Maneuvering Swine

[itsnotmymind]

Paul McCartney, in a moment of anger and grief that undoubtedly should have been kept private, once described John Lennon as a “maneuvering swine”.

John, in fact, described himself similarly in Lennon Remembers: They [businessmen] play the game the way we play music, and it’s something to see. They play a game, first they have a ritual, then they create. Allen, he’s a very creative guy, you know, he creates situations which create positions for them to move in, they all do it, you know, and it’s a sight to see. We played our part, we both did. [...] I did a job on this banker that we were using, and on a few other people, and on the Beatles. I maneuver people. That’s what leaders do, and I sit and make situations which will be of benefit to me with other people, it’s as simple as that. I had to do a job to get Allen in Apple. I did a job, so did Yoko.

What's really interesting to me is the conversation between John and Yoko that follows:

Yoko: You do it with instinct, you know.

John: Oh. God, Yoko, don't say that. Maneuvering is what it is, let's not be coy about it. It is a deliberate and thought-out maneuver of how to get a situation the way we want it. That's how life's about, isn't it, is it not?

Yoko: Well, you're pretty instinctive.

John: Instinctive doesn't . . . isn't Dick James – so is Lew Grade – they're all instinctive, so is he, if it's instinctive – but it's maneuvering. There's nothing ashamed about it. We all do it, it's just owning up, you know, not going around saying "God Bless you, Brother," pretending there is no vested interest.

Yoko: The difference is that you don't go down and bullshit and get them. But you just instinctively said that Allen is the guy to jump into it.

John: That's not the thing, the point I'm talking about is creating a situation around Apple and the Beatles in which Allen could come in, that is what I'm talking about, and he wouldn't have gotten in unless I'd done it, and he wouldn't have gotten in unless you'd done it, you made the decision, too.

One thing that really strikes me about this is Yoko defending John, against his insistence, but not herself. She's insisting that he's not manipulative in the way those businessmen are - but she doesn't object to the idea that she's manipulative. Of course, John gets the last word - whenever I've seen John and Yoko have a disagreement in an interview, John gets the last word.

John's insistence at he is, in fact, as cynical and manipulative as any banker flies directly in the face of the image John was apparently going for in that interview: that of a honest, candid guy who is trying to resist selling out, as opposed to his supposedly money-obsessed ex-bandmate McCartney. John certainly jusitifies himself - this is something everyone does, leaders do it, etc. Others did not share that opinion. After John's death, Paul, commenting on this interview, claimed that he didn't remember anyone engaging in his maneuvering both John signed with Allen Klein.

Maybe it's the fact that John was so negative in that that people saw him as being honest. I've noticed that negativity is sometimes taken as truth just because it's negative. For example, I've heard about people describing John's musical attack on Paul, "How Do You Sleep?", as honest - a song where John claims that Paul never did anything but Yesterday and has no musical talent, directly in contradiction even with the interviews John was giving at the time. To express negative feelings without apparent shame, perhaps, is seen as honest. It doesn't matter if those feelings are expressed in the form of cruel lies.

But I think John's self-contradiction - that he could one minute be the socialist advocate of peace and love and another minute a cynical maneuvering capitalist doing what he claims everybody does - is in fact the main reason why John was so effective at winning the press over, especially when he was contrasted to Paul McCartney.

One thing that’s really amazed me as I get older is that the little anecdotes Paul tells always have a goal, something specific that he is trying to communicate. A message, if you will. And they do it well. They’re really works of art, those little anecdotes. Paul’s very good at using story to communicate.

But the problem is, that means he always has an agenda. Paul approaches interviews the way he approaches everything: with a clear, specific goal. John does appear to have come into interviews with an image he wanted to project, but he was loose with the details. He mostly just said whatever came into his head (people confusing impulsivity with honesty, perhaps). His goal was not to communicate a specific image—it was to get the interviewer to like him. So what he said did not have to be accurate, or promote a specific image. It had to appeal to the person interviewing him. One of things interviewers like - for that matter, one of the things most people like - is to be able to tell the story. John gave them the freedom to do that. Paul does not.

John Lennon could get the press on his side. And once they’re on your side, who cares what they write? They could write that John was a purple penguin and Paul as a grizzly bear trying to eat him and John wouldn’t care - as long as he was the hero of the story. John's lack of consistency gave reporters a lot of freedom to tell the tale they wanted to tell. He gave them plenty of juicy quotes that they could craft anyway they chose. Not many interview subjects are like that.

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

There's also the "which is the better story" question. For the media, that is. Janet Malcolm, in her fascinating musing about the nature of biographies and the biographical industry for which she took the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes biographers as examples, said that the iron rule of journalism is that you pick a story and you stick to it. Cinderella versus the evil stepmother and the evil stepsisters, she continued, is a good story. "Second Stepsister not so bad after all" is NOT a good story. "Beatles break up for various complicated reasons both related to money and personalities" is far more difficult to tell than Honest John versus Sell Out Paul.

Of course they all after years in the public glare were veterans in dealing with the media and trying to get a message they wanted across, and that includes at least some basic manipulating skills, though if you look at their teenage years, i.e. before everyone by force of necessity had to get media savvy, you have a lot of manouevring already, from John, Paul and interestingly enough also from George (who according to himself campaigned as much to get rid of the non-essential Quarry Men as Paul did). And then there's John persuading Stu to invest the money from his sold art into aquiring an instrument Stu didn't play because the band needed a bass guitar (and a bass guitarist), and to put what was a very promising art career on hold to join a band that pre Germany wasn't all that good and hadn't had any impressive successes to look on. Talk about persuasive skills.

