Westerners—and not just the British—project a bundle of Asian stereotypes onto Yoko Ono, but her detractors discount Lennon’s attachment and devotion. His last five years with her only seem, at least on the surface, to provide more fodder for the anti-Yoko school that brands Lennon a caged beast. Ono’s reputation as a savvy negotiator and protector of Lennon’s estate steals attention from her intellectual whimsy, her delight in upending people’s assumptions about art and where it lies in wait. Her severity masks an implacable creativity that has only grown in stature—the work across several mediums bends conventional notions about art, music, and performance. With a furious playfulness, she dazzled Lennon right up through their final collaboration; he adored her pop orgasm on “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” from Double Fantasy.
All this gives Cynthia Lennon’s famous remark a new twist. Cynthia describes a vivid parallel she saw when Yoko Ono took Lennon back in after first kicking him out. “When I read comments from Yoko comparing herself to Aunt Mimi,” she says in John, “I had to smile. She’d got it dead right.”1 Ono represents more a fusing of Aunt Mimi with her younger sibling, Julia, those feuding Stanley sisters who turned his teenage years into a rigged game of musical chairs. Lennon looked out at them both as he stood with the Quarrymen at St. Peter’s Church in July 1957, the day he met Paul McCartney, singing the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me”: Mimi scowled, Julia beamed. Perhaps as an emergent father, Lennon grew closer to the carefree Julia in Yoko than to the militant Mimi. There’s much more evidence that Lennon was happiest in the last five years of his life than not; tearing down Yoko ignores this vital truth.
With the birth of Sean in October 1975, life at the Dakota quieted down, and Gruen’s pictures of Lennon holding Sean show a smile breaking his face. There’s a fairy-tale aspect to Lennon’s Dakota years that bathes his second fatherhood period in a halo of goodness and light. Compared to his lifestyle as a Beatle, and his “lost weekend,” this period seems relatively calm: and while the lack of incident sends some biographers off on tangents, it’s just as plausible to believe that Lennon enjoyed serious downtime and took care of personal matters.
Gruen stayed close, and now talks openly about how nurturing the John and Yoko myth meant finagling a more practical marital arrangement. “They were friends, they were married, and they figured out a way to make it work,” Gruen says. “They had decided to be friends rather than jealous lovers. . . . But he always emphasized: JohnandYoko is one word—they were a team.”2 And Gruen stresses this had as much to do with aesthetics as it did with parenthood. As with many other bohemian couples throughout the ages, the arrangement figured in intimate compromise that snubbed middle-class convention.
Lennon hadn’t seen or heard from his father since the confrontation at Tittenhurst in 1970, after which Lennon revoked his allowance and lost touch again. But early in 1976, Alfred’s young wife, Pauline, contacted Lennon again through the Apple offices to let him know that Alfred had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Lennon immediately put a call through to the local hospital in March and had one last conversation with “that Alf.” According to Alfred’s autobiography, published by Pauline in 1991, John was full of cheer and apologies, saying, “How you doing, whacker? I’ve been very worried about you.”
“Fifteen two,” Freddie responded, using one of his favorite non sequiturs. Lennon told his father about his new grandson, Sean, and promised they would meet one day. What must have passed through Lennon’s mind now as he spoke with his estranged father? “I’m sorry I treated you the way I did, Dad,” Pauline Lennon reports his saying. “I should never have gone to the head shrink. It was a big mistake.”
“Forget it, John,” Alf replied. “It’s just bloody marvelous to talk to you again.” The next day, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived at the hospital with a note: “To Dad—Get well soon—With much love from John, Yoko and Sean.”3 Alfred Lennon died on April Fools’ Day, 1976, at the age of sixty-three, a month after their final talk. Lennon never spoke of this reconciliation to reporters.
By 1976, rumors of a Beatle reunion sparked a bidding war between promoters, a renowned comedy gag, and a colossal opportunity missed. From Los Angeles, promoter Bill Sargent offered the Beatles a guarantee of $50 million to reunite for a single concert, which would fan out via closed-circuit television around the world. None of the Beatles responded. After a month, Sargent doubled his offer, promising payment upon signing. He proposed the Fourth of July as the date, the American Bicentennial. A British promoter, Mike Mathews, responded with an offer of £3 million and proceeds from the closed-circuit revenues, which he estimated at around £30 million.
This gulf between the scale of American and British figures triggered a famous Saturday Night Live routine that aired on April 24, 1976, with producer Lorne Michaels offering them $3,000 to sing three songs. “If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you,” he quipped.4 Lennon happened to catch the show live at the Dakota with Paul and Linda McCartney, who were eager to see that evening’s SNL guests, former Lovin’ Spoonful singer-songwriter John Sebastian (enjoying a revival as the author of the theme song to the Welcome Back, Kotter sitcom) and Raquel Welch.
It must have given John and Paul a boost, since they both talked admiringly about SNL’s spoof afterward as something they would have scrambled to be a part of. Only they were spent. “He [Paul] and I were watching it,” Lennon remembered, “and we went ha-ha, wouldn’t it be funny if we went down and we almost went down to the studio, just as a gag. We nearly got into the cab, but we were actually too tired.”5
Staying at home must have felt right—Lennon started turning down all public appearances. Eager to keep the good vibe going, perhaps even do some writing, McCartney came back the next day with a guitar, but Lennon was stressed out and told him, “ ‘Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same anymore. You know, just give me a ring.’ That upset him, but I didn’t mean it badly. I just meant that I was taking care of a baby all day, and some guy turns up at the door with a guitar.”6 McCartney headed to Dallas, for more rehearsals with Wings for the forthcoming tour supporting Wings at the Speed of Sound.
Michaels’s Saturday Night Live bit also goes down as the rock fates mocking parental fatigue. It would be the last time Lennon ever saw Paul McCartney.7
Despite Lennon’s calmer home life, legal problems continued. He appeared in court in New York in the months following Sean’s birth to see through his defense of the Morris Levy suit surrounding opening lines borrowed from Chuck Berry and the Roots album Levy had hijacked to sell on late-night television. “The reason I fought this,” Lennon said, “was to discourage ridiculous suits like this. They didn’t think I’d show or that I’d fight it. They thought I’d just settle, but I WON’T.”8
Judge Thomas Griesa found in Lennon’s favor for the majority of this case after hearing lots of testimony, including Lennon’s, on the music business and the creative process. In late February 1976, part one of Judge Griesa’s three-part decision stated that Levy’s publishing concern, Big Seven, was not entitled to damages from Lennon, Capitol, or Apple, for his original claim. Finally, that July, the last two parts were handed down: Big Seven was awarded $6,795 for breach of contract (the original agreement whereby Lennon would pay for quoting the opening lines of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” in “Come Together” by recording two songs from Big Seven’s catalog). Lennon, however, was awarded $107,700 for his counterclaim that Levy’s actions cost him lost royalties on the Rock ’n’ Roll album, and another $3,500 in compensatory damages for “hurt to his reputation.”
Greisa delivered an unusual personal summation from the bench, which touched on the peculiar crossover nature of Lennon’s persona. “I am convinced of the fact that Lennon perhaps has a career whose balance is somewhat more delicate than the career of other artists. Lennon has attempted a variety of ventures both in popular music and avant-garde music,” he wrote. “Any unlawful interference with Lennon in the way that Levy and the Roots album accomplished must be taken seriously.”9
That July also saw Lennon’s long-drawn-out immigration case come to a close, with the official award ceremony for his green card. The event was a simple legal formality held in a small hearing room on the fourteenth floor of the INS Building on July 27. Since the previous October, when the Court of Appeals overturned all previous attempts to deport him, the U. S. government had gone silent on the matter. But the public-relations game drove Leon Wildes to summon several prominent character witnesses on Lennon’s behalf to read their endorsements into the record. TV reporter Geraldo Rivera talked about John and Yoko as great humanitarians for the charity work they did on behalf of the children at Willowbrook. Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese sculptor, offered similar remarks. And Norman Mailer reminisced about how American literature still regretted the loss of T. S. Eliot to England, and hoped that America would not also lose Lennon. Even Gloria Swanson, now a physical-fitness freak, testified about what a good influence Lennon could be on the young.
