It was like I lost myself. Not that I purposely set out to be a hypocrite or a phony.
—JOHN LENNON, DECEMBER 8, 1980
During the course of his two trips from Honolulu to New York City, Mark Chapman believed he had become familiar with all of the doormen who maintained the casual, twenty-four-hour guard at the entrance to the Dakota building. As he stepped onto the curb at West 72nd Street some time after 9:30 on the morning of December 8, he was surprised to confront a man he didn’t recognize wearing the building’s distinctive dark green, gold-trimmed uniform. The doorman he had expected to see, Steve Hargett, who usually worked the morning shift at the building, had called in sick. Dakota maintenance man Patrick O’Loughlin had been pressed into service in Hargett’s place.
O’Loughlin had worked at the Dakota sentry booth before. He recognized most of the die-hard John and Yoko zealots who routinely congregated, sometimes day and night, outside the building. He didn’t recognize Chapman.
Displaying John Lennon’s Double Fantasy album prominently in his left hand, Chapman put on his most ingenuous smile as he approached O’Loughlin in much the same manner he had approached the two fans whom he had befriended outside the Dakota two days earlier. Wary of the new doorman, he kept his right hand in his coat pocket, close to his revolver. He had no reason to suspect that his ruse had been discovered, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He had seen a lot of movies and read a lot of books and he knew that it wasn’t unusual for police investigators to masquerade in the uniforms of doormen and security guards. He also was aware that armed, off-duty policemen sometimes moonlighted as security officers and sentries at hotels and apartment buildings.
For all that Mark David Chapman knew, John Lennon and Yoko Ono employed their own secret security force to work from time to time as Dakota doormen. As a doorman, a security agent would be able to gather a great deal of information about the peculiar assortment of fans that lurked outside the couple’s dwelling. On his first trip to New York, Chapman had observed several disheveled and apparently deranged Lennon fanatics who had stood for long hours outside the building, sometimes begging coins from passersby. He had made it a point to dress and to behave with restraint, to avoid suspicion and to distinguish himself from the unbathed and unkempt celebrity worshipers who would be likely to attract a guard’s notice. Chapman himself had worked until recently as a guard at an exclusive high-rise apartment building in Honolulu. Years before that, he had worked on security details for rock concerts back home in Atlanta, Georgia. He knew something about the kind of dress and behavior that would arouse concerns. Chapman realized that he was being paranoid. He also knew that he was being cautious.
After pacing back and forth for several minutes in front of the building, observing the unfamiliar doorman from the corner of his eye, he relaxed his guard. He knew he would have little trouble gaining the new man’s confidence.
“Mornin’,” he said, stressing his Southern accent for the desired effect. “You wouldn’t happen to know whether John Lennon might be planning to come out today, would you? I’ve got this album here. I’m hoping to get it autographed while I’m here in New York.”
O’Loughlin explained that he wasn’t the regular doorman and said he didn’t know much about Lennon. He said he thought the rock star had left the building earlier, before he had come on duty around 8 A.M. In response to Chapman’s questions, O’Loughlin said he had no idea where Lennon might have gone or when or whether the musician would be coming back.
“Where you from?” O’Loughlin asked, curious about the pronounced accent that Chapman had affected.
“Believe it or not, I’m from Honolulu,” Chapman replied. “Honolulu, Hawaii.”
Surprised for some reason that the doorman would ask him a question, Chapman fell into an apprehensive silence. Keeping both hands in his pockets and the album clasped under his arm, he moved from the sentry’s view, back against the gargoyle-studded rail of the building where he became lost in an unexpected web of paranoid musings. He stood for what seemed to him a long time and he began to feel confused by thoughts and fears that threatened to derail him from his purpose.
Growing fidgety, Chapman ambled slowly away from the building. He crossed the street to sit on one of the green park benches at the shrub-lined border of a concrete path leading into Central Park. Gazing back at the Dakota, he intently studied the classically bowed windows, oblique towers, soaring flag-tipped pinnacles, and convoluted details of the building’s unique architecture. Methodically, he surveyed each of the sixth-floor windows. He imagined that he might catch a glimpse of the rock star who had unwittingly lured him six thousand miles from the sunshine and rainbows of the Hawaiian islands to linger in the chill and urban congestion of New York City in December.
