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‘The radicalism was phoney, really, because it was out of guilt. I always felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it’

When it came to returning favours, John remembered his friends, and he owed a big ‘thank you’ to Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, who had backed him loyally throughout the journalistic feeding frenzies of the Two Virgins and the Beatles break-up. So the beginning of December 1970 saw him and Yoko in New York publicising his new album – lawyers having found a reason for him to be granted another temporary US visa – and doing a long interview with Rolling Stone, including a photo session with the young Annie Leibovitz. Some of what he said that day he’d often expressed privately with ‘not for publication’ requests. But with Rolling Stone the prohibitions came off as he went on a long iconoclastic rant.

Of course, as was his nature, he exaggerated a lot. Not even he could have had sex with, as he boasted, ‘a million chicks’; and did he honestly believe that ‘Yoko’s bottoms thing’ was ‘as important as Sgt. Pepper’? But that was John. When he was in an album-selling mood, the hyperbole bubbled, and, to give Rolling Stone its due, there had never before been such a lifting of the lid on any rock group. In a realpolitik sense, John wanted to find headlines in the world’s newspapers when the next edition of Rolling Stone was published. And he got them.

There was, however, a selfish side to his outburst. That he confessed to his behaviour during Beatles tours as part of his destruction of their legend might, in his new desire for honesty, have been conscience-salving for him. But when he talked of ‘orgies’ and of tours being ‘like Fellini’s Satyricon’, he wasn’t just talking about himself. If the wives and partners of any of the other Beatles and their lieutenants had been in any doubt as to what might have happened when their boys were away, they weren’t now. Did he ever pause to think about the wounds he might be opening? Or had his heroin use blunted his sensitivities, as he would later claim?

Apart from his visits with the Beatles, it was his first time in New York, the city that he called Yoko’s ‘old stomping ground’, and he immediately felt at home, but slightly sheepish, as she showed him around Greenwich Village and introduced him to her old avant-garde friends. In London, it would be mainly John who would make the introductions, but in New York it was Yoko who led the way into the ‘hip art world’. As Dan Richter, their assistant, expressed it: ‘John wanted to be cool and accepted . . . as something more than a rock star. Yoko was his guide, his entrée . . . He was constantly trying to become more sophisticated.’

One of the routes to this was, John began to believe, in film-making. Yoko’s Bottoms film had been a minor cause célèbre, so the two now planned to do a sequel. It was entitled Up Your Legs Forever, for which Allen Klein’s most junior member of staff, a twenty-year-old called May Pang, contacted as many celebrities of the couple and friends as she could, and asked them to meet in a small studio where they would have their bare legs filmed. She found 364.5 pairs in all – Andy Warhol having agreed to join the project encouraging others, including actor George Segal, writer Tom Wolfe, Klein himself and someone with an artificial leg. The point of the film was never really apparent, but it amused John no end.

Yoko had been an early feminist, and now at her side (rather than Yoko being at his side), John would increasingly display the zeal of the convert about the exploitation of women – which was something that might, but evidently didn’t, conflict with the plans he and Yoko had for another film they made called Fly. The idea for that movie was to follow in extreme close-up a fly walking around the naked body of a young woman. Several models were considered, the chosen one going professionally by the name of Virginia Lust – who appeared to be completely stoned throughout the filming. Presumably, Yoko believed that the viewers of the film would be so interested in the perambulations of the fly that they might not at first notice its location. Well, maybe . . .

It was, it seems, a difficult shoot. First the young woman’s body was painted with honey to attract the fly, and discourage it from flying away. But when that didn’t work it was decided to spray the insect with carbon monoxide, in the hope that when it woke it would start walking around. It didn’t. Understudy flies came and went. As John watched, ever loyal to his wife, Yoko insisted that the fly be placed on the woman’s toe. Then on her breast. Then on her . . .

At which point the cameraman, Steve Gebhardt, backed off. ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. So Yoko put it there.

Dan Richter described the shooting of the scene in his book The Dream Is Over. ‘For almost 24 hours . . . drugged flies . . . were staggering around Virginia Lust’s naked body . . . from the hills of her breasts to the dark valley of her vagina.’

They had been married for almost two years when in January 1971, John and Yoko flew to Japan where the ex-Beatle was introduced to his wife’s very conservative parents, who had now retired there. By arriving wearing a modish surplus military outfit, John didn’t immediately endear himself to Mr Ono, but he had always got on with older women and Mrs Ono was soon charmed.

The couple, however, didn’t stay long in Japan. Returning to England after just one week, John’s next ventures would show him to be in almost faux revolutionary mood. As a performer, he needed the ‘straight press’ to reach the fans, but the youthful rebelliousness of the underground newspapers, with their small circulations, had always appealed to the romantic anarchist in him. And when the Oxford-educated writer and activist Tariq Ali, together with academic Robin Blackburn, asked to interview him for the far-left newspaper Red Mole, he was flattered.

