The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  The ashram is halfway to Tibet and halfway around the world from Los Angeles. At the Beverly Hilton, on February 29, 1968, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band wins Album of the Year and Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, at the tenth annual Grammy Awards.

  The Beatles are in absentia. They are in the audience of the maharishi, who’s insistent that they end all drug use.

  George is a quick convert. “The meditation buzz is incredible,” he says. “I get higher than I ever did with drugs.”

  Paul has trouble banishing the music from his mind. “The minute you clear it,” he says, “a thought comes in and says, ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’”

  Or two. During a month at the ashram in Rishikesh, he and John write most of the songs for what will become The Beatles, a double album known as the White Album after its minimalist white sleeve.

  Their productivity causes George much consternation. He argues, “We’re not fucking here to do the next album, we’re here to meditate!”

  “The way George is going he’ll be flying on a magic carpet by the time he’s forty,” John jokes, though he does take the meditation seriously and practices it for eight hours at a stretch. His brain is then flooded with lyrics for what he calls “the most miserable songs on earth.” He explains that “in ‘Yer Blues,’ when I wrote ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I wasn’t kidding. That’s how I felt…up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal.”

  John is aching for Yoko. And then her letters start arriving.

  “I’m a cloud,” she writes on a postcard. “Look in the sky.” He tells Cynthia he needs more space, soon moving out of the bungalow they’d been sharing.

  But he doesn’t stop making music. “John was keen to learn the finger-style guitar I played and he was a good student,” Donovan recalls. “John wrote ‘Julia’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ [for fellow maharishi disciple Prudence Farrow, Mia’s nineteen-year-old sister] based on the picking I taught him.”

  John tells Paul that he’s waiting for the maharishi to “slip me the real secret mantra which would give me happiness.”

  The fantastical transaction never materializes, not even when John flies high over the Ganges on a helicopter ride with the guru.

  “Why were you so keen? You really wanted to get in that helicopter,” Paul says to John after he returns to the ashram.

  John replies, “I thought he might slip me the answer!”

  Cynthia has hers.

  “Something had gone very wrong between John and me,” she says. “It was as if a brick wall had gone up between us.”

  In April, on their return flight to London, John demolishes it. He makes a long, drunken confession detailing the numerous transgressions he’s committed against their marriage—with groupies, with reporters, with other musicians, with the wives of friends, and countless others. In fact, he’s never been faithful; he’s “always had some kind of affairs going.” In the close confines of the airplane, Cyn is forced to listen.

  But it’s a one-way street. “We had no problems at home” is Cynthia’s viewpoint. “We really didn’t have a cross word.” Though even she sees that John is slipping further and further away. “At home he would be lost in a daydream: present, but absent. I’d talk to him, but he wouldn’t hear me.”

  * * *

  “We are going in with clear heads and hoping for the best,” Paul says as the band prepares to record the dozens of songs he and John wrote while in India.

  But first, they fly to New York. On May 14, they’ll announce the launch of Apple Records.

  Though cynics hear the refrain of “Taxman,” John emphasizes his creative, altruistic vision for the multifaceted company (incorporated in London in April of 1967 and headquartered at 94 Baker Street) that is to produce not only music but also film and even clothing. “We hope to make a thing that’s free,” he says in a television interview, “where people can come and do and record.”

  John has even more to do. He sends Cyn to relax with friends in Greece (Julian stays with the housekeeper), then goes on holiday—from his marriage. The gravitational pull of Yoko Ono is too strong for him to resist.

  John calls Yoko. “Are you coming?” he asks. “Take a taxi.”

  It’s midnight when she arrives at Weybridge.

  John is normally cool. But in Yoko’s presence, he’s sweating, unsure of himself.

  “We can do two things,” he says to her while they’re sitting in his living room, in the uncomfortable company of Pete Shotton, John’s friend and former bandmate in the original Quarry Men. “One is sit here and chat, or go up and make music.”

  Yoko, the daughter of a successful concert pianist, studied musical composition at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York. Together they begin to improvise the sounds and vocals that in November of 1968 appear on their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.

  They make love at sunrise. In the morning, Shotton finds John in the kitchen.

  “We’ve been up all night,” John tells him.

  That much is obvious. What John says next is the real stunner. “I want to go and live with Yoko.”

  * * *

  Cynthia opens the door to the sunroom. It’s May 22, and she’s returned one day early from Greece. She finds her husband and a Japanese woman dressed in robes and sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing each other.

  Cynthia freezes. She recognizes the woman—the artist Yoko Ono. They’d met once before at a meditation meeting.

  Cyn stares, blinking rapidly, as if trying to wash the sight from her eyes.

  No. No, this can’t be happening.

  “Oh, hi,” John says.

  Yoko looks in the opposite direction as Cyn stumbles out of the sunroom and leaves the house.

  After a tenuous reconciliation that lasts only a few weeks, John sends Cyn on holiday again, this time to Italy.

  Yoko moves into John’s house. She’s left her second husband, Tony Cox, and their young daughter, Kyoko.

  John has never felt more alive—or happier. Yoko has transformed him.

