I don’t know how they got ahold of it. I never asked; they never told. But one evening in the late 1970s, as we lounged and chatted in our usual spots in the bedroom—John and Yoko on the bed, me in my white wicker chair—Yoko held up an old brass key and suggested we give it a try.
It unlocked apartment 71, just down the hall from John and Yoko’s, and the only other domicile on their side of the Dakota’s seventh floor. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been occupied by an elderly woman who almost never opened her door, never showed her face, and never had any visitors. In that way, she was the perfect neighbor for the Lennons, and yet, despite her ghostlike profile, John and Yoko had been obsessed with acquiring her apartment almost from the moment they moved into the Dakota. They wanted their corner of the seventh all to themselves, their own private sanctuary on New York’s Upper West Side, so that there was never a danger of anyone they didn’t know—or that Yoko’s numerologists hadn’t vetted—ever stepping off the elevator into their personal oasis.
And then, miracle of miracles—just before Thanksgiving, if I’m recalling correctly—there were rumors that the woman was finally ready to sell. Her apartment had not been listed—technically it wasn’t yet on the market—but John and Yoko had learned that 71’s owner was not at home. Where she had gone, and for how long, they couldn’t be sure; they only knew that, right at that moment, she wasn’t there. So, with Yoko leading the way, clutching that mysteriously obtained key, the three of us left 72 and all but tiptoed down the hallway to investigate just what was behind 71’s always-closed door.
After Yoko unlocked the apartment, all we could see was darkness. John felt around the wall next to the entranceway until he finally found a light switch, which turned on a single floor lamp way on the other side of what revealed itself as a grand, dark-wood-paneled living room. Weirdly, there was almost no furniture in the place—just three overstuffed club chairs near a fireplace arranged around a simple wooden coffee table, as well as a few other random, scattered pieces. Either the woman had already begun moving out or she’d lived for all those decades a remarkably uncluttered life.
We slowly inched our way into the uncharted dwelling, taking in the sky-high ceilings and banks of heavily draped windows, mentally measuring the floor space—I guessed 3,000 square feet, insignificantly smaller than 72—until we found ourselves standing at the club chairs by the fireplace. Yoko sat down first. John and I followed suit.
“It’s important that this woman sell us this apartment,” Yoko announced as she rummaged through a small bag that she had brought with her.
“Well, why not make her an offer?” I suggested.
“Yes, but before we make an offer, we have to find out the best way to make that offer,” Yoko went on, arranging the contents of her bag—a candle, some crystals, and a deck of tarot cards—on the coffee table. “She doesn’t know us. So we must find a way of getting her to want to sell us the apartment; otherwise she might sell it to someone else who makes a better offer, or maybe will it to a relative.”
“And how do you do that?” I asked. John looked like he was curious about the answer to that question as well.
“Just watch,” Yoko said.
She lit the candle, rubbed the crystals between her fingers for a few minutes, then spent several long moments turning over cards, studying them intensely. John and I watched in silence, mesmerized by her mystical rituals. Finally, Yoko closed her eyes, breathed deeply, then blew out the candle.
“Is it done, Mother?” John asked.
“Yes,” she said, gathering up her cards and crystals. “It is done.”
We left, turning off the light and locking up behind us.
Two weeks later, I was back home in Laurel Canyon when the red light started flashing. “Have you spoken to Mother yet?” John asked when I picked up the phone.
“No, why?”
“We got 71!”
“Really?” I said. “How?”
“It was the magic, Ellie. Mother’s magic!”
It may very well have been the magic. Or else Yoko made an offer on the place that the seller simply couldn’t refuse—a different sort of magic—but either way, the Lennons finally had the seventh floor all to themselves.
At first, John and Yoko left the apartment pretty much exactly as we found it when we snuck in for our reconnaissance visit. Except for an antique, bubble-topped Wurlitzer jukebox that Yoko had purchased for one of John’s birthdays, as well as a Yamaha electric piano she had given him, they hardly added any furniture to it or decorated it in any way at all—until about a year later, that is, on a snowy New Year’s Eve, as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. That’s when John transformed apartment 71, for one evening only, into “Club Dakota,” the most exclusive—and enchanting—nightspot in all of New York City.
I’ll get back to that extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime event in just a moment. But first, a few words about holidays at the Dakota—arguably the most Dickensian building in Manhattan—which were remarkable occasions in their own right.
