62

‘I never stop wanting to make music’

For the best part of the next four years, John was rarely seen in public, or even by many of his old friends. As Yoko spent more and more time in her office running the business, he would, in theory, look after Sean. He did enjoy his time with the child, but when he found that was all too much of a chore he would hand him back to the governess Yoko had hired and hide away in his bedroom reading and watching TV. This was not new behaviour: he’d always spent a lot of time in his bedroom, scribbling notes to himself, drawing cartoons or writing little stories or lyrics, and, sometimes, just getting quietly stoned – a practice he still kept up. This was the way he put it in a letter to Derek Taylor: ‘I myself have decided to be or not to be for a couple of years . . . Boredoms set in. How many backbeats are there, I ask myself.’

What was new was that, apart from walking a block or so down to a Japanese restaurant or La Fortuna coffee shop on Columbus Avenue, he rarely ventured very far outside his home. For a man who had previously packed so much into his every day, this ‘suspended animation’, as his Dakota assistant Fred Seaman would later describe his boss’s new existence, was incomprehensible. It was also liable to induce depression.

Business bored him, but with Yoko running everything and everyone from her office, it was going on all around him, all the time. As his Dakota apartments – and there were now several – became the centre of his domestic, professional and financial interests, cooks, masseurs, cleaners, acupuncturists, accountants, lawyers, builders, psychics, interior designers, art dealers and decorators, together with a bodyguard for Sean, but not one for John, would compete for his wife’s attention and instructions.

Yoko wasn’t only John’s manager, however. Seeming also to view herself in the role of his guardian, within a year of his moving back in with her she had become the drawbridge between him and the outside world. With an assistant on a switchboard filtering incoming calls to him through her, she decided upon those to whom he might or might not want to speak.

Inevitably, as the years passed, with few signs of him in public, a rumour got around that he was turning into a hermit, locked away in the grim-looking towers of the Dakota, seeing no one other than Yoko and Sean, and refusing to come out and play with his old friends when they phoned. This sounded silly to him, but there was an element of truth in it. Although Paul and Linda visited a couple of times, as did John’s rascal of an old school friend Pete Shotton, even Mick Jagger would complain that he could never be put through to John when he phoned, and he soon gave up trying. And those who might tempt him back into mischievous ways, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson for instance, were simply not welcome in his life any more. ‘Yoko has him all locked up,’ Mick Jagger would say. But to believe that was to miss the point. There was nothing keeping John in the Dakota. He could go out any time he wanted to. The difficulty was, since he’d given up his Lennono Music office at Capitol Records, and had retired from music, he had nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to see. Apart from famously learning to bake bread, and watching a lot of Dumbo cartoons with Sean as the baby grew into a little boy, John’s ambition had evaporated, as May would notice during his increasingly rare secret meetings with her.

A few years later he would describe this time as his ‘househusband period’. But this was just an excuse. He was a multi-millionaire with a legion of staff at his beck and call to do the househusband tasks. Stuck there in the Dakota, looking down at the cars passing outside, he was really just passing the time. Worrying about his diet – photographs show that he had become anorexic-thin – convinced that the FBI were still listening in to his calls, he would spend his days sending out assistants to buy books and records and expensive liver for his three cats. Like Mimi, he loved his cats, Sasha, Misha and Charo. But it was as though he’d escaped from one life that had perhaps sometimes frightened him during his Lost Weekend, without finding a fulfilling alternative. Many people who retire too early from exciting jobs show similar symptoms of depression. But they aren’t usually still in their mid-thirties.

Yoko had long had an interest in the occult and tarot numerology, a branch of which meant that she would plan not only her and John’s daily lives according to the various constellations of the planets, but that her business affairs were also ordered around her astrological readings. It’s difficult not to imagine a younger, more cynical Liverpudlian John Lennon mockingly rejecting this as hocus pocus, but he now went along with whatever Yoko said. Did he believe in it? He must have done . . . to an extent . . . when he wanted to. He’d believed in Magic Alex and the Maharishi, too.

Once again he was wearing the imprint of the last forceful person who sat on him. And Yoko had the strongest personality of anyone he’d ever met.

For years he’d been telling Mimi that as soon as his Green Card came through he would take Sean and Yoko to the UK to introduce the little boy to her and his family. But he didn’t. His first trip out of the US was to Hong Kong by himself under instructions from Yoko and her tarot cards. It was the first time he’d been anywhere on his own since he’d flown back to Liverpool from Hamburg in 1960. The purpose of the trip seems to have been . . . simply that he made the trip.

