The Beatles: Who was the “girl with Kaleidoscope eyes”?
From the off, John Lennon pleaded ignorance. “I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone when interrogated about the title of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. For years afterwards, he would refute the idea that the Sgt Pepper’s track had anything to do with acid, but nobody believed him. The song remains a powerful symbol of The Beatles‘ most explorative period, a period which just so happened to coincide with the LSD explosion of the late 1960s. Still, the question remains: who was Lennon’s “girl with kaleidoscope eyes”?
Despite claims that ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was written as an ode to The Beatles’ favourite hallucinogen, Lennon always maintained that it had been inspired by something far more innocent: a painting his three-year-old son Julian made of one of his classmates at Heath House nursery school, Lucy O’Donnell. “This is the truth,” Lennon told Dick Cavett in 1971. “My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around, I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,’ and I thought, ‘That’s beautiful.’ I immediately wrote a song about it. After the album had come out and the album had been published, someone noticed that the letters spelt out LSD and I had no idea about it. … But nobody believes me.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that Lennon’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show was an attempt by the musician to humanise himself before the American public. Viewed as a threat to national security by the Nixon administration, Lennon was doing everything he could to avoid deportation. Whether it was true or not, Lennon’s charming story allowed him to shake off his association with LSD while casting himself as a family man.
After much media-fuelled confusion, the identity of the real Lucy was confirmed in 2009 when she died of complications from Lupus. By that time, Julian had reconnected with her following a BBC broadcast in which she had said: “I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant… Julian had painted a picture and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school.”
However, the Lucy of the song’s title may not be Lennon’s “girl with kaleidoscope eyes”. Whether in retrospect or during the writing process, Lennon weaved in his own interpretation of the subject matter, later claiming that the girl turned out to be Yoko Ono. “There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me,” he said, “A ‘girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn’t met Yoko yet. The imagery was [Lewis Carroll’s] Alice in the boat. And also the image of this female who would come and save me—this secret love that was going to come one day. So it turned out to be Yoko, though, and I hadn’t met Yoko then. But she was my imaginary girl that we all have.”
This comment later led Revolution in the Head author Ian MacDoland to suggest: “The ‘girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ was, for Lennon, the lover/mother of his most helpless fantasies: the image of the female who would someday come save me. This mysterious, oracular woman,” a woman, MacDonald noted, who the musician was “bewildered by” in ‘She Said, She Said’ and “mourned for” in ‘Julia’ and ‘Yes It Is’. It’s quite possible, therefore, that Lucy was never one person but a constantly evolving archetype who started off as his mother, Julian Lennon, and ended up as Yoko Ono.
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