“Hey Jude” even for the first-time listener, is unforgettable. This rock ’n’ roll gem, its composer says, was inspired by the divorce of John and Cynthia Lennon, who died Wednesday at 75.
“Jude” it turns out, is Julian Lennon, who was about 5 when his parents divorced in 1968. Paul came up with idea when making a conciliatory drive out to see Cynthia, who was cast out of the Beatles’ inner circle after John met Yoko Ono, his future wife.

“I started with the idea 'Hey Jules,’ which was Julian, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better,” Paul said, as Howard Sounes wrote in “Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney” in 2011.
As Paul explained, he intended to take out the song’s most mysterious line —“the movement you need is on your shoulder” — but John wouldn’t have it.
“I was playing the song to John, and I said ... 'I’ll be taking that out,’” Paul said. “He said, 'What for? ... that’s the best line in it, man.’”
Paul said he’s come to appreciate the lyric. It emerged as a sort of pep talk for Julian, meaning, “You have the wherewithal to be what you want to be,” Paul said.

Unfortunately, John and Cynthia Lennon didn’t seem to have this power of self-actualization. They met as teenagers in Liverpool in the 1950s, but were an odd pair — Cynthia reserved, John an extrovert. And John, who Cynthia said once hit her when he saw her dancing with original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe, wasn’t exactly a catch.
“He was a very jealous young man at the time, and he had a lot of pain inside,” she said in 2005. “He wanted to trust me, and he thought by seeing me dancing with a friend of his that I was being disloyal or messing around. So he smacked me, but that was the only time.”
The Lennons got married when Cynthia got pregnant with Julian in 1962. John, who played a show on his wedding night, wasn’t all that enthused.
“I said, 'Yes, we’ll have to get married,’” John later said. “I didn’t fight it.”
Then the marriage a Beatle didn’t want became the marriage the Beatles didn’t want. A teen idol with a wife and son wouldn’t go over well with the kids, and what Cynthia later deemed her “undercover existence” was kept hush-hush.
Though John wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” about a picture Julian drew, he wasn’t exactly a doting father.
“I’ve never really wanted to know the truth about how Dad was with me,” Julian Lennon said. “There was some very negative stuff talked about me ... like when he said I’d come out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night.” Stuff
Once Ono was on the scene, the marriage couldn’t last. When Cynthia caught Lennon with the avant-garde artist at the family’s home when she returned from a vacation, it was “Hello. Goodbye.”
“He said, 'Hello,’” Cynthia said. “I didn’t get one word out of Yoko.”
But the fraught relationship resulted in a song that John called a “masterpiece.” Of course, John, ever the egotist, didn’t think the song was about Julian — but about himself, encouraging him to leave Cynthia.
“I always heard it as a song to me,” John said in 1980, not long before his death. “Yoko’s just come into the picture. ... He’s saying, 'Hey, Jude — hey, John.’ Subconsciously he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.’”