When John hadn’t returned from the Dakota by ten o’clock, May became worried and phoned Yoko, asking to speak to him. John was sleeping, Yoko replied. ‘The cure was very difficult.’ He would call her back the following day. He didn’t. So, on the Saturday, May called Yoko again. John was exhausted and still sleeping, Yoko told her this time.
Sunday came and went with no word from John. May could see the picture that was emerging. It was the one that she had feared.
On the Monday morning she had to attend a check-up at the dentist. She’d booked sequential appointments for both herself and John, and, as she left the dentist’s surgery, she found him waiting to go in. She hung round until he came out. Then together they walked back to their apartment.
When they got there, and were in private, he told her what she’d already guessed. Yoko had ‘allowed’ him to go home, he said. He’d just come back to pick up a few belongings. ‘It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It just happened,’ he explained. Then he lit a cigarette. The cure obviously hadn’t worked.
As May tells it, he looked ‘dazed’ and ‘disoriented’. Was he just trying to hide his embarrassment, and perhaps some shame or guilt, at a difficult moment? Or was there, as May believes, some other reason? It’s impossible to know.
‘Tell me about the cure,’ she said as, between tears, she watched him pack.
‘It was horrible,’ he said. ‘Just like primal therapy . . . I was throwing up all the time. Kept throwing my guts out. I kept falling asleep, and, when I woke up, they would do it to me again.’
For a man who had so much to say on virtually every aspect of his life, John never said anything publicly about what happened to him when he underwent hypnosis. He never revealed anything about the hypnotist, what his or her qualifications might have been, or the method that was used. Since he became so ill during the process, presumably some kind of aversion therapy was included.
There was still some final work to do preparing Rock ’n’ Roll for release, so May continued her work as his assistant, after which they would go back to the apartment and go to bed. Then John would shower before he went home to Yoko. Although he told May that Yoko had said that it would be all right for him to continue to keep her as his mistress, his wife would soon change her mind about that, and his assignations with his lover would become increasingly furtive. In public John and Yoko would present themselves as a reconciled couple and very much in love. But in private he would slip away to see May occasionally for a further eighteen months, using visits to a hospitalised friend as a cover. He never did go down to New Orleans to see Paul, however.
May had reasoned at the very beginning that famous men like John never chose women like her or had affairs with them. Well, she’d had an affair with him, but now she was being cast aside as, over the next few years, their meetings became fewer.
But why did John suddenly go back to Yoko when everything seemed to be going so well, when he was looking at an entirely different kind of future that might well have involved working with Paul again? Had he become bored with his young lover? Obviously not, as he continued to see her in secret. Or had a part of him been in love with Yoko all along? That was the line that he and Yoko would take as he joked about the affair being an eighteen-month ‘Lost Weekend’, after the Billy Wilder movie about an alcoholic that he’d seen on television. ‘The separation failed,’ he would say. That’s possible.
Perhaps, though, there is a further explanation. Was John running away from the demons within himself, which, when they’d lived in California, neither he nor May had sometimes been able to handle? It was all very well for Yoko to tell May to look after her husband and keep him out of trouble when she chose her as his mistress, but on occasions it had been an impossible task. May didn’t do drugs nor did she drink much, and she knew that alcohol and cocaine had a devastating effect on the behaviour of her lover-boss. But when he made up his mind, she couldn’t stop him mixing them.
Had John come to realise that, as pleasant and cosy as things had become in New York with May, there would be other times when he might not be so happy or so social, when, as he had earlier worried, he might be ‘fucked up’? Had his song ‘Scared’ on Walls And Bridges reflected his fear of himself? Did he feel he needed someone with an iron will at his side? No one ever questioned the strength of Yoko’s will, or the length to which she would go when she wanted something. When he was with the Beatles he’d written the song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ for the Abbey Road album. It had been about Yoko and had been purposely misunderstood and mocked by some who were of a mind to criticise. But John had known what he was saying. He had seen Yoko as being ‘heavy’ in the metaphorical sense of being both intellectually and artistically substantial. She was also, by nature, extraordinarily controlling of the environment she inhabited.
But there may have been something else, too. When John had found himself back at the Dakota for the hypnosis weekend, did he look around at the large, rich, swanky seventh-floor apartment with the fashionable address of 1 West 72nd Street that he owned, a place that contained nearly all his belongings, the bits and pieces of his life’s work? Did he feel that it was time to cease his wanderings and come home to the orderly life of the mother ship? Was it simply easier that way? Did he sense that in her eccentric, manipulative way, Yoko was the person who could offer him what he needed most – security? Was that the attraction? Had Yoko somehow convinced him, having convinced herself, that only she could protect him? Had the life he’d been living and the strain of being so famous for so long mentally exhausted him? ‘I feel I’ve been on Sinbad’s voyage and I’ve battled all the monsters,’ was how he expressed it to writer Pete Hamill a few days after returning home.
It hadn’t been all battling monsters while he’d been on his Long Weekend. May had been good for him, and he’d been very busy, very creative and done a lot of work. Unfortunately, it had been his occasional inner demons that had captured the headlines. And there had always been an impermanence about it.
With the Beatles negotiations settled, and the visa problem looking less worrying now that Nixon had resigned and the White House had been cleared of his motley crew, was John looking for a nest for himself, a place where, without any worries, he could curl up and rest?
Yoko was demanding and could be difficult, but, so long as he didn’t upset her or question her enormous ego and desire for equal fame with him, she was capable of taking care of everything – policing the phones and directing the staff. All the time John had been with May he had stressed that he didn’t want to do anything to hurt Yoko. That didn’t suggest he still necessarily felt romantic love for his wife, but a more dutiful regard and respect for her in what had really always been a symbiotic relationship. She had needed him for his fame and the cachet it gave her, for his money and the limousines. And he had been drawn to her for her zany intelligence and the entrée she appeared to give him to the avant-garde. She made him feel clever, not just a rock and roller. And, now, as she ran the Dakota apartment and staff, and sat in his place on the Apple board, she seemed to offer to bring order to his life. With Yoko in charge, arranging all the stuff he couldn’t be bothered to do, he would never have to worry. He could rest. She was more than a wife to him. She was more like a mother. Perhaps that was why he began to call her Mother.
When Rock ’n’ Roll was released that spring, John knew it would be a disappointment to his fans. It was a disappointment to him. By disguising his voice with too much reverb and echo, and with the backings far too fussy, between them, he and Phil Spector had failed to capture the excitement in the simplicity of the original hits that they had once both enjoyed so much. A cover version of Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was good enough, although taken too fast, but, other than when paying homage to the first songwriter who influenced him with Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’, the whole album sounded as though he’d simply tried too hard. He’d done a better job of rock classics when he’d sung ‘Money’ and ‘Please Mr Postman’ back in 1963 with the Beatles.