There are those who believe Yoko not only approved of the affair but arranged it. That she planted May Pang in the seat next to John on that American Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles knowing full well what was likely to happen. That their comely twenty-three-year-old assistant would sooner or later end up sleeping with her husband.
It’s theoretically possible, I suppose. Yoko has always been a complicated woman, gaming out her future like a chess master thinking five moves ahead. It could be she saw some strategic long-term advantage in setting up the affair; by handpicking John’s mistress, she might have felt she could exert some dominion over his extramarital wanderings. Perhaps, thanks to her mystical advisors, she really did see what was coming, knew that John was heading for a free fall, and was endeavoring to soften his inevitable crash.
If any of that is true, though, Yoko never breathed a word of it to me. All she said in October of 1973 was that she was sending John and an assistant to L.A. Could I please meet them at the airport?
I was by then aware that their marriage was in deep trouble. Despite their best efforts to mend the relationship—despite all that intense nesting in their new home at the Dakota—the red light on my bedroom ceiling had been blinking even more feverishly than usual in the days and weeks leading up to what would later be known as John’s “Lost Weekend,” the eighteen months he spent in exile from his wife and his home in New York.
Yoko’s demeanor back then, as always, was not demonstrably emotional: that’s not who she’s ever been, even under the stress of her collapsing marriage. But it was clear from our phone conversations that she was in pain. “John and I are not getting along very well. You know that, don’t you, Elliot?” she asked during one of them.
“I’m so sorry to hear it,” I said.
“We don’t see each other very much. And we don’t talk very much, either.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
“What could you possibly do to help?” she answered. “John has become a distraction to my work. He doesn’t understand all that I do. He just gets in the way. It gets very tiring. Sometimes I just need to be alone.”
John’s calls were every bit as depressing.
“Has Mother been talking to you about us?” he asked during one early morning chat.
“Yoko talks to me about everything,” I answered vaguely.
“I never get to be with her anymore,” he lamented. “The other day I shaved and got dressed up and told her I wanted to take her to her favorite restaurant. And she turned me down. She said she didn’t have time. Me own fucking wife said that to me!”
I don’t know if there was one specific moment—a particularly hurtful slight, perhaps, or an especially cross word—that finally snapped Yoko’s patience. I suspect not. She has always been a methodical person, and my guess is that she precisely and carefully orchestrated John’s eviction from the Dakota. She likely consulted with her team of spiritual advisors to determine the most astrologically and numerologically opportune time to begin their marital separation, then went about arranging the logistical details—his flight itinerary, his lodgings in L.A., perhaps even his female companionship—with the cool precision of a doctor preparing for an amputation. It was all so smoothly planned and executed, John might not have even realized what was happening to him.
He certainly didn’t seem like a man who’d been kicked out of his home when I met him and May Pang at LAX airport.
“You look trim, Ellie!” he said with a big grin when I greeted them at the arrival gate. “Have you been taking those diet pills again?”
“Injections,” I corrected him. “And, no, I haven’t.”
They had very little luggage, suggesting that neither of them was expecting a long stay in Los Angeles. I grabbed some of their bags and led the way to where I had parked my car. My instructions from Yoko were to drive them to music manager Lou Adler’s house in Bel Air, an 8,000-square-foot mini-mansion up on Stone Canyon Road that had been borrowed for John while he was in town. A few heads turned as we quickly traversed the terminal, but in those days airports were relatively safe spaces for celebrities. (This was before paparazzi started runway stakeouts to ambush bleary-eyed stars deplaning from long, exhausting flights.)
“I need some money,” John said as we settled into my weary old Jaguar. May, who had barely said a word since they’d landed, sat in the back seat. “Mother said these could be used for money,” John continued, shoving a fistful of traveler’s checks in my hand. It was about $10,000 worth, a sizable sum even now but a small fortune back in 1973. “Can you get money for these?”
John was functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself. This wasn’t his fault: he’d been a rock star since he was a teenager. His every want had been arranged for him virtually his entire adult life. He never learned to do his own grocery shopping, never paid a utility bill or mailed a package or involved himself in any of the myriad mundane tasks the rest of us spend so much of our daily lives mired in. He was clueless about the most basic elements of human commerce, like money and how to buy stuff with it.
