- 4 days ago
John Lennon remains one of the most influential cultural figures of the twentieth century.
He is widely remembered as a singer-songwriter who gave the world songs of hope, protest, and unity.
His public image was built around peace, imagination, and the belief that people could live without violence.
Yet the story of John Lennon is more complicated than the slogans that made him famous.
Behind the anthems, behind the famous messages of “peace,” there were deeply troubled personal relationships and a home life marked by pain, absence, and emotional conflict.
He is widely remembered as a singer-songwriter who gave the world songs of hope, protest, and unity.
His public image was built around peace, imagination, and the belief that people could live without violence.
Yet the story of John Lennon is more complicated than the slogans that made him famous.
Behind the anthems, behind the famous messages of “peace,” there were deeply troubled personal relationships and a home life marked by pain, absence, and emotional conflict.
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00:00John Lennon became the world's most recognizable voice for peace, urging people to imagine a world
00:05without conflict or division. But behind that public image was a personal life that told a
00:11very different story. The contrast between those two versions of Lennon is where this story begins.
00:17Let's start with the image everyone knows, it's March 1969. John Lennon has just married Yoko
00:23Ono in Gibraltar and instead of a normal honeymoon. The two of them check into a hotel room in
00:28Amsterdam and just stay in bed for a week. The bed-in was a non-violent protest against wars
00:34initiated by Yoko Ono and her husband John Lennon during a two-week period in Amsterdam and Montreal
00:40as an experimental test of new ways to promote peace. Picture the scene, two figures, clad in
00:47white, sit amongst flowers and protest signs on a hotel bed, daring the world to give peace the
00:52slightest chance. While 30 reporters, all awkwardly crouched around the bed of the cramped hotel room,
00:57chaotically tried to ask the musicians questions. Lennon isn't hiding from the cameras, he's inviting
01:03them in. He wants the whole planet watching. Then comes Montreal. John Lennon, then still a member of
01:09the Beatles, married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. And they spent their honeymoon as two week-long bed-ins,
01:14one in Amsterdam, the other in Montreal. Intended as a protest against war, remaining in bed for the
01:20entire fortnight while receiving members of the press and answering questions. And during the Montreal,
01:26bed in Lennon, organized a makeshift reporting session. Out of that hotel room comes, give peace
01:31a chance. Recorded with whoever happened to be in the room that day, from Timothy Leary to Alan
01:37Ginsberg. That song doesn't just sit on a shelf. Months later, at the 15 November 1969 anti-war
01:43demonstration in Washington, D.C., one of the largest ever, folk singer Pete Seeger, sang the song for the
01:49quarter million people in attendance. And Newsweek reported that soon the entire assemblage was
01:55chanting the plaintiff hymn over and over. And the peace movement had found an anthem.
01:59Lennon himself knew exactly what he was building. He talked about marketing what he called the product
02:05called Peace, saying it had to be sold to the man in the street, and that he wanted to make
02:09peace big
02:10business for everybody. That's not a man stumbling into fame by accident. That's a deliberate campaign.
02:16He wanted the peace sign everywhere. He said it himself, whenever the press came in. He made sure
02:21the word peace was visible, calling it a subtle, subliminal message, and noting that kids started flashing
02:27him the peace sign wherever he went. Two years later comes Imagine, no drums to speak of, just a piano
02:33and a voice.
02:34Asking people to picture a world without borders, without possessions, without religion, all of
02:40humanity living as one. It becomes the song people play at vigils, at memorials, at moments when the
02:46world needs something to hold onto. By the time he's murdered outside his own apartment building in
02:51December 1980, John Lennon is not just a former Beatle. He is, in the eyes of most of the planet,
02:57the guy who
02:58stood for peace and loved louder than almost anyone alive. Now here's where the story gets complicated.
03:04Because at the exact same time, all of this was happening. The bed-ins, the anthem, the global peace campaign.
03:10Lennon had a wife back home named Cynthia, and a young son named Julie. In the picture inside, that house
03:16did not match the picture on the hotel bed surrounded by flowers.
03:20Cynthia Lennon met John in art school in Liverpool in the late 1950s, years before any of the world knew
03:27his name.
03:28Cynthia Lennon met John Lennon in the late 1950s while attending art school, and the couple had a tumultuous and
03:34abusive marriage.
03:35That word, abusive, isn't coming from a tabloid. It's coming from Cynthia herself, and eventually from John.
03:41The first documented incident happened while they were still students. Cynthia describes the only occasion when John struck her that
03:49early on, writing that while they were at art college.