“It’s great to be legal again,” Lennon said as he held up his green card (actually blue). “And I want to thank the Immigration Service for finally seeing the light of day. I just feel overwhelmed.”10
Once free of his visa problems, Lennon traveled widely, to places as disparate as Egypt, South Africa, and the Middle and Far East, as often alone as with Ono and Sean. Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo reports that in the midst of settling his court cases, John and Yoko made a swift trip to Egypt to spend the night at the Great Pyramid. Yoko soon “confounded record-company attorneys at legal meetings by showing up as John’s only representative (a non-attorney Japanese feminist artist). Now, she turned up for legal conferences garbed in ancient Egyptian robe and headdress.”11
These furtive jaunts were steered by Ono’s coterie of astrologists, psychics, and numerologists. At this point, British observers like to point out that for all his heavy travel during his professional sabbatical, Lennon never landed on British soil. No longer worried about getting let back into the United States, he staved off any ideas of a homecoming or family visits to Liverpool, Dorset (where Aunt Mimi lived), or London.
Their most frequent trips as a family were to Japan, where they stayed for five months during 1978. Lennon also started learning Japanese, and drew constantly during his sabbatical, both brief cartoons and more elaborate character sketches in lithograph. (Today Ono places much of this work in revolving circulation in a traveling exhibition.) A disarming “dictionary” of Japanese words and characters appeared in the museum catalog for “The Art of John Lennon: Drawings, Performances, Films,” a 1995 exhibition at the Kunsthalle, in Bremen.12 It begins with Nippon go o narau, or “It takes time to learn Japanese”: a sober man with Japanese characters on his breast lifts an index finger. The next picture shows Jibun, or “Myself,” one of those uncanny Lennon self-portraits with spectacles that capture his whimsically essential disguise. Very quickly Lennon elaborates phrase-by-phrase, drawing-by-drawing, to a wild-haired man at the piano, and brief Asian facial expressions for “Sweet, sour, salty, hot and bitter,” as a balloon coming out of a man’s head.
At the same time, Lennon also wrote some autobiographical sketches in plain verse that appeared later as Skywriting by Word of Mouth, and which, like some of his later songs, assume the voice of a parent explaining things to a child.
“John was moving about and sometimes he moved on his own,” Ringo Starr remembers. “Yoko used to send him away on his own so he’d grow up. I don’t know if he grew up but he certainly went places without her. And I think he had a very strange time in Macao if my memory serves me well.” From Nippon, Lennon sent Starr a postcard which read: “back by 9 Oct. love,” signed with another drawing of John, Yoko, and Sean, with a sun and a flower, and two stars popping out around Ringo’s Monaco address.13
One day in November 1976, Lennon came home from his Japanese language course to find a note from his Woolton friend Pete Shotton, who was visiting his elder brother in New Jersey.14 Shotton had been roaming around Central Park with a friend and asked directions to the notorious Dakota, which he recognized from Rosemary’s Baby. Lennon rang him up later that same afternoon and sent a car to New Jersey to pick him up for dinner.
Within the hour, the Dakota doorman ushered Shotton into the elevator. When its doors reopened, he saw John beaming from the doorway with his infant son Sean cradled in his arms. Shotton was struck both by the baby’s gorgeous features (combining the best features from his parents, he thought) and Lennon’s fit physical stature.
Following the Japanese custom, Lennon had Shotton take off his shoes, and he remarked how serendipitous Shotton’s appearance seemed. He told Pete about taking language lessons, and learning the new word shoton, which had made him wonder how his old friend was doing. John and Yoko’s numerologist cleared Shotton for a visit once Lennon came home to his note.
Shotton writes about how composed Yoko looked compared with when he had last seen her, and Lennon announced he had made dinner reservations at his favorite Japanese restaurant. What impressed Shotton the most, though, was how cavalierly Lennon refused the offer of his cigarette. He claimed to have quit smoking altogether, which struck his Merseyside visitor as nothing short of miraculous.
Lennon tucked Sean into bed, and the three set out on foot for the restaurant. Having been beside John during the height of Beatlemania, Shotton was nonplussed at how casually Lennon took this early evening public stroll—and how nonchalant New Yorkers were about the rock star in their midst. Lennon clearly enjoyed the relative anonymity of New York’s streets. He never got hassled, he said, and people only approached him to tell him how much they loved his music, or perhaps pass along a furtive joint. One thing Lennon had never enjoyed on the streets of London, Shotton reflected, was the respectful distance of strangers.
Shotton describes Lennon’s temperament that evening as warm and humorous, as if he had finally reconciled himself to his ex-Beatles status. To top it off, Lennon insisted on paying for the meal and calculating the tip—something his friend had never seen him do as a Beatle. Back at the Dakota, they sat up with Yoko watching Sally Field in the TV movie Sibyl, with the sound turned way down low so as not to disturb the sleeping baby. As John proclaimed he had quit alcohol (again), they chatted over several pots of tea, and then he recounted a recent solo adventure to Hong Kong following Yoko’s mysterious calculations to reset John’s clock with the planet’s rotations.
Like many Lennon friends who reported of constant astrological consultants and vague, New Age–y trips to adjust his karma, Shotton simply nodded appreciatively. Whatever he might be doing, Shotton thought, Lennon seemed happy, and looked better than Shotton could have hoped. Lennon pressed a copy of William Duffy’s Sugar Blues into Shotton’s hand as he left, which he did with countless other visitors as well. This became another late Lennon signature: adopting an anti-sugar regimen while sneaking Hershey bars and Gitane cigarettes. That first night sent Shotton home with a warm afterglow.
They dined again two nights later, only this time Shotton described a phone call where Lennon argued with Yoko over the invitation, and described him as pale and stuck in a darker mood than before. As usual, Yoko remained quiet as they chatted and never tried to connect with Lennon’s Woolton chum.15
The following summer, 1977, the Lennon family took a trip to an upscale mountain resort called Karuizawa, outside Tokyo. On Lennon’s instructions, Elliot Mintz followed once they sent him a plane ticket. The day before Mintz left for Japan, however, some epic news came over the wires: Elvis Presley had died of what appeared to be a prescription drug overdose in his bathroom at Graceland, at age forty-two. It was August 16, 1977. The rock press went into overdrive. Millions of fans around the world began to grieve the King; Graceland became glutted with mourners.
Mintz called Lennon in Japan to give him the news. He remembers Lennon’s outré reaction: “Elvis died in the army. . . . The difference between him and us is that, with us, our manager died and we lived. With Elvis, he dies and his manager lives. Come to Japan.” Apparently, Lennon couldn’t have been less interested in talking to Mintz about Presley’s life or musical legacy. Mintz made his way to the hotel, where he was greeted with a mineral bath, a room filled with incense, and a note saying, “We are all together now, just like a family. We’ll see you in the morning. John, Yoko and Sean.”