But then, that was what May was for. Whatever other intentions Yoko may or may not have had for the assistant, her primary job in L.A. was to make sure John was properly fed and cared for, that all his basic needs—or at least most of them—were satisfied.
A few words here about May, because over the decades she has never been shy about presenting her own version of what transpired during the Lost Weekend (or about sharing her own unflattering views about Yoko, whom she apparently perceived as her romantic rival). She’s published several books about her affair with John, discussed the intimate details of it in documentaries, and given hundreds of interviews on the subject. And if you believe her account, you inevitably come away with the impression that for a time she was the red-hot center of John’s universe—that their romance was the axis around which the entire Lost Weekend revolved.
I don’t doubt that she believes this to be true. I suspect she was indeed deeply in love with John. And I have no reason to doubt that John harbored genuine affection for her, too. I can tell you my impression of her when I picked them up at the airport was that she was an intelligent, attractive, and highly competent young woman. She didn’t smoke. She didn’t drink. She struck me as potentially a superb assistant.
But I can also tell you that after I dropped her and John off at Adler’s house—stopping briefly at a bank on the way to cash those traveler’s checks—I seldom bumped into her again in Los Angeles. Perhaps even more tellingly, in all the years I knew John—all the way up to his final days—I cannot recall a single conversation in which he ever mentioned her name.
So I will let May tell her own story in her own way in her own books. In this one, I will leave her for now at the front door of Adler’s house in Bel Air, escorting her employer’s husband inside, while I pull away in my Jag, heading back to Laurel Canyon, watching the two of them disappear in my rearview mirror. To this day, I only wish her well.
Twenty or so minutes later, when I opened the door to my own home, I could hear the phone ringing. It was, of course, the hotline. Yoko was calling.
“Did everything go okay?” she asked.
“Yes, they arrived safely. I got the traveler’s checks cashed for him and took them to Lou Adler’s house. Everything went smoothly.”
“How did he appear?” Yoko asked.
“You mean physically?”
“You know what I mean, Elliot. Did he appear happy?”
“He just appeared like John.”
“Are you withholding anything from me?”
“Yoko, I want to make something clear. I love you. And I love John. And I will not take sides. I’m not going to withhold anything from either of you. If there’s something you don’t want John to know, just don’t tell me. Because I’m not comfortable keeping secrets from either of you.”
There was a long pause before she spoke again.
“Just keep him safe, Elliot. Can you do that for me? Can you keep him safe?”
“I’ll do everything I can,” I answered.
For the first few months, John appeared entirely content in Los Angeles—one might even say gleeful. He seemed to consider his expulsion from the Dakota and banishment to the West Coast as something of a bachelor’s holiday. Remember, he was twenty-one when he married Cynthia; he was twenty-eight when he married Yoko. Now, at the cusp of thirty-three, for the first time in his adult life, he didn’t have a wife (or, for that matter, three other partners) who made up his extended family. He was a free man.
His spirits were certainly high when, a couple of weeks into his L.A. stay, I filmed him during a stroll along the Malibu shoreline. He had a new album coming out, Mind Games, and was anxious to publicize it, so he’d agreed to do another interview with me. But rather than putting him on my radio show again, I asked John if he’d be interested in letting me talk to him on camera for a segment on KABC TV’s Eyewitness News.
“We could do it on the beach,” I suggested, knowing how much John enjoyed the call of the ocean. “It’d be nice to take in some sea air.”
John quickly agreed, but I started having second thoughts the minute I began planning out the details. Would I need a permit to shoot on the beach? What about crowd control: How to make sure we weren’t mobbed by onlookers? Which beach should we tape at? Which was the least crowded? And what sort of equipment would we need? In those days, a portable news camera was a gigantic contraption that sat on a cameraman’s shoulder. The battery pack was even bigger and was worn like a knapsack on the operator’s back. Separate sound equipment would be required as well: capturing TV-quality audio on a windy beach filled with the ambient sounds of crashing waves was a lot harder than it looked.
