The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  “I wasn’t saying the Beatles are better than Jesus or God or Christianity,” John explains. “I could have said TV, or cinema, or anything else that’s popular, or motorcars are bigger than Jesus. But I just said Beatles because, you know, that’s the easiest one for me. I just never thought of the repercussions. I never really thought of it.”

  He tells the assembled reporters that when his words were “put into a kid’s magazine [DATEbook],” his original intention “just loses its meaning or its context immediately…and everybody starts making their own versions of it.”

  Paul feels for his bandmate and friend. “Because John’s quote was taken out of context, it was widely misunderstood,” he’ll say in a 2019 interview. “He was actually making a point about church congregations shrinking, therefore I felt very bad for John during the whole episode.”

  “I didn’t want to talk because I thought they’d kill me,” John later says of that face-off with the press, “because they take things so seriously [in the States]. I mean, they shoot you and then they realize it wasn’t that important.”

  That night, thirteen thousand forgiving fans “hail Beatles in Chicago,” as Salt Lake City’s Deseret News reports. At the August 13 stop, Detroit’s Olympia Stadium, picketers messaging JESUS SAVES—JOHN SINS and LIMEY GO HOME! are vastly outnumbered, the Associated Press reports, by nearly thirty thousand fans “not deterred by the story of protest kicked up recently by Beatle John Lennon.”

  Cleveland Municipal Stadium is to host the band on August 14. But even as a Baptist minister warns parishioners that any concert attendees among them face expulsion from the congregation, the Vatican sides with John: “It cannot be denied that there is some foundation to the latest observations of John Lennon about atheism or the distraction of many people.”

  But papal validation doesn’t stop the large-scale burning of Beatles records known as Beatles bonfires. On August 11, the AP publishes a photo from Chester, South Carolina, of a KKK grand dragon feeding albums into the flames of a burning cross. And though WAQY-AM disc jockey Tommy Charles releases a statement accepting John’s apology and canceling the Birmingham bonfire, the one organized by radio station KLUE in Longview, Texas, happens on August 13. Two days later, a picture of a teenage Longview girl armed with a torch, igniting a pile of albums, goes out over the UPI wire. By then, the Beatles are already at DC Stadium (later RFK Stadium) for their August 15 show.

  In the clubhouse of baseball’s Washington Senators, who were in the midst of a losing season in the American League, the Beatles face down a press corps primed to throw curveballs. Yet the Washington Post’s Leroy Aarons had scooped them all with an advance sympathetic interview headlined “CAN’T EXPRESS MYSELF VERY WELL”; BEATLE APOLOGIZES FOR REMARKS, which explained that the religious views of the twenty-five-year-old John were “more of a groping than a finding.” Regarding the ten days of bonfires: “That was the real shock, the physical burning. I couldn’t go away knowing that I created another little piece of hate in the world.”

  Hate personified appears at the stadium in the form of five red-, white,- and green-robed members of the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Ku Klux Klan. They picket but don’t interrupt the concert. The music goes on in Philadelphia, Toronto, and Boston—where numerous Kennedys, including Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s teenage children, Joseph and Kathleen, have traveled from Hyannis Port to join the audience of twenty-five thousand.

  They are scheduled to perform two shows at the Mid-South Coliseum, in Memphis, on Friday, August 19, even though on August 10, local leaders issued a unanimous resolution to “advise the Beatles that they are not welcome in the City of Memphis.”

  Despite warnings made to Tony Barrow that “religious zealots…were actually threatening to assassinate John Lennon if the Beatles came to Memphis,” the band boards its charter flight.

  “Send John out first. He’s the one they want,” George suggests jokingly, while John plays the sacrificial martyr: “You might as well paint a target on me.”

  But John is truly fearful.

  George is, too. “All the time, constantly,” he feels “frightened by things” because it’s been less than three years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

  “There was always an edge in America,” Ringo says later. “We knew they did have guns.”

  Yet more than twenty thousand adoring fans have paid the ticket price of $5.50. One young woman tells a reporter, “I love Jesus, but I love those Beatles, too.”

  * * *

  Surrounded by a police detail, the Beatles file into the back of the armored van that will transport them to the Mid-South Coliseum. A member of their entourage remembers that “we had to lie down, because they thought snipers might shoot us.”

  The Beatles take the stage at 4:00 p.m. and play an uneventful show.

  During their second performance, George is singing the first verse of “If I Needed Someone” (on the Rubber Soul album in the UK, Yesterday and Today in America), when a loud popping noise—the sound a gun would make—rips through the concert hall.

  “Every one of us,” John later recalls, “look[ed] at each other, because each thought it was the other that had been shot. It was that bad.”

  When they get offstage, the band learns that two teenagers had lobbed a cherry bomb from the upper balcony.

  A pair of teenage girls had smuggled their own contraband into the coliseum: a cassette recorder. In 2007, the “cherry bomb tape” surfaces. Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reviews the recording, and the moment the Beatles react to the explosion, “the men of the moment blast off into double-time, Lennon positively flogging his rhythm guitar,” though a 1966 article from UPI notes that “the four performers didn’t bat an eye or miss a note” when a “cherry bomb went off with a loud report at the booted feet of drummer Ringo Starr.”