Mintz tucked himself in without waking his hosts. The next morning, Lennon opened a screen, looking “high and wonderful.”16 A typical day began with a shiatsu massage, and an ice bath for Ono. Then they would all do yoga, take Sean for a walk, and stop off somewhere for noodles. Yoko wrote about Karuizawa in her notes to her production of Lennon’s Anthology box set, describing it as a cross between the Hamptons and Vail, Colorado. They cycled to a coffeehouse in a pine forest every day with Sean, and spent afternoons in a huge family hammock in its backyard, giggling and watching the sky. During the rainy seasons, Lennon worked on collages in their hotel room.17
Collage filtered into Lennon’s personal correspondence as well. A Claes Oldenburg cartoon-gun postcard stamped in New York, overlaid with a headline reading: ADOLF HITLER ARRIVED IN LIVERPOOL IN NOVEMBER OF 1912 FOR A FIVE-MONTH VISIT, came to Ringo Starr’s Monaco address in early May 1979: “Dear Ringo . . . Thought you’d like to know.” Several days later, another card arrived, this time a plain white ruled index card sent to Ringo’s Los Angeles address: “How Hi the Moon (with female vocal harmony) DISCO—NATCH! i know, THIS AIN’T SIMPLE I KNOW” “This is John telling me what sort of things to record,” Ringo later wrote. “He used to say, ‘Do this sort of track.’ ‘Do it in a disco style!’ He’d obviously just heard Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ which we all loved—that was a really cool record.”18
In Tokyo, John, Yoko, and Sean stayed in the presidential suite at the Hotel Okura. Mintz describes an intimate informal concert Lennon gave to a Japanese couple there one evening in the sprawling set of rooms accessible only by elevator direct from the lobby:
Around ten o’clock that night, I was sitting on the couch and John was strumming his acoustic guitar. . . . Suddenly, the elevator door opened. I presumed Yoko had returned, but instead a middle-aged Japanese couple who neither of us had seen before walked down the hallway and entered the dimly lit room. They noticed that there was a man playing guitar and another man seated near a table. . . . They spoke softly in Japanese, and seemed to want to listen to the solo music for a few minutes.
Like Nick Carraway stumbling upon Jay Gatsby as an anonymous guest at one of his own Long Island mansion parties, these tourists didn’t recognize the world-famous Lennon. They started to get fidgety, looking around for a server to bring them cocktails. John gave them “Jealous Guy” in English, and after another few minutes, the couple arose and left. When the elevator door closed, Lennon and Mintz collapsed in laughter.19
After McCartney toured America with Wings in support of his 1976 single, the adamantly flaky “Silly Love Songs,” Lennon’s absence from the scene became a new rock theme. Critics began remarking on how much expectation had built up around any future moves. In the gap between disco and punk, when the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Bruce Springsteen were gathering momentum on the sidelines, the mainstream disco pop of Saturday Night Fever’s Bee Gees gave rock fans fits. The unmet expectations of Lennon’s solo career pressed up against everybody’s wavering sense of dislocation, and pop music’s overall lack of spine. (For some, it echoed the ghost of Buddy Holly, memorialized in Don McLean’s “American Pie”: “the day the music died.”) There was a lingering sense that had Lennon kept on writing, he would have made the breakthrough a lot of this early seventies material aimed toward.
Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone wrote “An Open Letter to John Lennon” that season in his “American Grandstand” column, in late 1977. Hearing rumors of Lennon traveling in Japan, his once ubiquitous presence seemed inexplicable. “Why, the new Ringo album just came out and you’re not even on that,” Marsh began.
George Harrison had toured America in the fall of 1974, and Gerald Ford’s son, Steven, invited him to the White House. Wires carried photos of Harrison with Billy Preston greeting Ford. McCartney’s tour made a much bigger noise, and also made Lennon look deliberate in his silence, since he had never really let an opportunity pass before. Even the new president, Jimmy Carter, invoked Bob Dylan lyrics during his inauguration speech in early 1977. Surely Lennon would want a piece of rock culture’s new legitimacy.
“Elvis is gone, the Sex Pistols have arrived,” Marsh continued, “and instead of trying to get rockers deported, the White House lets them sit around the Oval Office waiting room, looking for an audience with the Peanut King. . . . I think the notion of overt anarchists in the British Top Ten should pique your curiosity.” Since Lennon had such a claim on the public imagination, Marsh thought nothing of laying all this on his doorstep, as if none of Lennon’s renunciations had registered. “Somehow, without any comment from John Lennon, there’s a hole left in our understanding of what’s going on.”20 Maybe the unflattering cartoon Jann Wenner chose of Yoko that ran alongside Marsh’s piece persuaded Lennon to remain quiet.
Some of the things Lennon left behind provide more clues as to why he needed so much time to himself. Amid demo tapes, private home videos made for Yoko and Sean from hotel rooms, and home movies made in Japan, there’s a notorious audio diary Lennon made in 1979 that circulates among collectors. The Los Angeles DJ Elliot Mintz, who later became a celebrity publicist for Paris Hilton, questions the authenticity of many of these audio leaks. But John and Yoko were as lax about interior security as they were when out in public; several personal assistants testify to the vast range of files they had easy access to, and many couldn’t resist the temptation to purloin a letter or picture that had never been cataloged. This material still crops up at record shows, auctions, and online.
But on this 1979 tape, Lennon’s unmistakable voice begins by noting the date, and he stops and starts several times to collect his thoughts. As one of the only such tapes yet to emerge, it seems like a halting start to a larger oral autobiography, and Lennon’s thoughts pursue a rash of associations, smells, and subconscious leaps. Listening to this monologue, it’s easy to feel yourself cast as Lennon’s therapist, miffed yet fascinated. Did Lennon imagine his wife or son(s) might listen in someday? Or did he plan to listen back to his thoughts later on when he wrote up his Stanley sisters epic? (“A kind of Forsyte Saga,” which Lennon mentioned to Wenner.) History frets at all the unfinished business. But to ignore this evidence leaves out a revealing page in the story of Lennon’s self-awareness.
He begins on the fifth of September 1979, announcing the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon, and veers immediately into the only first-person description he left of that early Stanley apartment at 9 Newcastle Road. It’s the first place he remembers, he tells the tape, so that’s a good place to start. He describes the red brick house with some detail, its front-room curtains always drawn, and a picture of a horse and carriage on the wall, before veering straight into an early nightmare. But just as quickly, he tires of all the description and shuts off the machine, complaining that he can’t be bothered.
That earliest memory of a nightmare jibes with the blitz that continued on through Lennon’s first year of life. It’s hard not to notice how he drops this detail just before a description of the apartment’s layout, and then protests he’s bored, even though he’s described the picture on the wall and the aunt’s Cheshire home where it wound up in precise detail. Any shrink would tell you: there’s gold in that nightmare.
Then Lennon meanders off into catty talk about Dylan’s new single, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” accusing him of wanting to be a waiter for Christ. Lennon eviscerates Jerry Wexler’s whole Slow Train Coming production that the single conjures: Dylan’s singing is pathetic, he says, the lyrics embarrassing. Surveying the 1979 rock scene, Lennon remarks how the Mighty Dylan, McCartney, and Jagger seem to be sliding down a mountain, blood with mud in their nails. This leads to a reflection on how competitive he used to feel with fellow rock stars, and how silly it all seems from his new vantage. Even a couple of years back he remembers the anxious panic such competition induced. Now there doesn’t seem to be much use to listen to their albums. He still sends out for them, but they all sound pointless.
Lennon has enough wary self-consciousness to realize that even asking after his colleagues’ records indicates he’s not completely detached, that the ultimate detachment would mean not even knowing when they had new releases. But now, he says, he gets more pleasure than panic from reading the trades. It’s all a load of shit, he says to the recorder. Later on in the same sequence, he adds that they’re all company men in various masks.
This is what we assume all rock stars do: keep tabs on one another, make assessments, compare their own moves to their peers’ in the never-ending game of rock ’n’ roll high school, as if they’re all perpetual seniors vying for attention, pulling off practical jokes, pairing off with various cheerleaders. In interviews, Lennon was more open than most about this horse race, but this audio diary lets us eavesdrop on the real thing, humanizing the titans of classic rock with mock horror, and a palpable sense of relief.