03:52John had become jealous after seeing her dance with his close friend Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the Beatles' early members.
03:58The next day, according to her account, he followed her to the girls' bathroom in the basement, and when she
04:04came out he was waiting with a dark look on his face, and before she could speak, he raised his
04:09arm and hit her across the face, knocking her head into the pipes on the wall behind her.
04:14That's the origin point, and it's not the last time.
04:17By her own account, Cynthia wrote in her memoir, John, that he was prone to violent tantrums, and that she
04:23could put up with his outbursts, the jealousy and possessiveness, but not the violence.
04:27So already before the peace sign, before the bed ends, before imagine, there's a pattern.
04:33A man capable of real tenderness in public, and real violence behind closed doors.
04:38That contradiction is the whole story here, and it doesn't get smaller as the years go on. It gets bigger.
04:44To understand how deep this went, you have to understand what Cynthia Lennon's life actually looked like.
04:50While her husband was becoming the most famous man on earth, they married in 1962, quietly, because Cynthia was pregnant.
04:57John's foray into fatherhood got off to a controversial start, when he and then-girlfriend Cynthia Powell discovered they were
05:04expecting a child after they failed to use contraception.
05:08And when John found out Cynthia was pregnant, he decided they would marry.
05:12Julian was born the following spring, John wasn't even there.
05:16Their son Julian was born in April 1963, but John missed the birth due to his responsibilities with the Beatles.
05:22Then Beatlemania hits, and Cynthia gets erased from the public record almost immediately.
05:28As Beatlemania gripped the world, Beatles manager Brian Epstein worked hard to keep John's marriage a secret.
05:34But rumors that John Lennon had a wife and child leaked out into the public from time to time, all
05:39of which the band denied.
05:41So while John is becoming a global heartthrob, his actual wife is living as a secret, raising a newborn largely
05:48alone, while strangers start showing up at her door.
05:51After giving birth to Julian in April 1963, Cynthia experienced firsthand the impact of her husband's fame.
05:57As fans started to show up outside their home, and she told the BBC, she had a stranger at the
06:03door one day when she was on her own with Julian.
06:05It takes until 1964, a full year later, for the world to even know she exists.
06:11In a bold move, John invited Cynthia to come with him to the United States in 1964, where the two
06:17were photographed together publicly.
06:19And finally the secret was out, and the world knew that Cynthia Lennon was John's wife.
06:23You'd think that trip might have been some kind of turning point toward honesty.
06:28Instead, on the plane ride home, John tells her something that changes everything.
06:32On the plane ride back, John Lennon admitted to his wife that he had had multiple affairs throughout their relationship.
06:39Around them, the household staff were watching things unravel too.
06:43The Lennon's housekeeper, a woman named Dorothy Jarlett, later gave a sworn statement describing what she saw inside that house
06:50during those years.
06:51Tension building, the mood shifting, Cynthia growing withdrawn.
06:55Jarlett wrote that until about the summer of 1967, she thought the house was reasonably happy.
07:01But from about a year before that, John did not seem as keen as before to take Cynthia out with
07:06him to functions and studio recordings.
07:08And the letter described how the atmosphere seemed to change with more tension, and Mrs. Lennon was often depressed and
07:14unhappy.
07:15That same statement describes the discipline in the house too, and it's worth sitting with.
07:20Jarlett said Julian, who was a very sensitive child, would become upset.
07:24And Mrs. Lennon would argue with Mr. Lennon about this, resulting in arguments about the way Julian was being brought
07:30up.
07:31Because John would say Cynthia was too soft with him.
07:34And here's the detail that makes those arguments look worse in hindsight.
07:38Jarlett said the arguments always surprised her because to her, it seemed as though Julian's table manners were, if anything,
07:45better than average.
07:46In other words, there was no real behavioral problem to justify the tension.
07:50The friction was coming from somewhere else.
07:53That somewhere else comes into full view in 1968.
07:56Cynthia goes on a trip to Greece.
07:58She comes home to Kenwood, their house, and finds her husband with another woman.
08:02That spring, she came home from a vacation in Greece to find Ono and John at Kenwood.
08:07And she later recalled in her memoir having a woman sitting next to her husband, both in toweling robes.
08:14And it being obvious the woman had been there for the night.
08:17She tries to keep it light.
08:18She said, oh, hi, John, how about coming out for dinner, not knowing what else to say, and he just
08:23looked at her.
08:24That's the end of the marriage in every way that matters.
08:27And here's what happens next, which tells you a lot about the man underneath the peace sign.
