John dropped out. It was as simple as that. It was fashionable for a student to drop out of college to join a rock and roll band. But John turned that on its head. He dropped out of rock and roll and his two dozen guitars to stay at home and become a dad. Dr Winston O’Boogie, as he’d whimsically referred to himself during his Lost Weekend, had been banished, to be replaced by the reborn JohnandYoko. Once more John was changing his life, starting again, even referring to his pre-Dakota life as his ‘previous incarnation’. And, to go with his new life, he would soon have some new crazes, too.
‘Dear Ray,’ Yoko wrote to me on a postcard that spring of 1975, ‘Here’s a hard one for you to take – John and Yoko have not only come back together, but they’re having a baby – due October!’
That was a surprise . . . to John, as well. He’d told Cynthia at one of their rare meetings a couple of years earlier that he didn’t believe he would be able to father any more children, because his procreativity had been wrecked by the many drugs he’d enjoyed. He’d been wrong. But for Yoko there would be problems.
‘She’d had too many miscarriages,’ John would explain. ‘When she was a young girl there was no Pill, so there were lots of abortions and miscarriages. Her stomach must be like Kew Gardens in London . . . But this Chinese acupuncturist in San Francisco said, “You behave yourself, no drugs, eat well, no drink. You have child . . .”’
Yoko put a romantic spin on the conception. ‘When John came back, we had great sex and I got pregnant,’ she smiled to an interviewer, which John confidently dated as occurring on 6 February, six days after he left May. Like his father, he, too, was confident that he knew the exact moment of his son’s start in life.
Years later Yoko would admit that initially, at the age of forty-two, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted a baby and had considered another abortion – only deciding to continue with the pregnancy when she saw how keen John was to be a father again.
And he was thrilled. He’d been halfway through writing the songs for his next album, but when the pregnancy was confirmed, he put them to one side. Fatherhood was an experience that he’d largely missed with Julian, occurring as it did at the height of Beatlemania. ‘I’ve already “lost” one family to produce, what . . . Sgt. Pepper?’ he wrote dismissively of the Beatles’ most famous album. This time it would be different. ‘I’m blessed with a second chance,’ he said. And, with no outside obligations, he threw himself into fatherhood with the fervour he would always adopt when beginning any new project. That meant, as instructed by Yoko, cleansing his body of alcohol and going on a macrobiotic diet, and also hanging up his guitar. If he ever needed a shot of rock and roll as a reminder he could only find it in what he and Yoko called the Black Room in their Dakota apartment, the place where he kept his jukebox stuffed with mainly Fifties rock and roll records. Mostly, though, he didn’t need it. He cancelled his subscription to Billboard magazine, didn’t try to keep up with the pop charts any more, although he followed the Bee Gees, Bowie and Elton John, and tuned the radio in the kitchen to a middle-of-the-road easy listening station. Actually, he was probably more likely to hear Beatles records there, too.
He’d written a log while he’d been away from Yoko with May, outlining his everyday life of ‘waking up in strange places, or reading about myself in the papers doing extraordinary things, half of which I’d done and half of which I hadn’t’. Now the two of them ceremonially burned the log as they reaffirmed their marriage vows. Then, as he was starting a new life while waiting for the baby to arrive, he began a morbidly personal new journal, noting everything he did or thought during each day. He often wished, he would write, that he and Yoko weren’t famous any more and that they could ‘enjoy a really private life’. But he knew that was a futile desire – and he certainly enjoyed the financial perks of world fame, as did Yoko, to an even greater extent. What he did do, however, was to avoid giving any interviews for the next four years.
He’d always been a letter writer, so with no audience outside his home to amuse, he began to write dozens of letters (typing them, actually, because he worried that his handwriting was illegible) to family and friends at home in the UK. Generally just chatty and jokey, some of them would also unpeel a John Lennon quite different from that of his recent public image, someone who cared enough about his relatives to ask them to send him recent photographs of themselves and their children. Mimi got a request too, to send him his old school tie. Although he liked to say that the past was behind him, that only the present and future mattered, his childhood never left him.
His cousin Liela had always been his favourite relative. She was now a doctor, and when she criticised his lifestyle in a letter he was quick to fondly tell her, ‘old bossy boots’, that she may have been ‘a little naive’ in judging him, before going on to have a bit of a grouse about Mimi. He was, he wrote, thinking of taking piano lessons, because he could ‘only play with eight fingers . . . self-taught and lousy . . . Mimi would never let me have a piano in the house . . . said it was common’ – adding that his aunt still believed that he had ‘no talent’ and that he’d simply ‘got lucky’. Actually, Mimi didn’t think that at all, but the bruises of his fights with her, which the whole family had known about, were still there. ‘She always wanted to castrate everyone (male and female) and put their “balls” in an apple pie!’ was his merry end to that particular little complaint.