In the end, though, I decided to just wing it. I picked up John at Lou’s house around noon and headed to Malibu in the Jag, a small crew following close behind in a TV news van. I figured we’d drive along the coast until we found a beachy spot that looked hospitable and simply shoot the interview guerrilla-style, with no permits or crowd control, just the element of surprise working in our favor. Hopefully, the cameraman and sound operator would know what needed to be done.
“Have you eaten anything?” I asked John as I drove, making conversation.
“I had a cup of tea, nothing else,” he said. “I could go for a bite.”
As it happened, there was a McDonald’s just down the road—I could see its giant golden arches—so I signaled the van behind us that we were going to make a brief pit stop. For some reason, this McDonald’s parking lot was nearly deserted, which I counted as a lucky break. The last thing I needed was for John to get mobbed by fans even before the interview started.
“Tell me what you want, and I’ll pick it up; you stay in the car,” I told John after I swung into one of the empty spaces.
“What do they have?” he asked. “Bangers and mash? That would do me well.”
And here, I confess, I was at something of a loss. I had never eaten at a McDonald’s before (or, for that matter, since). I had heard the term “Big Mac” but was not entirely sure what it meant. I was confident, however, that bangers and mash were not on the menu.
“It’s hamburgers and French fries—that sort of thing,” I said.
“Whatever you call them, Ellie, that’ll be fine,” he said, glancing around at the empty parking lot with a curious glint in his eyes.
Then, before I could open my car door, John put his hand on my arm.
“I haven’t driven a car in a while,” he said. “Do you think I could drive yours around here for a bit?”
It was no secret that John was a notoriously terrible driver. Although he’d passed a British driving test in 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, he’d spent almost no time behind the wheel. On those few occasions when he did drive, he was famously poor at navigating roads and even worse at noticing other traffic. In fact, just four years earlier, in 1969, while holidaying in Scotland, he’d been in a horrendous accident, crashing and rolling his Austin Maxi into a roadside ditch.
I gulped down hard. I thought about my promise to Yoko to keep him safe. But I knew John well enough not to argue with him. Besides, the lot was so empty, what could go wrong? I nodded and motioned for him to switch places with me.
“Are you sure you can handle this?” I asked nervously from the passenger seat as he fiddled with the shifter.
“Just you watch,” he answered overconfidently.
And with that, John jammed his foot on the accelerator and sent the car shooting through the lot like an off-course rocket. I could feel the g-forces plunging me into the back of my seat as we caromed around the asphalt. John jerked the wheel wildly to the right, sending me slamming against the passenger door. Then, just as wildly, he yanked the wheel to the left, nearly flinging the Jag into a 360-degree spinout. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he pounded on the brakes and came to a screeching halt, filling the air with the smell of burning tire rubber. In my side mirror, I could see the camera guys standing by the TV van across the lot, staring at us with their mouths wide-open.
“Well,” I said after catching my breath, “how did that feel?”
“I think your steering wheel needs adjustment,” John said.
My steering wheel was fine. My neck, on the other hand…
The interview, in the end, turned out great. After carefully pulling out of the McDonald’s lot, I cautiously navigated to a surprisingly desolate stretch of beach near the Malibu pier, where the camera crew taped John and me talking about everything from his new album to his memories of Beatlemania to the ultimate question on everybody’s mind—and the one John had been asked at least a thousand times before: the possibility of a Beatles reunion.
“It’s quite possible, yes,” he said as we sat on the sand. “I don’t know why the hell we’d do it, but it’s possible.”
“Would you like that to happen?” I pressed.
“If it happens, I’ll enjoy it.”
“Would you want to initiate that to happen?”
“Well, I couldn’t say.”
“But if you could, is it something you’d like to see yourself doing?”
“I don’t know, Ellie. You know me: I go on instinct. If the idea hit me tomorrow, I might call them and say, ‘Come on, let’s do something.’ So, I couldn’t really tell you. If it happens, it’ll happen.”
“So it’s not something you would totally rule out as never taking place?”
“No, no, my memories are now all fond and the wounds have all healed. If we do it, we do it. If we record, we record.”