Maybe John Lennon would step onto one of the building’s rooftop balconies, Chapman fantasized. He recalled a picture he had seen in a Beatles book or on an album cover. The picture was of the historic musical group’s last concert. The Beatles had performed the impromptu concert on the roof of the building that had housed their recording studio, Apple Records, in London. Bickering among themselves, beset by problems caused by their money and fame, the most popular musical group in history had broken up soon after the rooftop jam session. Chapman had inferred from the Anthony Fawcett book about Lennon that it was there, at the Apple building, that the Beatles had stopped being musicians and started becoming a multimillion-dollar business enterprise. John, Paul, George, and Ringo had gone their separate ways to begin merchandising the images of their collective success.
They had parlayed their innocent songs of love and peace, Chapman believed, into a corrupt and vast enterprise of personal wealth and power. In the eyes of the self-made Holden Caulfield, Lennon had come to symbolize the hypocrisy that was the source of the world’s problems. Most acutely, he believed it to be the source of his own pain.
Chapman had known since childhood that the Beatles would never have existed without the genius of John Lennon. After studying the Fawcett book, he had begun to believe that the Beatles Generation had all been a sham, orchestrated from the beginning by Lennon, a cunning businessman posing as a rock star. As he gazed at the Dakota, he saw the ostentatious building as a symbol of all the hypocritical things that the “phony adult” had come to symbolize in his newfound Holden Caulfield consciousness. Closing his eyes, he leafed again in his mind through the pages of John Lennon: One Day at a Time. He envisioned the rich and powerful man taunting him from the Dakota rooftop.
Chapman abruptly stood and walked away from the bench, seized by the fear that John Lennon would leave the building and that he would be unable to get back across the street in time to meet him. He waited anxiously at the crosswalk for the traffic light to change. Studying a group of commuters that had just exited subway stairs at the corner of the Dakota, he smiled at a pretty Asian girl. The girl reminded him of his wife.
In a moment of anguish, Chapman recalled his wife’s tears and confusion upon his return from his last trip to New York, less than a month earlier. Swallowing hard, he struggled against a familiar anchor of sadness and remorse that still threatened to hold him back from the thing he knew he had to do.
“Give me the strength,” he prayed silently, searching out the familiar dark spot in his mind, barely moving his lips. He choked back tears that had begun to sting the corners of his eyes. “Please give me the strength to do it. It has to be done. Please give me the strength. The phonies have to know.
“It’s pure, it’s holy, it’s real. I can no longer stand this pain.”
Returning to the stone archway of the Dakota, Chapman observed how the building had become blackened and made somehow more elegantly sinister by decades of exhaust fumes and city soot. He remembered reading somewhere that the Dakota had been the backdrop that Hollywood director Roman Polanski had used when filming Rosemary’s Baby. Chapman had seen the movie years ago. He began to ponder the horrifying tale of a young housewife, played by Mia Farrow, who had unknowingly been seduced by the devil and given birth to the son of Satan. He seemed to recall a scene from the movie in which someone was falling or being pushed from the top of the Dakota to the sidewalk below, where he was standing.
Chapman thought it ironic that Polanski’s wife, a beautiful and talented young actress named Sharon Tate, had been murdered not long after he had made the macabre Rosemary’s Baby. Along with a group of Polanski’s friends, she had been stabbed to death by killers who had laughed at her pleas to spare the unborn infant that she was due to deliver in a few weeks. In a further ironic twist, the killers said they had been driven to murder by a drug-hazed message that they had received from John Lennon and the Beatles.
The infamous Tate-LaBianca killings were part of a gory plan that Charles Manson had code-named Helter Skelter, after the song of the same name that Lennon had written for the Beatles’ untitled “white album.” The lyrics to “Helter Skelter,” “Piggies,” “Blackbird,” and other Beatles tunes had been interpreted by Manson as a command from the Beatles to begin slaughtering members of the wealthy and famous Hollywood social elite. The killers had scrawled “Helter Skelter” in their victims’ blood on the walls of the expensive homes in which the bodies were found.
Chapman had found the Beatles-Manson-Dakota connection fraught with significance. As he pondered yet another irony in the events that had brought him to New York, he blinked in astonishment at a petite, vaguely familiar woman with soft, large eyes who smiled as she walked in front of him with a group of children. The woman and the children crossed the street in front of the Dakota and disappeared into Central Park. Caught up in his own angry reveries, he didn’t trust his eyes until he heard a passerby give voice to his recognition: “Hey, that was that actress. You know. What’s her name—Mia Farrow.”