08:32Even though he was the one who'd been unfaithful, despite being the party guilty of committing adultery,
08:38Lennon actually initially looked to sue his first wife for divorce.
08:42And when she countersued after news of Ono's pregnancy made his infidelity clear,
08:47Lennon refused to pay out any more than roughly £75,000.
08:51Saying such a sum was akin to winning the football pools and that she wasn't worth any more than that.
08:56Years later, two days before his death, Lennon sat for an interview and unprompted admitted the full scope of what
09:03had happened in that house.
09:04He didn't dodge it. He said it plainly. It is a diary form of writing.
09:08He responded, explaining that the line about being cruel to his woman, beating her and keeping her apart from the
09:14things she loved, was about him.
09:16That he used to be cruel to his woman, and physically, to any woman, that he was a hitter.
09:21That he couldn't express himself and so he hit, and he fought men and hit women.
09:25Then comes the line that connects every thread of this story together.
09:29The line that explains why a man capable of that would end up on a hotel bed, telling the world
09:35to love one another.
09:36Lennon said his violent past was part of why he became so passionate about peace.
09:41Saying it's the most violent people who go for love and peace, that everything's the opposite.
09:46But that he sincerely believed in love and peace, and that he was a violent man who had learned not
09:51to be violent and regretted his violence.
09:53He wasn't denying it. He was telling you, in his own words, that the peace campaign and the violence came
09:59from the same place.
10:00If Cynthia carries the story of the marriage, Julian Lennon carries the story of what it was like to be
10:06the child in that house.
10:07And then later, the child outside of it entirely.
10:10Julian was five years old when his parents divorced.
10:13After John and Cynthia Lennon divorced in 1968, the then five-year-old Julian faced life without his father at
10:20a pivotal time in his young life.
10:22And the situation left little Julian with a lot of anger.
10:25Because John devoted most of his focus to his new wife and son, essentially abandoning his first family.
10:31Julian himself has described the exact moment he felt it happen.
10:35Not gradually, suddenly.
10:37He said, then suddenly my dad literally disappeared off the face of the planet.
10:41At least, that's how it seemed to me.
10:43He and Yoko Ono were deeply and publicly in love.
10:47And I felt as if my mom and I had been cast aside.
10:50Ten years, that's roughly how long father and son went with almost no relationship.
10:55Julian said maybe ten years passed, during which he and his dad barely spoke.
10:59And he was very angry about how his father left the family.
11:02And it was thanks to his mom that they started having conversations again.
11:07Because she was such a gentle soul, never vindictive.
11:10And she always wanted him to have a relationship with his father.
11:13Paul McCartney, of all people, is the one who steps into that gap.
11:17He writes a song for the boy.
11:19Paul McCartney was inspired to write Hey Jules, later changed to Hey Jude, for Julian when Cynthia and John split.
11:26And Julian has described his father's songwriting partner as being like an uncle to him.
11:31Julian himself has said as much directly.
11:34Julian felt grateful that his dad's bandmate Paul McCartney didn't forget about him.
11:38Saying not everyone forgot about them.
11:40And that Paul wrote Hey Jules after dropping in to check how his mom and he were doing.
11:45Think about that, the uncle figure showed up more than the father did.
11:49The housekeeper's statement, the same one describing the tension in the marriage,
11:53also alleges something about how Julian was treated directly.
11:56In the document, Jarlett says she found Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono, while his wife was out of the
12:02country.
12:02And she also claims that Lennon would smack his son Julian if he misbehaved.
12:07And even setting that specific allegation aside,
12:10the emotional distance alone left scars that Julian has spent decades naming publicly.
12:15He gave one of his most direct assessments in an interview years ago,
12:19and it's become the single most quoted line about his father's contradiction.
12:22Talking about the gap between the public image and the private man,
12:26Julian said he felt his dad was a hypocrite.
12:29Because his dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world,
12:32but could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him, his wife and son.
12:37That line, dad could talk about peace and love to the world, but couldn't show it at home,
12:41is basically the whole video in one sentence.
12:44And it's coming directly from the son, not from a critic or a biographer.
12:48Julian has also been asked, point blank, whether it's fair to hold his father accountable as an
12:54absent parent.
12:55Given how young John himself was when Julian was born, he didn't let his father off the hook.
13:00When asked if he felt it was fair to hold John accountable for being an absent father,
13:05he affirmed that he did.
13:06Saying if you bring a child into this world, whether planned or an accident,
13:11you better make sure you can care for it.
13:13Even the reunion, such as it was, stayed shallow.
