Maureen Cleave, journalist who reported John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" quote, dead at 87

Maureen Cleave, who befriended the Beatles as a young reporter for London's Evening Standard, died at age 87 on Nov. 6.

She interviewed the group early in its career, accompanied them on their first visit to the U.S., and in March1966 wrote feature stories on each member, plus one with Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

All the interviews captured the Beatles in a transitional period, just ahead of Revolver, the end of touring and Sgt. Pepper. The band was asking questions about what to do now that they'd achieved all they'd set out to do.

George talked of his interest in Indian music; Ringo discussed his home life as a young dad in suburbia; Paul was the swinging bachelor in London checking out art exhibits, plays and performances of avant-garde music, and John was feeling stir crazy, reading widely about religion and philosophy, and planning his next move - there was more to life than being a moptop.

In the course of the interview, John observed - not braggingly, but matter-of-factly - that, right then, the Beatles were more popular than Christ. He felt that the teachings of Jesus had been distorted by his disciples and all the church leaders who followed, and that people no longer felt connected to the faith as a result.

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink," John told Cleave, "I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

While Cleave's piece didn't get into the details, one of the books John had recently read was the controversial best-seller “The Passover Plot,” by Hugh J. Schonfield, an English Biblical scholar who was among the first theologians to study the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In his book, Schonfield presents the case that Jesus was not the son of God, but instead a normal man who attempted to stage his death and resurrection as a way to bring peace to the world by carrying out the messianic prophecies of his time. The plan was for Jesus to consume a non-fatal poison that made him appear dead after his crucifixion and to then rise up, but the scheme went awry when he was stabbed while on the cross.

By presenting Christ as a brilliant spiritual leader who also was “magnificently human,” Schonfield hoped that readers would see that the “Kingdom of God was right beside them, under their noses, ready to appear whenever they were willing to comply with the conditions which would inaugurate it.”

“The mind that was in the Messiah can therefore also be in us,” Schonfield wrote. Each of us, he said, had the power to ensure that “the victory for which Jesus relentlessly schemed and strove will be won at last. There will be peace throughout the earth.”

One can see how the book inspired not just John's statement in Cleave's interview, but his emerging interest in being a spokesman for peace.

John's comment received scant notice in England, but caused a storm of protest when the article was republished in Datebook, a teen magazine in the U.S. Protests and record burnings took place and Brian Epstein considered canceling the Beatles' American tour that summer. John was forced to repeatedly address the quote, mixing his attempts at clarification with notes of apology.  

“With a PR man at his side,” Maureen Cleave later recalled, “the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, where it ended up. As it was, the Evening Standard didn’t even put it in the headline. We were used to him sounding off like that and knew it was ironically meant. But the Americans have little sense of irony, and when the article appeared in a magazine, all hell broke loose. It was the last time the Beatles ever toured.”

While it was rumored that Lennon had had an affair with Cleave and that she was the inspiration for the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood," Cleave said that Lennon had made "no pass" at her.

Cleave did little reporting on Lennon or the Beatles after the controversy, but she wrote affectionately about him in the Telegraph Weekend Magazine 10 years after his death, saying, "Once or twice I had been tempted to call and see him. What had happened to my old friend? Friend, buddy and pal, as he used to say.”

The Telegraph has an obituary of Cleave here.

And here are a couple of videos of her:

Comments