"(Yoko was) not my cup of tea... I think John and I
were a great partnership. Yoko was the catalyst who created the
breakup in the end"
"...Divorce is never easy, but I understood. (John) found his soul
mate (Yoko Ono)"
"A fight between Yoko and me is a publicist's dream. If there's a
cat fight, it will be manufactured."
"(John Lennon) had a strange fascination for many of the girls..He
wasn't the sort of chap you'd swoon over. What concerned me, and drew
me to him at first, was that he was so lazy about his work. He didn't
give a damn and I got worried, being a conscientious type, that he
would get into trouble and get kicked out of college...I cared more
about his future and his work than he did. I saw in John so much
talent, as an artist, but if he got chucked out of college, which was
likely, where would he go? I was a lot older than him, mentally."
"On lettering days, (John Lennon) always arrived late, anything up
to half an hour. He looked a mess. He had scruffy black trousers,
quiffed hair with a slight DA at the back, and it was an attempt to
look like a teddy boy. But often, even though he was late, he'd have
a screwed-up drawing under his arm to present to the teacher. And it
would get him off the hook, in a way. Arthur Ballard (the teacher)
would hold it up to the class and say: 'Now look, this is the kind of
original idea and inspiration we're looking for.'"
"(Stuart Sutcliffe) was very spotty with horn-rimmed glasses and,
just like John's, they were taped up at the edges. As a student, he
was precisely the opposite of John, because he was working himself to
death, totally dedicated. He wasn't eating properly and didn't have
much to do with girls. His work was all-important to him."
"(John) gave off this feeling that he was already battling through
life, even at eighteen. Whenever he was going anywhere or doing
anyhting, he walked like lightning, as if he was being shot from an
arrow. It was a kind of panic. He would look round as if someone was
chasing him. He staggered, quickly, as though he believed that if he
moved quickly, people might miss him."
"The love and warmth of (John's) letters (from Hamburg) made me
feel wonderful and miserable at the same time."
"When John first took me home, I suppose Mimi looked on it as a
childhood romance, nothing serious. We were about eighteen and no
aunt would expect her nephew to be seriously involved at that age.
The more (the relationship) drifted on for months, the greater I
could see Mimi worrying and looking concerned..."
"I knew then (when John Lennon starting using LSD) that our
marriage was in trouble. We had lost communication. John was on
another planet."
"(LSD) seemed to be all right for (John), although I was totally
against it. It opened the floodgates of his mind and he seemed to
escape from the imprisonment of fame. Tensions, and bad tempers, were
replaced by understanding and love as his message."
"I had blind faith (that John Lennon would not have an
extramarital affair). I couldn't imagine John being involved with
another woman. And even if he had, I would have ignored it because he
always came back. Whatever John did outside our marriage, he didn't
flaunt anything. So when I learned later about the temptations he had
succumbed to, I had the satisfaction of knowing he had protected me
at the time, just like he had since we first met."
"Once (John Lennon) became famous, he was like a national
institution, not easy to be picked off for flings, well, easy maybe,
but he had to be careful about it, be careful who knew."
"Strangely, it was a very loving moment (when John Lennon told
Cynthia he had numerous affairs). I was in tears, not of anger or
shock, but tears of happiness that he could tell me, that we'd once
again got close enough for him to get rid of it, talk it through and
put it on a different level. Perhaps it would have been better if I'd
been able to be a bit more aggressive. But I was so happy that at
last he felt he could open his heart and tell me what was on his
mind...When John told me he'd had all these affairs, I felt as though
we were being brought together again. He'd been leading his life as a
musician and pop star and I'd led mine as a wife and mother.
Conversation had become very thin on the ground. He was doing so many
thing I wasn't involved in."
"It wasn't successful. It taught me that you can't step back into
the past. Too many dramatic things had happened to all of them and
the break-up of the very first Beatle marriage came home to them.
They were all shell-shocked after they'd been there a while. Tight,
nervous, everybody watching everyone else." (describing a party she
had thrown after the Beatles' and her marriage to John in which the
former Beatles came.)
"Americans are obsessed with (Yoko Ono).Everywhere I go people
ask, 'So, what's Yoko really like?' I don't even know the woman. The
last time I talked with her was when I picked up the phone shortly
after John had been killed. She was calling to arrange funeral plans
with Julian. Yoko and I are not kindred spirits. We are very
different people who just happened to love the same man."
"The first five years, even though John was on tour, he always
came back to Julian and, of course, after the divorce John moved to
America and he didn't see him for a while, but there was constant
contact...always constant. There were phone calls. There were
presents. There was as much as John could do at the time. I think
that in many interviews that Julian's had all that comes across is
love, and he had a marvelous relationship even though it was at a
distance. You know, John was in the States, and Julian was at home
with me. It was difficult at first following the divorce, but slowly
it built up and it was really building up beautifully before he lost
his father. It's a great tragedy because they would have been great
pals, and they would have jammed together and had a wonderful time."
"Cynthia did a very fine job of bringing (Julian)
up."-Yoko Ono
"Bloody hell-she's fantastic-just like Brigitte Bardot."- Helen
Anderson, a friend of John Lennon's. She said that he would say this
about Cynthia to her.
"Postman, postman, don't be slow, I'm in love with Cyn so go, man,
go."- what John Lennon would write to Cynthia on the envelopes of
letters he sent from Hamburg to her.
"There was nothing basically wrong with my marriage to Cyn. It was
just like an amber light. It wasn't on go and it wasn't on stop. I
suppose that me being away so much during the early years of our
marriage, I never did feel like the average married man."-John Lennon
"I think it's important, very important to say that Julian is very
much Cynthia and John's child. There's a lot of her warmth in Julian
too. (Cynthia's) a very warm person, and I think that Julian has a
lot of his mother's warmth and his father's talent..."-Tony King
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