Alma Cogan - Hostess To The Beatles

Hostess To The Beatles

By the mid 1960s, Cogan was a staple of the UK press less for her performing career than for the all-night parties she threw at the ground floor Kensington High Street apartment her father had purchased in 1951 (Mark Cohen died in 1952): 44 Stafford Court was the longtime residence of Cogan and her mother Fay Cohen and sister Sandra Caron.

Cynthia Lennon described Cogan's home as "decorated like a swish nightclub with dark, richly coloured silken fabrics and brocades everywhere. Every surface was covered with ethnic sculptures, ornaments and dozens of photographs in elaborate silver, gold and jewelled frames."

Regular visitors included such diverse figures as Noël Coward, Tommy Steele, Cary Grant, Sammy Davis, Jr, Danny Kaye, Audrey Hepburn, Princess Margaret, Michael Caine, Frankie Vaughan, Lionel Bart, Stanley Baker, Bruce Forsyth, Ethel Merman, Roger Moore and a host of other celebrities.

Lonnie Donegan recalls Cogan "told me Cary Grant proposed to her, and she said 'I don’t know what to do, Lonnie.' I said 'Well, love, if you have to ask the answer's got to be no.' She didn't accept, so I suppose she must have listened to me!"

Cogan was especially noted for her friendship with the Beatles, whom she met during rehearsals for Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 12 January 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular being her frequent guests.

John Lennon's first wife Cynthia Lennon would recall "John and I had thought of Alma out of date and unhip. We remembered her in the old-fashioned cinched-in waists and wide skirts of the Fifties. But in the flesh she was beautiful, intelligent and funny, oozing sex appeal and charm." In fact Cynthia detected sexual tension between her husband and Cogan to the point of believing the two were intimately involved and a long-term affair between Cogan and John Lennon is alleged by Sandra Caron (Paul McCartney acknowledges conducting a "slight romance" with Caron). The other three Beatles referred to Cogan as "Auntie Alma".

It was on the piano at Cogan's flat that McCartney first played the melody of "Yesterday" which had come to him in a dream: McCartney wished assurance his dream song was original and felt that Cogan with her vast musical knowledge would be the person to identify the tune if it did already exist. (Her response was: "I don't know what it is, but it's beautiful.")

Rumours that McCartney and Lennon contributed musically to Cogan's mid-'60s recording sessions proved longstanding but only McCartney's playing tambourine on "I Knew Right Away" – the B-side of Cogan's 30 October 1964 release "It's You" – is verifiable. McCartney has said of Cogan: "We'd known Alma as the big singing star. We never interacted musically, she was a little too old for our generation, not much probably, but it seemed like an eternity, so I never took her seriously musically. She was old-school showbiz."