John and Cynthia
I’m reading John, by Cynthia Lennon, John Lennon’s first wife and partner of six years, who he had dated for several years prior to marrying. Cynthia didn’t ever step into the limelight, and now so many years later she decided to set the record straight because without her voice to counter them, the media has always defaulted to a dull and unintelligent portrait of her, preferring to spend their typeface discussing the dramatic, high-profile relationship between John and Yoko. From learning more about John and Cynthia’s life in the years shortly before The Beatles became famous and during those first few years of celebrity, I wonder if all highly creative people need a strong anchor at their side to keep them present on this plane–whether they become famous or not.
In my own life, I’ve seen this to be true. My beau (and close friend over the last three years) is a self-proclaimed “crazy artist.” I’m learning to recognize when he’s in his “work mode” and I know that when he is, I’ll get little out of him. He is never cruel, but when his eyes dart away from the computer (or drawing table) momentarily to meet mine, I can see that the rest of his energy is still fixated on his art. I know that at these times, it’s best to stick to the basics, “When will you be done?” “Are you hungry?” etc. These moments echo the relationship of John and Cynthia. Cynthia was always independent of John and gave him his space when it was needed. I wonder—if Will were ever a famous artist, and I chose to stay out of the lime light—how would the media treat me? Would they assume I was dim-witted because I wished to maintain a certain level of anonymity. Through the Beatlemania years, because she stayed out of center stage, in most places Cynthia was never recognized when she wasn’t with John, had she been photographed more this certainly wouldn’t have been the case. She was a strong woman; she chose to raise Julian, their son, largely without the help of a nanny and stood by John during the year they were told by Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, to keep their marriage (and child) a secret.
The media doesn’t even give Cynthia credit for putting up with being alone so much of the time during the years when The Beatles were struggling to get a record deal, or during the first few years of fame—let alone acknowledging the deep connection between she and John. Cynthia was John’s tether to this world—to her he was always just John. Artists feel things at a deeper level than many other people. With their ability to perceive in unique and poignant ways, there comes a price: emotional intensity and sometimes creating a volatile individual. I wonder if these souls always come in two’s—creative genius consisting of two necessary components: the space cadet and her anchor.
The other thing this book has me thinking about is the concept of celebrity. Why is it that we, in a society free of monarchy and a dominating aristocracy based on bloodlines, build up the champions in selected fields (primarily, the arts) to be demigods? When I’ve seen those pictures in magazines of CELEBRITIES WITHOUT MAKEUP!, they remind me that those celebrities aren’t that different from you or me. Many of whom are not, in truth, more attractive than the local beauty queens; the only difference is their fame and entourage of makeup and hair people. I wonder how others react to these images? Do they believe it’s bad for Jennifer Lopez to go a day without wearing makeup? What are we supposed to feel when we look at these images?
I’m not above celebrity voyeurism. From time to time, I check in with the celebrities who pique my interest, but I always feel as though I’ve debased myself when I watch the 10-second clips of celebrities like Christina Aguilera, fighting through a throng of photographers as she tries to make her way from the club’s door to her waiting vehicle. If I ever met her in person, I’d feel ashamed that I’d watched that anything like that and in doing so feeding into what has stripped her of her personal freedom. The seemingly all-male photographers say stock phrases like, “Looking beautiful Christina,” in an attempt to get a good shot. There’s something perverted about our cultural obsession with celebrity. What is it in our psychology that fuels us to, when organized in societies, create these larger-than-life-seeming figures? In my biography-reading experience (which is not profuse I’ll admit), illuminating the back story of these figures slowly let’s the air out of the inflated, public persona, revealing a three-dimensional human being, no different than the people I’ve known in my own life.
As a society, we need to reexamine the way we treat the other members of our species whose talent we admire. The fragile human ego malfunctions when faced with such obsessive adulation (why do so many of our beloved famous artists wind up dieing so young?). Instead of ballooning out the one aspect of the celebrity we love (ie their singing voice, their acting ability, their writing, their painting) and forgetting about the rest. We should keep their humanity in mind. They are people just like us, who use the bathroom, who don’t always want to wear makeup or comb their hair, and who never thought they’d live anything but a normal life.
John always said in interviews that he didn’t miss Liverpool. The truth was that it deeply saddened him that he couldn’t return to his hometown and simply visit friends, stop by his favorite pub, and walk the streets as he once did. Are we really so out of touch culturally that we can’t let a person be?
Below is a great video of Liz Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, giving a talk on creative genius….very interesting.
