Cynthia Lennon obituary

As the first Mrs John Lennon, the former Cynthia Powell witnessed at first hand the reality-distorting effects of pop stardom on a hitherto unknown scale. Cynthia, who has died of cancer aged 75, married Lennon in 1962, just before the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do. By the time the couple’s marriage foundered in 1968, the Beatles had become more like a religion than a pop group.

Cynthia had done her best to share Lennon’s journey through drugs, mysticism and superstardom, but it proved an impossible challenge. When she returned that year from a trip to Greece to their Surrey mansion to find Lennon and the artist Yoko Ono, in matching towelling robes, gazing at each other, she realised the game was up. “The Beatles had overdosed on everything that fame can bring,” she reflected later.

The couple divorced that November, but Cynthia never managed to escape completely from Lennon’s giant shadow – “having tried to live an ordinary life for so many years since John and I parted, I have come to realise that I will always be known as John’s first wife,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir John – but for the rest of her life she kept trying her hand at a variety of roles. She opened restaurants, wrote books and even made a stab at becoming a recording artist. She married three more times and was a devoted mother to her son, the musician Julian Lennon.

Cynthia was the third child of Charles Powell, who worked for the electrical and engineering company GEC, and his wife, Lillian. She was born in the opening days of the second world war, in Blackpool, to where her mother had been evacuated from the family home in Liverpool. As the war got into full swing and the Luftwaffe began to target Liverpool, “my Liverpudlian parents moved across the Mersey to the relative safety of Hoylake, a sweet little seaside village,” she recalled.

Cynthia showed artistic flair, and after attending the city’s Junior Art School, began studying at the Liverpool College of Art in 1957. She met John Lennon in lettering classes (he mocked her middle-class manners by addressing her as “Miss Hoylake”), and despite her protests that she was already engaged to a boy in Hoylake, she rapidly succumbed to Lennon’s caustic charms.

Their relationship was volatile, with Lennon prone to jealousy and violence (“I was in sort of a blind rage for two years, I was either drunk or fighting,” he said). Nonetheless she stuck by him, and visited Hamburg in 1961 when the Beatles played a residency there, apparently remaining oblivious to the band’s frantic promiscuity. The following year, aged 22, she found herself pregnant, to which Lennon retorted: “We’ll have to get married then, Cyn.”

This they did, in Liverpool on 23 August 1962, with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, as best man. Cynthia had been intending to become an art teacher, but now found herself in a kind of limbo as a wife and, after Julian’s birth in 1963, mother. Epstein insisted that the fans should never know that John was married, to preserve his aura of laddish availability, so Cynthia was often left behind with Julian while John was away touring or recording. “There was John, rapidly becoming famous and wealthy … and there was I, in a grim little five-pounds-a-week bedsit, with his son,” she wrote later.

In 1964 the Lennons moved in to Kenwood, a mock-Tudor pile near Weybridge, Surrey. Cynthia enjoyed the company of her fellow Beatle wives Pattie Boyd (married to George Harrison) and Maureen Starkey (Mrs Ringo Starr), who lived nearby, and became accustomed to a life of social gatherings of the pop glitterati at her home or nights out in West End clubland. But drug use in their circle grew, with John becoming a compulsive taker of LSD. “John’s discovery of LSD made him vulnerable to anything bizarre, odd or exciting which knocked on his door – which, of course, is what Yoko did,” said Cynthia.

She had hoped the Beatles’ journey in February 1968 to Rishikesh in India to meditate with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi might restore some calm to their marriage, but instead found that “it just presaged the end,” with John secretly receiving letters from Ono during the trip. Cynthia started divorce proceedings after hearing that Ono was pregnant. Eventually John grudgingly agreed to pay Cynthia £100,000, plus maintenance of £2,400 a year, with another £100,000 placed in a trust fund for Julian (though eventually he had to share this with John and Yoko’s son Sean).

The Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini became the new man in Cynthia’s life. They were married in 1970 and divorced in 1973. Cynthia then opened Oliver’s Bistro, a restaurant and B&B in Ruthin, Wales, and in 1976 married John Twist. In 1978 she published a memoir, A Twist of Lennon, despite John Lennon’s attempts to block it.

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In December 1980 she was staying with Maureen Starkey when Ringo called to break the news that John had been murdered in New York. Ono decreed that Cynthia should not attend the funeral, and although John had achieved a rapprochement with Julian during the 1970s after years of paternal indifference, there would be much legal wrangling before Ono would part with any financial support for Julian.

Cynthia was divorced from Twist in 1983, sold Oliver’s Bistro and changed her name back to Lennon by deed poll, frankly admitting that it made her more bankable. She raised money by auctioning Beatles memorabilia, but her business initiatives (including textile designing, the launch of a fragrance called Woman and a Lennon’s restaurant in Covent Garden, London) were not successful. In 1995 she tried her hand as a pop singer with a recording of Those Were the Days. The song had been a No 1 hit for Mary Hopkin in 1968, boosted by production by Paul McCartney, but Cynthia’s version did not make the charts.

In 2002 she married a nightclub owner, Noel Charles, and in 2005 published John, about her life with and without Lennon. There were signs of a thaw in relations with Ono when both attended the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles-themed show Love in Las Vegas in 2006. In 2010 Cynthia joined Ono, Sean and John Lennon’s erstwhile lover May Pang in New York at the launch of Julian’s photo exhibition Timeless.

Cynthia lived in Majorca with Noel, and remained there after his death in 2013. She is survived by Julian.