His head, he would say, was suddenly full of songs, and he loved Bermuda. When Seaman reached the island he found a changed man. The pale, indoors New York pallor was gone. John was, he would write, ‘exuding health and vitality’, and happier than he’d ever seen him.
Yoko had stayed behind in New York, but Sean and his governess had accompanied Seaman down to Bermuda. Soon a large house, Villa Undercliff, was found for the family. With polite, discreet tourists and reggae on the radio, the carefree ambience of this sub-tropical little British dependency was the perfect environment to undam the creativity that had been suppressed for so long. After playing with Sean on the beach, John would go to work in the afternoons and evenings, and, using some basic recording equipment he’d bought in a local store, would make demo copies on cassettes of the music that was now bubbling out of him again. One of the first was the reggae-styled ‘Living On Borrowed Time’.
‘It was amazing. I was there on the beach taping songs . . . just playing guitar and singing,’ he would delight in telling interviewers. Luckily the Villa Undercliff had a piano, and recording got even better when a computerised drum machine was quickly sent down to him from New York.
He’d always had odds and ends of songs, some half-written and others half-recorded on cassettes that he’d been working on at the Dakota, and when he’d been with May he’d been working on a song with the working title of ‘Tennessee’. That title and the original lyrics had now been replaced with ‘Watching The Wheels’, a riposte to those who thought he’d been crazy while sitting in the Dakota and no longer ‘riding on the merry-go-round’ of fame. It was as good as anything on the Imagine album. Then there was the witty ‘Nobody Told Me’, with its mention of the UFO he and May had seen. ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’ was a hymn of devotion that every parent could sing to a child, complete with the rueful line about life being what happens to a person while ‘you’re busy making other plans’. That thought wasn’t original to John. He’d read it in a magazine, but, by borrowing it, he took authorship of it in the public mind. Another ‘steal’ was the line ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be’, which he lifted from the poet Robert Browning for the song usually known as ‘God Bless Our Love’. If he was going to steal, at least he stole from the best, and, unlike Chuck Berry lyrics, Browning’s lines were long out of copyright. And then there was ‘Woman’, ostensibly a guilty ‘thank you’ to Yoko for teaching him ‘the meaning of success’, but which, like all his best work, had a universality about it.
Eventually, after several changes of plan, Yoko visited him in Bermuda, but she only stayed for the weekend. John was upset and angry, Fred Seaman told me. John had looked forward to her coming, and to playing his new songs to her. It was important to him that she liked the songs. He always needed approval. But she had business to attend to and she soon left. Whether there was anything else, or anyone, that kept her in New York during those weeks is only speculation and rumour. But, as John would later admit, when he couldn’t get her on the phone one day, his response had been to sit at the piano in Bermuda and write the bluesy song ‘I’m Losing You’. Yoko might have shown that she was immune to romantic anxiety and sexual jealousy when she had set him up with May, but he wasn’t.
He left Bermuda and returned to New York on 29 July, on a direction and timetable that Yoko’s tarot cards decreed were positive. Already he had the title of his new album. It would be called Double Fantasy after a yellow freesia he’d seen while walking with Sean in the Botanical Gardens in Bermuda.
Originally he had planned his comeback album to be a solo affair, and he certainly had enough songs for one, but Yoko had convinced him that she should be on it too, with one of her songs always following one of his, like a conversation. He knew that wouldn’t be what any record company would want. But that was what Yoko wanted, so, in the end, he wanted it too.
After rehearsing the musicians chosen for the new sessions at the Dakota for a couple of nights, recording began with producer Jack Douglas at the Hit Factory in midtown Manhattan on 8 August. It took just nine days to record twenty-two songs, with fourteen chosen for Double Fantasy, seven of John’s and seven of Yoko’s. John worked quickly on his songs, having worked out in his head all the arrangements beforehand. Yoko took longer with hers. Never having been a professional musician or singer, it was more difficult for her.
In order to maintain total control of the project, John paid all the costs of production, and only when recording was finished was a record company sought to press and distribute the album. That was Yoko’s job, and the company chosen was a new one owned by David Geffen, the former manager of Crosby, Stills and Nash and many other big rock names. It is believed that Geffen agreed the deal without hearing any of the tracks.