  There are six more cities to play before the tour is complete. On August 21, contending with rainy conditions that caused the cancellation of the show at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field—“The only gig we ever missed!” says George—and impeded travel to St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, the band reaches its limit.

  “After the gig,” says Paul, “I remember us getting in a big, empty steel-lined wagon, like a removal van. There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold on to something, and at that moment everyone said, ‘Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.’”

  When the band arrives in Los Angeles ahead of the August 28 show at the Hollywood Bowl, Capitol Records executive Ken Mansfield sees the stress on John’s face. “When I hung out with him years before, he had this carefree, lighthearted attitude, but in ’66, his mood was entirely different. He was struggling mightily to get out from the comments he made.”

  John says of the cumulative effect of the backlash, “It was as if they were all in a big movie and we were the ones trapped in the middle of it.”

  There is one last show—a thirty-minute set—to be played at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on Monday, August 29. An AP photographer captures conflicting signage—GOD SAVE THE BEATLES and JESUS LOVES YOU—DO THE BEATLES?—while one fan declares: LENNON SAVES.

  The Beatles need saving from the ordeal of this American tour. But first, a memento. Moments before the band takes the stage, Paul makes a first-ever request of press man Tony Barrow: “Tape it, will you? Tape the show.”

  Following the closing notes of “Paperback Writer,” Paul steps to the microphone. “We’d like to ask you to join in and, er, clap, sing, talk, do anything. Anyway, the song is…good night.”

  They play “Long Tall Sally.” Back in December of 1960, the song was their opening number at Litherland Town Hall. Barrow’s tape ends before the band finishes the song.

  John is the last to leave the stage. He stares at the crowd, taking it all in for one final time. Then he joins the others in their rush for the armored car that will take them to the airport.

  On board their London-bound fl
ight, George raises a glass. “Right—that’s it, I’m not a Beatle anymore!”

  Three years earlier, when the Beatles’ popularity was first exploding, John had been sanguine when asked by a journalist about his future plans. “I’ll just develop what I’m doing at the moment, although whatever I say now I’ll change my mind next week,” he’d stated. “This isn’t show business. It’s something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines. You don’t go on from this. You do this and then you finish.”

  By the time Revolver tops the American charts, on September 10, the Beatles are back in England.

  For good.

  Chapter 32

  Love and hope and sex and dreams…

  —“Shattered”

  If you wanted to, John, you could be a very interesting actor,” director Richard Lester says, offering him the role of the musketeer Gripweed in How I Won the War, Lester’s black farce about World War II.

  John signs on. But when shooting gets under way in Almeria, Spain, in September of 1966, he has trouble on set, struggling to remember his lines and fighting boredom in between scenes.

  He drives around in his Rolls-Royce and trips on acid nearly every day.

  Gets nostalgic and daydreams about his childhood in Liverpool.

  What about Brian? John hasn’t seen much of him since Los Angeles, where an opportunistic ex of Brian’s stole his briefcase, filled with cash and incriminating details about his sexuality. The thorny situation kept Brian from witnessing the Beatles’ final concert.

  John keeps music in his head—the brass band from the orphanage at Strawberry Field. He nostalgically recalls his forbidden (by Mimi) youthful forays to the old Gothic mansion, with its overgrown garden and trees made for climbing.

  “I have visions of Strawberry Fields,” he says, telling Rolling Stone in 1968 that “Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go.” But unlike the 1965 ballad “In My Life,” which was also inspired by memories of Liverpool, this new song is penned by a hippie sage.

  The lines roll off his pen. He makes a demo on a portable tape recorder.

  On holiday in Spain with Ringo and Maureen, Cyn and John quarrel over his drug use. “John was still searching,” Cynthia Lennon will later write, “whereas I thought I had found what I wanted out of life.”

  In his final on-screen moments in How I Won the War, John plays a death scene, speaking the line, “I knew it would end this way.” He then addresses the audience directly: “You knew it would end this way, too, didn’t you?” (When the film is released, in October of 1967, reviews are lackluster, but critics can’t deny that the images of a dying Lennon hold profound emotional impact. And perhaps most influential: the round “granny glasses” his character wears, which John makes part of his personal style forever after.)

  With the lyrics for what would become “Strawberry Fields Forever” spinning around in his head, John returns home from Spain. In a departure from his usual inclination to write quickly, he continues to work on the song.

  * * *

  In the local newspaper, John reads an article describing a 1966 black-and-white movie directed by a Japanese avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono, a member of the interdisciplinary, experimental global artists collective called Fluxus. The five-and-a-half-minute Four (Fluxfilm no. 16), now archived in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is described by Fluxus founder George Maciunas as “sequences of buttock moment as various performers walked. Filmed at constant distance.”

  John laughs but is secretly intrigued by the artist’s brashness and honesty.

  So when John Dunbar (married to musician Marianne Faithfull, who in 1966 began a highly publicized romance with Mick Jagger), co-owner of a year-old Mayfair gallery called Indica, invites John to the November 8 opening of Ono’s Unfinished Paintings and Objects, the Beatle shows up a day early, while she’s still installing the exhibition.