Then his talk turns to neuroses, their roots, as Lennon chuckles at his young ambition (“I couldn’t walk so I tried to run,” he sang in “Mother”). In 1954, Lennon was thirteen going on fourteen years old. It was the year before Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and his skiffle craze. Long before the Elvis boom confirmed all these new sensations and thrust him into music that affirmed every sexual impulse he could ever imagine, Lennon pressed his face up against the glass of formative sexual desires.
Then some bagpipes come over the radio in the tape’s background, and the music sends him reeling back further, to a distant horizon of boyhood summers with his aunt Mater (Elizabeth), where he attended an Edinburgh festival and heard marching bands. His favorites were the Americans, because they knew how to swing. And the summer ceremonies closed with one lone bagpiper, hit by a spotlight, for an emotional finale. Lennon describes the experience in great detail, the memory frozen in boyhood time. He describes always feeling free in Scotland, the same feeling he gets in Japan. You don’t feel as though you belong, he says, so you don’t have to deal with the social mores as much. It’s easier to be yourself in a foreign country, he says. Then he wonders out loud about taking Sean to see Liverpool. Nineteen eighty-one looks like a good year to go, he thinks. Then he shuts off the recorder again.
When he clicks the recorder back on during the same sequence, he drops a bombshell for all the future biographers sitting on his shoulder. He remembers sitting on the bed with Julia, his hand on her bosom, in the apartment at 1 Blomfield Road, off Mather Avenue, near Garston. He had taken a day off school to hang out at her house, and they were lying about together; he wonders aloud if he should have done anything else. It was a strange moment, he says, because he had the hots for another female who lived across the road, but he always thought he should have done something more, and whether Julia would have allowed it. And then the tape cuts off again.
These associations summon more sensory associations, right down to Julia’s angora sweater, her yellow mottled skirt, and the adolescent envy he felt toward his stepfather, Bobby Dykins. It’s as if Lennon could still smell his mother lying next to him, and the primitive, unwieldy tension between teenage son and his flirtatious, mysterious, musical-mentor and out-of-reach mother. He remembers catching Judy going down on Twitchy, but can’t remember exactly what he felt—and then proceeds to describe the envy and confusion with as much articulacy as any shrink has ever hoped for. For Lennon, it was the idea of her going down on him, that sleazy little waiter, with his nervous cough and slicked-back hair. Dykins always used to push his hand in margarine or butter and grease his hair back before leaving the house, Lennon pointedly says. He was already feeling up girls, and his own sexual discoveries mingled with a teenager’s desire to provoke and dare Julia to favor him over anybody else. A passionate ambivalence about his status in her house with her daughters welled up like a flood of desire that took shape as a forbidden incestuous impulse.
He used to steal the tips Dykins kept in a big tin on top of a kitchen cupboard, and Julia would get blamed. That was the least those two could do for him, Lennon says bitterly. Already, as an adolescent, manipulating resentments between his elders to poke and prod his mother into noticing his cunning, filching from Dykins’s tip jar as revenge, the invisible houseguest thief with an adolescent boy’s imperious agenda. And here he sits, a father now himself, shuttled out to Long Island to look for a summer house, like a boy led along by an auntie, or a dilettante who can’t be bothered to choose his own vacation spot, an endless search for a new Scotland within driving distance of Manhattan.
Taken out of context, this matter-of-fact free association about Julia and boyhood feeds intense speculation about Lennon’s psychic health. But as he continues, Lennon lays out a context: his self-revelation about middle-age testosterone anxiety, where it’s taken him, and where he sits with it on Long Island, nearing forty. He describes reading in a magazine recently about someone’s sexual fantasies and urges that continued throughout life. How when this person was twenty and then thirty he thought they’d cool down a bit, and then when he got in his forties he thought they’d stop and they didn’t, not when he was sixty, seventy, and he was still dribbling on about it.
Lennon’s response is wild-eyed identification. He himself kept hoping that his sexual impulses might lessen over the years, but now resigns himself to the idea that they’ll go on forever. Even an amateur psychologist (or a pop audience, or a critic) can trace the larger themes in this monologue, the way Lennon connects superstar gamesmanship, his flirtatious mother, his stepfather’s grooming habits, and the primal sexual scene most children grapple with: catching his mother having sex. For Lennon, each strand tugs at complex sources: to start, the superstar gamesmanship takes place without rules, where rock ’n’ roll has already torn down so many phony show business benchmarks, redressing empty conventions, only to wind up yet another version of the same old game: grown men trying to outdo one another.
His utterance about his mother leaps from the tape as one of the very few instances where Lennon actually describes her in detail. “Julia,” the song he baked alone at EMI after all the other twenty-nine White Album tracks were cooked, remains notable for its dreamy particularities (“seashell eyes”) and doubles as a love song to Yoko Ono (“ocean child”). But nowhere else in the vast catalog of Lennon interviews does he go into a scene from childhood, the way Julia dressed, the memory of how she smelled, the way it made him feel, and the way his libido was ultimately entwined with grievance and loss. Consider how long it took him to retrieve this memory at all, never mind link it up with a contemporary quandary.
Aside from confirming Lennon’s adolescent disdain for Dykins, this audio journal provides a peephole into Lennon’s young mind, as he always took pains to speak respectfully of Dykins in many other contexts. Clearly, he felt for the man as they both lost Julia that night in 1958 when she was struck and killed on Menlove Avenue right outside Mendips. It’s almost as if Lennon left this tape behind for future biographers to delve into the nature of his sexual dysfunction. Like a time bomb, or forbidden Rosebud, hidden among the artifacts of his life.
Students of psychology may have a different interpretation. Lennon’s testimony (to himself? to his child? to his audience, eavesdropping long after his death?) has the air of a person doing his own therapy work in middle age—sifting through dreams, memories, and associations to make sense of a vast subconscious beset by uncertainty. Those incestuous impulses seem like rather ordinary Freudian fodder, especially considering Julia’s once-removed status in Lennon’s life, her well-known physical and personal charms, and a future rock star’s raging teen hormones. This all floods back through intimate details and a shared awkward moment on the same bed where he’d come upon her giving Dykins a blowjob. Is it possible to expect Lennon to long for his abandoning mother without a hint of sexuality?
Given everything he’s already spilled in song and interview, it’s impossible not to imagine a whiff of sexual magnetism between Julia and John. How could Lennon, the exhibitionist’s exhibitionist, not leave a trace of this somewhere for somebody to find? Alone in a car or a hotel room with a tape recorder, did he toy with history? Did he imagine some future ambulance-chasing biographers uncovering this moment? Or is this a MacGuffin, a Lennon prank planted to titillate, throw people off? Revealing to a cassette journal that he let his young teenage hand brush across his mother’s chest, just to gauge her response, seems like one of Lennon’s more innocent outrages.
Lennon’s response to Marsh and others calling for some kind of “statement” was steadfast silence, and stories began to appear about Ono managing his fortune, buying properties (in Florida and Long Island), and conducting Beatle business in lieu of a new manager. Instead of signing on with a new father figure to replace Allen Klein, Lennon let Ono steer the ship.
