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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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