  Yoko Ono is wearing a black sweater and black pants to match her long black hair, which is combed straight down around a center part.

  “Never bring anybody until it’s all ready,” she chides Dunbar. She seems furious—until she takes a look at John, who says, “Maybe I should follow you and see what you’re doing.”

  “He was shaved—and he was wearing a suit,” she later recalls. “Up to then, English men had all looked kind of weedy to me. This was the first sexy one I met.”

  Yoko is seven years older than John and married to her second husband, an American artist. They have a daughter, Kyoko, the same age as Julian.

  “Well,” John says, “what’s the event?”

  She hands him a little card. He opens it and sees a single word:

  Breathe.

  “You mean, like, exhale?” he asks with an exaggerated pant.

  “That’s it. You’ve got it,” she replies with a smile.

  Yoko is also exhibiting an apple. When John sees the price—£200—he has a flash of fear that the artist is after his Beatles riches.

  Yoko continues to follow until John stops at her Ceiling Painting. He climbs a white stepladder and uses a magnifying glass to inspect another small card suspended from the ceiling.

  In the center, she’s written YES—a very small YES.

  John smiles at the artist’s positive message—and he’s completely enthralled. “I thought it was fantastic,” John later says. “I got the humor immediately.”

  John goes home to his wife. That night, in bed, sleeping next to Cyn, he’s still thinking about Yoko Ono.

  * * *

  Riding a wave of emotion, John returns to Studio Two at Abbey Road. On November 24, 1966, he performs a solo acoustic version of his new song for the band, the producers, and the sound engineers.

  “When I first heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ I was sidesmacked,” George Martin recalls. “Even with John singing it alone on his acoustic guitar, I thought it was a wonderful piece of work.”

  John isn’t content with the sound. He leads the Beatles through multiple versions, from dreamy to metallic, ultimately calling on George Martin to combine two of the arrangements.

  “Well, there are two things against it,” the producer explains. “One is that they’re in different keys. The other is that they’re in different tempos.”

  With a “You can fix it, George,” John doesn’t have to choose.

  This time.

  But the pressures on the Beatles, his marriage, and his fragile psyche are mounting, and only John can decide his next move.

  December 6, 1980

  Jude Stein and her friend Jeri return to the Dakota shortly after 5:00 p.m. Their new friend from Hawaii, Mark Chapman, said he would meet them there and promised to take them to dinner at a Japanese restaurant.

  “I don’t see Mark anywhere,” Jeri says.

  “Let’s wait a few minutes. Maybe he’s running late.”

  “I hope he gets here soon. It’s getting cold.”

  And dark, Jude thinks. The streets are barely safe during the day. At night, the city turns into a horror show. The “rotten apple” is setting record levels for murder, rape, burglary, and car theft. It’s no wonder people are fleeing in droves.

  There’s no one normal here anymore. The city needs normal people—people like Mark Chapman. Nice and friendly. Kind. Polite. I would have definitely gone out with him.

  Jeri wants to stick around to see if John Lennon makes an appearance. Jude, though, is eyeing a homeless guy who’s approaching them. He’s doing that creepy zombie walk, which makes her think he’s on crack. The “poor man’s cocaine” is everywhere. Crackheads are mugging and killing people.

  “Where are the cops when you need them?” Jude says. “Let’s get going.”

  They’re about to leave when a yellow cab slides to the curb in front of the building. John Lennon emerges, wearing a tan jacket. He takes a drag from his cigarette—a Gitane for sure!—and waves to them.

  But he doesn’t rush inside the Dakota. He comes over to them.

  John greets his t
wo loyal fans by name. He chats with them for a few minutes about his new album.

  “I believe it’s my best work since the Beatles,” John says. “I feel truly alive for the first time in twenty years.”

  You should have come back, Mark, Jude thinks. You missed having your dream come true—standing right next to, and speaking with, John Lennon.

  Chapter 33

  I’m not feelin’ too good myself.

  —“Feelin’ Alright?”

  For Christmas in 1966, paid members of the Beatles fan club receive their annual flexi disc from the band featuring a Christmas message. This year’s, called “Pantomime: Everywhere It’s Christmas,” is a wacky six and a half minutes of skits and novelty tunes that the band recorded between takes of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

  At Studio Two, the holiday spirit feels more like a burn. The Beatles have been putting in long hours there since the end of November.

  The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds (released by Capitol on May 16, 1966) and John’s song “Strawberry Fields Forever” have lit a pair of creative fires under Paul. Just a week later, on December 29, he comes in and lays down the piano tracks for his own tribute to bygone Liverpool, “Penny Lane.”

  This is how it had always been with John and Paul. “He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields,’” says Paul, “I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane.’” No question that it was “to compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition.”

  Even so, the Beatles are many songs short of an album, but Brian is pressing for a new hit.

  “I must have a really great single,” the manager tells George Martin. “What have you got?”

  “Well, I’ve got three tracks,” the producer tells him, “and two of them are the best they’ve ever made. We could put the two together and make a smashing single.”