The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  He slams the door on Alf in disgust.

  * * *

  During repeated acid trips—a thousand over time, John later estimates—“a lot of early childhood was coming out.”

  A 1964 book called The Psychedelic Experience pulls him even deeper. Lines jump out at John and seize his mind and soul:

  Do not struggle.

  Trust your divinity, trust your brain, trust your companions.

  Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.

  Coauthored by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert—former Harvard clinical psychologists ousted from the university not only for taking the psychotropics LSD and psilocybin alongside their research subjects but also for forcing their students to take them—The Psychedelic Experience is about the therapeutic uses of mild-altering drugs. John interprets the book’s message as “I should destroy my ego and I did.”

  So he wants no part of the extensive tour UK Brian is proposing for December of 1965. The band agrees to only nine UK dates. Then they’ll make three international stops before they reprise their American summer tour in 1966.

  On April 6, 1966, the Beatles return to the studio to record what John dubs “the acid album.”

  John wishes Stu Sutcliffe were still alive to design the cover for the album they’ll call Revolver. Between 1963 and 1965, photographer Robert Freeman had created covers for four British Beatles albums, including a “stretched” look for Rubber Soul, but John wants to push it further. So he calls up Klaus Voormann, their German artist friend from Hamburg, and tasks him to work with Robert Whitaker, who’d been the Beatles’ official photographer since they’d met during the 1964 Australian tour, to create a distinctive new look that combines drawings and photographs.

  John is “eating acid all the time,” and he writes “a sad song, an acidy song,” which opens “She said / I know what it’s like to be dead”—about the story Peter Fonda told the year before in Los Angeles. And he plays George Martin the song he wants to close out the album. It’s called “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Accompanying himself on the acoustic guitar, he sings lines straight from The Psychedelic Experience: “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream…”

  December 6, 1980

  You gals are waiting for someone, I bet.”

  He gives the two women standing in front of the Dakota his best smile to put them at ease.

  Now small talk.

  Successful manipulation, Mark knows, requires that the prey feel safe at all times. Charm, kindness, and flattery must be used constantly in order to disarm the victim.

  When he met Gloria, at the travel agency in Hawaii, he told her he wanted to take a trip around the world. She worked with him for hours, days, planning the fantasy voyage down to the last detail. With every moment in his presence, Gloria was falling deeper in love.

  These two young women are eyeing him suspiciously. Which is to be expected. He is a stranger, and this is New York. Bad, awful things happen here every day, every hour—especially to young, attractive women.

  “As a matter of fact,” the curly-haired brunette says, “we’re waiting for you.” She gives him the once-over. “It wasn’t worth it.”

  Mark is genuinely stung by the insult. He shows it, too—it’s important to display the psychic wound. Then, when the aggressor reveals vulnerability, brought on by innate niceness and strong desire to avoid appearing rude—overpower her.

  He reaches for the gun.

  “I was only teasing you,” the brunette says and smiles. She offers her hand.

  Mark releases his grip on the revolver, shakes her hand, and introduces himself.

  “I’m Jude Stein,” she says. “This is my friend Jeri Moll.”

  “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad,” Mark sings. He chuckles. “I bet nobody ever said that to you before.”

  Jeri Moll makes a groaning sound.

  Mark knows she’s thinking he’s just like any other guy. I’m not. She’ll see.

  He’ll play their game—for now. These two clearly have a sense of entitlement. They think their proximity to the Dakota makes them the most knowledgeable of all Lennon fans. The most special.

  “I heard John Lennon lives here,” he says, all innocence. “I was hoping to get his autograph. Is he in town?”

  “You can be sure of one thing,” Jude replies. “John Lennon is somewhere in New York City.”

  His heart surges with joy. His smile is genuine.

  Mark tells them he’s flown from Hawaii for a chance to meet his idol.

  He gauges their reaction. They’re falling for his normal act.

  He gets the women to open up to him some more. They’re both in their late twenties, and they tell him that for the past five years they’ve come here almost every single night to try to talk to John and Yoko.

  “We’re permanent fixtures here,” Jude says. “And John and Yoko know us well.”

  “Really well,” Jeri Moll adds. “We’re like family.”

  Bullshit, Mark wants to scream. Lennon doesn’t care about his fans—he lies to them.

  “Back in October,” Jude says, “we were waiting out here with birthday gifts for John and Sean. Yoko saw us, and when we told her about the presents? She invited us up.”

  Jeri Moll squeals with excitement. “To their apartment!”

  “I mean, we were shocked. I’ve never been more shocked in my entire life.”

  You will be, Mark thinks, smiling.

  “Yoko called Sean over,” Jude says, “and after we gave him the present, she invited us for tea, in their dining room. Can you believe it?”

  You’re so blind. So blind and stupid and mindless. Lennon is not Jesus, and I’m going to prove it to you.

  “That’s…wow,” Mark says, putting on a face of bewilderment and wonder, like a child who has been invited inside Santa’s secret workshop. “That is so amazing.”