When the couple started to peek out of their shell, they began with a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times of May 27, 1979, signed by both of them. They described their retreat and referred to parenting, new philosophies, and the power of wishing. “The past 10 years we noticed everything we wished came true in its own time,” the ad started,
good or bad, one way or the other. We kept telling each other that one of these days we would have to get organized and wish for only good things. Then our baby arrived! We were overjoyed and at the same time felt very responsible. Now our wishes would also affect him. . . . Many people are sending us vibes every day in letters, telegrams, taps on the gate, or just flowers and nice thoughts. We thank them all and appreciate them for respecting our quiet space, which we need. . . . If you think of us next time, remember, our silence is a silence of love and not of indifference. . . . PS We noticed that three angels were looking over our shoulders when we wrote this!21
This prompted Dave Marsh to write another open letter in Rolling Stone, apologizing for the first: “If the past two years have taught me anything, it’s that every rock fan is on his own. And that this is a Good Thing. No more leaders, which you [i.e., Lennon] said first.” Marsh couldn’t stand Lennon’s precious tone in his ad, which only set off more rumors. Marsh warned against whatever expectancy was in the air, bemoaning comeback records long before they became standard rock career moves, and declaring Lennon a genius for picking the perfect moment to clam up. The statement, Marsh wrote, “actually accomplished . . . the undoing of everything your silence has worked toward; already there has been an avalanche of reunion rumors. Only you, John Lennon, can put an end to them.”22
Lennon often stayed at a getaway house in Glen Cove on weekends. Sometimes he went with Sean, sometimes the three of them went as a family. There, he made home videos with song demos, always lovingly dedicated to Yoko and Sean, singing songs (“Dear Yoko”) that were just as frankly private as the tapes. He introduced himself with the same loopy malapropisms and corny self-aggrandizements, but they were family barbs done purely for pleasure, not to impress a pop audience. He also recorded a Yoko Ono song that became the title track to Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him, a tribute album for her fiftieth birthday, compiled after his death. Elvis Costello recorded a brittle “Walking on Thin Ice” for the project, alongside turns from Rosanne Cash and Harry Nilsson. Lennon left behind a whispery version of the song himself, a posthumous valentine.
That last year, 1980, Yoko sent John and Sean to Glen Cove for a stretch while she stayed at a friend’s house on Fire Island. According to her own admissions to British biographer Philip Norman, she had become addicted to heroin again—a habit she concealed from John through their fragmented relationship and frequent travel. When considering the fairy-tale “happy ending” to the romance, Ono’s heroin relapse should factor in: how she waded in deep enough to spend months hiding it from her once-junkie husband and then kicked it cold turkey without his ever finding out.
For her forty-seventh birthday in February 1980, she told Philip Norman that she woke up in their Palm Beach mansion, El Solano, to find gardenias strewn from her bed all the way down the stairs and into the hallway. “He did that for me because he knew gardenias were my favorite flower. . . . And I felt so guilty because I’d gone back onto heroin and he didn’t know.”23 Later that year, Ono determined to kick the drug for good. She claimed to be suffering from a terrible flu, and forbade her husband and son from seeing her until she recovered. This puts Lennon’s audio diary into perspective: such frequent and extensive separations from his wife, whom he clearly adored, would rouse understandable sexual anxiety in men with one-tenth of his libido.
Lennon did stints sailing on Long Island Sound off Glen Cove, which gave him an appetite for a more ambitious venture. When he met up with David Scheff, the Playboy interviewer, in the fall of 1980, he told him about his sailing trip to Bermuda. With Yoko’s encouragement, he chartered a Rhode Island yacht out of Newport, called the Megan Jaye, and planned to meet up with Sean in Bermuda.
His first time at sea was typically overambitious—three thousand miles, from Rhode Island to Bermuda, in seven days. “I’d always talked about sailing but my excuse was that I never had lessons,” Lennon said. “Yoko’s attitude was: ‘Put up or shut up.’ So she sent me on this trip and I went.” So instead of getting sailing lessons, he simply hired a boat with crew and pointed himself toward Bermuda. He already had a sense that Ono had an ulterior motive: “We had talked about making music again,” he said later, “but she knew I would fight creating again, even though I said that I wanted to. . . . She sent me specifically to open up my creativity, though she didn’t tell me that. She knew I’d have fought it.”
After a couple of days at sea, Lennon and the two skippers hit a huge storm, which lasted three harrowing days and made the crew so ill that Lennon had to take over the wheel. “They were sick and throwing up and the captain says to me, ‘There’s a storm coming up. Do you want to take over the wheel?’ I said, ‘Do you think I can?’ I was supposed to be the cabin boy learning the trade, but he said, ‘Well, you have to. There’s no one else who can do it.’ I said, ‘Well, you had better keep an eye on me.’ He said he would.”
Five minutes afterward the captain went below to sleep, saying, “See you later.” So there was Lennon, steering the boat for six solid hours. “You can’t change your mind. It’s like being on stage—once you’re on, there’s no getting off.” Once they arrived safely in Bermuda, Lennon became convinced that the trial had rejuvenated his muse. “I was so centered after the experience at sea that I was tuned in, or whatever, to the cosmos. And all these songs came!”24
Almost as soon as there were songs that summer of 1980, Lennon got back in touch with Jack Douglas, the Spector engineer turned producer who had worked on most Lennon projects, beginning as second engineer on Imagine. Douglas, now in demand as a celebrated orchestrator of albums from Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, had worked on classic material like the Who’s Who’s Next and introduced Wisconsin’s Cheap Trick to the world. He eagerly took Lennon’s call and swore on to a secret project.
“He flew me in a seaplane out to Glen Cove,” Douglas says. “I picked up all these cassettes from John. He narrated every number, like for ‘Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna give this one to Ringo.’ And like on others he’d say, ‘This is sort of a calypso number,’ or whatever. He just wasn’t sure whether he had anything going on that people might be interested in. So he wanted to keep it all under wraps until he knew it was going to reach a certain level.”25
Under stern orders to keep things quiet, Douglas began rehearsing musicians in Manhattan. “The whole project was shrouded in secrecy,” he remembers. “Everything was clamped down, even the studio staffers didn’t know what I was working on. For two months during rehearsal and preproduction, I was rehearsing musicians on this material and nobody knew whose project this was. I’d play [rehearsal] tapes back for John in his bedroom, and he made suggestions, and I’d go back and we’d try different things. Some of the musicians guessed, but even then they kept their mouths shut.
“Then, only on the last day of rehearsal, that evening I told the players to meet me at the corner of 72nd and Central Park West, then some of them figured it out. It wasn’t until John was sure that this record was really good, and that he could do it, that he turned to Yoko and said, ‘Mother, tell the world we’re making a record.’ ”
Much as with the surviving song demos for The White Album (the “Esher Demos”), Douglas pondered how to arrange numbers that seemed born complete. “And you know,” he continues, “this material, I’d sit and listen to these cassettes, and think, ‘What can I do with this?’ It was all there. I mean, I did some arrangements, orchestrated things slightly, but it was all there, it didn’t really need a producer.”
Shortly after Lennon handed Douglas his homemade cassettes, Ono wedged Douglas into one of their marital contests, almost as if she saw herself as the new Paul McCartney. “Then another time I’m out in Glen Cove,” Douglas recalls, “Yoko hands me this huge stack of five-inch reel-to-reel tapes, and she says, ‘This is my stuff. Now don’t tell John, but I’m gonna have some stuff on this record . . .’ So now there’s already this very complicated situation, with the studio and the players all learning this stuff in secret, there’s all this intrigue, John’s making a comeback record, and I’m supposed to keep Yoko’s involvement from her own husband! It was ridiculous.”
Some of this material came together quickly; other stuff needed work. “When I hired the musicians,” Douglas says, “John would say, ‘Make sure they’re contemporaries of mine,’ because he would use an oldies jam to get them in a mood for a certain song. This was part of how he got himself comfortable in the studio, singing old songs, but it was also how he cued his players to the groove he wanted on a track.”
