| From
the Depression of Divorce, Came “Hey Jude”
One of the Beatles best kept secrets, was
John Lennon’s marriage to wife, Cynthia Twist. The two had met at the Liverpool
College of Art in the late 1950s, where an aunt had managed to get Lennon
enrolled.
They dated for some time, before Twist
discovered she was pregnant in 1962. Their son, John Charles Julian Lennon,
was born April 8, 1963. It would be another year, before raging fans discovered
that one of the fab four had deserted them, and gotten married.
On the one hand, they needn’t have worried,
because 1968 would see Cynthia suing for divorce on the grounds of John’s
adultery with Yoko Ono. Lennon did not contest the divorce. But their son
Julian, took the separation very hard.
In the role of family friend, Paul McCartney
wrote the tune “Hey Jude”, which was originally “Hey Jules”, to cheer Julian
up. The title change is attributed to McCartney’s fondness for a character
named “Jud” in the stage musical Oklahoma.
An early version of the song’s lyrics,
written in a notebook belonging to Beatle aide Mel Evans, sold for 110,000
pounds at a Sotheby’s auction. In April of 2002, McCartney blocked a Christie’s
auction of his original handwritten lyrics, all 19 lines on a torn out
sheet of notebook paper. The man offering the paper for sale, claimed to
have picked it up in the Portobello market, 30 years before. McCartney
countered that it had disappeared from his house.
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