13:15Describing the relationship at the time of his father's death, Julian said it was still
13:20very distant.
13:21That he probably knew his father, about as much as he knew the interviewer asking the
13:25question.
13:26That there were cuddles now and then, but there was always an uneasy tension.
13:30And then there's the line that might be the coldest part of this whole story.
13:34Something John said about the two boys, comparing them directly.
13:38Before his death, John candidly spoke about the contrast between his first family with
13:42Julian and Cynthia, and his second union with Yoko and their son Sean.
13:46Remarking that Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference.
13:50Imagine being the older son, and hearing that your father saw you as, essentially, the accident,
13:56and your little brother as the one who counted.
13:58Money made the divide even more literal.
14:01When it came time to settle the estate arrangements, Lennon added a codicil to the terms of Julian's
14:06trust fund, which meant that if he was to have any further children, the payout would
14:10be reduced.
14:11And when Sean Ono Lennon was born, Julian's inheritance was cut in half.
14:16The peace and love icon literally wrote a clause into a legal document that shrank his firstborn's
14:21inheritance the moment his second son arrived.
14:24That's the shape of Julian's childhood, a father who vanished for the better part of a
14:29decade.
14:29A stepfather uncle in Paul McCartney who showed up more, a trust fund that got smaller because
14:34he existed first, and a direct comparison to his baby brother that framed him as the unwanted
14:40one.
14:40None of this happened in a vacuum, and to understand why John Lennon could hold both of these realities
14:45at once, the peace campaign and the abuse, you have to go back further to his own childhood.
14:51John was practically abandoned twice before he was even a teenager.
14:55John Winston Lennon was born to Julia Stanley and Alfred Lennon in Liverpool.
15:00And Alfred, a merchant seaman, was often away, leaving Julia alone with their son.
15:05Until by 1942, Alfred had abandoned his relationship with Julia and his son.
15:10And concerns about Julia led to John being given to one of her sisters, Mary, known as
15:15Aunt Mimi.
15:16A film years later dramatized the confrontation Lennon eventually had with his own absent father,
15:23where when they met, Lennon accused his father of abandoning him, but Freddie said that he left
15:27it up to John.
15:28So he grew up with Mimi, in a home that was stable materially but cold in other ways.
15:33He lived with the Smiths for most of his childhood and remained close to his aunt, even though she
15:38was highly dismissive of his musical ambitions, his girlfriends and wives, often telling the
15:44teenage Lennon that the guitar was all right, but he'd never make a living out of it.
15:48Then, right as he was becoming a teenager and starting to rebuild a real relationship with
15:53his birth mother, she was killed.
15:55Julia Lennon's life came to an untimely end in July 1958, when she was struck and killed
16:01by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, shortly after leaving her sister Mimi's house.
16:06He was 17.
16:08Someone who knew him at the time said fate took Julia away forever when John was 17,
16:13that Julia was hit by a vehicle and killed, and that John took it very badly.
16:17He spent the rest of his life writing about her.
16:20The rawest of those songs is called simply, Mother, and in it, he screams the same repeated
16:25plea about wanting his parents back.
16:27A song biographers have called, a heart-rending summary of the ex-Beatles' traumatic childhood.
16:32One writer summarized his relationship with his mother in blunt terms.
16:36On his 1970 song, Mother, he sang, You had me but I never had you.
16:41Here's the part that matters most for this story.
16:44People close to Lennon have drawn a direct line from that childhood wound to what he later
16:48did to his own son.
16:50One commentator put it plainly, John's childhood scars are the very reason he was able to abandon
16:56Julia.
16:56Even a writer sympathetic to Lennon's talent admitted the same thing outright, that the
17:01star never stopped mourning Julia.
17:03Although he repeated her mistakes by ignoring his own son Julian through most of his childhood.
17:09That's the cycle in one sentence.
17:11A boy handed off by his mother, raised by an aunt who loved him but kept him at arm's length,
17:16loses that mother permanently as a teenager, and grows up to hand off his own son the same
17:21way.
17:21But here's the detail that makes this more than just, trauma repeating trauma.
17:26When Sean was born, John did something he never did for Julian.
17:30But John did not abandon his second son Sean.
17:32In fact, the famous Beatle raised countless eyebrows when he decided to step out of the
17:37music business to raise his new son.
17:39And the reason for that was John's own awakening.
17:42He'd actually gone through primal therapy a few years earlier, digging into that exact
17:47childhood wound.
17:48In 1970, John Lennon underwent primal therapy with Arthur Janov, at his home, and at the
17:54Primal Institute in California.