‘Yoko’s a tough customer. One never really knows what’s on her mind,’ Seaman overheard Geffen telling John.
Other label chiefs had, it was rumoured, lost some of their enthusiasm when told that only half the tracks on the album would be by John, but he hadn’t been prepared to consider reducing the number of Yoko’s tracks in favour of more of his own. Was that because he knew there would be ructions at home? Or was it simply loyalty to his wife? Ever since they’d met, Yoko had been in love with the idea of performing on stage as a rock star. When she’d tried doing it in New York and then Japan while John was with May, she’d failed. Now he was going to help her, even though he knew that her presence on the album would mean that many fans would simply lift up the pick-up when a Yoko song came on and move it to the next one by John. To say that he and Yoko by this stage had a complicated, sometimes contradictory, often incomprehensible relationship would be an understatement.
For years John had idealised their love affair in song, but Seaman, who would overhear their rows, would observe that reality was very different. It was, however, a difference that they never revealed or explained in the rash of interviews they did together to promote the album, as soon as the record deal had been signed.
‘It’s a teacher-pupil relationship,’ John told Playboy. ‘She’s the teacher and I’m the pupil.’ While to Newsweek he said: ‘Being with Yoko makes me whole. I don’t want to sing if she’s not there.’ There was no mention of any tensions in the marriage. For them the point of all interviews was to sell records, and to do that they would fall back on the public idyll that had been created of JohnandYoko, an enduring love story.
While they waited for the album to be released, John turned forty on 9 October, with Sean becoming five on the same day. To celebrate the two birthdays, Yoko organised a sky-writing bi-plane to smoke-write ‘Happy Birthday John and Sean. Love Yoko’ in the clear blue afternoon sky above Central Park. Sean was very excited and watched from the roof of the Dakota along with his governess and some other members of staff. John wasn’t interested in public birthday celebrations and went to bed for a sleep instead. Yoko didn’t watch either.
A single from the new album, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, was released as a teaser during the last week of October. Purposely in the style of an ‘Elvis/Orbison song’, according to John, it was selected not because it was the strongest track – it wasn’t – but because its title and theme captured the moment of reincarnation for John’s career. Although it was an instant top ten hit, it was not received without some disappointment. Nor was the album, when that followed three weeks later.
John cared more about the sales than the tepid reviews. Yoko, too, and she decided that action was needed if there was to be sufficient interest in her first single, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, a disco track that John was producing. So, to accompany the record, she planned a promotional video that was filmed on 26 November at a studio in SoHo where photographers Allan Tannenbaum and Ethan Russell had cameras waiting on a set that consisted of a divan bed by a window, through which fake sunlight was streaming.
Nudity had worked earlier for Yoko in generating publicity. Now it would be called upon again. After taking off the kimonos that they were wearing, she and John lay naked on the bed and pretended to make love for the next four hours, with Yoko helping dictate the camera angles. Talking to Playboy, a few weeks earlier, John had scoffed at the idea that ‘John and Yoko would do anything for publicity’. The ‘Walking On Thin Ice’ video would seem to suggest otherwise. Whether John enjoyed the filming, or knew before he arrived at the studio what he was expected to do in it, is uncertain. But he went along with it anyway.
With Christmas approaching, Yoko’s single to be completed, and albums to be sold, it was a busy time, but John was particularly pleased when on Saturday, 6 December, British disc jockey Andy Peebles and a BBC team arrived at the Hit Factory studios for a radio interview. John had been living in the United States for nine years and despite his promises to Liela and Mimi, whom he’d phoned that morning, he hadn’t been back to the United Kingdom once in all that time. Nor had either of them, or indeed any of his family, other than Julian, been to see him. Mimi would later blame herself for not having gone to New York, but Seaman had gathered the impression that for John and Yoko the timing had never been quite right when she’d brought it up.
It is difficult to understand why John hadn’t been back for a visit. Most likely he was too proud. He didn’t want to go home as a has-been curiosity from the Sixties. When he did go, he wanted it to be on the back of a number one hit record. Hence the visit from the BBC and the opportunity to promote the album.