When it aired later that night, it seemed as if the entire city of Los Angeles—and beyond—had watched. It was by far the most well-received interview I’d ever done or ever would do. In fact, about the only person I knew who didn’t watch it was John.
“Why would I watch it?” he said when I asked what he thought of the broadcast. “I was there when you filmed it.”
John and I spent a lot of time together over the next several weeks and months. And when we didn’t see each other in person, we kept up our regular phone calls. But he was also expanding his friendship circle in L.A., hanging out with people like Harry Nilsson, the brilliant but notoriously hell-raising singer-songwriter, who was quickly becoming one of John’s best drinking buddies. In fact, a few weeks after our TV interview on the beach, John called to tell me he wanted to fly up to Vegas to party with some of his new pals. Could I take him there?
It was clear he wasn’t inviting me to join them; rather, he needed an escort to make the journey with him and get him to whatever hotel—it might have been the Flamingo, or perhaps Caesars Palace; I don’t remember—had been designated as their meeting spot. But I said yes anyway because…well, because John asked me.
So, the next day, at 10:00 a.m.—an ungodly hour on my timetable—I picked up John at Adler’s house and drove him to LAX, where even in those days there were hourly flights to Vegas. About halfway to the airport, though, on a particularly sketchy stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, John spotted something that made his eyes go big: It was a sorry little strip joint called the Losers.
“We need to stop there, Ellie,” he said. “We need to check out the Losers.”
I glanced over at him and saw that he was serious. Against my better judgment, I pulled the car into the club’s lot, where there were three or four other parked cars. I tried to imagine what sort of people might be compelled to frequent such a seedy establishment at 10:30 in the morning…until I realized we were about to become two of them. Then, as I so often did when wandering in public with John, I began mentally calculating the likelihood of a crowd situation. I remembered the mob John drew the last time he’d put us in a similar situation, when he’d asked me to take him to see Deep Throat at the Pussycat Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. We had to elbow through hundreds of grabby autograph seekers before finally getting through the doors and taking our seats for the 5:45 showing. (John, by the way, didn’t care for the film; we left after twenty minutes. “I had much better,” he noted dryly on the drive home.)
But here’s the thing about fame that I learned that morning during our brief stopover at the Losers: context is everything. The odds of an artist of John Lennon’s stature turning up in a place this sad and dreary were so astronomically remote that when he did show up, nobody could believe it. Even the weary dancer performing on the stage inches away from him—staring straight into his easily recognizable face—couldn’t bring herself to make the connection. She might have thought, Hey, this guy looks a lot like John Lennon, but I doubt she suspected for a second that she really was dancing for the genius who wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
We spent maybe thirty depressing minutes at the Losers, dropping quarters in the jukebox in the corner, watching as the morning shift dancers listlessly gyrated and struggled to remove their bikini tops, before resuming our trip to the airport. As we left, John smiled and softly sang an all-too-appropriate lyric from one of the songs on Some Time in New York City: “We make her paint her face and dance…”
After we landed in Vegas and arrived at the hotel, I witnessed the flip side of the context of fame. Unlike a seedy topless club on La Cienega, a fancy hotel casino on the Strip was an entirely plausible place for a celebrity like John Lennon to be spotted—which is why it was completely predictable that John would set off a stampede when he stopped for a few spins at the roulette wheel.
He was demonstrating a “can’t lose” gambling system he had developed on his own. Using $300 that he borrowed from me—once again, I was reminded of and amused to see how bad John was with money and how odd it was that he never carried his own cash—he was placing one-chip bets on all but one of the numbers on the table. Of course, with that big a spread, one of John’s numbers nearly always came up, which he took as proof that his system was infallible. When I tried to explain that he was losing money on every spin—the casino paid him thirty-five chips for every winning bet, but it was costing him thirty-seven chips to nearly cover the table—he just stared back at me, indignant.
“But I’m winning every time!” he exclaimed.
I never got the chance to unpack the flaw in his gaming logic because, within a matter of minutes, the roulette table was overrun by fans waving napkins and pens in John’s face, demanding autographs. “The Beatles are here! The Beatles are here!” someone in the casino shouted, triggering an even larger surge around us. I grabbed John by the arm and steered him through the throng until we found a phalanx of hotel security guards, who pulled John behind them and escorted him to safety. I followed closely behind, making sure John was okay. After a brief, reassuring conversation with the hotel staff, I felt confident he would get to his appointment with his friends.
