Copyright 2004
EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
Sunday Express April 11, 2004

REVEALED, HOW JOHN LENNON FINALLY MADE PEACE WITH FATHER WHO DESERTED HIM
From David Gardner in Los Angeles

A LOST TAPE HAS revealed for the first time how John Lennon finally forgave his runaway father on his deathbed. Lennon barely knew Freddy, who walked out on the family in Liverpool when his son was just five years old.

Lennon's fractured childhood played a crucial role in forming his caustic sweet-and-sour personality - and the harder edge to the Beatles sound.

But the never-before-heard recording reveal in Lennon's own words how he made peace in the end with his father, who died of cancer in Brighton on April 1, 1976.

He explains how Freddy's last words were to exhort him to read the memoirs the old man had written so he could "put my side" to Lennon after a strained relationship that lurched from a brief delight at being reunited to bitter resentment at believing his father had only come back into his life to milk his fame.

On the tape, which is expected to sell for more than GBP 100,000 in an online auction, Lennon says that reading about Freddy's wild adventures as a sailor "filled a big hole" and helped him understand why his father had deserted him.

But even then, he said, his father couldn't help taking digs at him.

Speaking on November 11, 1977, three years before he was gunned down in New York, Lennon told how making peace with Freddy had helped him feel better about himself.

He explained: "My father died last year. I didn't really know him that well, but I talked to him before he died and it's very funny what he did.

"He had written out his life story. He had cancer. The surgeon told me that before he died he and my father had written a book. All he wanted was for me to hear his side of the story, which I hadn't heard - why he wasn't there, etc, etc. And there's this incredible manuscript about every detail of his life.

"It's really a wild adventure. He was a sailor, you know, and he was in trouble all around the world. He was one of those people who always just managed not to get in too deep a trouble, but in trouble, you know.

"But at the end of every chapter, he's written like a little homily, sort of a little dig at me. He's still sort of competing with me, it's amazing.

"There's a little put-down at the end of every chapter, which I didn't mind. We really didn't have a relationship.

"There's all these adventures. He was in prison in Africa during the war and running around New York and boxing in Bali, going to bars, this incredible trip. Then he died and that was it.

"He said 'Read the book, read the book, read the book.' I said 'OK, I'll read it.' And then he died and left me this book, which has filled a big whole in my life.

"I said 'Oh! That's why he couldn't make it. You know, huh. And now I can understand it a little bit. It's quite a story and there's more to it.

I'm barely touching on all of it."

Freddy always claimed Lennon's mother, Julia, threw him out and refused to have him back. But he was branded a compulsive liar by his ex-wife and was deemed the black sheep of the family. Julia died in a car accident when she was 44, leaving John to be brought up by his beloved Aunt Mimi.

Freddy, known as "that Alf Lennon" by Julia's family, was never thought good enough for her. He worked as a steward on troop ships carrying soldiers between Liverpool and Southampton and France and was arrested on one ship in north Africa for stealing a bottle of vodka.

Lennon didn't see his father for 18 years after he walked out. When they finally met after the Beatles hit the big time, Lennon's first question to his father was:

"What do you want then?"

Their final face-to-face meeting was said to have been at Lennon's country home, Tittenhurst Park, in Berkshire, in 1970, when the furious Beatle stormed: "Get out of my life - get off my back."

The meeting followed Lennon's controversial primal scream therapy with Dr Arthur Janov and, according to biographer Ray Coleman, he told Freddy:

"Have you any idea what I've been through because of you? Day after day in therapy, screaming for my daddy, sobbing for you to come home. What did you care? Away at sea all those years."

Until now, the details of Lennon's deathbed conversation with his father in hospital had not been known. The manuscript Lennon was referring to was later used in a book written by Freddy's second wife, Pauline.

Lennon was talking on the tape to American artist Tony Cox, who was previously married to Yoko Ono, and had a daughter with her called Kyoko.

Worried that Yoko and Lennon wanted to take Kyoko from him, Cox went on the run with his daughter for more than two decades before mother and daughter were finally reconciled in the mid-1990s. COX HAD HOPED TO arrange a meeting with Lennon and Yoko, but nothing ever came of it.

Lennon says on the tape that the tug-of-war between Kyoko's parents was like "a cosmic car wreck".

He told Cox: "It's like having an old friend that something went wrong and you're not quite sure what it was. It's like we were all in some big, giant cosmic car accident and each of us were taken to different hospitals, you know.

"And we never found out what happened to each other. I mean, maybe, you read occasionally that we did this or we did that, but you never got the real story about what we are doing." Cox, who now lives in California, sold the tapes to collector Chris Lopez. He said last night: "To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has ever heard John talking about his father like this. I have been told to expect a great response from collectors."

One the tape, being auctioned on www. mastronet. com, Lennon sounds relaxed and also talks about taking Japanese lessons and planning to read James Clavell 's bestselling novel Shogun.