The following year, after attending an eight-week intensive Berlitz Language School course in Japanese, he took Yoko and Sean, plus a small retinue of governess and assistants, on a three-month holiday to Japan to meet Yoko’s extended family. He didn’t much enjoy it. Although Japan offered a relative anonymity he couldn’t have expected in the UK or US, he got bored, and soon Yoko requested that her friend Elliot Mintz join them. It was in Japan that John learned that Elvis Presley had been found dead at his home in Memphis, aged forty-two. That gave him pause for thought. At least he wasn’t spending his time in a white suit in Las Vegas singing his old hits. What he was going to do, he didn’t know.

He was glad when it was time to go home, but he had reckoned without another of Yoko’s interpretations of her cards. Apparently, while the numbers said it was good for her to fly back from Tokyo to New York eastwards, John’s numbers meant that he and the rest of the retinue, including Sean and his governess, had to continue westward to Hong Kong, on to Dubai and then home to the US via Frankfurt. Some husbands might have thought this was a wild goose chase, but John seems to have simply accepted it as one of ‘Mother’s’ regular little eccentricities. And, with no job to go to when he got back to New York, it wasn’t as if he was pushed for time.

So, the late Seventies passed bizarrely, if relatively uneventfully, as John watched Sean grow into a toddler, pulling at his reins, and then into a little boy at nursery school, with more holidays in Japan with the child’s cousins. By any standards Sean was being raised in a most peculiar household in which on one occasion his father chose not to speak for ten days, and at other times was decidedly druggy; while his mother regularly relied on the advice of psychics. Money, however, was no object. ‘Whatever Sean wants, he gets,’ was Yoko’s order to her staff. And chastisement was rare.

One Christmas, Sean’s half-brother Julian, now aged fifteen, came to stay when the Lennons went down to Palm Beach in Florida. The older boy couldn’t help but notice how Sean was the centre of his father’s devotion in a way that he had never been. That had to hurt. On another occasion, the couple whom Yoko would call ‘John’s in-laws’, Paul and Linda, turned up at the door singing Christmas carols. But if Paul had been vaguely hoping for a Lennon and McCartney rapprochement, as Linda always was, it wasn’t to be. That moment had been passed when John had returned to Yoko.

As for Yoko herself, it seemed that she had found her metier in life as, with a telephone rarely out of her hand, she ran the busy Lennon empire, where the astrological phrase ‘Mercury is in retrograde’ was as likely to be heard as ‘avant-garde’ used to be. She was, she thought, good at business, perhaps because her father had spent a lifetime in banking, and sister Setsuko was making a career for herself in the World Bank. An alternative view was that she was lucky, and had a never-ending income stream from song and record royalties with which to play.

Dabbling in art, even buying a Renoir, she also became obsessed with ancient Egyptian artefacts, which meant that she and John flew to Cairo – causing John to joke to his cousin Liela, whose father had been Egyptian, ‘I might dig up some of your father’s relatives’. Her shrewdest purchases, however, were in property. As Mark Twain had advised a century earlier: ‘Buy land. They’re not making it any more.’ And that held true in the late twentieth century more than ever. So she added to their Dakota apartments with farms in upstate New York, a herd of Holstein Friesian cows, and eventually a house by the sea on the north shore of Long Island called Cannon Hill.

John would later tell interviewers how much he had enjoyed his years being a househusband, but the frequency with which his frustrations over small, everyday aggravations would cause him to explode into temper would suggest that this long period of self-enforced idleness wasn’t suiting him. On the occasions he’d spent time with May, who always welcomed him back, he seemed anxious and fragile. He would talk about music with her. May was a fan as well as a lover in a way that Yoko had never been, and one day in December 1978 she asked him if he wanted to record again.

‘Of course I do. I never stop wanting to make music,’ he told her. But he did nothing about it.

At home he didn’t get very far with the book he intended to write, The Ballad Of John And Yoko, which he’d once considered might become a Broadway show; and, presumably because he wasn’t satisfied with some of the short stories that would be included in his posthumous book Skywriting By Word Of Mouth, they weren’t, at the time, even offered to a publisher. He kept up with a new post-May journal he was writing, and he even began talking into a cassette machine about his earliest memories from Liverpool, but his days mainly seemed to be lived on the fringes of a world that Yoko was running without him. His songs were the great provider for all the activity he saw around him in his home, but sometimes his own presence there must have felt like an irrelevance.