I had done what had been requested of me. I had delivered John to Vegas. There wasn’t much else for me to do, so I turned around, took a cab back to the airport, hopped on a plane, and was back in Laurel Canyon a few hours later.
Again, within minutes of opening my door, the hotline started ringing.
“How is he?” Yoko asked.
“He’s fine,” I told her. “He’s in Las Vegas meeting some friends.”
“Which friends? Who is he meeting?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I answered truthfully. “He didn’t really say. I’m guessing maybe Harry Nilsson. They’ve been hanging out a lot.”
Yoko was silent for a beat.
“Keep trying to keep him safe, Elliot.”
Once again, I promised I would try.
As time went on, however, keeping John safe became a far more complicated task. After three or four months in L.A., much of his initial enthusiasm had boiled off and his mood was starting to curdle. He was missing Yoko: he began asking me when I thought she’d be ready for him to come home, a question I could never answer. He started spending more and more time with Nilsson, drinking at the Troubadour till all hours, often shutting the place down. After John famously got thrown out for drunkenly heckling the Smothers Brothers—I wasn’t there during that incident, but the next day, at John’s request, I sent a large floral arrangement to the brothers as an apology—the late-night shenanigans moved from the Troubadour to the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. That’s where John and Harry and a collection of others—including my old pals Micky Dolenz and Alice Cooper, as well as former Beatles road manager Mal Evans, songwriter Bernie Taupin, and musicians Keith Allison, Klaus Voormann, and Marc Bolan—formed an infamous drinking club known as the Hollywood Vampires.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the level of unbridled indulgences that took place in the Rainbow’s VIP room, a small alcove atop some stairs overlooking the bar. The amount of alcohol imbibed was staggering, to say the least, and there were also small bags of cocaine discreetly passed into the room. Nilsson, a great big bear of a man, could pound down a dozen or so Brandy Alexanders—a potent mix of brandy and cream, his cocktail of choice, which John soon adopted as his own—in a single sitting. Not being a celebrity, I was never invited to become a member of the Hollywood Vampires, but I was a welcome visitor and spent many a late night on the edges of their wild, sometimes harrowing saturnalias.
“What are you drinking?” Nilsson asked me when John first introduced us.
“Um, a glass of Chardonnay would be nice,” I told him.
He signaled a waiter and ordered a full bottle.
“Oh, I’ll only drink a glass or two,” I protested. “I’ve already had a couple.”
John leaned into my ear and whispered, “Tonight, you’re drinkin’ the whole fuckin’ bottle.” I was reminded once again of why Yoko worried so much about John and alcohol: this wasn’t a side of him either of us ever wanted to see.
There was always a crowd of attractive young women at the bottom of the steps leading to the Vampires’ VIP lair, waiting for a chance to snag an interlude with a rock star. Frankly, though, by the time the boys descended, usually at closing time, most of them were too wasted to take advantage of the opportunity. I lost count of the number of times I all but carried John down those stairs and poured him into whatever car service I had called to the bar’s parking lot.
For the most part, I kept my promise to Yoko: I kept John safe. But one night about three or four months into the Lost Weekend, I realized things were starting to spiral out of my control. Normally, John didn’t put up much of a fight when I helped him down the stairs at the Rainbow Bar; even when completely drunk, he knew when the party was over. But on this occasion, he resisted. He didn’t want to go home. He demanded to keep going even though the bar was closing, its patrons spilling out the doors. He pushed away and dove straight into the crowd in the parking lot, a throng filled with folks every bit as inebriated as he was. It was an incredibly dangerous situation, my worst nightmare, a drunken star lost inside a drunken mob.
I dove into the swarm after him, jostling through knots of revelers, desperately searching for any sign of him, growing more and more frantic. Finally, I spotted John with Nilsson at the edge of the lot, the two of them climbing into the back of a black limousine. A moment later, the limo pulled away into the night, going I had no idea where.
John, I realized with a sinking feeling in my gut, was slipping away.