  Mark keeps encouraging them to talk. If what they’re saying is true—and it may very well be, because the two women seem to know not only the doorman but also everyone entering and leaving the building—they could prove useful. When Lennon arrives, he’ll feel comfortable approaching them—will want to approach them. Which will bring Lennon closer. To me.

  Mark’s hand squeezes the gun, his skin tingling with excitement as Jude says, “Have you listened to Double Fantasy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should buy a copy. I think it’s John’s greatest work. If you have a copy, I bet he’ll sign it.”

  What a perfect ruse, Mark realizes. If he’s holding it, Lennon will be more apt to stop and sign it. I’ll give Lennon the album and then, instead of removing a pen from my jacket pocket, I’ll remove my gun and shoot him.

  Mark waves good-bye and walks up Columbus Avenue, where he finds a record store with posters of Lennon in the windows. He purchases a copy of Double Fantasy and stares at the photo on the cover, a black-and-white shot of John and Yoko kissing.

  He imagines his face on the cover.

  Imagines himself leaning forward to kiss Yoko.

  Imagines Lennon lying on the ground, dead, covered in blood.

  It’s late afternoon when he returns to the Dakota. The two young women are still there, standing vigil. As he waits with them, they study the album from front to back.

  Jude and Jeri agree that “I’m Losing You” is the best song on the album. “It’s John at his most emotional,” they say with a sigh.

  Mark’s never listened to any of the songs, but he’s read enough reviews. He counters with Yoko’s harsh response song, which accuses John of “getting phony”: “I’m Moving On.”

  Now it’s time for him to do the same.

  “I didn’t come all this way to argue with the two of you,” he says. “I imagine I’ll be doing more than just meeting John Lennon.”

  A car pulls up to the front of the building.

  Mark keeps his hand on the gun as the passenger steps out.

  It’s not Lennon.

&nb
sp; Every time a car stops, he experiences an adrenaline rush. Is this John Lennon? Will he step out and greet them? Each time Mark keeps his hand on the revolver.

  By early evening, with no sign of Lennon, Mark decides to pack it in. There’s a new day coming. He returns to the Y to strategize.

  Chapter 29

  Guess I got what I deserve.

  —“Baby Blue”

  At the end of February in 1966, twenty-five-year-old reporter Maureen Cleave asks twenty-six-year-old John Lennon for an interview. They’ve been friendly ever since she started covering the band for the Evening Standard in February of 1963, back when it was still a big deal to have a London paper mention them at all.

  Even so, it’s a major coup when John invites her to his house for a sit-down—not one but four exclusives (each of the Beatles agrees to speak with Cleave individually).

  John is being generous to his friend, but he also has a point to make. Dubbed the “cheeky Beatle” or “the smart Beatle” because of his snappy one-liners and naughty double entendres, he wants to show that the members of the band, the so-called mop-tops, are free thinkers on the important issues of the day, such as the escalating war in Vietnam and social injustices happening around the world.

  “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This” runs in the March 4 edition of the Evening Standard. Cleave reports on Lennon’s intense bouts of self-education, most recently the Indian music George has introduced him to and his own reading on world religion.

  “Christianity will go,” John predicts in the midst of their wide-ranging conversation. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

  Says John later, “A few people wrote into the papers, and a few wrote back, saying, ‘So what, he said that. Who is he anyway,’ or they said, ‘So he can have his own opinion.’ And then it just vanished.”

  The band’s prim image is starting to chafe. Beatles photographer Robert Whitaker observes, “All over the world I’d watched people worshipping like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.”

  When the opportunity arises to shoot something different with Whitaker, the Beatles are eager.

  “There we were, supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were really aware of life,” John says.

  Whitaker agrees. “I got fed up with taking squeaky-clean pictures of the Beatles, and I thought I’d revolutionize what pop idols are,” he later says in an interview. Near the end of March, the band books a photo shoot with the twenty-six-year-old, and they take some surrealism-inflected photos of a smiling Fab Four dressed in white butcher coats, holding slabs of meat and dismembered baby dolls. Whitaker “knew we liked black humor and sick jokes,” Paul recalls. “It didn’t seem too offensive to us. It was just dolls and a lot of meat.”

  With the band’s latest American tour scheduled for August, Capitol decides to release Yesterday and Today, a compilation of songs pulled from the American versions of Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver plus the previously released “We Can Work It Out” / “Day Tripper” single. Capitol needs a design for the cover.

  John wants to send the record label Whitaker’s “butcher” photograph as a cover image.

  The Beatles, against Brian’s wishes, have already included this photo in promotional materials for their tenth consecutive British number-one single, “Paperback Writer.” No one in Britain complained, but Capitol balks at using it for an album cover. Although they eventually give in and ship 750,000 albums ahead of the June 15, 1966, release, nearly every record store refuses to display them.

  “It’s as relevant as Vietnam,” John explains to the press about the controversial image. “If the public can accept something as cruel as the war, they can accept this cover.”

  Nevertheless, Capitol can’t. On June 14, the company recalls the record, incurring shipping and manufacturing costs to replace the controversial cover photograph with another one Whitaker shot, showing the band gathered around an open steamer trunk.