There's also that quote of May Pang's from Loving John, which remains one of the most haunting statements, to me, about John Lennon: "John was a very frightened man. He dealt with his fear of women by allowing himself to be manipulated; he dealt with his fear of men by manipulating them. He could do it by pining them down with his piercing stare, by speaking to them in an unmistakably authorative voice. He could also do it by being the public John - a man of startling honesty and common sense. In reality John allowed almost no one to be a close friend; even though his truthful, direct style helped to create an illusion of startling intimacy, he used his directness as a way of keeping people at a distance. (...)Suddenly I was afraid. I did not want to think about the fact htat John could turn on a public voice whenever he wanted to. It would make me question his truthfulness and wonder if he was ever using his public voice with me."

"An illusion of startling intimacy" is how your avarage John interview does feel like, especially since he varies his statements depending to when the interview is from and what his goal du jour is, whereas Paul sticks to essentially the same couple of anecdotes and statements since decades, such rare exceptions like the conversation with Hunter Davies from 1981 after reading Philip Norman you quoted from aside. I.e. you're aware in a Paul interview you're held at polite and friendly arms length, and, like you said, that he has a couple of points he wants to get across; whereas John gave his interviewers the impression that he was completely opening up and that they, not he, were in charge of what they found out from this encounter.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

There's also the "which is the better story" question.

Yes. And if you have to stick with a story - well, the first story had to be written in the moment with whatever information reporters were able to get at that time. They didn't have all the sources and perspective that we have decades later. You have to tell a good story, quickly, with limited information. So it would make sense that John, who was more interesting in the moment, would become the hero.

The Beatles were as charismatic as they were talented - that was part of their appeal. They all got the press to love them back in the early days. I suppose it's not surprising that their portrayal in the press would be one of the things that John and Paul would end up competing over.

That is a great quote from May Pang.

BTW, do you have any thoughts on that exchange above where Yoko defends John by saying he does these things instinctively? It's interesting to me, but I haven't figured out what to say about it.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

re: that exchange, I see it in the context of this particular interview (i.e. Lennon Remembers), what they hoped from it and a slightly differing perception of that and of John's own self image. Yoko saying John does it by instinct to me felt tied to the idea of John as quintessentially honest (versus the Eastmans and Paul as calculated and dishonest), wanting to get this across and fearing that an admittance of manouevring would feel like an admittance of acting with the same type of calculation, as opposed to always acting on true feelings. Whereas John sees "you do it by instinct" as meaning "you have a manipulative nature", which definitely goes not just against what he wants to project in late 1970/early 1971, but his entire idea of himself.

Whereas with Yoko's image, the public perception of her was still extremely negative and in addition to various racist aspects could be summed up as "nutty parasite making John do crazy things". Against this, the two things that J & Y come across as wanting to get through in their interviews through the 70s is a) Yoko as a great artist in her own right and b) Yoko as a skilled business woman. Neither of which conflicts with the idea of Yoko being good at manoeuvring in the Apple/Klein/Eastman battle, so she doesn't push against it in the interview.

And if you have to stick with a story - well, the first story had to be written in the moment with whatever information reporters were able to get at that time.

True, and you have that extraordinary six months or so interlude of Paul not giving any interviews at all (which fed the Paul is dead craze) and being holed up in Scotland working through his depression (I think in a decades lasting career still an unparalleled interlude - even in the aftermaths of other minor and major catastrophers like the Japanese pot arrest, or Linda's death, of the Heather Mills divorce, he was more publically available), at a point when John was giving, what, four interviews per day? (Peter Doggett had the numbers in "You never give me your money", but I don't have the book with me right now, it's in Munich and I'm in Bamberg.) So it's not surprising the media responded as it did.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Were they going for the Yoko-as-a-great business woman in this interview? I know that was a major theme in their 1980 interviews, but at this time Yoko hadn't yet taken over their finances. Yoko was instrumental in choosing Allen Klein, which John mentions in Lennon Remembers. But they don't make a big deal of it, and I seem to recall at least one point in one interview where John credits only his own instincts for picking out Allen. I think they only started selling Yoko's business skills later.

True, and you have that extraordinary six months or so interlude of Paul not giving any interviews at all (which fed the Paul is dead craze) and being holed up in Scotland working through his depression (I think in a decades lasting career still an unparalleled interlude - even in the aftermaths of other minor and major catastrophers like the Japanese pot arrest, or Linda's death, of the Heather Mills divorce, he was more publically available), at a point when John was giving, what, four interviews per day?

And I can see that in terms of their interview styles. Paul probably wanted to to tell a consistent and detailed story - a story I doubt he was emotionally capable of coming up with at that point in his life. John just had a general picture of what he wanted to get across, and then ran his mouth off, without being concerned about the consequences of what he said. And once John started giving nasty interviews, that made it even more difficult for Paul to speak out in public. Paul has talked about how he knew John would win a battle in the press - so now Paul had to avoid pissing off John when he gave interviews - despite the fact that he himself was incredibly angry at John.

Perhaps Paul was more willing to give interviews in the aftermath of later crisis because it went so badly in 1969/1970. The Beatles' interaction with the press during the break-up period really was different from what it had been previously. A whole new set of lessons to learn, I imagine.