John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Page B

feeling of alienation from a seemingly bountiful and indulgent world was perfectly expressed in Rebel Without a Cause , the 1955 film that was both Dean’s apotheosis and farewell. That same year, he died in an auto accident in his Porsche sports car, thereby achieving immortality.
    In Britain also, the postwar years had seen rising concern over what was still patronizingly termed “the younger generation.” Juvenile crime increasingly dominated newspaper headlines, from the Craig-Bentley murder case (in which a London policeman’s sixteen-year-old killer was judged too young to face otherwise automatic capital punishment) to the rise of so-called coshboys (young men who carried blackjacks almost like a fashion accessory) as a threat to formerly safe urban streets.
    But the first generalized outbreak of deviancy among the younger generation occurred in no place more sinister than tailors’ fitting rooms. During 1955, a proportion of British youths rejected the tweed jackets and baggy gray flannels prescribed for them almost by statute, and took to going about in knee-length coats with black velvet collars, frilled shirts, leopardskin waistcoats, bootlace ties, ankle-hugging “drainpipe” trousers, fluorescent orange or lime green socks, and chukka boots raised on two inches of spongy rubber. The style being reminiscent of Edwardian dress, its adherents were dubbed TeddyBoys, though dandified Wild West heroes like Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok also represented a strong influence. Their most radical departure from convention was their hair—no longer planed into an army-style short back and sides and flattened with Brylcreem, but blow-dried into a flossy forelock, backswept over long sideburns, and interleaved at the rear into a D.A., or duck’s arse.
    Teddy Boys were exclusively working-class young men who by rights should have been welcomed as symbols of growing national affluence. Since no men’s outfitters stocked such outlandish garments, they had to be expensively tailor-made, often to the client’s own design. Unfortunately, some (though by no means all) of these style pioneers were also apt to get into street brawls, using weapons like coshes, brass knuckles, and bicycle chains. As a result, for a decade to come, unusual suits and long hair would be synonymous in the British mind with proletarian criminality and riot.
    In Woolton, John and his circle were too young—albeit by just a whisker—to be swept up in James Dean mania or join the first blow wave of Teddy Boys. For John, the latter were no more than comic curiosities to be recorded in his sketchbook (like a Scotsman with a “drainpipe kilt”). Liverpool “Teds” took their reputation as hard men with special seriousness, none more so than John’s old Dovedale Primary schoolfellow Jimmy Tarbuck, now very big and tough and disinclined to any humor where his wardrobe was concerned. “We were all dead scared of Tarbuck,” Len Garry remembers. He’d only got to say ‘Are you looking at me?’ and we’d run…John the fastest of all.”
    Woolton did not offer much encouragement to would-be Teddy Boys. The village’s two barber’s shops, Ashcroft’s and Dicky Jones’s, both treated their teenage clientele merely as so many sheep to be sheared. John and his friends preferred to have their hair cut at Bioletti, in the little parade of shops off the Penny Lane roundabout. The proprietor and sole operator was an elderly Italian who had also cut John’s father’s hair—though John had no idea of this—when Alf Lennon was at the Bluecoat Hospital, thirty years earlier. Signor Bioletti’s hands were famously shaky, but his trembling scissors would make at least a stab at more modish styles. And inhis shop window—as a song would one day commemorate—were head shots of satisfied customers triumphantly coiffured like James Dean, Tony Curtis, or Jeff Chandler.
    One sunny evening during that June of 1955, Mendips’s most regular boarder, Michael