Another fakery: John Lennon
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| Wrongly identified as John’s wedding photo. |
We’re not sure when this forgery was made, Sara from “Meet The Beatles For Real” seems to think it was done as early as in the sixties (see her April fools day blog post here).
Unfortunately, this photo is widely spread online, mainly on Pinterest, and often it is mistaken to be a wedding photo from John Lennon’s first marriage, that to Cynthia Powell. We have no idea whatsoever who the married couple is (although an added signature of the bottom says “Judith Alyson” or something similar).
The head of the husband in question has been replaced by John Lennon’s head as found in this genuine Beatles photo, taken by photographer Dezo Hoffmann in 1963.
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| Beatles photo by Dezo Hoffmann, 1963. © Apple Corps Ltd. |
She may have been just a fan, who wasn’t satisfied with her choice of husband, or it may have been someone’s silly joke, we have no clue as to the origin of the fake wedding photo. There’s also a John Lennon autograph in the fake photo, taken from a chewing gum card of the sixties.
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| Collector’s card |
What’s irritating is that people are wrongly assuming that it is a genuine photo from John’s wedding to his first wife, Cynthia, who passed away in 2015. Check out this memorial page for her, for instance.
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| Sorry girls – he’s married! And Cynthia looks nothing like that other woman. |
After Cynthia became pregnant (with Julian), she and John were hurriedly married on 23 August, 1962 at the Mount Pleasant register office in Liverpool. Fellow Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison were in attendance, as was their manager, Brian Epstein, who was best man; no parents were there. The wedding was farcical, because as soon as the ceremony began, a workman in the backyard of the building opposite started using a jackhammer which drowned out anything the registrar, John, or Cynthia said. When the registrar asked for the groom to step forward, George stepped forward instead.
With no photographs or flowers the wedding party celebrated afterwards, at Epstein’s invitation, in Reece’s restaurant in Clayton Square, which was the same restaurant where Lennon’s parents, Alfred Lennon and Julia Lennon, had celebrated their marriage in 1938. Lennon was 21 years old at the time, and Powell 22.
The newlyweds had no honeymoon, as Lennon had to play an engagement at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester the same night, although they did travel to the Hotel George V in Paris, for a belated honeymoon on 16 September.
This “wedding photo” was made by Finnish youth magazine Suosikki in the beginning of 1965 with also picures of other three Beatles with their “new wives” as, according to the magazine, they were supposedly married simultaneously in the same ceremony (Ringo new wife was Finnish according to the article). The hoax was revealed with a very small print in the gutter of the magazine. Some people believed and some people didn’t, but the pictures, at least the one with John Lennon and his “wife” Judith, spread around the world.