As I’ve made more than abundantly clear, John and Yoko were not religious people. Spiritual, for sure, but hardly traditional believers. Still, they took Christmas seriously, if not as a holy day, then certainly as secular celebration, particularly after Sean was born. They always had a tree, for instance—a big one, usually an eight-footer, festooned with old-fashioned bulbs and colored lights and tinsel, just like you’d find on a Christmas card—which stood in the nook off the kitchen in John and Yoko’s entertainment center. One year Yoko even went so far as to garnish the otherwise pristine white room with a holiday bauble: a single unadorned pine branch elegantly placed in a vase. It was, I suppose, her own postmodern deconstruction of a traditional Yule tree. Personally, I thought it was a tad understated but lovely nonetheless.
They did not generally host Christmas parties, but they did entertain in a manner of speaking. And though their guest lists were extremely limited, they could sometimes be filled with stunning surprises. I remember one year when Paul and Linda McCartney turned up at the Dakota for Christmas lunch. I’d never met either of them, and I’d been given no indication they were coming—I’d assumed John and Yoko and I would be spending the day alone with Sean. But here were the four of them—John and Paul and Yoko and Linda—together again for the first time in years.
I’ve often wondered why John and Yoko wanted me present for this moment; I was keenly aware at the time of how much of an outsider I was at this all-too-personal gathering. I suppose John and Yoko might have felt the presence of a stranger—to Paul and Linda—would provide some sort of buffer, keeping everyone on their best behavior. I don’t know, and I never bothered to ask. But I was certainly grateful to have been included in the experience, as awkward and even oddly anticlimactic as it ended up being.
The lunch didn’t take place at the Dakota; we decided to eat at Elaine’s on Eighty-Eighth Street and Second Avenue. But everyone congregated in the white room first, where Yoko and Linda immediately gravitated to each other and just started talking. Paul and John seemed very convivial at first. They seemed like they might have just bumped into each other a month before, like not much time had passed.
Soon after, we all descended to the lobby and then climbed into the McCartneys’ chauffeured car for the drive across town to the Upper East Side. Elaine’s at the time was the red-hot center of New York City high culture. Along with Woody Allen—who was practically the dining room’s unofficial mascot—the place was always buzzing with glitterati. Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Michael Caine, Jacqueline Onassis, Luciano Pavarotti, Elaine Stritch, Tom Wolfe, Mario Puzo, Gay Talese—on any given day, it was packed with enough New York celebrities to fill an Al Hirschfeld mural. But even amid all those luminaries, John and Paul breaking bread together with their wives was beyond conspicuous. Every eyeball in the restaurant was trained on our table. It made for a very self-conscious meal.
Also, with all due respect to its late proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, the food from her kitchen was infamously unpalatable. Somehow, Elaine’s could turn a basic dish like chicken parmigiana into a goopy soup; the scampi there was so overcooked, you’d need the Jaws of Life to pry the shrimp from the shell. After perusing the small-printed menu, nobody at our table could find anything they wanted to risk ordering.
“You know,” Linda finally offered, “there’s a great pizza place not far from here. Maybe they could deliver?”
I had a hunch this would be a social faux pas—but I was also quite certain Elaine wasn’t going to eject John and Paul and their wives from her restaurant for any reason. I found a pay phone in the back and ordered a couple of pies. They were delivered to the kitchen, where they were removed from their cardboard boxes and decoratively placed on Elaine’s own platters.
After lunch, we all returned to the Dakota, where I hoped the repartee might become somewhat more sparkling. Yoko and Linda paired off for a bit and chatted amiably—the two of them got along famously, bonded by the shared experience, perhaps, of being married to a Beatle—while John and Paul stood by the windows overlooking Central Park, watching as the afternoon sky turned a whiter shade of pale over Manhattan. They remained silent for long stretches, until awkwardness forced one of them to take a stab at conversation.
“Are you making any music?” Paul asked at one point.
“Well, you know, I play some stuff for me, but I’m not working on anything. Music isn’t what’s driving me at this point. It’s all about the baby. What about you?”
“Oh, I’m always recording,” Paul said. “I couldn’t live without the music in me life.”
Then, for a spell, they fell back into silence.