One person to whom John probably didn’t write was Michael de Freitas, who was still known to the newspapers by his chosen ‘revolutionary’ name of Michael X. He did, however, add his signature to a petition calling for clemency, after de Freitas was found guilty in court in Trinidad, and sentenced to death for murder. John, a long-time opponent of the death penalty, didn’t desert the man he had once trusted and whom he believed to be reformed, but who had conned him out of thousands of pounds before going on to murder. Clemency was not granted. De Freitas was hanged in Port of Spain on 16 May 1975.
Yoko had a difficult pregnancy, and during it John revealed his caring side as, on doctor’s orders, she had to spend much of the time in bed. And when in late September she was taken into New York Hospital two weeks early, he went with her, ‘sleeping on the floor’, John would tell his half-sister Julia.
His US visa problem had by this time been going through the legal process for over four years, as he had dug in ever deeper and refused to be extradited. Then, in October, while at the hospital, he received some good news. By a margin of two to one, the US Court of Appeals had ruled that his 1968 conviction for cannabis possession in London had been unfair by the standards of US law, and it recommended that the Immigration and Naturalization Service use its discretion regarding his visa. For the first time he could see a happy ending on the horizon.
In the immediate future was Yoko’s baby. There are various conflicting theories about why Sean Ono Taro Lennon came to be born by Caesarean section the following day, 9 October, John’s birthday. Was it because Yoko believed, as did some people in Japan and the Far East, that a son born on the same day as his father would inherit the soul of his father after he had died? John would later deny that that had been the reason, but Yoko was no stranger to some bizarre beliefs, and neither John’s word nor hers was always to be trusted on personal matters. Whatever the explanation, the baby would be in intensive care for two weeks, before Yoko could take him home. Coupled with the good news from Leon Wildes, John’s visa lawyer, it was time for a double celebration. Elton John was named as the baby’s godfather, chosen, John would joke, because Elton didn’t have any children (at the time), so Sean could inherit all of his money too.
The Lennons didn’t have a nanny at first, John would tell half-sister Julia – which must have brought a wry smile back in Liverpool, where few people could afford a nanny; Cynthia certainly hadn’t when she’d had Julian. But, though he grumbled that he was losing sleep when Yoko was breastfeeding and he needed to be at her side every four hours, he was actually rejoicing in his new role.
Before Sean had been born, Yoko had put it to him that, when she had the baby, the division of labour in their home would be reversed from the usual practice. As Tony Cox, her second husband, had found when he’d had to look after Kyoko, John was going to have to do the child rearing too. In return, Yoko, it was decided, could, in the absence now of Allen Klein or indeed anyone else, take more of an interest in John’s business affairs. She had no experience of business. But she had never lacked for self-confidence. Eventually she would become his manager and take control of his finances. It wasn’t as if he was planning to have an active career anyway. ‘It’s irrelevant to me whether I ever record again,’ he would write in 1978. And, now that the Apple funds had been released, he wouldn’t need to, as money flooded in from his song and record royalties.
So, while Yoko issued instructions to her ever-growing Dakota staff from the groundfloor office she called Studio One, John happily retreated into his letter writing, catching up with people from his past, the jokes still sparkling. In a letter to me that autumn he referred to Beatle George as ‘George (I’m with God) Harrisong’ who was in New York and about to have ‘the unmitigated honor’ of meeting the ‘incredibly beautiful and intelligent Sean Ono Lennon’ before signing off with: ‘P.S. The Bay City Rollers are gay (scoop) except one who’s pretending. What’s the world coming to, I says.’
Another letter, earlier in the year, had been to the Beatles’ former road manager Mal Evans. Mal planned to write a memoir based on diaries he’d kept while working for the group, but he wanted John’s blessing before he started. John was all for it. ‘Make a buck but don’t fuck it . . .’ was his advice.
He’d always been very close to Mal, who at nearly six foot four and heavy with it had been the Beatles’ gentle giant and bodyguard when needed, his sheer size, friendly manner and horn-rimmed glasses keeping at bay most of those who would do them harm. Like Neil Aspinall, Mal had been at every gig and every recording session. He’d been an employee, but, more than that, a trusted friend. Never taking sides, he was always willing and available, to the extent that when Allen Klein fired him, he found himself reinstated in his job by the Beatles the following day.
Not that there had been much for him to do when the Beatles broke up. So Mal, who was no longer involved with Badfinger, the group he’d discovered, had decided to leave and make it on his own as a songwriter and record producer. In his own quiet way, he wanted some of the glory. John’s attitude had been to encourage the roadie to make the break.