  Though the “butcher cover” remains a highly sought-after Beatles collectible, the chart-topping album is a money loser for Capitol, the only Beatles record with that dubious distinction.

  * * *

  Ahead of the August tour dates, the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow—originator of the band’s nickname, the Fab Four—sends Maureen Cleave’s Evening Standard profiles to DATEbook, an American teen magazine favored by the band for its progressive social vision. “I think the style and content is very much in line with the sort of thing DATEbook likes to use,” Barrow writes to the editors, who agree. They reprint the profiles in their September issue (on stands in mid-July) with a quotation from John (the second of eight) on the cover: “I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”

  The Associated Press picks up on the story, and two radio disc jockeys mobilize their teenage listeners to denounce John Lennon and defend Jesus Christ.

  “This is Doug Layton and Tommy Charles reminding you that our fantastic Beatles boycott is still in effect,” Layton broadcasts from WAQY-AM’s Birmingham, Alabama, studio. “Don’t you forget what the Beatles have said.”

  The disc jockeys organize a burning of Beatles records as a publicity stunt to boost ratings. Charles adds, “Don’t forget to take your Beatles records and Beatles paraphernalia to any one of our fourteen pickup points in Birmingham, Alabama, and turn them in this week if possible.”

  The band has no idea the trouble these two men are about to cause.

  Chapter 30

  Every way you look at it you lose.

  —“Mrs. Robinson”

  Ratings at WAQY-AM are up—in part because of the sensational efforts of station disc jockeys Doug Layton and Tommy Charles. They borrow a giant tree-grinding machine from the Birmingham town council and rename it “the Beatle grinder.” On August 8, three days before the first American tour date, kids show up with records and photos and feed them into the machine, which chomps them into dust.

  Pennsylvania senator Robert Fleming introduces a resolution to ban the Beatles—they’re supposed to play Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium on August 16—and pull their records from jukeboxes statewide.

  “We can get along very well without the Beatles,” Fleming tells reporters, “but there are multitudes of us that cannot get along without Jesus Christ.”

  When the city of Boston denies Democratic state representative Charles Iannello’s request to revoke the Beatles’ permit for a concert planned at Suffolk Downs (where the legendary thoroughbred Seabiscuit once ran), he asks, “Who are these four creeps to put themselves above the High and Mighty? Do you think they’ll do anything for the morals of our teenagers? We’ve got enough problems.”

  * * *

  So does John.

  Freda Kelly, Brian Epstein’s personal secretary as well as the secretary for the Beatles fan club, delivers letters by the sackful to John’s mock Tudor mansion in Weybridge. Cyn divides them into two piles—fan mail and hate mail.

  Each day, John asks Cyn which pile is bigger. The answer is always the same: “Letters arrived at the house full of threats, hate, and venom,” Cyn says.

  Psychics are sending him their predictions. One foresees the Beatles will die in a plane crash, another that John will be shot while on tour in the United States.

  On August 5, 1966 (August 8 in the United States), the album Revolver and the double A–side single “Eleanor Rigby” / “Yellow Submarine” are released in the UK. The Beatles’ fourteen-city concert tour is set to begin in less than a week. They’ve already decided not to play any of the new music live, since it won’t be heard over the screaming fans, but they haven’t planned for
the screaming press.

  On August 6, Brian Epstein holds an ineffectual press conference at New York’s Americana Hotel.

  “What will it cost to cancel the tour?” Brian asks business associate Nat Weiss afterward.

  “A million dollars,” Weiss answers.

  But there’s another compelling financial reason to perform the American shows: British taxes.

  During the spring recording sessions for Revolver, George Harrison contributed the song “Taxman,” a biting commentary on the 95 percent “supertax” that Labour Party prime minister Harold Wilson proposed on high earners. “Should 5 percent appear too small,” Harrison wrote, “be thankful I don’t take it all.”

  “They were never happy with that,” Beatles’ accountant Harry Pinsker explains. “That’s why George wrote ‘Taxman.’ They’d been poor boys who’d worked hard and made money, and now someone was trying to take it away.”

  The American tour will make them around $4 million (more than $32 million in today’s dollars). And they won’t have to contend with the supertax.

  John and Cyn hug each other tightly as they say their good-byes at London’s Heathrow Airport. The band arrives in Chicago and checks in to the Astor Tower hotel, in Chicago’s Gold Coast. It’s August 11, 1966, the night before the Beatles are to play the first of two shows at the International Amphitheatre, and John is sitting in a wooden chair inside his suite on the twenty-seventh floor, fighting to gain control of his shaking hands.

  “If anything were to happen to any of you,” Brian tells them, “I’d never forgive myself.”

  Chapter 31

  Nobody told me there’d be days like these.

  —“Nobody Told Me”

  On August 12, John and his bandmates enter Tony Barrow’s suite, where under the press man’s watchful eye they’ll face nearly three dozen reporters. John sits down solemnly and leans across a table into a solitary microphone.