Features
‘Lucy’ Dies
Lucy Vodden, who palled around with John Lennon’s son Julian when both were children, has died from lupus. She was 46.
Vodden was one of the few people in the world who could claim to have inspired a Beatles song. During the mid 1960s Julian Lennon showed his famous father a drawing of his friend, saying it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
But when the song appeared on the band’s groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, many people believed the tune was drug-inspired, and that the elder Lennon was playing his own little joke on the world by embedding the initials L S D in the track’s title.
Vodden lost touch with her school chum following John Lennon’s divorce from first wife Cynthia, which resulted in Julian attending a different school. Julian, who now lives in France, reconnected with his childhood friend after learning she suffered from lupus.
“I wasn’t sure at first how to approach her,” Lennon said in June. “I wanted at least to get a note to her. Then I heard she had a great love of gardening, and I thought I’d help with something she’s passionate about, and I love gardening too. I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face.”
Although Vodden enjoyed her connection to the Fab Four, she wasn’t all that crazy about the song she inspired.
“I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” Vodden said earlier this year. “As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept quiet, to myself.”