She stopped John from being with his natural mother.' He was brought up by his aunt Mimi, described as insensitive and overbearing, who took John into her home even before his mother's death. 'John was always insecure,' she said, having come from a broken family and losing his mother at a young age. 'But I would not put up with physical abuse,' she said, a reference to the new book's description - absent from her 1978 book, 'A Twist of Lennon' - of John striking her in a fit of jealousy after he saw Cynthia and Sutcliffe dancing. 'I'm not passive, I'm patient,' said Lennon when asked why she put up with John's verbal abuse, heavy drug use and long absences from the family home. The comment goes a long way to explaining the character of a woman often portrayed as weak and victimized. Lennon, who now lives in Spain with her fourth husband, said she was prepared to continue waiting until Julian's ready to talk. 'I was trying to give him some more of a sense of being John's son.' Asked for Julian's reaction to the book, she replied: 'I'm still waiting for it.' The 66-year-old Lennon - speaking Wednesday at the Foreign Press Association in London - said she also wrote the book for their son, Julian, who she maintains has been 'very scarred by life.' 'The only way you can get the truth is from the inside, not the outside,' she said. And she was with John through the group's delirious ride through fame - drugs, meditation and all.Īnd now, more than 35 years after her painful divorce from John and 25 years after his death, Cynthia Lennon has published 'John' - a book she says needed to be written to erase the misconceptions left by other books about John, their 1962-1969 marriage and the Beatles. Lennon, when the Beatles were not even a concept. It was there, as a teenager attending art school, that she met and fell in love with an equally young student who was destined to become one of the most famous pop artists in history.Ĭynthia was in the mix long before she became Mrs.

Instead, it was a quiet-spoken, middle-class woman from a northern England suburb. And not Billy Preston, whose keyboard talents can be heard on The Beatles' later recordings and in their last live performance. Nor was it Yoko Ono - seemingly attached to John at the hip during the group's twilight years. It wasn't Stu Sutcliffe - the Liverpool artist and best friend of John Lennon - who died shortly after leaving the group, nor George Martin, though his talent as a producer helped open the door to the group's creativity.

LONDON, England (CNN) - Long before anyone was called 'the fifth Beatle,' Cynthia Powell could rightfully have claimed the title for her own.

A twist of lennon