Douglas decided on Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and guitarist Rick Nielsen to flesh out “Losing You.” To reach them, he called George Martin, who was now producing Cheap Trick’s fifth record, All Shook Up, at his AIR Studios in Montserrat. “I had to call Martin at his island studio to book my players,” Douglas remembers. “I called him and said, ‘Can I borrow some of my guys to play with your guy?’ ”
After three tart, ambitious power-pop records, Cheap Trick’s Dream Police reached Billboard’s top five album chart during the summer of 1979. This followed up a huge radio hit, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” that sprang from Cheap Trick at Budokan. During release season, the band worked the road constantly that summer to boost its numbers. Coincidentally, Cheap Trick’s whopping live cover of “Day Tripper” had been slapped onto a 1980 EP, Found All the Parts, and they began hearing about airplay of the Beatles song in Phoenix. Bun E. Carlos remembered getting the call that June: “Jack Douglas called, and they had a song they were having trouble getting a version of, and did I want to play on this thing, and I said sure, you know, like yeah . . .” Carlos continues:
Then we went in and he introduced us to John Lennon, and he said, “Oh you’re the guys from Cheap Trick, they told me your name but they didn’t tell me what band you’re in,” so we thought that was kinda neat. . . . We told him, “You know we wanted you to produce our first record,” and Lennon said, “I woulda done that no one told me!” We sat around the control booth and Jack played us the acoustic version of “Losing You,” and Lennon turned to us and said, you know, “You got any ideas?” In Cheap Trick we did “Cold Turkey,” and “It’s So Hard,” and we did some other Beatles tunes, “Day Tripper,” stuff like that. In the band, we’re all big Plastic Ono Band fans, we’re always saying, “Well, how would Plastic Ono Band have done this?” Or like, “If this were the next song after ‘Cold Turkey,’ how would it go?”26
Lennon’s collaborative approach impressed Nielsen and Carlos, just as it had Tex Gabriel back with the Elephant’s Memory Band. When they asked him what tempo he wanted, Lennon simply said, “Whatever you think it should be.” They cut the track live with Lennon on rhythm guitar to Nielsen’s lead, and then Nielsen overdubbed a second guitar track as they gathered in the booth. “It kind of happened so quickly you didn’t have time to really pinch yourself,” Carlos says.
Cheap Trick had a hit record on the charts, so hustling between gigs to keep sales going and banging out sessions for John Lennon’s secret project were all a part of the new status the band enjoyed. “And John was like, hey you wanna smoke a joint? And we were like ‘Sure!’ ’Cause we’d been in Canada all week, Cheap Trick, they didn’t have pot up there back then,” Carlos says. “Lennon got out his guitar and he said, ‘This is my “Day Tripper” guitar,’ and he had had it refinished and stuff, and we made some wisecrack like ‘Oh that’s number ten in Phoenix this week.’ ” Lennon shot them a look. No, Carlos and Nielsen insisted, “we have an EP and it’s on there.” And then, Carlos remembers, “Lennon’s eyebrows kinda went up at that a little, like he hadn’t heard, and wasn’t sure whether to believe us or not.”
After Nielsen’s second guitar part, Lennon invited them along for dinner, but Carlos had to beg off: “I told him, ‘I gotta go home to Chicago, we’re going to Japan tomorrow for three shows and then coming back next week to do another track,’ and he goes ‘Ah! I married one of the emperor’s daughters!’ ”
Like a lot of touring musicians, Carlos did a good deal of this invisible work, banging out tracks only to be replaced by studio players down the line. He certainly never expected to make the final cut on a Lennon comeback album. “We came in to find a version for the song the other guys couldn’t get a version for,” he says simply. “We weren’t surprised when it wasn’t on the record, they just used us as a demo version.” Even though Douglas had thought of his Cheap Trick players as perfect for Lennon’s tracks, Ono intervened. “Yoko decided Cheap Trick would be riding on Lennon’s coattails. Her attitude was ‘Who are these people, I’ve never heard of them! We’re not gonna give these guys a free ride,’ ” Douglas says.
Yoko’s own track, “I’m Movin’ On,” took shape with the same musicians. Douglas had them revive a drum part from their first album that they hadn’t used, and Yoko provided some sheet music with words and chords, which Nielsen wrote some riffs around. Then, Carlos says, “John got on the mike and said, ‘Mother, dear, why don’t you do Tony’s first verse and then do the boys’ arrangement,’ ’cause he was calling me and Rick ‘the boys.’ ” And Yoko shot back: “Fuck you very much, John,” and everyone dissolved with laughter. “We just cracked up with that, ’cause it was pretty obvious, you know, they were a team.”
Carlos admits that “Our playing wasn’t great on Yoko’s track, the feel never quite coalesced. But there were things like, Yoko’d be in the booth and say, ‘Does anyone want some granola?’ or whatever she had, and it looked like animal feed. And John would be like down the hall with the roadies, you know, sneaking a slice of pizza.”
Jack Douglas flew Carlos and Nielsen back for another session some weeks later, but Lennon had decided to start mixing what he had (they originally laid out enough material for a double set), thanked them for their help, and signed autographs. Once the tracks were finished, Douglas set about sequencing and mastering, and John and Yoko took meetings with record labels. David Geffen, who had wooed Dylan away from Columbia earlier in the seventies and then lost him, was busy starting up a new label: Geffen Records. Donna Summer and Elton John signed on as his first artists. But the label hadn’t released any records yet. He sent Yoko Ono a telegram when he heard there might be a Lennon record, and took a meeting with Ono in her ground-floor Dakota office.
“Well, why should we go with you?” Yoko asked him. “Because I will be very sensitive to who you are and deal with you straight and do a good job,” Geffen shot back. Ono pressed him to find out what he knew about her music, and Geffen admitted he didn’t know her work, and was even spotty on Lennon’s solo career. And Ono reminded him that he hadn’t even launched his label yet. But Geffen assured her he would treat them right.
Geffen walked out of the Dakota thinking that he had just sat through the strangest meeting ever. “She had a poker face, very aloof,” he remembers. After she ran “his numbers” (a combination of his birthday, address, phone number, and “who knows what”), Ono invited Geffen over to meet John. Without ever hearing the record, Geffen agreed to her terms:
“Don’t you want to want to hear the music first?” I said, “No, I’ll wait until whenever you want to play it for me.” And she said, “Well, if you wanted to hear the music before you made the deal, we wouldn’t have gone with you.”27
When Geffen met up with John in the studio, they reminisced about the L.A. scene where they had crossed paths in the mid-seventies. Lennon told him how excited he was for Yoko’s career, how the earlier hostility toward her seemed to be dropping away.
Like many of the musicians who worked with John and Yoko, Geffen came away with a telling insight as to how they leaned on each other’s strengths. “When Yoko’s alone, she’s Yoko Ono and she takes care of everything. But when she was with John, she deferred to him. She had an incredible respect for what he thought and what he wanted and what he aspired to. She influenced him a great deal and he influenced her a great deal.”28 This adds a new level to our understanding of the creative partnership: Lennon depended on Yoko to handle business negotiations; Yoko relied on Lennon for the personal leverage and mass appeal. Their professional stature depended on a mutual need, much the way the Beatles had developed their ensemble politics.
Jack Douglas had different memories of how they interacted. “I don’t mean to sound anti-Yoko because I’m not,” he says now, “but there was always some kind of minor war going on. In the end, Lennon would always fold to ‘Mother,’ he just didn’t want the grief. Like when it came time to do the song sequence for Double Fantasy, John said, ‘Okay, boys, let’s make an order. You guys make your order and put it in this hat, and I’ll make an order and put it in the hat.’ So we drew up our song lists, and my order and John’s were fairly similar, they all had John songs on side A and Yoko’s songs on side B. And then Yoko looked at these layouts and said, ‘No way! If you want to hear John, you’ve got to hear Yoko, too!’ And so we laced them together, first John and then Yoko, throughout the record. But with her, it wasn’t really a negotiation, it was like, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ ”
Double Fantasy went into production for release on November 17, 1980. Once they put the record to bed, John and Yoko booked press for the first time since 1975. The publicity appeared slowly at first, with articles in Newsweek and the New York Times, for exchanges with reporters that turned out to be far more enjoyable than Lennon remembered from the past. These expanded to several lengthier interviews as Double Fantasy turned into a hit, transforming Lennon’s comeback into a major event. The long, compelling Playboy interview with David Scheff, taped in September for release in the January issue, hit newsstands in mid-November. Long-form sessions booked with Rolling Stone, the New York Times Sunday magazine, and several British radio outlets found slots in early December.
