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‘To finish off . . . we thought we’d do a number by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul’

As inexplicable and self-destructive as was some of John’s behaviour, his time with May wasn’t just eighteen months on the razzle. By no means. He worked hard, writing, recording and producing for most of the time, with the loyal May always at his side. Only his violent aberrations made the headlines. When Mind Games was released – the cover of which features a miniature John looking like a Lilliputian walking away from a prone Gulliver-like giant Yoko – he made himself available to all the US rock magazines, and even made a jokey video for TV. Unfortunately, the album was another setback with justifiably poor reviews, and, by John’s standards, modest sales. There was, however, an upside. Through the promotion he became good friends with Elton John. Both had started their careers having their songs published by Dick James, with whom both had later fallen out. They had a lot to talk about.

At May’s instigation, he also spent time at Disneyland with his son Julian, now aged ten, whom he hadn’t seen in the two years that he’d lived in America. The boy hadn’t been invited to New York to see his father because his presence in the Lennons’ household would have reminded Yoko of the loss of her daughter Kyoko, whom she still hadn’t been able to find.

With work on his Rock ’n’ Roll album coming to a halt when Phil Spector suddenly disappeared, taking the already recorded tracks with him, John was at a loss as to what to do next. Then his friend and drinking partner Harry Nilsson came up with an answer. Nilsson liked golden oldies too, so John agreed to produce an album for him. It was called Pussy Cats, and, hearing about the project, Ringo flew in to join the team, as did another drummer, Keith Moon.

On the first night of recording, who should turn up at the studio door but Paul and Linda. It was the first time since the Beatles had broken up that John and Paul had been in the same room. Would there be an almighty row? Absolutely not. When musicians get together and conversation runs out or gets awkward, they do what they always do. They play. With Paul on drums, in the absence of Ringo and Keith Moon that night, and John picking up his guitar, soon to be joined by Stevie Wonder, they went into a jam of ‘Midnight Special’. It was a song John and Paul hadn’t played together since they’d been at the Cavern. It was an icebreaker. As the evening ended, John invited Paul and Linda to come to the house he and May, along with Ringo, Nilsson and Moon, had just moved into, on the beach just north of Santa Monica, the following day.

The McCartneys arrived, bringing their children with them, and were given a tour of the house. John and May delighted in showing every visitor their bedroom, which was said to be the one in which Marilyn Monroe had entertained either Bobby or Jack Kennedy, or perhaps both, at different times – no one was sure. But John did love his gossip. After the tour, Paul went to the piano downstairs and began to play, as he did wherever he went. At that time he was going through a hot spell professionally, with the success of ‘Live And Let Die’ and the album Band On The Run. If John was jealous, and he probably was, he didn’t show it.

Before Paul left that day, he had a surprise for his former partner. Taking John aside, he told him that when Yoko had been in London recently, where she’d taken John’s place on the Apple board, she’d told him that if her husband wanted to get back with her, he would ‘have to work at it’. So here was Paul acting as the mediator between John and the woman who had so often infuriated him and who had helped break up the Beatles. Life, John must have thought, is full of ironies.

As much as John admired Harry Nilsson’s voice, the sessions didn’t go as well as he’d expected. The problem was partly that Harry was ruining his voice with alcohol and drugs, and eventually he began coughing up blood. But it wasn’t only that. Harry, Ringo and Keith Moon wanted to party every night, leading May to sometimes think that she was living in ‘an asylum for the insane’. Paul had thought it was ‘crazed’.

Soon, John began to realise that ruin lay ahead. And, as he was producing the album, he was responsible. ‘I just woke up in the middle of it and thought, “There’s something wrong here. I’d better straighten myself out.”’ He did, and took Harry and the tapes back to New York and remixed the album there.

Was it that the visit from the successful solo Paul had brought back the old competitive spirit in him, seeing himself as Paul would have done, an old friend going nowhere, throwing his talent away in the modern land of the lotus eaters? Or was it that Yoko was said to be thinking about finding a divorce lawyer?

