There was blood everywhere. Although a patrolling police car was at the Dakota within a couple of minutes, the bullet wounds in John had done devastating damage. As more police arrived to arrest the gunman, John was being carried by two police officers to their car and rushed to nearby Roosevelt Hospital. ‘Do you know who you are?’ asked one of the officers. Half the world knew who he was.
The doctors in the resuscitation emergency department had been alerted and were waiting as John was rushed in. But there was nothing anyone could have done. John was pronounced dead at 11.15. The official cause of death was given as shock as a result of massive haemorrhaging. John had bled to death.
Yoko, who had been taken to the hospital in a following police car, was told immediately, and David Geffen was summoned to the hospital to be with her. Then Yoko was driven back alone to the Dakota, where she was let into the building by a side entrance.
By then, as news of John’s murder was being told and retold all night on radio and television stations, crowds were emerging on to streets around the Dakota. In London it was already early morning on 9 December, and I was cancelling my flight to New York, and sitting down to write the obituary John had enquired about a decade earlier. It seemed heartless at the time, and it was difficult. But that’s what a journalist does.
Yoko would tell how she phoned Mimi to tell her. But Paul, who had become accustomed to turning off his telephone at night, didn’t hear until Linda arrived back at their home in Sussex after having driven their children to school, having been told by other mothers at the school gate. Cynthia was staying with Ringo’s ex-wife Maureen when she heard. Yoko asked her not to go to New York. She understood. But both Julian and Ringo went.
Nearly everyone who is old enough can remember where they were when they heard the news. It wasn’t simply that a famous rock star had died. John was more than that. He had become symbolic of his time, of the music, of the Sixties, of saying what he thought, and of his generation. At that time, America had become, sadly, familiar with political assassinations following the killings of President Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But those had all been, in some part, politically motivated murders. John, as the world would come to know during the next few days, had been killed simply because of how famous he was.
For days the Dakota was under siege from thousands of fans, as radio stations around the world played records by John and the Beatles, newspapers published special supplements, and television stations quickly assembled documentaries. And, as is the nature of these things, Double Fantasy shot to the top of the charts, and ‘Imagine’ was re-released.
There was no funeral for him and there would be no gravestone. Thirty-six hours after his death, John’s body was driven in a hearse to Hartsdale Crematorium in New York State and swiftly, and privately, cremated. When Yoko returned to the Dakota she asked Julian, who had recently arrived, if he would like to hold the still warm urn containing the ashes of his father.
The following Sunday there would be vigils in Liverpool, where fans chorused ‘We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah’, and another across the road from the Dakota in New York’s Central Park, in the area now known as Strawberry Fields. Yoko watched from a window as a message from her to the fans was read out, in which she said John had prayed for everyone.
She no doubt meant well, but, for those who knew him, it’s difficult to imagine John in prayer for humanity. But, as if to satisfy some emotional demand, his image was already being whitewashed, and his memory canonised. In life he’d been a joker and a rebel. In death he was already being seen as a martyr. There was irony in that. From his very emergence onto the world stage, he’d made no secret of the fact that he didn’t believe in the veneration of dead stars. ‘I don’t believe in dead heroes,’ he once told me, repeated to Playboy just a few weeks before his death: ‘I don’t appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious, or of dead James Dean, or of dead John Wayne . . . It’s garbage to me. I worship the people who survive.’ He wouldn’t have appreciated the worship of dead John Lennon either, but that was what he got.
Though millions who didn’t know him loved him, sometimes those who knew him well didn’t always like him. A natural leader, who could so easily be led and who saw himself as a chameleon, he was at various times a clever, witty, angry, funny, sharp-tongued, far-sighted, impetuous, talented, guilt-laden, preaching, sardonic, exaggerating, gullible, aggressive, unfaithful, obsessive, self-absorbed, outspoken, jealous, sometimes cruel but often generous man. He was certainly no saint, but, to his friends, he was hard not to like. Above all, he was absolutely a one-off.