It probably wasn’t the best advice. Mal on his own, without the Beatles, was rudderless. Separating from his wife Lil, and leaving her and their two children behind in England, he was seduced away to California. Badfinger had hit the US top ten with a song that he’d produced, but there would be no more hits for him.
On 4 January 1976, two years to the day after leaving his wife and children, Mal became depressed in his Los Angeles apartment and picked up an air rifle that he used for taking pot shots at lizards. On seeing the gun, the girlfriend with whom he was living called the police, saying, it was alleged: ‘My old man has a gun and has taken Valium and is totally screwed up.’
When the police arrived, they told Mal to put the weapon down. Mal responded, the Los Angeles Police Department would later say, by pointing the gun at them.
He was shot dead instantly, four bullets hitting him. He was forty. Only afterwards did the police discover that the gun was an air rifle and wasn’t even loaded.
John, like all the Beatles, was devastated. Mal had been the most inoffensive of men, the bodyguard who had never had a fight; the former Post Office telephone engineer who had only become involved with the Beatles because, going back to work after eating his sandwiches for his lunch at the Pier Head in Liverpool one day, he’d heard music that ‘sounded like Elvis’ coming from a basement in a back street. From that moment his fate had been sealed.
Mal’s body was cremated in Los Angeles three days later. No one from his family was present, although Harry Nilsson attended the brief ceremony, after which his ashes were sent back to his wife, Lil, in England.
She never received them. They got lost in the post. John’s response when he heard that was the saddest of unhappy quips he ever made. ‘Have they tried looking in the lost letter department?’ he asked bitterly.
John’s record contract with EMI and Capitol came to an end in February 1976, and, although he was asked to renew it, he declined. Not even a better offer from Columbia could tempt him. He no longer wanted to be encumbered with obligations to make music. As he watched as Paul made album after album, busy as ever, he felt no desire to join in the race any more. The muse had dried up when he’d returned to the Dakota. He always claimed that he wrote best when he was under pressure, but now he had removed himself from that possibility. No pressure: no muse.
But, and it’s easily forgotten, for a singer-songwriter an album takes at least a year out of a musician’s life, from writing the songs, to their recording, and then there is the necessary promotion that follows. John was bored with all that. Instead, always aware that in not having been to university he was less educated than he would like to have been, he began to read widely, usually having several books open at the same time. Then there was time to take Sean for walks in his pram in Central Park across the road, and to concentrate on the macrobiotic, no-sugar diet that he had now adopted.
Towards the end of the previous year he’d asked Neil at Apple in London to try to make contact with his father, to whom he’d behaved so brutally when he’d summoned him to Tittenhurst Park in 1971. Having long regretted his behaviour on that day, he now wished to make amends.
But Freddie didn’t take up the offer of a reconciliation that Neil offered. He didn’t want anything more to do with his son. There was an irony there. John, he felt, had abandoned him.
Then, early in 1976, Freddie’s wife Pauline phoned Apple. Freddie had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. He would now like to talk to his son again. The next day John phoned his father in hospital and they made their peace. Not knowing how ill his father was, John told him he looked forward to getting him over to New York when Freddie felt better. But, following surgery, Freddie died a few weeks later.
Apart from Pauline there was only one other person at Freddie’s funeral, the publicist who had encouraged him to make a record. He would remember a bouquet of flowers being delivered that was almost bigger than the grave. It was ‘from John, Yoko and Sean’.
A few days later, Pauline sent John an unpublished autobiography that Freddie had written, outlining his version of the events leading up to his desertion, as Mimi had always told it, of his five-year-old son. It hadn’t been all his fault, he maintained. John had by now probably already realised that.
At lawyer Leon Wildes’ suggestion, John had carefully burnished his image during the past year by enthusiastically taking part in charity events, and even singing ‘Imagine’ on stage at a TV tribute to honour Lew Grade, the chairman of ATV Music, whose company now owned Northern Songs. It had worked. After the phone-tapping, FBI surveillance and snooping, court appearances, statements, appeals, extensions and depositions by high-profile character witnesses, the long struggle for him to solve his US visa problems was finally ended in a small room on the fourteenth floor of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York on 27 July 1976. John, or at least his legal team, had won. He could now apply for a Green Card. His residency in the United States was secure.
‘It’s great to be legal again,’ John smiled to waiting reporters and cameras on leaving the building. But then, safe in the US at last, he couldn’t resist having a last sarcastic snap back at his former tormentors. ‘And I would like to thank the Immigration Service for finally seeing the light of day.’ That was John, always wanting the last word.