While the divorce papers of John Lennon and Cynthia Powel stated the reason behind the failed six-year marriage was the former Beatle’s affair with Yoko Ono, private letters published by The Telegraph in 2017, reveal a different side of the story.
Lennon wrote the letter addressed to his former wife in 1976 in a response to Powell’s tell-all interviews with newspapers and magazines about Lennon’s affair.
At the time, an excerpt from Powell’s memoir ‘A Twist of Lennon’ was being published in the News of the World.
In the letter, Lennon asks Powell to stop running to Newspapers with details of his affairs.
“As you and I well know, our marriage was over long before the advent of LSD or Yoko Ono…and that’s reality!” Lennon wrote.
The former Beatle goes on to correct Powell’s public statements on their drug abuse. “Your memory is impaired, to say the least. Your version of our first LSD trip is rather vague, and you seem to have forgotten subsequent trips altogether!”
Lennon then recalls an uncomfortable encounter with the former life – “You suddenly brought Julian to see me in Los Angeles after three years of silence,” Lennon wrote. “During this visit, you hardly allowed me to be alone with him for one moment. You even asked me to remarry you and/or give you another child, ‘for Julian’s sake’. I politely told you no, and that, anyway, I was still in love with Yoko.”
Lennon added in the letter while he doesn’t blame her for wishing to move on from her experience with the Beatles, he suggests that, if Powell were serious, she “should try to avoid talking to and posing for magazines and newspapers!”
John Lennon and Cynthia Powell met in 1957 in art school and were married in 1962.
The marriage lasted six years. Powell claimed she knew the marriage is over when she found Yoko Ono in her house after she returned from a holiday early.
“She had been staying with John that night, and I came home and they were there”.Powell told the American radio talk show host Terry Gross in 1985.
Reportedly, they were both dressed in white dressing gowns and staring into each other’s eyes.
“ That moment was sort of curtains for our marriage as far as all of us were concerned really,” Powell claimed.