Then in 1980 a change began to take shape, and, almost by design, it seemed to involve Paul. In January of that year Paul was arrested at Tokyo airport on a charge of possessing drugs, when he, Linda, their children and his band Wings were entering Japan to play a concert tour. Since many a fan loves a conspiracy, a rumour immediately surfaced that Yoko must have wickedly tipped off the Japanese authorities that Paul had some very potent marijuana in his suitcase. It was nonsense, of course – the tip-off, not the pot. Not even Yoko, with or without her tarot cards, could have engineered that kind of intervention. But the whole episode of Paul’s short incarceration put John into a merry state of schadenfreude about his old friend, and amused him enormously – although he sent him a Good Luck card. More importantly, it put Paul firmly back in his mind. And when, a few weeks later, he heard Paul’s new single ‘Coming Up’, he was intrigued, sending an assistant out to buy the album it was on. To this day, Paul believes that the success of ‘Coming Up’, a huge hit, may have triggered John’s return to music, in that it helped reawaken his competitive spirit.

Yoko had a problem at the time. She had developed a heroin habit, as she admitted to writer Philip Norman. Needing some time alone to secretly go cold turkey and cope with withdrawal symptoms, she packed John, Sean, his Japanese governess, and assistant Fred Seaman off to their beach house, Cannon Hill.

The house had a splendid view of the ocean, which for John was a magnet. Perhaps because he’d grown up in a port, with a father and grandfather who’d gone to sea, water had always held a fascination. And, after mucking about in a dinghy with an outboard engine with his assistant Seaman, he decided to buy a yacht and learn to sail. Quickly mastering the basics of that, he then decided, as he did with all new enthusiasms, that he needed a bigger challenge; a real sea voyage, for instance. Accordingly, a 43-foot schooner, the Megan Jaye, at Newport, Rhode Island, was chartered for July, and preparations were begun.

Meanwhile, Yoko, having recovered from her heroin problem, had a new idea for him too. It was time for him to take another trip, and she instructed that he fly to South Africa. It might have seemed to some that she was always trying to get rid of him, but he did as he was told, putting in a call to May, whom he hadn’t seen for over a year, when he arrived in Cape Town. He was apologetic at first for not having called for so long, but, he said, he’d hidden his secret book of phone numbers somewhere and had forgotten where he’d left it. After that, they talked about music, as they always did, and planned to meet again in New York at some later unspecified date. Then, after talking for an hour and a half and making a vague future plan, he went home to New York again, to join the waiting Megan Jaye.

A crew of four had been assembled for the voyage, all experienced sailors, so now the only question to be asked was, where should they go? John rather fancifully liked the idea of sailing across the Atlantic to England and then up the Thames or the Mersey, but that was impractical. As usual Yoko consulted her tarot cards. The answer the cards gave was that south-east was John’s best direction of travel. The only place south-east of Newport was Bermuda. So that became the destination. It seemed an impulsively difficult venture to undertake, but for John it was at last a chance for adventure after years of mental suffocation. And on 4 June 1980, he kissed Sean goodbye and set off on the 630-mile ocean voyage.

As the least experienced member of the crew, and no doubt considered by the real yachtsmen as merely a rich passenger, the most useful contribution John could make was in the galley making up meals for his companions. But, under supervision, he was given turns at the wheel, too. For two days it was beautiful summer sailing weather, and he loved it, amusing the crew with funny stories about his life with the Beatles, and asking about theirs. Then the weather reports began predicting something very different – a Force 8 gale.

Soon everyone except John and the captain, a grizzled rock of a guy and a former rock promoter called Hank Halstead, were ill with seasickness and had taken to their bunks. With John at his side, Halstead stayed at the wheel through the gale for forty-eight hours until, too exhausted to continue, he insisted that the inexperienced cook/passenger would have to take over.

Terrified, but lashed to the rails, John did. This was how he would later describe the experience to Playboy.

I was there driving the boat for six hours, keeping it on course. I was buried under water . . . smashed in the face by waves for six solid hours. It won’t go away. You can’t change your mind. It’s like being on stage; once you’re on, there’s no getting off. A couple of the waves had me on my knees. I was just hanging on with my hands on the wheel . . . and I was having the time of my life. I was screaming sea shanties and shouting at the gods! I felt like a Viking . . . or Jason and the Golden Fleece.

By the time they reached Hamilton, Bermuda, after seven days at sea, Halstead and the rest of the crew had revised their opinion of their celebrity passenger. It had never been intended that he would be left in charge of the boat, but he’d performed astonishingly well.

More importantly, John had revised his opinion of himself. He’d enjoyed the control he’d felt in his arms as he’d crashed through the waves and gale. He could do it. For years he had depended on others to do everything for him, for May to be at his side day and night, and for Yoko to direct all those who worked for him. But he’d been in charge; dependent on no one; completely his own man again. Seven days at sea had done more for his self-confidence and his sense of his own worth than five years hiding from the world in the Dakota.

Exultant, as soon as he landed he phoned New York and asked assistant Fred Seaman to bring him his guitar down to Bermuda. He had work to do.

For the first time in five years, John Lennon was ready to start writing and recording again.