Wednesday, September 17, 1964 THERE IS a scene in the movie, "A Hard Day's Night," in which the Beatles, wearing tight jeans and all that loose hair, clash briefly in a Class A compartment on a London-bound train with a portly Britisher who is simply reeking of Empire and the Old School.     Making his entrance, the freshly-barbered man in pin stripes bangs his attache case against the knee of Paul McCartney's movie grandfather (Wilfred Brambell). Then he orders Ringo Starr to turn off that frightful Rock and Roll sound on the portable radio. Then he demands that the window be shut, always making the point that "I (underscoring the "I") travel on this train regularly, twice a week." Finally, because the mopheads won't listen, he explodes and says:     "I fought the war for your sort!"     Alun Owen, the script writer, worked that into the picture on the Beatles' own insistence--because it actually happened to them once on a trip from London to Margate to keep a playing date.       "I suppose the stuffy (pronounced "stoofy") old bloke felt that four fellows like us (say "oos") who talked so funny (say "foony") and dressed so funny had no right to be in a Class A compartment," George Harrison remembers. George was more amused than angry; the one it rankled with the most was John Lennon, which is why it is told here.   *       *       * JOHN LENNON IS NOT JUST THE NO. 1 BEATLE BUT ALSO THE one with the most seething contempt for the Old Order in the Mother Country. You can't settle for the term "Angry Young Man" here because it doesn't quite fit around the broad shoulders of the handsome, tough-talking founder of the worldwide cartel known as Beatles Ltd. It doesn't cover all the things he's against, for this 24-year-old is not only non-U and anti-Establishment but non-Everything and anti-Everything.     This attitude, not all accidental, starts with the Rich Old Eton Boy and goes all the way to Buckingham Palace itself. If you doubt it, go back to the Royal Command Variety Performance last November when, going into the Beatles' "Twist and Shout" number, Paul McCartney stepped to the Prince of Wales Theatre footlights and said this:       "Would the people in the cheaper seats please clap their hands. The rest of you can rattle your jewelry."     That line didn't come spontaneously; it wasn't Paul's. John Lennon suggested it when the Beatles, backstage, were debating how to approach a song which normally calls for the audience to stamp their feet and clap their hands to the beat. The theater abounded in Royalty that night, led by Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and the Queen Mother, along with a house full of assorted aristocrats, and the Beatles new they couldn't ask people like that to join in an undignified accompaniment for the rowdiest imaginable Rock and Roll number.     "Just tell them to rattle their jewelry," John said to Paul.   *       *       * THE QUEEN HERSELF, BY THE WAY, CANNOT ESCAPE THE Lennon barb. If you ask him about her, he will say, "Oh, she's all right--very good job." George Harrison, asked once whether the Beatles had a leading lady in mind for their next movie, replied, "We're trying to get the Queen. She sells." That's a Lennon line, too, for no other Beatle is quite that irreverent.     The other kind of longhairs--the psychiatrists and the deep thinkers in the colleges--have talked about the Beatles' "comic defiance" of the adult status quo and about their droopy hairdos and dandy Edwardian jackets spoofing the well-clipped, Rich Old Eton Boy. The fact is, it is not comic; it is serious because it is the country cousin from the dank and smoggy northern reaches giving the what-for to the whole blooming, manicured Upper Class.     Beyond this, what happened in Liverpool itself last July when the Beatles made their triumphant return (400 stretcher cases in the throng) from their tour of Australia and New Zealand and the Lord Mayor, Louis Caplan, was hovering around them at the airport as they prepared to return to London.       "Looie," John Lennon said. "I saw people in that crowd today without any teeth. When are you going to get them teeth?"     This doesn't mean that the top man in Beatles Ltd. is spending all his time brooding about the condition of the British masses; It does mean that that's where his home is and that's where it has to be--even with his pretty blonde wife and his infant son ensconced in a palatial London home with a Rolls Royce parked outside.   *       *       * JOHN LENNON LIKES TO SAY THAT HE ENJOYED A CHILDHOOD of "uninterrupted calm" afflicted neither with "waves of sorrow" nor of joy, but that doesn't really describe it. His father walked out when he was three years old. His mother, remarried, died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident before John was 14; but long before that he had elected to go and live with his Aunt Mimi--Mrs. Mary Smith.     "It was bloody complicated," he told me on the Beatle jet last week, flying down South, "living with my auntie and my mother only half ("'arf," he says) a mile away, but I would go to see her a lot. She knew how to play the piano and the banjo and she taught me the banjo chords when I got my first guitar.      "But Aunt Mimi wanted me to go to the university and my mother was saying that all her sisters and everybody played the piano and all but nothing ever came of it. I tell you it was a bloody complicated thing."     Another complication arose this year: one of the London papers turned up John's long-missing father, a porter now, but the boy had drawn that curtain very securely.      "I don't think about him," John said. "I don't feel as if I owe him anything. He has never helped me. I got there by myself."     Exit Lennon Sr.     There is a hurt there, very likely. Perhaps it is one of the things that explain the hard look in the brown eyes behind the dark glasses John Lennon often wears offstage (he won't wear glasses when he's working, although his eyes have been bad since he was 10).     And perhaps it explains, as well, the hard drive that is so evident all the time, on stage or off, in the Beatle who never read much but has written a book of his own and who doesn't read or write music but can sit down with Paul McCartney and turn out a song hit in a matter of minutes.   *       *       * THERE ARE QUITE A FEW OUT-OF-BOUNDS AREAS WHEN YOU'RE talking to John Lennon. He won't say any more about the father who left him. He won't talk about his wife, who is 21, except to say that he met Cynthia Powell in the Liverpool Art Institute and she was the first of his girls who could win the all-important blessing of Aunt Mimi. He won't talk about the money cascading into the brimming coffers of Beatles Ltd.     He will talk about the Beatles' music, especially about the notion that it's some kind of new "Mersey Sound" (after the dirty river that flows through Liverpool to the sea) or that it's some brilliant mixture of Rock and Roll and Rhythm and Blues.     "That's a lot of rubbish," he told me backstage in the Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto. "We write it and we know what it is. It's Rock and Roll when it's fast and it's ballads when it's slow.     "Basically, we started with the same thing that Elvis Presley was doing, and Bill Haley, ('Rock Around the Clock') and Little Richard (Little Richard Penniman, the Southern R&R singer who quit to turn preacher) and Carl Perkins (another Dixie apostle of R&R). There's no mystery about it."      John credits his mother, by the way, with introducing him to the musical charms, if that's the word, of Elvis Presley.     "I knew about Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine and Tennessee Ernie Ford," he says, "but my mother heard one of the early Presley records and told me he was like all three of them rolled into one. I listened to the record and I went out of my mind. After that we all tried to be like Elvis. I even grew sideburns."      What happened to the sideburns, of course, is a matter which has been observed and remarked upon in the farthest corners of the free world: they just grew and grew.   *       *       * ANOTHER THING JOHN LIKES TO TALK ABOUT IS HIS BOOK, "John Lennon In His Own Write," a wacky little anthology of poetry and prose in which quite a few of the characters are disabled or infirm or, in some cases, suddenly dead.     In London, The Times Literary Supplement hailed the book as "worthy of the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and the English imagination." Elsewhere, critics traced the Lennon jabberwocky to such eminent sources as James Joyce, James Thurber and Lewis Carroll. The young author himself is rather disdainful of this sort of acclaim.     "I got a laugh out of the Joyce thing," he says. "I never read the man--I'm always meaning to. I did read a couple of Thurber's stories and I read 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Through-the Looking Glass,' but that fellow Carroll wrote a lot of rubbish too, didn't he? I love the hellish compliments I get from these intellectuals but I'd keep writing whether I got them or not."     There's a footnote to all this in Paul McCartney's introduction to the book:     "There are bound to be thickheads who will wonder why some of it doesn't make sense, and others  who will search for hidden meanings."     With John Lennon, obviously, any such search, on any level, off the Rock-and-Roll path is risky. One thing is certain: he won't help much. ____ TOMORROW: Paul McCartney.