Chapman smiled with satisfaction. It was yet another synchronicity, another sign, he thought. Rosemary herself had walked past him in front of the Dakota. To Chapman, it was a confirmation.
“It has to be right,” he said to himself. “This has to be the day. I couldn’t possibly be imagining all these things.”
Chapman snapped to attention when a trim, well-dressed woman with a mane of straight, black hair got out of a taxi and went into the Dakota. Satisfied that he wasn’t looking at Yoko Ono, he relaxed and leaned back against the black rail. He looked at his watch and was astonished to discover that it was only 10:30 A.M. He withdrew The Catcher in the Rye from his pocket and soon found himself lost in the book.
Moments later, Chapman was almost in tears as he read about an emotionally exhausted Holden Caulfield talking in confusion to Allie, his dead brother, while wandering alone and frightened on the streets of New York: “I’d say to him, ‘Allie, don’t let me disappear.’ ”
Several pages later, he found himself chuckling out loud as he read again about Holden’s reaction to graffiti scrawled by vandals at his little sister’s school and on a mummy exhibit at the museum: “I think, even, if I die, and they stick me in a cemetery and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck You.’ ”
His mind riveted between the covers of the book, Chapman was only vaguely aware that a taxi had stopped at the curb in front of him. He paid no attention to the slender man in a slouch hat and tan jacket who stepped from the back of the cab. The man nodded and smiled through thick, circular lenses at the Dakota doorman before bounding beneath the stone archway and up low steps leading through shiny glass and brass doors into the sanctuary of the building.
“Did you see him?”
Chapman pulled his eyes reluctantly from the book, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. The doorman asked a second time, “Did you see him?”
“What? See what?”
“Mr. Lennon,” the doorman said. “John Lennon. That was him. He just got out of that cab and went inside the building. Just now.”
Stunned, Chapman slid the red paperback into his pocket and regained his composure.
“Guess I missed my chance,” he said, holding up the Lennon album. “Guess I’ll just have to keep waiting.”
Chapman was disappointed, but he sensed that his opportunity had not been lost.
“This wasn’t the right time anyway,” he consoled himself. “When the time is right, it will happen. He’ll be back. It won’t be long now. I got a feeling.”
Jude Stein was surprised to see Chapman standing again in front of the Dakota when she arrived Monday morning shortly after 11:00 A.M. Chapman waved at her and began talking excitedly as she approached. Jude smiled at Chapman and said hello to Pat, the doorman.
“You just missed him,” Chapman said. “I missed him too. I was standing here reading. I had my head down, like a dummy. He pulled right up and got out of a cab and walked right by me and I didn’t even see him, except out of the corner of my eye. I noticed somebody in a tan jacket, though.”
The doorman smiled at Jude and confirmed that Lennon had indeed walked past just moments before her arrival. Jude told Chapman and O’Loughlin that she and Jery had seen John on Saturday. With feigned nonchalance, she added that Lennon had stopped for an amiable chat with her and her friend.
“You weren’t here,” she said to Chapman, accusingly.
He didn’t respond.
A small flurry of activity had erupted outside the Dakota entrance. It was shortly before noon when Jude noticed that another Lennon fan, free-lance photographer Paul Goresh, had arrived. About the same time, she saw Frederic Seaman, Lennon’s personal secretary, go into the building. She pointed out Seaman to Chapman. He had moved close to her and was trying to interject himself into a conversation she had struck up with the photographer. Seaman disappeared into the building as Chapman started to approach him with the Double Fantasy album.
As he had told everyone he’d met outside the building for the past three days, Chapman apprised Goresh that he was from Hawaii and that he wanted to get John Lennon’s autograph.
Goresh, detecting that Chapman spoke with an accent, said he didn’t realize people from Honolulu had a Southern drawl.
“Where you staying in New York?” Goresh added.
Chapman was unable to understand the sudden hostility that the photographer’s question evoked. “Careful,” he told himself, clutching the Lennon album protectively to his chest. “Inappropriate response. Totally inappropriate response,” he reminded himself. Unable to conceal the hostility and paranoia that had been triggered by Goresh’s question, he stepped close to the photographer’s face.
“Why the hell did you ask me that question?” Chapman demanded. “What do you want to know that for?”
His right hand was in the pocket of his trench coat. The knuckles of his left hand were white from the grip he had on the album.