  They become inseparable.

  Chapter 35

  And while Lennon read a book on Marx…

  —“American Pie”

  I want to put out what I feel about revolution,” John tells Yoko.

  That word, revolution, has been swirling in his head ever since his sojourn in India. John and Yoko follow the news. Every headline shouts of fresh violence. John F. Kennedy. Assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated. Twenty thousand of the nearly half million US troops in Vietnam. Killed in action.

  John risks hostile fire on multiple fronts when on May 31, 1968, the Beatles begin recording a new album.

  Yoko, seven years John’s senior, has made it clear that her happiness is linked to his.

  “I demand equal time, equal space, equal rights,” she tells John.

  “What do you want, a contract?” he asks.

  “Well,” she says, “the answer to that is that I can’t be here.”

  Her absence is a situation John can’t accept, so he breaks the band’s long-held pact forbidding wives and girlfriends from recording sessions.

  “She just moved in,” George says, voicing what the rest of the group, along with George Martin and the studio engineers, is feeling.

  Paul is more understanding. “It’s not that bad,” he says. “Let the young lovers be together.” But knowing how tense things are in the band, he’s prescient in joking, “It’s gonna be such an incredible sort of comical thing, like in fifty years’ time, you know. ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp!’”

  The first song up is a bluesy, acoustic version of John’s “Revolution,” to be titled “Revolution 1” on the album. He envisions it as a single, but Paul and George think it’s too slow, so they regroup to cut a raging electric version of the song. John plays his electric guitar at maximum volume, but he’s not getting the sound he wants.

  “No, no, I want that guitar to sound dirti
er!” he shouts at engineer Geoff Emerick, who patches together two preamps and overloads the signals to create the distorted guitar sound John is after.

  Miraculously, the console doesn’t overheat and explode, but tempers routinely do. John and Yoko break off to work on “Revolution 9,” a “sound collage” that springs from the swirl of tape loops, chants, and sound effects that closes out the original ten-minute version of “Revolution 1.” (The number 9 holds meaning for John; he was born on October 9 and lived at 9 Newcastle Road in Liverpool.)

  “It was as much Yoko’s as it was John’s,” Emerick says. “Certainly it wasn’t Beatles music.” (A critic for New Musical Express calls this track “a pimple on the face of the [White] album” with “some character coming back every few minutes to tell us ‘Number Nine, Number Nine.’”)

  John places supreme value on Yoko’s contributions. “She inspired all this creation in me. It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me. The statement in ‘Revolution’ was mine.” It’s filled with the kind of ideas that John voices on a television interview with BBC2 to promote the opening of In His Own Write, the stage adaptation of his first two books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965).

  “I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, you know,” John says on the June 6 broadcast. “If anybody can put on paper what our government, and the American government, and the Russian, Chinese…what they are all trying to do, and what they think they’re doing…I think they’re all insane.”

  “It’s an overtly political song about revolution and a great one,” Paul says, defending him.

  * * *

  On June 18, John takes Yoko to the premiere of In His Own Write at London’s Old Vic theater. They wear matching outfits and sit in the front row.

  Only those in his inner circle know he has left Cyn for Yoko and that Yoko is already two months pregnant.

  As the production begins, the actors onstage are drowned out by hecklers who point to John and shout, “Where’s your wife?” and “Where’s Cynthia?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouts back.

  Outside the theater, the crowd of angry fans yells “Chink” and “River Kwai” and “Yellow” at Yoko. Someone extends a bouquet of yellow roses toward her stems first, puncturing her hands with thorns.

  The next morning, their relationship is international news.

  John finds himself locked in the biggest scandal since his comments about Jesus two years before. John takes Yoko to visit Mimi in Poole, England, where he had bought his aunt a waterfront bungalow for £25,000 in 1965 (in 2018, the property was listed for just under $9.5 million).

  “Who’s the poisoned dwarf, John?” Mimi asks.

  “It’s Yoko,” John answers.

  “I’m an artist,” Yoko says.

  “That’s very funny,” Mimi replies. “I’ve never heard of you.”

  Cynthia certainly has. When she returns from Italy, she takes to calling the Beatles’ office and leaving messages. John doesn’t return her calls. If she wants to hear her husband’s voice, she’ll have to buy his new record.

  The A side is “Hey Jude.” “[Paul] said it was written about Julian, my child. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian,” John later remembers.

  “But I always heard it as a song to me,” he continues. “Yoko’s just come into the picture…The words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me”—and their Beatles partnership.

  Mick Jagger and a few lucky bystanders listen in when Paul spins an advance copy at the hashish-filled Club Vesuvio, in a London basement. “That’s something else, innit?” Jagger says to Paul. “It’s like two songs.”

  The seven-inch single pushes the boundaries of recording technology to contain the song’s seven-minutes-plus running time. “It wasn’t intended to go on that long at the end,” Paul explains to the Rolling Stones frontman. “So then we built it with the orchestra but it was mainly because I just wouldn’t stop doing all that ‘Judy judy judy—wooow!’ Cary Grant on heat!”

