Music Scholar Finds Forgotten Film That Inspired John Lennon's 'Grow Old With Me'
A music scholar has discovered which baseball film inspired John Lennon’s “Grow Old With Me,” solving the decades-old mystery about the origin of one of the singer’s final songs prior to his 1980 murder.
The opening lyric in “Grow Old With Me” quotes Robert Browning’s 1864 poem “Rabbi ben Ezra“: “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.” Lennon had admitted that he was inspired to write the song after watching a baseball movie on television during a trip to Bermuda, but the actual film Lennon was watching remained unknown for 40 years.
However, in the upcoming book John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life, author Kenneth Womack writes that the 1978 made-for-TV movie A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story — about the New York Yankees legend who died at the age of 37 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — was the baseball movie that Lennon viewed.
Source: Daniel Kreps/rollingstone.com