Goresh was taken aback by the sudden mood change that had descended upon Chapman for no apparent reason. As the photographer backed away, the man from Honolulu continued to demand to know why he had asked where he was staying in New York.
“Easy, man,” Goresh said at last. “Take it easy. I was only making conversation, you know? I mean, you’re the one who started the conversation in the first place.”
His camera dangling around his neck, Goresh turned away from Chapman to walk to the other side of the Dakota archway. “Forget it,” he said as he walked away. “Just forget it.”
Under his breath Goresh muttered quietly to himself, “Big dope. Big damn dope.”
After Goresh walked away, Chapman’s hostility seemed to burn itself out as suddenly and inexplicably as it had flared. While the photographer puzzled silently over the brief and hostile incident, Chapman followed Jude across the street to the Dakota Grill.
“My treat,” Chapman said, as he stepped off the curb behind Jude and walked quickly to her side.
Inside the restaurant, Chapman searched out a table near the window. He wanted to maintain a view of the Dakota entrance. When he sat down, he took off his coat and hat, keeping the coat folded across his lap. He kept the album in front of him on the table.
“Order anything you like,” he said, handing Jude a copy of the menu. “I’m buying.”
Jude ordered an omelette and coffee. Chapman ordered a hamburger and two bottles of beer.
As Jude sat in the restaurant across from Chapman, she felt awkward at times, unable to reply to the nearly constant stream of questions, advice, and conversation that he seemed compelled to maintain. He talked mostly about Hawaii, about what “a great place” it was and how he also thought that New York was “nice too.” He told her that he had traveled around the world. He described the long plane ride and told her of his visit to Tokyo after Jude said she had always wanted to visit Japan.
Jude said she also had dreamed of visiting Hawaii, but that she would probably never be able to afford a vacation there.
“You can if you set your mind to it,” Chapman admonished her. “You can do anything if you set your mind to it. The human mind is an incredible thing. Once it’s made up, nothing can stop it from doing what it wants to do.”
Before they left the restaurant, Jude gave Chapman her address and phone number. She also wrote down her friend Jery’s address, along with the names and phone numbers of other Beatles fans in New York City. She wrote the information on a paper napkin that she folded neatly and gave to him. Absentmindedly, Chapman wadded the napkin in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket.
After leaving the restaurant, Chapman and the girl returned to the Dakota where they stood silently for more than an hour. Jude turned and burst suddenly into a smile as an older woman stepped around the ornate gate from the Dakota courtyard and stood beneath the archway. The woman was holding the hand of a doll-like child with large, almond eyes, porcelain skin, and straight black hair. When Jude began talking to the woman, Chapman moved in close behind her.
As Chapman stood smiling forlornly at the child, Jude introduced him to the boy’s nanny, Helen Seaman, the aunt of Lennon’s personal secretary Frederic Seaman. Jude explained that Chapman was a Beatles fan from Hawaii who hoped to get Lennon’s autograph. As he was introduced to John Lennon’s son, Chapman stepped forward and uncurled the sweaty fingers of his right hand from around the chunk of steel. Sliding his hand carefully from the deep pocket of his coat, he knelt on one knee before Sean Lennon. He wrapped his fingers around the child’s tiny hand.
“I came all the way across the ocean from Hawaii and I’m honored to meet you,” he said. The child stared at him blankly and sneezed.
Chapman smiled.
“You’d better take care of that runny nose,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas.”
Chapman stood near the curb and waved good-bye as Sean and the nanny got into a Mercedes-Benz station wagon and drove away.
“Isn’t he the cutest?” Jude asked Chapman.
“Yeah,” Chapman said. “John and Yoko must be really proud to have such a beautiful child.”
“Oh well,” Jude said. “It’s been nice meeting you. I hope you get your album signed.”
“You’re not leaving now, are you?” Chapman asked. “You haven’t seen John yet. He’s bound to come out today. I got a feeling about it.”
“I don’t think so,” Jude said. “It’s getting late and I don’t think so. I’ve got to go.”
“No!” Chapman exclaimed. “I mean, wait. We just got to know each other. How about waiting a while longer and then we can go have dinner and see a movie or a play or something. My treat.”
He wondered if the woman could hear the desperation he heard in his own voice.
“Thanks, but I’ve got to be going,” Jude said.
“Just a little longer,” he pleaded.
“I have to be going,” she said with finality. “Good luck getting the autograph.”