  The summer of 1968 is burning with social unrest.

  Two days after the August 26 US release (August 30 in the UK) of Paul’s “Hey Jude” with John’s “Revolution” on the flip side, violence erupts in Chicago when antiwar protesters clash with National Guard troops outside the Conrad Hilton hotel, site of the Democratic National Convention, where Hubert Humphrey wins the presidential nomination over Eugene McCarthy while continuing to support President Johnson’s war efforts in Vietnam.

  The demonstrators shout, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”

  They are listening, too. “Hey Jude,” Apple Records’ first release, is also the Beatles’ most successful single, selling more than five million copies worldwide by the end of 1968.

  * * *

  As the recording of the White Album continues, John and Yoko need a place to stay. Ringo is able to provide them with one.

  In 1965, Ringo leased flat 1 at 34 Montagu Square, around a mile from Abbey Road, and kept it as a city pied-à-terre even after he moved to Weybridge, Surrey. He’d rented the apartment first to Paul, then to twenty-five-year-old Jimi Hendrix, who wrote “The Wind Cries Mary,” a May 1967 British single that also appeared on his debut US album Are You Experienced, while living there. Ringo evicted Hendrix after the celebrity tenant damaged the apartment’s walls during an acid trip.

  Late in the morning of October 18, 1968, John, age twenty-eight, and Yoko, thirty-five, are in bed and half naked when a loud knock sounds on the door.

  “I’ve got a message for you,” John hears someone say.

  John wonders if it’s a reporter looking for an exclusive comment on the couple’s recent public announcement about Yoko’s pregnancy. She’s now six months along and due in February.

  John’s not wearing his glasses, but he can make out a figure standing by their bedroom window. His first thought is that it must be one of the Kray twins, a pair of infamous London gangsters and stone-cold killers known for their violent shakedowns of business owners and entertainers.

  Once John puts on his glasses and sees a police officer standing there, he knows why they’ve come knocking. He’d been forewarned by a reporter from the Daily Mirror.

  The drug squad’s coming to get you.

  Yoko runs to fetch some clothes.

  “Ring the lawyer, quick!” John tells her, refusing to open the front door.

  The couple has been living on what John describes as “a strange cocktail of love, sex, and forgetfulness,” or what Yoko calls “a diet of champagne, caviar, and heroin.”

  Officers led by Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of the Scotland Yard Drug Squad start to force their way in through a back window. Pilcher is famous for staging celebrity drug busts. He’s already arrested Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Donovan.

  Pilcher pushes his way past John and Yoko, trailed by a plainclothes detective, two detective constables, two canine handlers, and a policewoman. It’s an incredible show of force—especially since Pilcher and his team are unable to find any drugs in the apartment.

  Mindful that police may have been watching the apartment since back when Jimi Hendrix was in residence, John and Yoko have been careful to keep the place scrubbed. Even so, Yogi and Boo-Boo, the drug-sniffing dogs, zero in on forgotten traces of cannabis inside a cigarette roller, a film can, and a binoculars case.

  Norman Pilcher can’t hide his gap-toothed smile from the reporters crowded outside the apartment as John and Yoko are driven in a squad car to the Paddington Green police station.

  LENNON AND FRIEND CHARGED IN POSSESSION OF MARIJUANA, the New York Times reports via the AP wire, detailing a further charge of obstructing the execution of a search warrant.

  At Marylebone Magistrates Court, John agrees to plead guilty and pay a £150 fine.

  “It was the most terrifying experience I have ever had,” he says.

  “John’s drug bust,” Ringo says, �
�was a reminder that a cop was lying in wait if anyone had a party.”

  Though charges against Yoko are dropped, on November 4, in the aftermath of the stressful arrest, she’s admitted to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, where she suffers a miscarriage on November 21. John sleeps on the floor of Yoko’s room rather than leave her side.

  They name the unborn boy John Ono Lennon II and bury him in an undisclosed location.

  Five years later, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher is the one who’s on trial—for perjury in another drug case. At London’s central criminal court, Old Bailey, the judge who will sentence Pilcher to four years in prison tells him, “You poisoned the wells of criminal justice and set about it deliberately.”

  December 6, 1980

  Mark wants to be as close to Lennon as possible. To achieve that aim, he needs to find much nicer accommodations—with a vantage point that puts him eyeball-to-eyeball with the man who believes he’s bigger and better than Jesus.

  He leaves the Y with his suitcase and travels south around ten blocks to the Sheraton Centre, at 811 Seventh Avenue, on the corner of West 53rd Street.

  At the reception desk, he asks for a room with a view of the westernmost edge of Central Park. The expense, $82 per night, is well worth it. Upstairs, he goes to the window of room 2730 and looks north past the bare branches that divide the park from Central Park West.

  The hotel is visible from Lennon’s living room, on the seventh floor of the Dakota. And now Mark can look right back at his target.

  Satisfied, he reaches for his Walkman and a bunch of cassettes. He grabs his camera and his copy of Double Fantasy and heads outside to take a short subway ride back to the Dakota.