In all of these quotes, Lennon held forth with a new confidence, proud of his new songs and unabashedly sentimental about his new home life. For Robert Palmer’s New York Times profile, which ran on November 9, Lennon went on about his time off and fatherhood, recasting his late career as a salvation narrative. “I was a machine that was supposed to produce so much creative something and give it out periodically for approval or to justify my existence on earth. But I don’t think I would have been able to just withdraw from the whole music business if it hadn’t been for Sean. . . . When I look at the relative importance of what life is about, I can’t quite convince myself that making a record or having a career is more important or even as important as my child, or any child.”
Another Lennon quote that Palmer used finally came clean about some of the “working class” myths Lennon often fudged:
Going back to the beginnings of rock and roll, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and so on were working-class entertainment; they were working class. The Beatles were slightly less working class; for Paul McCartney and me at least, going to university was a possibility. I had all this artsy stuff in me anyway, so we put a little more intellect into our music, just because of what we were. And gradually, expectations for the Beatles became educated, middle-class expectations. And I tended to get too intellectual about pop music, I had this sort of critic John Lennon sitting over me saying, “You did that already, you can’t do it again. You can’t say it that simply.” Now the music’s coming through me again.29
That’s a bracing clarification of Lennon’s own symbolic stature, broken down for two cultural audiences: in Britain, being working class at the time meant the impossibility of a higher education. In America, such distinctions get lost amid foreign accents and zany humor.
Douglas remembers Lennon feeling recharged by the album’s sales and media interest: “He was so proud of Double Fantasy turning into a hit, he was going to take the material on a huge world tour. He had already done sketches of the production, hired the musicians, like drummer Andy Newmark, bassist Tony Levin, and guitarist Hugh McCracken.”
With “(Just Like) Starting Over” as its parodic lead single, Double Fantasy found traction on the charts, goading big plans. Douglas remembers a lot of conversation about Lennon’s old partners, about Lennon returning to Britain, where he hadn’t been since 1971, and even beyond the tour, reaching out toward other projects. “There was a Ringo album coming down the pike, and a reunion, at least by the three of them (Harrison, Lennon, and Starr), that was all planned out. That was going to be Lennon’s next move after the world tour,” Douglas continues. “He talked fondly about McCartney every night, and he always wanted to redo certain Beatles songs, but he really spoke more like he really loved those guys. The only person that he was pissed at was George, because George put out this memoir [I Me Mine] and John was really, really pissed about that. I remember him saying, ‘How do you write about your life and not talk about the guy whose band you were in?’ ”
The reviews of Double Fantasy were positive, but a tricky five-year expectations game tipped against Lennon, especially from the old guard. American critics were disappointed; but British critics seemed crestfallen. Geoffrey Stokes wrote an essay for the the Village Voice titled “The Infantilization of John Lennon” and called the music “basically misogynist.” To Stokes, the whole househusband pretext stank of public relations, and he characterized the album’s concept as “vampire-woman-sucks-life-out-of-man-who-enjoys-every-minute-of-his-destruction.” Stokes especially hated Ono’s “Hard Times Are Over”—a finale “so all-fired powerful it exists without (present) pain, without conflict.”30 In England, Charles Shaar Murray, a longtime reviewer for NME, sounded downright insulted: “Everything’s peachy for the Lennons and nothing else matters, so everything’s peachy QED. How wonderful, man. One is thrilled to hear of so much happiness. . . . It sounds like a great life, but unfortunately it makes a lousy record.”31
That first week in December, as Reagan assembled his new cabinet, pundits began taking stock of the season. It was the year Solidarity began organizing in Poland, the year America boycotted Moscow’s Summer Olympics with sixty-three other countries to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the year before MTV launched. The Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back topped the box-office receipts. Paul McCartney released McCartney II, a milquetoast commemoration of his first solo album’s ten-year anniversary, which included “Coming Up,” a track Lennon felt obliged to praise, and “Temporary Secretary.” It reached number one in the UK, but peaked at number three in America.
Lennon was busier than he had been in almost five years. He sat for three major interviews: Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone taped on December 5; the BBC’s Andy Peebles on Saturday, December 6; and RKO Radio on Monday afternoon, December 8. Peebles remembers Ono’s strict advance negotiations: how at least half of the questions needed to be pitched directly to her. Slotted for half an hour, before Peebles could blink two hours had gone by and Lennon had taken off, soaring high above his career, looking down, pointing out details nobody had noticed before, remembering names, dates, and songs people had long forgotten, ticking off hit records by other acts nobody knew he paid any attention to, and generally charming this young British radio crew.
“Are you kidding me?” Peebles said many years later. “I remember the very day I saw Please Please Me in the record shop, buying it and racing home to put it on. To be interviewing John Lennon that day, I was dead chuffed.”
When Peebles took a break with his producers, Doreen Davis and Paul Williams, he ran into Yoko after hitting the bathroom. He took her aside to reassure her: “I said I know what we negotiated, I have questions for you, I just need to get a word in, I promise we mean to get your side of the story here.” And Yoko, clearly astonished at what was happening, said, “It’s okay, it’s okay! I had no idea he was going to talk so much.”32 So much talk over so many weeks, and so little overlap. Lennon was just getting warmed up.
As Lennon talked to the BBC, a young man in his mid-twenties began hanging around the Dakota, on Saturday, December 6. Like so many before him, he talked with other autograph hounds and hoped to get a glimpse of his hero. This anonymous figure barely stood out. He had been born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1955, an air force kid who graduated from Columbia High School in Decatur, Georgia, in 1973. There, he played guitar in a rock band, took Christ as his “personal savior,” and carried around a “Jesus notebook.”
In October 1980, this young man, at twenty-five, applied for a pistol permit from his home in Honolulu, claiming an attempted burglary at his apartment necessitated self-protection. Later that month, he plunked down $169 in cash for a five-shot Charter Arm revolver with a two-inch barrel at J&S Enterprises-Gun in Honolulu. According to police records, he traveled to New York on Saturday, December 6, spent the night at the West Side YMCA on 63rd Street and Central Park West, and then went over to the Sheraton Center at 52nd Street and Seventh to book a room, number 2730, at $82 a night, for the week.
The afternoon of Monday, December 8 was sunny and promising. Lennon had a number-one hit single with “(Just Like) Starting Over,” and plans were progressing for Ono’s techno-pop “Walking on Thin Ice” to be its follow-up. The Playboy interview, with its detailed deconstruction of Lennon-McCartney authorship, proved newsstand bounty. If insecurities had found voice during the production of Double Fantasy, they evaporated in the public’s embrace of Lennon’s new music. Now that the couple sat atop certain success, they could be selective about his exposure, and finally book some British press.
Annie Leibovitz, who had taken Lennon’s handsome portrait for the Rolling Stone cover in 1970, returned to the Dakota apartment to follow through on a session from the previous week. She lived upstairs in the same building. Ono recalled the shoot later for Rolling Stone: “We were feeling comfortable because it was Annie, whom we respected and trusted, so John seemed not to have any problem taking off his clothes. John and I were hugging each other, feeling a bit giggly and up.”
“I was thinking that they had never been embarrassed to take their clothes off, that they could do a nude embrace,” says Leibovitz. John immediately assented and took off his clothes; Yoko was reluctant. She agreed to take her shirt off but not her pants; Liebovitz said, “Just leave everything on.” She took a Polaroid shot for a test, and all three of them knew they were on to something—that the pose alone would create a stir.
