Although John initially insisted
that 'Polythene Pam' was about "a mythical Liverpool
scrubber (promiscuous girl or grupie) dressed up in her
jackboots and kilt", the song was actually based on two
people who he had known. The name came from Pat Dawson (then
Pat Hodgett), a Beatles' fan from the Cavern Club days who,
because of her habit of eating polythene, was known to the
group as Polythene Pat. "I started going to see the Beatles
in 1961 when I was 14 and I got quite friendly with them,"
she remembers. "If they were playing out of town they'd give
me a lift back home in their van. It was about the same time
that I started getting called Polythene Pat. It's
embarrassing really. I just used to eat polythene all the
time. I'd tie it in knots and then eat it. Sometimes I even
used to burn it and then eat it when it got cold. Then I had
a friend who got a job in a polythene bag factory, which was
wonderful because it meant I had a constant
supply."
But Polythene Pat never dressed up
in polythene bags as the song says. That little quirk was
taken from an incident involving a girl called Stephanie,
who John met in the Channel Islands while on tour in August
1963.
Although John wouldn't elaborate
when he spoke to Playboy in 1980, he did supply a few clues.
"(Polythene Pam) was me remembering a little event with a
woman in Jersey, and a man who was England's answer to Allen
Ginsberg, who gave us our first exposure..."
England's answer to American beat
poet Ginsberg turned out to be Roystom Ellis a young writer
who first met the Beatles in May or June of 1960 when
invited to read poetry at Liverpool University.
What John went on reluctantly to
tell Playboy was that Ellis was the first person to
introduce the Beatles to drugs when he showed them how get
high from the strips inside a Benzedrine inhaler.
The "little event with a woman", as
John described it, actually took place on the Channel island
of Guernsey, not Jersey, when John met up with Ellis who had
a summer job there as a ferry boat engineer. After the
Beatles' concerts at the Auditorium in Guersey on August 8,
Ellis and his girlfriend Stephanie took John back to the
attic flat Ellis was renting and this is where the polythene
came into the story. "(Ellis) said Miss X (a girl he wanted
me to meet) dressed up in polythene," John later remembered.
"She did. She didn't wear jackboots and kilts. I just sort
of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. I was just
looking for something to write about."
Ellis who now lives in Sri Lanka
and writes travel books, can't really recall any 'perverted
sex' but he can recall the night spent in a bed with
Stephanie and John. "We'd read all this things about leather
and we didn't have any leather but I had my oilskins and we
had some polythene bags from somewhere," he says. "We all
dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the
night with us in the same bed. I don't think anything very
exciting happened and we all wondered what the fun was in
being 'kinky'. It was probably more my idea than John's. It
could have all happened because in a poetry booklet of mine
which I had dedicated to the Beatles there was a poem with
the lines: 'I long to have sex between black leather sheets,
And ride shivering motorcycles between your
thighs.'
"I can't really remember everything
that happened. At the time, it meant nothing to me. It was
just one event during a very eventful time of my
life,"
Ellis adds. Besides being a poet,
Ellis was a pundit on teenage life and a chronicler of
emergent British rock'n'roll. At the time of their first
meeting, he had just completed The Big Beat Scene, an
excellent survey of late Fifties British beat
music.
John was fascinated by Ellis
because he stood at the converging point of rock'n'roll and
literature. Ellis arranged for the Beatles to back him early
on at a beat music and poetry event at the Jacaranda Club.
In July 1960, the Record Mirror reported that 'the bearded
sage' was thinking of bringing a Liverpool group called the
'Beetles' to London to play behind him as he performed his
poetry. "I was quite a star for them at that time because I
had come up from London and that was a world they didn't
really know about," says Ellis. "I stayed with them for
about a week in their flat at Gambier Terrace during that
1960 visit. John was fascinated by the fact that I was a
poet and that led to deep conversations."
Shortly after introducing John to
the delights of polythene, Ellis left England and has spent
much of the time since traveling. So far removed has he been
from the British pop scene, that he had never even heard
'Polythene Pam' until contacted to tell his pat of the story
(1994). He does recall with some pride, though, that in 1973
John wrote to the alternative newspaper International Times
to correct them about the circumstances of the Beatles'
first drug experiences: "The first dope, from a Benzedrine
inhaler, was given the Beatles (John, George, Paul and
Stuart) by an English cover version of Allen Ginsberg - one
of Royston Ellis, known as 'beat poet' ... So, give the
saint his due."
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