• Abridged extract from John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins - Philip Norman, 2008