Back in New York, he went to live a few blocks away from the Dakota at the Pierre Hotel, where May joined him. Soon Yoko would suggest that the two move to another apartment in the Dakota that had become vacant, but John chose instead to rent a place for May and himself in Sutton Place on East 52nd Street.

Yoko was happy with that. And when, after sloping off for a night with a girl he’d met, he got Yoko to tell May that he’d stayed the night in a spare room at the Dakota, she was even amused. It’s a bizarre situation when a wife lies to her husband’s mistress when he is being unfaithful to that mistress.

John had always liked New York, and, once back, he was soon in the recording studio making a new album. He called it Walls And Bridges, and for its sleeve he asked Aunt Mimi to send him some illustrations he’d done at school when he was eleven. One showed a game of football, and another was a scene of two Hollywood-style Red Indians on horses galloping towards the artist. His past never left him. Whenever he called Mimi, she always wanted to know when she would be seeing him again. But he could never say. While the visa problem was still rumbling on, he daren’t leave the US in case he could never get back in. When he asked her to come and visit him, her answer was always that she wasn’t ‘going to any country where the police had guns’. She probably just didn’t want to go. She was still a stubborn woman.

Walls And Bridges would be a big improvement on Mind Games, although John’s self-absorbed, self-pitying attitude lingered in songs like ‘Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down And Out)’ and ‘Scared’ – good as they were. Playing the songs to Elton John one night before recording them, however, Elton asked if he could be on one of the tracks and chose ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’, on which he played organ and sang harmony. It was John’s least favourite song on the album, but by that time Elton knew more about the current US record market than he did, and insisted that it would be a number one. Should that happen, John promised that he would appear on stage alongside Elton, never thinking it was even likely. The single failed completely in the UK, but it became a million seller in the US, John’s first since ‘Imagine’ in 1971.

Not everyone rejoiced at the success of the album, and the lacerating that John gave Allen Klein in ‘Steel And Glass’ was vicious. The five-year contract that John had pushed George and Ringo to sign had now run its course and would not be renewed, and, feeling that Klein had cheated him in some way, John went after him in the only way he knew how. ‘You leave your smell like an alley cat,’ he sang.

Klein didn’t like it, but he had bigger fish to fry. For four years, teams of lawyers had been working in London and New York on finding a way to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership and were now inching towards a settlement. And, as John was now prepared to agree with Paul that hiring Klein had been a mistake, a separate suit against the American manager was also in progress. Naturally, by way of protecting himself and his business, Klein was, in return, suing the Beatles.

Paul was right when he said that the legal fees involved in the Beatles’ dissolution must have put many lawyers’ kids through college, because lawyers were everywhere. Just as one team had reached an agreement for John and Paul with ATV Music about Northern Songs, a new problem appeared for other lawyers to sort out. The new dispute referred back to the Beatles’ recording of ‘Come Together’, when John had ignored Paul’s caution and borrowed a line from a Chuck Berry song. This being music publishing, inevitably the head of the company who owned the song had noticed, and equally inevitably he wanted some form of compensation.

The man was Maurice Levy, who was a tough guy in the record world with Mafia links. To John, it seemed that the easiest way to satisfy him was to record three songs for his Rock ’n’ Roll album that Levy published. As the tapes for the album that Phil Spector had spirited away had finally been retrieved by, yes, more lawyers at Capitol Records, he was now keen to finish it.

Despite all the warnings about Levy, John took a shine to the fellow. Sometimes his naivety knew no limits. Levy was a character, he said. He was certainly that. After recording the necessary additional songs, John was so pleased to finish the album he sent Levy an unmixed copy of all the tapes. That was another big mistake.

By this time, he and Yoko had been apart for fifteen months. According to May, John said that when Yoko had suggested divorce, he agreed to it, only for Yoko to decide, upon returning from a disastrous solo singing tour in Japan, that the stars weren’t right – she was now heavily into astrology. Yoko had talked vaguely about divorce on the phone to me, too, but how serious either she or John was on the subject is impossible to say, so adept were they at playing games with each other, floating ideas and then withdrawing them. How much May could believe what they each told her is difficult to judge too.