“When I was with John and Yoko, they seemed like gods to me,” Leibovitz remembers now. “It’s hard to think about that time, but I remember being impressed with the simple kiss they did on the cover of Double Fantasy. The eighties were not a romantic era, and the kiss was just so beautiful.”33
After putting his clothes back on, Lennon sat down with the UK’s syndicated RKO Radio that afternoon and talked his head off. “When I was writing this [album],” he said, “I was visualizing all the people of my own age group . . . being in their thirties and forties now, just like me, and having wives and children and having gone through everything together. I’m singing for them. I’m saying, ‘Here I am now. How are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t the seventies a drag, you know? . . . Well, let’s try to make the eighties good, because it’s still up to us to make what we can of it.’ ” As the interview ends and the crew breaks up the equipment, you can hear everyone’s elation on the tape. Especially Lennon’s.
That evening, John and Yoko came out of the front gate to take their limo to the Hit Factory on West 44th Street, to work on Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice,” which they were both convinced would break Ono through to the pop charts. Lennon had raved to her about her obvious influence on the B-52’s single “Rock Lobster.” He seemed certain that once she found the right material, Ono could take her place as the rightful influence on the cutting sounds coming from punk and new wave. On his way to the car, Lennon signed some autographs on the cover of Double Fantasy. Somebody flashed a picture. The person holding the album had unkempt hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and wore a dark raincoat and scarf.
David Geffen, now the doting, friendly record executive, visited the couple at the Record Plant that evening, to listen to the final mix. He remembers Lennon smiling and dancing around, filled with anticipation about Yoko’s single. “Wait’ll you hear Yoko’s record. It’s a smash! This is better than anything we did on Double Fantasy,” Lennon said. Yoko remained skeptical, although she seemed to be enjoying John’s enthusiasm. “Oh, John, it’s not that great,” she said. “Oh yes it is,” Lennon insisted. “It’s better than anything the B-52’s ever did. And we want you to put it out before Christmas.” Geffen said, “Well, let’s put it out after Christmas and really do the thing right. Take out an ad.” Lennon said, “An ad! Listen to this, Mother, you’re gonna get an ad!”
Then Geffen gave Lennon some news: Double Fantasy would be the number one album the next week in England. “Yoko gave me this real funny look,” Geffen remembers, “like it better be number one in England. That was the thing she was interested in, not for herself but because John wanted it so badly.”34
John and Yoko spent the evening at the studio, mixing Ono’s track, and decided to pop back home instead of heading out somewhere for dinner. At around 10:50 P.M. that evening, their limo pulled up to the Dakota and the couple hopped out at the curb. As they walked up to the gate, a young autograph hound called, “Mr. Lennon,” pulled out his handgun, dropped to a “combat stance,” and pulled the trigger five times into the singer’s back before he could turn around. Four of the shots ripped through Lennon’s flesh—two on the left side of his back and two in his left shoulder.
Two witnesses saw the shooting: the Dakota elevator operator at the door and a cabdriver who had just dropped off another passenger. Somebody called 911. From their nearby patrol car at 72nd and Broadway, about three blocks away, Officers Steve Spiro and Peter Cullen heard a report of shots fired. When they arrived, they found the killer standing “very calmly,” reading his book, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Bleeding profusely, Lennon had somehow stumbled all the way through the courtyard of the Dakota into the lobby, where he lay bleeding in front of Jay Hastings, the doorman. A second patrol car arrived with Officers Bill Gamble and James Moran, and they loaded Lennon into the backseat of their squad car rather than wait for an ambulance. Moran reported Lennon “moaning” from the back. Officer Moran asked him, “Are you John Lennon?” and Lennon moaned, “Yeah.”
When they arrived at Roosevelt Hospital, Dr. Stephan Lynn could tell Lennon was beyond hope as the gurney whooshed past, but a team set about trying to revive him anyway. He had lost too much blood, and all attempts to get his heart beating again failed. Dr. Lynn pronounced Lennon dead at 11:15 P.M. The autopsy by Dr. Elliott M. Gross, chief medical examiner, said Lennon had died of “shock and loss of blood” and that “no one could have lived more than a few minutes with such injuries.” The lack of gunpowder burns on Lennon’s skin indicated the shots must have been fired from farther than eighteen inches.
David Geffen had gone straight from the Record Plant to his apartment and turned his phone off. After a few minutes, he noticed the light flashing, so he picked up and heard a strange woman’s voice tell him, “I’m a friend of Yoko’s, John’s just been shot. They’re at Roosevelt Hospital. Run right over.” Geffen thought it was a crank call. Just to make sure, he called the Record Plant, “and they said, no, it’s impossible, he just left here ten minutes ago.” Then Geffen’s phone rang again, and the same woman asked him, “Why haven’t you left? He’s shot!” Geffen called her back to verify, and then took a call from his partner, Eddi Rosenblatt, who’d seen the news bulletin on television. They met to grab a cab downtown.
Security was tight at the hospital, and Geffen had to yell his way past guards to find Ono:
It was such a scene. There were cops everywhere, big cops, you know. You feel so intimidated, and all I could think was that I had to get to Yoko. . . . Finally, someone opened the door and I ran in. Yoko was in this little room, hysterical, and I just picked her up in my arms. She said, “Someone’s shot John. Can you believe it? Someone shot him.” I was in shock.
Then a policeman called me outside and said, “He’s dead. He died on arrival at the hospital.” It was like an explosion in my mind.35
Ono was led away when doctors told her of her husband’s death. “Tell me it’s not true!” she was quoted as crying. Later, Geffen issued this statement on her behalf: “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him.”36
As mayhem rapidly descended on the Upper West Side, the most common feeling was one of disbelief, the stillness of a December evening violently sundered, as if the sixties had finally and irrevocably ended, only ten years too late. Many heard about Lennon’s death from ABC-TV, when Howard Cosell came back from a commercial break with an inexplicably sobering tone that shrank the Dolphins-Patriots Monday Night Football game to a pinpoint. Cosell had hosted a rare appearance by Lennon in his booth as a guest celebrity six years earlier, in December 1974, when Lennon raved about hearing “Yesterday” come over the PA system.
On this night, Cosell’s supernatural egotism went limp: “This, we have to say it, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to the Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
In New York City that night, spectacle engulfed the Dakota. News cameras and policemen swarmed the scene; flowers and photographs began piling up against the great Victorian façade. Pedestrians, caught unaware, stopped dead in their tracks as word spread. They turned direction, as if in mid-step, and began striding toward Central Park West, pulled by an invisible force, eventually the pull of the music. Beatle songs and spontaneous sing-alongs started up, faded away, and returned. Candles illuminating tearful faces contested the city’s great darkness. Extinguished either by wind or use, they were quietly relit.
Jay Hastings sat at his post in the Dakota lobby, his shirt still flecked with Lennon’s blood, and talked to reporters in a daze. He recognized the gunman. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Hastings told Rolling Stone. “Some bum came up and asked him for money, and the guy gave him a ten-dollar bill. The bum was ecstatic and kissed him and everything. He didn’t bother anyone here; I hardly noticed him.”37
The crowd seemed to speak in a hush, as if participating in somebody else’s bad dream, mortified to be part of the scene yet unable to turn away. “I keep thinking about all those years when the government tried to deport him,” said Joe Pecorino, who played the John Lennon character in Beatlemania, then running at the Winter Garden Theater. “Now it’s too damn bad they didn’t.”38 Sentiments like this echoed throughout much of the British press.
In shock, and increasing futility, American fans watched TV late into the night; still others awoke to Beatle tracks blanketing morning radio, and shock jocks quietly humbled. Five hours ahead of New York time, Britons awoke to the grim news, which disturbed the patter of their morning chat shows.