It seemed that these two rock ’n’ roll behemoths, men who in their youth had all but defined the zeitgeist of the ’60s—who had inspired an entire generation and redirected music’s very destiny—were now, a mere decade later, struggling to find things to say to each other.
A part of me found it sad. But then, what was I expecting? Even the best of childhood friends eventually slip into separate lives. It’s called growing up. Now they were just two old chums who no longer had all that much in common. It was unreasonable of me to presume that merely being in the same room together would somehow ignite the genius and energy of John and Paul’s initial creative partnership.
Still, on the walk back from the Dakota to the Plaza that evening, as I passed all the glimmering Christmas lights and heard snippets of holiday melodies wafting out of the few restaurants and bars that were still open and serving, I couldn’t help but think that history might have been made on this day.
“Are you making any music?” Paul had asked John.
What if John had said something like “No, but me guitar is in the next room. Let’s sit down and make some…”
God only knows what classic Lennon-McCartney creation might have been born that afternoon.
Of course, above all else, John and Yoko were now parents, so Christmas for them, like for most other moms and dads, was largely about buying gifts for their child. Unlike most families, though, John and Yoko enjoyed almost unlimited resources, so Christmas shopping with the Lennons was in some ways a wholly unique experience. For instance, not many dads had the clout to keep FAO Schwarz open after hours before Christmas for a private last-minute spree.
The FAO Schwarz flagship location on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street shuttered its doors years ago, but in its heyday, it was one of the great wonders of Manhattan shopping, the Taj Mahal of toy stores. Outside its entrance, a platoon of greeters dressed as life-sized wooden soldiers, complete with red, brass-buttoned coats and fuzzy bearskin hats, stood guard to welcome visitors and help customers load bags into waiting cabs. Inside, every imaginable doll, puppet, game, and gadget was not only stacked in a small mountain on a display table but also laid out to play with, so that kids (and grown-ups) could sample the prospective purchase before bringing it home. With a store like that, who needed Santa Claus?
John, however, obviously couldn’t just waltz into FAO Schwarz, especially right before Christmas Eve, when it was packed elbow-to-elbow with shoppers. But one year, when Sean was barely a toddler, John asked me to call the store and see if they could shut down for an hour or two so that he could do a little last-minute gift buying. Not surprisingly, the management was not crazy about the idea. Closing its doors in the middle of their busiest sales season so that one celebrity—even a former Beatle—could purchase a few thousand dollars’ worth of presents was not smart business practice. But they did offer to let John into the store after its normal closing time.
I happened to be in New York that Christmas and joined John for his FAO Schwarz after-hours excursion. John was about thirty-eight at the time, but the minute we stepped through the door, he dropped about three decades. He literally became a kid again.
As part of the decorations, there was a giant toy train track suspended from the ceiling and snaking around the store—it must have been fifty yards long—with big, chunky Lionel locomotives huffing and puffing along its rails.
“That! Let’s get that!” John exclaimed the second he saw it.
“And where would you set that up in the Dakota?” I asked him. “The dining room?”
“Okay,” he said, dejected. “Maybe not that.”
John had a complicated childhood after being abandoned by his father, mostly being raised by his aunt, and losing his mother as a teen. I suspect his own childhood Christmases in Liverpool were not particularly merry. So, as a grown-up, he was clearly determined to compensate, and not just for his son’s sake but for his own. John ended up buying thirty or forty toys at FAO Schwarz, all ostensibly for Sean but really things that mostly appealed to him: electronic gadgets and games that his son was still way too young for but that would end up getting plenty of hours of playtime anyway. John would see to that.
As huge a haul as it was, though, those presents were only a fraction of the gifts that Sean would ultimately find waiting for him on Christmas morning. In the days and weeks before then, scores of packages would arrive for Sean from all over the world, with John and Yoko’s friends falling over themselves to give offerings to the littlest Lennon. Literally, there must have been two hundred or more brightly papered and beribboned gifts spilling out from under the family Christmas tree, all with Sean’s name on them.
At the Lennon household, by the way, Christmas morning started at exactly one minute past midnight. That’s when John and Yoko would wake Sean, lead him to the tree, and let him tear open his gifts. I was there for several of those unboxings and there was always something of a tornado-like ambiance to the scene, with wrapping paper and cards flying all over the place. I would usually take it upon myself to try to keep track of who sent Sean what so that it would be easier to send thank-you notes to the correct givers. But it was a hopeless task, and eventually I would throw up my hands and let the mayhem unfold naturally.
