You’ve got to hide your myopia away: John Lennon’s contact lenses
John Lennon’s eyeglasses became iconic, but before 1966 he was seldom seen in public wearing glasses. Instead, he wore rigid contact lenses that frequently fell out.
This is a wild article from the professional/scientific “Journal of the College of Optometrists.” It goes deep on medical terminology, attempting to diagnose Lennon’s prescription and explaining why he had such problems wearing contacts.
Nigel Walley, John’s childhood friend and manager of John’s first band ‘The Quarrymen’ (which evolved into The Beatles) recalled: ‘The thing with John though was that he was as blind as a bat—he had glasses but he would never wear them. He was very vain about that’ ‘He didn’t want to be seen out in them, and kept them in an inside pocket along with his mouth organ. He might slip them on to see something, but he’d whip them off again very quickly’.
In 1980, John himself explained that ‘I was just a suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one’s life to look tough. I spent the whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me glasses off because glasses were sissy…’.
Paul McCartney recounted a story of John’s spectacle wearing habits from their teenage years in Liverpool. ‘He was pretty short-sighted, and it led to some funny occasions… Normally if there were girls around, he’d whip them off. He was a little bit shy with them, so if he was out and about, he’d just take them off… But he came down to my house, he lived about a mile or so away… We were writing some stuff and we got finished about midnight.
And so… he took off his glasses and walked home. The next day he said “…do you know those people on the corner of Booker Avenue?” I said ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘They’re crazy… at midnight when I left you, they were out on the porch of their house playing cards’. I said, ‘You’re kidding me’. So, I had to investigate. I went around and had a look… it was a nativity scene’.”