17:56And the intensive sessions gave birth to the autobiographical song, Mother, a haunting revelation
18:01of the Beatles' own childhood abandonment trauma.
18:04So he understood the wound.
18:05He wrote entire albums about it.
18:07And he still let Julian carry a version of it, while making sure Sean never did.
18:12That's not a man who didn't know better.
18:15That's a man who knew exactly what abandonment does to a child, and chose to inflict it on
18:19one son while sparing the other.
18:21Cynthia's own biographer noticed the same pattern reaching even further back, tying John's
18:27temper directly to the household that raised him.
18:30One review of her memoir notes it was passionately jealous, verbally cutting, sometimes abusive,
18:35and often neglectful, with a hint that his behavior may have paralleled that of the woman who
18:40raised him, his Aunt Mimi.
18:42Whatever the exact source, the through-line is clear.
18:45Abandonment and coldness passed from one generation of this family into the next.
18:49And John's fame just made the fallout more public.
18:52So where did all of this leave the people who actually lived inside it?
18:56Once the world had already crowned John Lennon its symbol of peace, Cynthia never fully
19:01let go of the bitterness, but she also never let it consume her either.
19:05She wrote two memoirs trying to set down what actually happened inside that marriage.
19:09The second one published decades after the divorce, and she kept raising Julian largely
19:14on her own resources, while John's fame kept growing without her.
19:18Cynthia Powell Lennon was an artist and author who wrote two memoirs before her death in 2015
19:23at age 75.
19:25One review of her book noted something important about her tone, that despite everything, even
19:31though there's a lot of bitterness and resentment in these pages, it's not overwhelming.
19:35Being offset by Cynthia's fierce love for her son and her continuing affection for her
19:40ex-husband, Julian, for his part, has spent much of his adult life working through what
19:45those early years did to him.
19:47He said outright that watching his parents' marriage collapse shaped his own hesitations
19:52about starting a family.
19:53He admitted in 2011, he was young and didn't know what the hell he was doing.
19:58And that's the reason I haven't had children yet.
20:01A relative described the wider risk running through the family, saying Julian was reluctant
20:06to become a parent, as he fears his famous family is cursed with fathers who walk out on
20:11their kids.
20:12But Julian doesn't only carry anger.
20:14He's spoken about trying to hold two things at once, the hurt, and something closer to grace.
20:19He said, I try to remember my dad as fondly as possible.
20:23I strive for forgiveness and understanding in that area of my life, for the difficult
20:28times that put my mom and me through.
20:30I loved her more than anything, and can't forget how poorly he treated her.
20:34And he's pointed to something real in the final years, that the distance was, however
20:38slowly, starting to close before it was cut short of the good.
20:42But our relationship was getting better before we died.
20:45He was in a happier place.
20:46He wanted to reconnect, not just with me, but with the rest of his family.
20:50He never got a chance to do so.
20:53That line matters, because it's the closest thing this story has to an ending that isn't
20:57just tragedy.
20:58John Lennon was murdered in December of 1980, outside the building where he lived with Yoko
21:04and Sean.
21:04At a moment when he and Julian were, by Julian's own account, just beginning to find their way
21:09back toward each other.
21:10Whatever repair might have happened between them got cut off permanently.
21:14Sean, meanwhile, grew up on the other side of that divide entirely, the son who got the
21:19father who stayed home.
21:20Who got the primal therapy version of John, who never had to feel what Julian felt.
21:25And yet the two brothers found their own way to each other as adults, without their father's
21:30help.
21:30Julian has described that bond in his own words.
21:33He said he's thankful that he and Sean get along so well, calling them best buddies.
21:38Adding that Sean tells him what he can even though things are pretty secret, on the Beatles'
21:42front.
21:43So here's where all five pieces of this actually land.
21:46The peace campaign was real.
21:48The Vedans happened.
21:49The anthem got sung by a quarter million people.
21:52Imagine still plays at vigils 50 years later.
21:55And the house behind that campaign held a wife who described being struck and controlled.
22:00And a son who described being erased for the better part of a decade.
22:04Treated as an afterthought next to his little brother.
22:06And left holding a legal document that literally shrank his inheritance the day his replacement
22:12was born.
22:12Lenin himself, two days before he died, told the world in his own words that the two things
22:17came from the same place inside him.
22:19That the violence and the peace were opposite sides of one man, who never fully separated
22:24from what his own childhood had made him.
22:26The world got the anthem.
22:28Cynthia and Julian got the man behind it.
22:31Both of those things happened, in the same house, in the same years, under the same name.