‘I really don’t want to be looked upon as some kind of victim,” Cynthia Lennon told me in her low, purring voice. It was 2010, and after a year of rejection she had finally consented to a half-hour telephone interview about her long-ago life with her late ex-husband. I reminded “Cyn” of the heartbreaking 1968 snapshot of her and Julian that had appeared in her memoir John (2005), which I had reviewed for the Washington Post.
There was the adorable five-year-old, clad in a Peanuts sweatshirt and lying in his mother’s lap, a wan smile across his face, as his mother, beautiful at 28 and freshly deserted for Yoko Ono, stared sadly into the camera. “It’s hard not to look at that photograph of you with Julian, where he has his Snoopy sweatshirt on” — Right, she said, wearily — “and not see victims.” “Well,” Cyn replied, “in the eyes of other people, yes, you can say that. But neither of us are, because we have each other. . . . That’s the best thing that’s come out of it.”
Comments