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If you were on an Athens-to-London flight today, you might have been lucky enough to see John and Paul with their significant others (at this point, that was Cynthia Lennon and Jane Asher, not Yoko and Linda), along with John’s son Julian, George Harrison’s sister-in-law Paula Boyd, and of course the omnipresent Magic Alex.
Out of all those people, who would you have tried to talk to? The correct answer is John Lennon, though I don’t know how receptive he would have been to approaches from random strangers. I also have a few questions I’d like to ask Magic Alex — like, how did you do it? How did you manage to insinuate yourself into The Beatles’ inner circle armed with nothing but a few grandiose ideas and an admittedly superb moustache? (Note to any aspiring filmmakers out there: that Magic Alex biopic is just waiting to be made.)
The party returned home to the news that the Rolling Stones had won the appeal in their drug case and would not be going to jail after all. In this picture, Paul’s holding a newspaper with a headline to that effect while Alex again hogs the foreground.
The paper is also visible in the shot below, which answers the question of what that sticklike object obscuring part of Julian Lennon in a previous photo was: it was a stick.
As usual Julian is hanging around Uncle Paul instead of his father. I’m not implying anything sinister about that except that John — as he readily admitted in later years — was not a very good father to his firstborn. Julian, not surprisingly, carries a little bitterness about this:
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. Stuff like that. 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.
Though he later added,
Dad and I got on a great deal better [during the Lost Weekend]. We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general when he was with May Pang. My memories of that time with Dad and May are very clear — they were the happiest time I can remember with them.
Note the nice backhanded slap there at Yoko — with whom Julian claims to have a “cordial” relationship. He does appear to get on well with Sean, and spent some time in 2007 taking photographs of his half-brother’s tour.
Well, where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. It’s just a bunch of stuff. The day is getting on, computer power is getting low, so let’s call that good for now.
Thanks. I share your curiosity vis-à-vis the interest the Beatles had in Magic Alex. I think it came to a head when he tried to “design” their new recording studio. Would have loved to around and listen to him spin his tales.