John Lennon was the most honest major public figure of his generation. Not the most diplomatic. Not the most strategic. The most honest. He had developed, possibly as a defense mechanism against the overwhelming unreality of his own fame, an almost compulsive commitment to saying the true thing even when the true thing was damaging to his image or his relationships or the carefully maintained mythology of the Beatles. He understood that the mythology was a construction and he felt, in the specific way of someone imprisoned by a construction, a periodic desperate need to break through it and say something real.
These are five times the breaking-through was so complete that the rooms fell silent.
1. On his own childhood. In an interview in 1971, Lennon was asked about his early years in the specific hagiographic way that journalists asked Beatles questions — the assumption built into the framing that everything had been building toward something magnificent, that even the difficult parts were retroactively blessed by the outcome. He interrupted the question. He said flatly that his childhood had been frightening. That the abandonment by his father and then by his mother — who left him with his aunt and then died when he was seventeen — had produced a damage in him that he had never fully repaired. He named the damage. He sat with it in the interview with a stillness that was unlike anything in his usual persona. The journalist stopped writing. Nobody said anything for a long time.
2. On the Beatles mythology. At the height of the band’s fame, asked about the screaming girls and the cultural phenomenon and the world-historical significance of what they were doing, Lennon said: we’re just a band. We always were just a band. The rest of it is something people put on us and we put on ourselves and none of it is really real. The mythology is real to the people who need it. It was never real to us from the inside. He said this and then looked at the interviewer with the expression of someone who has just removed something that was pressed against them and is breathing freely for the first time in years. The interviewer, who had expected something else entirely, did not know how to continue.
3. On Paul McCartney during the breakup period. Lennon was asked about McCartney in the early 1970s and the question was designed to elicit something manageable — something in the territory of professional respect that would play well in a music magazine. What Lennon gave instead was a direct account of his feelings about Paul that contained both love and resentment in proportions that he refused to separate into something clean. He said that he loved Paul and that Paul drove him mad and that he missed him and that the missing and the anger were the same feeling wearing different clothes. The publicist in the room started to intervene. Lennon looked at the publicist and the publicist sat back down.
4. On fame and what it cost. In one of his final major interviews, Lennon was asked whether he would do it again. The career. The Beatles. All of it. He paused for long enough that the interviewer started to reformulate the question, thinking it hadn’t landed. Then Lennon said: I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. The things it gave me I could not have gotten any other way. The things it took from me I cannot get back. I’m not sure how to weigh those against each other and I’ve been trying for twenty years. Nobody in the room said anything. The interviewer, who had done hundreds of celebrity interviews, has said since that it was the only answer in his career that he received that he believed absolutely and completely.
5. On his own limitations as a father. Lennon’s relationship with his son Julian — the child of his first marriage who had spent his childhood largely without his father — was something he addressed in the last years of his life with the specific honesty of someone who has decided that there is no longer any useful purpose in protecting his own image at the expense of the truth. He said in one interview that he had been a bad father. Not contextually bad, not bad given the circumstances, not bad in ways that could be explained by the pressures of fame or the chaos of the 1960s or any of the other mitigating factors that were available to him. Simply bad. That Julian had deserved better and had not received it and that this was true regardless of the reasons. The interviewer, who had a child of their own, later said that they had held it together through the interview and then cried in the car driving home.
Five moments. Five times a man with every professional incentive to protect himself chose instead to be completely, uncomplicatedly real.
That is what made him Lennon. Not the music alone. The refusal to hide. The specific courage of someone who had decided that the performance of themselves was less important than the truth of themselves.
He was honest until the end. It cost him things. He did it anyway.