Christmas 1974 was a good time for John. His appearance with Elton John had been a big success, he had a hit album and a single high in the charts, he was seeing Paul again and he had a mid-town Manhattan home life where he lived with a girlfriend who adored him. He possibly didn’t love her as much as she loved him, but he’d been with her for a year and a half, and had, despite other distractions, always quickly come back to her. So, their relationship, which was cosy, with no interfering staff, and in which May always did the hiring of cars and then the driving, the booking of appointments and the social arrangements with their friends, must have had quite a lot going for it.
His life was, however, as complicated as ever, when he suddenly found that four different issues from his past were simultaneously converging on him. The first was the Beatles dissolution problem. It had taken four years and five different legal teams, but now, as his lawyers showed him the terms while he and May sat in bed, John and Yoko style, he wanted more time to think about it. It was important for tax reasons that the papers were signed before the end of the year, but still John hesitated.
The second issue, more of a blessing than a problem, was that his son, Julian, about whom he had felt guilty for years, was coming to stay with him and May for Christmas.
But then there was Yoko. Was she really ‘thinking of taking him back’, as she’d now told May? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if he wanted to go back. He was as happy now as he’d been in years.
Finally there was George. He certainly wasn’t happy. He was on a forty-city US tour, but there had been poor reviews and the thinning audiences resented having to listen to forty minutes of Ravi Shankar’s Indian music before the ex-Beatle came on stage. So George had looked to John for help and not found it. Then, as the tour had reached New York just before Christmas, John sent a message to George, offering to do anything he could to help. For George it was too late.
Hadn’t he done everything John had asked for years, George asked bitterly – and that included agreeing with John to appoint Allen Klein as their manager. But where had John been when he’d needed him? Once again George’s long-held resentment at feeling himself a second-class Beatle had bubbled up. John understood. No one other than the four Beatles could understand what they’d lived through. It was almost a family row, because in so many ways the Beatles had been a family. Now George was feeling abandoned. He’d started this tour by himself and he would finish it by himself, he told John bitterly.
Then, on the night when Paul, George and John were to meet at the Plaza Hotel and sign the dissolution documents, John didn’t turn up. He was lying in bed in his flat in Sutton Place. ‘I didn’t sign it because my astrologer told me it wasn’t the right day,’ he would say later. This was the first anyone had ever heard of him having an astrologer. But Yoko had one. In the end he sent a white balloon. Paul and George were livid.
With such bad feelings around him, it must have been a relief to take May and Julian down to Florida to visit Disney World, where his girlfriend watched as, in their bedroom in the Polynesian Hotel, John finally succumbed to common sense and signed the dissolution agreement. Thus, in this Mickey Mouse world, the Beatles’ career of almost two decades, and their thirteen-year legal partnership, formally came to an end.
The tension had been lifted. Everyone was happy, and back home in Sutton Place, John, May and Julian had a regular Christmas with a tree and presents. Then there was a trip to Montauk to show Julian a house John had seen while he’d been with Mick Jagger that he was thinking of buying. That was where Julian would be staying next year, he told his son. And it got even better when, with Julian returning to London, Paul and Linda invited John and May out and ended up at a David Bowie studio mixing session, during which Bowie and John turned a jam session into the song ‘Fame’.
Almost immediately, however, a new problem arose when it became known that Maurice Levy, the man whom John thought was a ‘character’, had decided to show that character by distributing the unmixed Rock ’n’ Roll tapes that John had sent him as a cheap TV mail order album. John had been warned. His judgement of people had never been his strongest suit.
Once again lawyers had to be called in, although this time at Capitol’s expense, as it was their album that Levy was ripping off. Quickly, an injunction was slapped on Levy, making it pretty well impossible for him to sell his version of the album, which he was calling Roots.
John, working out of his Lennono Music office at Capitol Records on the Avenue of the Americas, with May at his side, began his final mix of the material. He was in a busy, jubilant mood, May remembers. And even before he’d finished Rock ’n’ Roll, he began compiling material for a new album, playing the songs to May as he went. Then came a call from Paul. He was going down to New Orleans to record his next album. Did John and May want to come down too? Paul asked.
Did he? In his new social whirl, he was tempted enough to tell Art Garfunkel over dinner about the invitation. Garfunkel thought he should go, and that if Paul wanted him to join in the recording he should do that, too. Still toying with the idea, John asked May: ‘What would you think if I began writing with Paul again?’
‘Are you kidding?’ said May, delighted.
Not as frequent a letter writer as he had been, John still liked to haphazardly keep in touch with old friends, and in one typical letter to Derek Taylor, who had now ceased to be the press officer at Apple, he typed: ‘Bowies cutting “universe” (Let It Beatle). Am a gonna be there (by request of courset). Then possibley down to New Orleans to see the McCartknees.’
To this day May remains convinced that had John joined Paul in New Orleans they would not have been able to resist working together again. She was excited.
Then Yoko rang.
She had, she said, found a new way of giving up smoking, and it was very effective. It was by hypnotism. Since John had been getting through two packets of his loosely packed French cigarettes a day for more years than he knew, he was keen to try the cure. The hypnotism would, said Yoko, take place at the Dakota. May asked to go too, to see the cure for herself, but John refused her.
For two weeks Yoko repeatedly changed the time of the appointment, May would later write, sometimes because the stars weren’t right. So John carried on writing his next album. One song that May liked particularly was called ‘Tennessee’.
Then, on Friday, 31 January 1975, Yoko called to say that the stars were in their right places.
‘I’ll call you later,’ John told May, and set off for the Dakota to be hypnotised.