The interview lasted for three hours, with John happily remembering the people he’d worked with when the Beatles had performed live dozens of times on BBC radio in their early days. He was in good spirits, recounting how when old friends from England asked why he wasn’t homesick, he joked about how he would tell them that England wasn’t going to vanish, that it would still be there when he decided go back. Then, to finish the interview, he explained how it had been Yoko who had sold him on New York, having left London when he’d felt it was difficult to go out because of the intense public interest in the Beatles. Of course, being John, he exaggerated it a bit.
‘We couldn’t walk around the block . . . couldn’t go to a restaurant . . .’ he said. ‘Yoko told me, “You will be able to walk here . . . you can walk on the street.” But I would be walking around, tense like, waiting for somebody to say something, or jump on me, and it took two years to unwind . . . I can go right out of this door now and go in a restaurant . . . I mean people come and ask for an autograph or say “hi”, but they don’t bug you, you know.’
John went down to La Fortuna on Columbus Avenue for his breakfast on Monday morning, 8 December, after which he had his hair cut. He’d had it longish, Beatles 1966 style, for the past few weeks, having gone through periods of either a pony tail or long hair and beard disguises over the past few years. Now he wanted it cut almost ‘schoolboy, 1958’ short, for when Annie Leibovitz arrived later that morning to photograph him for Rolling Stone.
While that was taking place, Yoko was phoning me in London, insisting I fly over immediately to do an interview for the Sunday Times that I’d called about a few weeks earlier. It was agreed that I would take an early flight the very next morning.
Having heard about the nude session that John and Yoko had done for the pop video twelve days earlier, Annie Leibovitz already had an idea in mind for her photograph when she arrived at the Dakota. Putting it to John, he happily undressed for her, but, for some reason, Yoko was now reluctant to take off her clothes. So Leibovitz simply asked her to leave everything on, which was a pair of black pants and black sweater. Then the naked John curled up and wrapped himself around his impassive wife on their bed, as though he was an overgrown baby hanging on to its mother, whose eyes were almost closed. It was an unsettling photograph, perhaps more so when John exclaimed to the photographer, ‘You’ve captured our relationship exactly.’
The interviews were still coming thick and fast, and, after talking to RKO Radio, John and Yoko left the Dakota later that afternoon to go to the Record Plant for John to do more work on Yoko’s new single.
As they left the side entrance of the building on West 72nd Street there was the usual scattering of fans hanging around hoping to catch a glimpse of him. The new album had put him back in the public eye, so there were a few more there than was usual.
As John was crossing the pavement, a plump young man in glasses held out a copy of Double Fantasy to be autographed.
John signed, murmuring words to the effect of: ‘This what you want?’ Then, getting into the RKO Radio team’s car that was giving him and Yoko a lift to the Record Plant, he was driven away from the smiling fan.
Mixing the record took most of the evening. Yoko was thrilled about it and wondering why it couldn’t be released immediately, but David Geffen, who popped in to see them, was insistent that it must wait until January. It was too close to Christmas now to put it out.
They finished work at around ten thirty. John was in good spirits, pleased with the work he’d done. After reminding producer Jack Douglas to be there ‘bright and early’ the following day to complete the mixing, and deciding not to get something to eat before going home, he and Yoko got into their waiting limousine and were driven back up Central Park West.
It was around 10.54 as the vehicle pulled up at the kerbside outside the Dakota. Getting out of the car, he and Yoko walked the few paces towards the security officer’s cubicle in the bridged carriageway entrance to the building. Yoko was slightly ahead, when John, who was carrying some cassettes of the evening’s work, heard a voice call to him from a few feet behind. ‘Mr Lennon . . . ?’
Still walking, he half-turned to see who it was. At that moment four bullets ripped into his back. His walk became a stagger as he strived to reach the Dakota’s security cubicle, before dropping the cassettes and collapsing inside it. Yoko was screaming. The young security officer on duty was pressing the alarm to call the police. As he lay on the floor of the cubicle, blood was pouring from John’s mouth and chest.
Outside on the Dakota forecourt the plump young man for whom John had earlier autographed a copy of Double Fantasy dropped his gun. Making no attempt to escape, he hung around; then, taking out a paperback copy of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher In The Rye, he began to read.
His name was Mark Chapman, and he had just fulfilled his ambition. He had made himself famous.