Who Killed John Lennon? by Lesley-Ann Jones

Author:Lesley-Ann Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Blake Publishing

CHAPTER 15

REVELATION

W

here to now, Johnny?

Look: four rich, famous, rudderless young Beatles, ripe for the taking. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was on hand. He counselled them in Bangor to think positively about Brian’s departure. Reassuring them that his spirit remained among them, he encouraged them to feel joyful about their manager’s death in order to help ease his passage into the next world. Negativity, warned Maharishi, would hinder the journey. This shred of sacred Hindu teaching did seem to comfort them. It also primed them for the giggling guru’s subsequent exhortation: that they should travel forthwith to India and join him at his ashram in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas.1

While Epstein would doubtless have counselled caution at the idea of such an intrepid expedition, he was no longer around to ask. The boys had dipped into the ancient texts and had elemental awareness of the fourth level of consciousness: ‘pure’, transcendental consciousness. They knew enough to know that they couldn’t reach it without ‘the mantra’. Maharishi had the mantra. Perhaps he also held the secrets of the Buddhas with the half-closed eyes . . .

To the eastern bank of the Ganges they went, in February 1968. Their WAGS, PAs and the press trolled along too. The latter were kept at bay by barbed wire, but some found their way up trees to decent vantage points. There was a sizeable contingent of TM trainees, among them the children of Tarzan’s Jane: Prudence Farrow, twenty, her brother John and their luminous elder sister, twenty-three-year-old actress Mia Farrow, who was going through a harrowing divorce from three-decades-older Frank Sinatra.2 Jenny Boyd was with her sister and brother-in-law Pattie and George, and Magic Alex. The Beach Boys’ Mike Love was there, as were saxophonist and flautist Paul Horn and Scottish folk singer Donovan. The expedition attracted worldwide media attention, some good, some less so. The hundreds of ‘Beatles Guru’ and ‘Year of the Guru’ headlines were offset by Private Eye’s hilariously derisive VERIRICHILOTSAMONEY YOGI BEAR.

The sun was up, the sky was blue. The younger Miss Farrow ignored plea after plea to come out and hang out, inspiring one of John’s best-loved songs. The aptly named sister was undeterred. Said John, ‘She wouldn’t come out of the little hut we were living in . . . We got her out of the house – she’d been locked in for three weeks and wouldn’t come out. She was trying to find God quicker than anyone else. That was the competition in Maharishi’s camp: who was going to get cosmic first.’

John, said Prudence Farrow, was ‘very brilliant and extremely funny. He was very astute in terms of sizing people up. So how do I know what he would write? I didn’t know. He could have written anything. What was nice was my privacy – he respected it to a great extent.’

What does she think of the song ‘Dear Prudence’ today?

‘It epitomized what the sixties were about in many ways. What it’s saying is very beautiful; it’s very positive.

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