Well known celebrities and their faults (Part I)

All of us, no matter who we are, do stupid things in our lives and behave in a manner that is outrageous at time. That is because we all have one thing in common. We are human beings. Unfortunately, many of those whom we look on as role models are not exemplary. In fact, some of them are not what you would want your children to be like. This series is intended to show my readers what some of these people are or were really like as human beings. It is not my intention to belittle the admirable things they did in life but to show my readers the terrible and sometimes outright stupid things that they also did to themselves and to others.

John Lennon (singer)

He was born on October 9th in 1940 and was an English rock musician, singer, writer, songwriter, artist, actor and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles.

In his solo career, Lennon wrote and recorded many songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". Lennon revealed his rebellious nature and wit on television, in films such as A Hard Day's Night, in books such as In His Own Write, and in press conferences and interviews. He was controversial through his work as a peace activist, artist, and author.

Lennon had two sons: Julian, with his first wife Cynthia, and Sean, with his second wife, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. After a self-imposed retirement from 1976 to 1980, Lennon re-emerged with a comeback album, but was murdered one month later in New York City on 8 December 1980 by a deranged fan.

He will be remembered for his contribution in the world for his many accomplishments. He didn’t invent rock and roll, nor did he embody it as toweringly as figures like Elvis Presley and Little Richard, but he did more than anyone else to shake it up, move it forward and instill it with a conscience. As the most daring and outspoken of the four Beatles, he helped shape the agenda of the Sixties --- socially and politically, no less than musically. As a solo artist, he made music that alternately disturbed and soothed and at the same time, provoked thought.

John virtually retired from the music business when his son Sean (with his second wife) was born, and, as the Eighties began, the musical scene had moved on from super-groups to punk rock. As famous as he was when the Beatles were in full swing, he was not the greatest singer in the rock era. Aretha Franklin was number 1, Ray Charles was number 2, Elvis Presley was number 3, Sam Cooke was number 4 and John Lennon was number 5.

Despite his popularity, John Lennon had a dark side.

John committed himself early to gangs and mischief, shoplifting, and group masturbation as boys screamed out the name of film siren Brigitte Bardot. By early 1958, he was fully the slouched teen rebel, a marginal student and resident trouble-maker.

Contemporary writer Maureen Cleave saw mid-career Lennon as "remarkably like a young Henry VIII: arrogant as an eagle ... unpredictable, indolent, disorganized, childlike, and vague."

John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, met John in the late 1950s in the English city of Liverpool, where they were both art students. The two married in 1962 and had their son, Julian.

She says that John had a violent temper and once smacked her face in public in a fit of jealousy. John had become jealous after seeing her dance with his close friend, Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the Beatles' early members. Her ex-husband, according to her, was prone to violent tantrums.

As an aside, later while John and Stuart were in Hamburg, Germany in 1962, the two men got into a fight and while John was beating his friend, he kicked him in the head. Stuart died not long afterward of a brain hemorrhage.

Although John was still verbally cutting and unkind to his wife, he was never again physically violent to her. However, John’s continuous brutal callousness toward Cynthia and cold indifference to their son, Julian made them a dysfunctional family. Julian wrote in the forward of his mother’s book; "Dad was a great talent, a remarkable man who stood for peace and love in the world. But at the same time, he found it very hard to show any peace and love to his first family, my mother and me."

The music legend was prone to unprovoked acts of cruelty, jealous rage and perverse sexual fantasies, according to the explosive new tell-all "John Lennon: The Life" by Beatles biographer Philip Norman.

John often left his first family penniless notwithstanding that he was reeling in millions of dollars at the height of Beatlemania. As far as he was concerned, his young female admirers didn’t want to know that he was married. They wanted to know that he was single and available so he buried his married life out of sight of his public life.

One day Cynthia arrived home from a short vacation abroad in 1968 to discover her husband with Japanese artist, Yoko Ono, the woman who would later become his second wife. Both were in toweling robes. John and Cynthia divorced on November 8, 1968. In the settlement, the multi-millionaire pop star gave her only $240,000 for Julian's education and nothing for her.

On the last page of her book, Cynthia admits that she regrets ever getting involved with John. As she put it, "If I had known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to, I would have turned around right then and walked away."

When John first met Yoko Ono, he groped a girl in front of her and then treated Yoko like she was the ‘lay du jour’ which obviously upset her.

Yoko Ono and Lennon married on March 20, 1969 in Gibraltar. During their first four years together as a couple, they spent virtually every minute of every day together. Though they continued to exhilarate each other on a creative level, their physical relationship inevitably lost some of its initial blaze. John's sexual drive remained as intense as ever, but Yoko was finding that she was less able, or inclined, to deal with it. She was becoming an increasingly unresponsive lover and John taunted her as if she was like a Victorian wife; 'You just lie there and think of England'. When John left Yoko for a year of reckless debauchery he told her, “You must take a lover too.”

They had a son, Sean. The boy said his father became enraged when he, then 4, failed to heed his lessons on how to cut his steak. His father screamed at him so loudly that he ended up in the hospital with damage to his ear.

Later, while living with Yoko, he succumbed to abnormal displays of jealousy and insecurity. Primal scream therapy didn’t help nor did the drug and alcohol he ingested during his infamous 18-month ‘lost weekend’ he and his wife had in California.

John Lennon did some really stupid things also in his life. Consider the following.

On March 4, 1966, the following quote of John's was printed in an interview by reporter Maureen Cleave in the London Evening Standard:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first --- rock 'n' roll or Christianity.”

Well, for the most part, over a billion people world-wide know who Jesus is. Most of them never heard of the Beatles. Christianity has been with us for almost two thousand years and it doesn’t show any signs of vanishing which is more than what can be said about rock ‘n’ roll.

In any case, after his statement was published, all hell broke loose. Radio stations in the southern United States banned Beatles music. There were rallies of boys and girls stomping on their records and bonfires of Beatles material. The press generally printed that Lennon had apologized, a planned second bonfire of records was called off, and no Beatles performances were cancelled. But the whole episode left a dark cloud over the public as far as the Beatles were concerned, and the upcoming tour would be their last.

I remember reading about an incident that occurred when John was still alive. He and some friends had walked into a restaurant to have a meal. While seated, he borrowed a Kotex from one of the women sitting with him and somehow managed to stick it on his forehead. When a waitress approached him, he looked at her and asked, “What do I look like?” She replied in a matter-of-fact voice, “Like an asshole with a Kotex on his face.”

Perhaps that statement sort of sums up what John Lennon was really like. He certainly was not the kind of father anyone would want to have and he wasn’t the kind of husband that any right-thinking woman would want and it would appear that he also wasn’t the kind of friend you would want.

Despite that, he was a talented musician. But as we all know, even a pretty flower can grow in a garbage heap.