A new John, however, was emerging in the East River apartment where he and May were now living. He was at his most friendly and sociable in years, as he welcomed guests to his home. Small though it was, with Greta Garbo living in the same block they were hardly slumming it, and Paul and Linda turned up on their first night there. ‘We spent two or three nights together,’ John would later say, ‘talking about the old days. It was cool seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.’ Mick Jagger came round too. He found it easier, he would tell May, now that he didn’t have to negotiate Yoko first, and he would always bring a bottle of good wine with him. One weekend he took John and May to stay the night at Andy Warhol’s house, which he and his then wife Bianca were renting at Montauk on Long Island. Elton was a visitor too. John had never been so welcoming.

Then one Friday night, stepping out on to the roof terrace, John saw a UFO over the East River. He called May to come and see this ‘black, grey object . . . with flashing lights’ as it passed the UN Building, and moved on down the river. She saw it too. So convinced were they by what they had seen that John was happy to be interviewed the next day by a TV news team, wearing his flat cap and pointing at the sky as he happily recounted the experience. He knew that, with his reputation for taking mind-altering drugs, some people might not be surprised to hear that he believed in flying saucers. He certainly hadn’t when the Harbingers had talked about them when he’d been in Denmark in 1970. But seeing is believing. He wasn’t stoned, he insisted. Whatever it was, he remained convinced for the rest of his life that he had seen something that he couldn’t explain.

Thanksgiving 1974 was the night Elton, in the middle of a US tour, chose for John to fulfil his promise about ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’, and join him on stage at Madison Square Garden. He didn’t force the issue. John could back out if he felt he wasn’t up to it. But John wanted to do it.

Foolishly, though, he’d mixed champagne and cocaine the previous night, so he was still feeling unwell as he put on a black suit for the show, together with a jewelled pendant that Elton had bought him as a gift. He and May travelled to the Garden with Elton in his limousine, to find, when they arrived, that Yoko had sent both singers a large white gardenia. John attached his to his lapel. Then, as the show started and Elton began going through his hits, John and May waited in the wings for Elton to make his announcement.

At this point, memories of the evening, and the events that followed, begin to diverge. Yoko would say later that John had no idea that she was attending the show, and John would agree. But May remembers things differently, because, she says, she’d been asked by Yoko to make sure there were tickets for her and her date for the night, her friend, guitarist David Spinozza, and that John knew very well she would be there.

Rumours had been flying around among the concert-goers all day, so when at last Elton turned to the audience and said, ‘Seeing as its Thanksgiving, we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us on stage . . .’ and John walked on, the auditorium was primed to explode. John was surprised at the reaction. ‘It was just like Beatlemania . . . I hadn’t heard it since the Beatles,’ he would later tell David Sheff at Newsweek.

Immediately John and Elton went into ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ and then came ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. But the biggest response was yet to come. ‘We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick,’ John joked, ‘and we thought we’d do a number by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul . . . It’s an old Beatle number, and we just about know it.’ And then, with a little tease as Elton’s lead guitarist played the intro to ‘I Feel Fine’, he and Elton went into ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.

It was a clever choice. Elton had suggested ‘Imagine’, but, as John would later say, ‘I didn’t want to come on like Dean Martin doing my classic hits. I wanted to have some fun and play some rock and roll.’ So a song that Paul had written virtually alone was chosen. It was the first time John had ever sung lead on it, but now Elton was taking the harmony he used to sing, and John was laying the foundations of a bridge back to Paul. Whether that bridge would ever be completed, he didn’t know.

Sitting in the audience, Yoko would later say that she thought John looked lonely. But standing in the wings, May thought he was amazing, believing that the night would be the start of something new.

John took May to a reception at the Pierre Hotel after the show. Yoko was there, and in the truncated version of events that she and John would later agree upon, they looked into each other’s eyes and that was that. Romance was rekindled and they were together again.

Actually, it wasn’t and they weren’t . . .

John did some table hopping at the party, chatted to Yoko for a while, and was intrigued as Uri Geller did some spoon bending. Then he took May home to their apartment in Sutton Place.