He wasn’t, however, particularly truthful. He would later refer to himself as ‘a chameleon’, although detractors might describe him as more of a ‘cushion’, in that he would, in this period of his life, increasingly begin to wear the imprint of the last person who sat on him – be it the Maharishi, Janov or Yoko. And it’s impossible not to draw the conclusion that at least some of the things he said in the interview with Red Mole were said to impress what he saw as his intellectual interviewers with his underground political credibility, rather than give an honest account of his childhood.

For example, this assertion: ‘It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean it’s just a basic working-class thing . . .’

That was just baloney. He hadn’t been brought up in a working-class home, and neither had Mimi raised him to regard the police as enemies. Nor was that a typical reflection of how most working-class British people viewed the police or the army. When, at an early gig, the Quarry Men had been frightened by a gang of Teddy boys, it had been a friendly, protective police constable who had escorted them safely to the bus stop so that they could make a getaway.

The truth was sometimes inconvenient, but John’s revised version of his life would always go unchallenged by interviewers. Perhaps, on reflection, he realised that he’d gone too far in cosying up to his interviewers, because when he was put on the spot by Tariq Ali and asked how he thought ‘we could destroy the capitalist system here in Britain’, his response was simply to talk the talk and then make a new record.

It was called ‘Power To The People’ and released just a month after ‘Instant Karma!’, with a picture sleeve that showed him making a fist salute and wearing one of the white hard hats that the Japanese leftist Zengakuren protestors wore during anti-American demonstrations. It would be his least successful solo single so far.

Nearly a decade later, after a couple more self-reinventions, he would be honest enough to be dismissive of the way he’d been at that time. ‘The radicalism was phoney, really, because it was out of guilt. I always felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it. I don’t mean I was a hypocrite. When I believe, I believe right down to the roots. But, being a chameleon, I became whoever I was with.’

To another journalist he said: ‘Tariq Ali kept coming around asking for money for Red Mole . . . I was rich . . . Any time anybody said anything like that, I would fork out. I wrote “Power To The People” as a sort of guilt song.’

Might another explanation have been that, with his own battles won, he found himself repeatedly welcoming the struggles of others in order to reinforce his own image of himself as being someone in permanent rebellion?

‘What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’ the Marlon Brando character is asked in the movie The Wild One.

To which he replies: ‘Whaddya got?’

There was an echo in this line of John Lennon at this stage in his career?

Another kind of guilt, certainly a worry, may have been preying on Yoko’s mind at that time. She’d had another miscarriage the previous summer, and perhaps that loss had brought home to her the fact that she already had a child, Kyoko, who was now seven, and whom she rarely saw. Finding herself unable to get in touch with her daughter, she discovered that Tony Cox had taken the little girl to the Mediterranean island of Majorca where he had enrolled on (coincidentally) a Maharishi meditation course.

In his eccentric way, Cox appears to have been a good father, and had always had more time to spend with Kyoko than had Yoko. But, now anxious to renew her access to her child, Yoko flew with John and a Spanish lawyer to Majorca where, without asking, they took Kyoko from the kindergarten where Cox had left her and returned with her to their hotel.

When Cox found out, he called the police, who arrested John and Yoko and took Kyoko into care. As the British newspapers caught up with the ‘tug-of-love’ story, and wrote that John and Yoko had been arrested for kidnap, Kyoko was handed back to her father, and it was agreed that the whole matter would be decided by the court the following month.

But when Yoko and John returned to Majorca a month later, clutching documents from Yoko’s Virgin Islands divorce from Cox that stipulated ‘shared custody’, they found that Cox and the child were no longer there.

So it would go on, in a chase and search that would never end, as Tony Cox and Kyoko went back to America and disappeared.

John was never the kind of star to hang out in showbiz circles, mixing with Hollywood actors, glamorous actresses and hanger-on celebrities. In fact, throughout his career he avoided and mocked the tinsel and fake tan of fame. But when his and Yoko’s film Fly was shown out of competition during the Cannes Film Festival in May, he broke the habit of a lifetime and flew down to the South of France.

John was long used to applause simply for existing, but the screening did not turn out to be an unalloyed happy experience. Dan Richter believed it had gone well, but others reported that European cineastes greeted it with catcalls and whistles, despite it having been cut by over an hour to just twenty-five minutes. Virginia Lust’s zonked patience and the various flies’ travails had, it seemed, been in vain.

John just shrugged. Once again, his money and fame hadn’t resulted in recognition for Yoko – whom he liked to call ‘the world’s most famous unknown artist’ – so he would just keep on trying. Yoko, he insisted, was a genius. One day, he was determined, the world would know her as such.

When Michael de Freitas had jumped bail and avoided British justice by disappearing to Trinidad, John had given his wife Desiree and their children free lodging in the gatehouse at Tittenhurst Park. Now with the family reunited in Trinidad, John and Yoko flew to the island to visit them. By this time, John had to have been aware of de Freitas’s violent reputation. But something inside him refused to believe it. Within a couple of years he would find himself forced to accept the truth.