The American journalist Gloria Emerson interviewed John and Yoko at the Apple headquarters on 3 December 1969. Having begun her career as a foreign correspondent in Saigon in the 1950s, she knew what she was talking about. The heated argument between Emerson and John and Yoko – notable, because Emerson was clearly no establishment reactionary – was broadcast by BBC Radio 2 a fortnight later.
JOHN: If I’m gonna get on the front page I might as well get on the front page with the word ‘peace’.
GLORIA EMERSON: But you made yourself ridiculous!
JOHN: To some people, but I don’t care, if it saves lives!
GLORIA: You don’t think you –? Oh, my dear boy! You’re living in a never-never land! You don’t think you’ve saved a single life?!
JOHN: Maybe we’ll save some in the future!
Eleven years older than John, and three years older than Yoko, Emerson sounds exasperated, like an adult confronted by unrepentant children.
GLORIA: What do you know about a protest movement anyway? It consists of a lot more than sending your chauffeur in your car back to Buckingham Palace!
JOHN: You’re just a snob about it. The only way to make –
GLORIA: You’re a fake! I mean, I know in England it’s kind of smart not to be serious about everything –
Silent up to now, suddenly Yoko pipes up.
YOKO: Everything needs a smile, you know.
GLORIA: I see. The Pinkville massacre,1 ha ha ha! Can’t you give up something else if it –
There is an awkward silence. John looks daggers at Gloria, and starts to chew his gum much more vigorously. She, in turn, puffs on a cigarette.
JOHN: It’s not the sacrifice. You can’t get that into your head, can you? You’ve stated half a dozen times the MBE is irrelevant. I agree, it was no sacrifice to get rid of the MBE, because it was embarrassing.
GLORIA: But what kind of a protest did you make?
JOHN: (raising his voice) I did an ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?
GLORIA: No, I can’t.
JOHN: – a very big advertising campaign for peace!
GLORIA: I think it shouts of self-aggrandisement! Are you advertising John Lennon or peace?
John begins shouting at her. If she is treating him like a child, he is treating her as a bourgeois flibbertigibbet. Perhaps he doesn’t know that she is a war correspondent; if he does, he seems to have forgotten.
JOHN: If you want nice middle-class gestures for peace and intellectual manifestos written by a lot of half-witted intellectuals and nobody reads them! That’s the trouble with the peace movement!
GLORIA: Well, it just seems a never-never land. I mean, I can’t think of anyone who seems more remote from the ugliness of what’s happening than you. I do see you getting up on a Tuesday morning and thinking, ‘Let’s see, what shall we do today, what war is on?’
YOKO: But that’s your imagination!
JOHN: Why don’t you make a film while you’re at it?
GLORIA: I’m someone who admired you very much.
JOHN: Well, I’m sorry you liked the old moptops, dear, and you thought I was very satirical and witty and you liked Hard Day’s Night, love. But I’ve grown up, and you obviously haven’t.
GLORIA: What have you grown up to?
JOHN: Twenty-nine.
GLORIA: Yes.
At this point she becomes quieter, more conciliatory. Perhaps she has only just realised quite how young he is, so finds his naïvety more forgivable.
GLORIA: How was Greece?
YOKO: Beautiful.
JOHN: We did a nice war protest on the army TV while we were there. I suppose you didn’t like us going to Greece, eh? You think we shouldn’t go to a fascist country like Greece where it’s all right to live in a fascist country like Britain or America, is it?
Emerson is unruffled, looking to the ceiling for a second and taking stock before continuing.
GLORIA: I think America’s a good place to live right now because I mean if you were interested or committed OR not too cowardly you might conceivably make a difference by what you did.
JOHN: Well, we’ve been trying to go to America to do something for the last seven or eight months, but I can’t get in.
GLORIA: You don’t understand how they protest, my dear –
JOHN: Tell me, what were they singing at the moratorium, the recent big one? They were singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’! And it was written specifically for them!
GLORIA: Where are we and what is this and what do you have to do with the moratorium? So they sang one of your songs! Great song, sure. But is that all you can say about that?
John wags his finger at her.
JOHN: You were saying that in America (starts imitating her accent) ‘they’re so serious about the protest movement but they were so flippant that they were singing a happy-go-lucky song’ which happens to be one I wrote and I’m glad they sang it and when I get there I’ll sing it with them, when I get in, and that was a message from me to America or to anywhere that I use my songwriting ability to write a song that we could all sing together and I’m PROUD that they sang it at the moratorium. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ but it just so happens they sang that and I’m PROUD of it and I’ll be glad to go there and sing with ’em!
GLORIA: Make it jolly.
JOHN: I WILL make it jolly.
Yoko now gives her only long speech. She speaks in a peculiarly childish voice, almost as though reading a children’s book.
YOKO: We have to make it jolly because if we make it jolly maybe we might stop the war because the thing is when you’re happy and when you’re smiling you don’t want to kill someone, do you, you know, it’s when you’re very serious you start to think about violence and death and killing. I mean, have you ever seen a person killing somebody with a smile on his face and being happy? No! Killers are unhappy people and they’re violent because they’re so unhappy and so damn serious.
Emerson picks up her bag.
GLORIA: Mr and Mrs Lennon, we’re boring each other, so I’ll go away. Thank you. Goodbye!
JOHN: Well, I think that’s what you wanted!
Emerson leaves the room, without another word.
YOKO: (to John) The last point was a good point and she didn’t want to respond to it.
JOHN: She didn’t hear anything.
The following year Gloria Emerson returned to Saigon, saying she ‘wanted to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story’. In her first reports she exposed the false American body counts, and the use of hard drugs by GIs. Years later she said that, by the end of her time there, she had lost count of the number of young American soldiers she had comforted in their final moments.
Nineteen years later, in the December 1988 issue of Q magazine, Yoko spoke to the journalist Tom Hibbert about the legacy of the bed-ins, in which she and John had stayed in bed ‘for peace’.
HIBBERT: Are those bed-ins something you look back on with pride?
YOKO: Oh yes. Pride and great joy. Those things we did were blessings. At the time we were doing it people used to sort of laugh at us – we were hoping that they would laugh with us but it didn’t work out that way. But in the end, you see, it did have an effect. Last year when Reagan and Gorbachev had their summit and shook hands, I sort of felt, well, John and I did have an effect.
1 The notorious My Lai massacre (March 1968) was originally known as the Pinkville massacre, ‘Pinkville’ being the US Army’s name for the area in which it took place.