Some of the presents were wildly age-inappropriate. Elton John once sent Sean a motorbike; Sean was too small to even sit on it. Many people sent stuffed animals, which he had zero interest in; he’d just toss those to the side. He did seem to like a chemistry set that someone had given him, although, again, Sean was too young to be mixing minerals and sulfurs. The one gift he seemed most attracted to, curiously enough, was a set of crystals. It was one of the few presents he actually took back to his room with him and kept at his bedside. Like mother, like son.
John and Yoko also gave each other gifts, of course. Some were the traditional sort of trinkets wealthy spouses purchased for one another. Yoko once got John a wristwatch from Cartier. He once got her a white diamond necklace, the only piece of jewelry I’d ever seen the usually un-bejeweled Yoko wear. But sometimes they could be impressively creative in their gift giving, particularly John. One time he asked me for help in recording a musical tape as a present to Yoko. John and I sat in the white room, a cassette recorder next to him as he played “Stardust” on the white piano while, at his insistence, I sang the lyrics into the mic—although, to be truthful, “sang” might be a generous word for what came out of my mouth. Whatever meager talents I may possess in this life, singing is not one of them. When John played the tape of my crooning to Yoko, he recorded her reaction to my less-than-Willie-Nelson delivery and later played it back for me. I could hear Yoko say something like “Oh God, no! Please make it stop!” followed by peels of her laughter.
But by far the greatest Christmas gift John ever gave to Yoko—as well as to me—wasn’t anything he’d purchased at a store or recorded onto a cassette tape. It was an event, an enchanted twinkling of pure distilled joy, that he orchestrated just for the three of us during the waning hours of December 31, 1979.
A few days earlier, John had laid out his plans to me. He wanted to turn the newly acquired apartment 71 into a private club. John was not a huge fan of nightlife—crowds were problematic for obvious reasons—but he enjoyed the concept of an exclusive, intimate space, something like an old English men’s establishment. He’d read about John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s private blues sanctum in Chicago and wanted to construct something like that for himself right there on the seventh floor of the Dakota. So, shortly after Christmas, he and I went shopping on New York’s Lower East Side, where there were dozens of secondhand shops, and proceeded to purchase enough cheap furniture and other decorations—overstuffed sofas, martini shakers, pink flamingo cardboard cutouts—to turn 71 into what John had by now begun referring to as Club Dakota.
After furniture shopping, we spent a few hours combing through vintage record shops, looking for old 78s to fill that antique bubble-top jukebox Yoko had given John. (We found Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By,” Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Bing Crosby’s “Please,” Gracie Fields’s “Sally,” and scores more.) Then we headed to Canal Street and picked up moldy old black-tie tails and white gloves to wear on Club Dakota’s opening night, which John had decided would be on New Year’s Eve. Technically, John and I were to be the club’s only charter members, but he instructed me to write out a formal invitation to Yoko, which I would later hand deliver to her on a silver platter. Yoko was made merely an “honorary” member because, as John joked to me, otherwise she would immediately try to sexually integrate the club.
I have thought often about that night, about how best to describe it to those who weren’t lucky enough to be there (which, of course, would be the whole rest of the world). And the best I can come up with is that it was like spending a blissful interlude suspended in a magical snow globe. In my memory, we all seem to move in slow motion, as if gliding through glycerin-laced air. The three of us—Yoko in an elegant black evening gown, John and I in ridiculous old penguin suits (he paired his with a white T-shirt and his old Liverpool school tie)—danced and laughed (and smoked) together without a care in the world, the jukebox filling the living room with glorious old tunes from the ’40s and ’50s. I took dozens of Polaroid photos of them that night, but for some reason none of them capture the magic of the moment.
And then, at midnight, our reveries were interrupted by the pop and crackle of fireworks. We all stood by the windows and watched the skyline over Central Park light up with flaming balls and sparkling whirly fountains and a slew of other aerial bursts and barrages. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. And I’d never seen John and Yoko looking more content and in love.
It was that rarest, most precious thing in life—a perfect moment.
It would also, as fate would have it, be John’s last New Year’s Eve.
He would be dead before the next one.