The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  They especially like his promises that they’ll be too rich to ever worry. “You should be able to say FYM—Fuck You, Money,” Klein tells them.

  “Rock ’n’ roll specializes in that kind of, ‘This guy’s a twerp. We’ve got to have him on our team!’” Paul says, but he wants no part of any association with Klein.

  When Paul tells John whom he’d rather have, John is struck by the obvious.

  Of course Paul wants Lee Eastman. The Manhattan music lawyer is the father of Paul’s fiancée, Linda Eastman, the New York photographer he’d first met in 1967, then reconnected with after he and Jane split up.

  Paul reaches out to Mick Jagger, who it turns out is trying to get rid of Klein. “Don’t go near him, he’s a dog. He’s a crook,” the Rolling Stone tells Paul. Jagger also calls John to advise him against “making the biggest mistake of your life,” but John’s made up his mind.

  And neither one of us is going to budge.

  They come to a bizarre arrangement.

  Both Lee Eastman and Allen Klein move their offices into Apple headquarters in London and carve out different slices—legal and financial, respectively—of the Beatles’ pie.

  * * *

  On March 12, 1969, twenty-six-year-old Paul marries twenty-seven-year-old Linda.

  None of the other Beatles is invited to the wedding. “Maybe it was because the group was breaking up,” Paul says. “We were all pissed off with each other. We certainly weren’t a gang anymore.”

  The press is chasing Paul and Linda. “It rained, and this was appropriate,” The Guardian reports. “The pavements outside the Marylebone register office would have been wet in any case with the tears of fans thrown by the sudden reality of having failed to become Mrs. McCartney.”

  Instead, Paul tosses candy to the lovelorn, who compete for the sweet mementos.

  News of Paul’s wedding ignites John’s competitive spirit.

  John’s divorce was only finalized on November 8, 1968, and Yoko’s second divorce was finalized on February 2. John hasn’t told his ex-wife, Cynthia, or their son, Julian, about his wedding plans. He envisions that he and Yoko will “get married on a cross-channel ferry. That was the romantic part.”

  John’s driver rushes them to Southampton, where a ferry crosses the English Channel to France, but Yoko, who is not a British citizen, is denied a visa. Another plan, to get married in Amsterdam, is dashed when the couple can’t meet the two-week residency requirement.

  John’s money and fame secure a private jet to Paris on March 16.

  In London, George and his wife, Pattie Boyd, are dominating the headlines. On Paul’s wedding day, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher led a drug raid on their home in Esher, where Yogi the police dog located a small amount of pot. On March 18, George and Pattie appear at a hearing on charges of cannabis possession.

  On the morning of March 20, 1969, eight days after Paul’s wedding, John and Yoko fly from Paris to Gibraltar, on Spain’s southern peninsula—a British territory since 1713. There’s no residency requirement, and as a British citizen, John can legally marry there. In “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” John names his personal assistant as the one who saved the wedding by saying, “You can make it O.K. / You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain.”

  A warm wind blows off the Mediterranean Sea as they arrive at the British consulate. Yoko has dressed for the ten-minute ceremony in a white minidress, tall white boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and dark glasses; John is in a white suit jacket, corduroys, and tennis shoes.

  With the Rock of Gibraltar as a backdrop, the couple poses for photos. John holds their marriage certificate overhead, victorious.

  “Intellectually, we didn’t believe in getting married,” John tells the reporters who’ve tracked them to this remote destination. “But one doesn’t love someone just intellectually. For two people marriage still has the edge over just living together.”

  Best man Peter Brown hires a white Rolls-Royce to transport the newlyweds to Amsterdam, where they check in to the Hilton for a weeklong stay.

  At a local pub, magazine reporter Rick Wilson and his editor are having lunch. “There’s been some communication to the office about some happening at the Hilton,” the editor says. “John Lennon’s holding court about something or other.”

  He and Yoko have sent out cards to the press, inviting them to a daily discussion about peace from March 25 to March 31.

  “We knew whatever we did was going to be in the papers,” John reasons. “We decided to utilize the space we would occupy anyway, by getting married, with a commercial for peace.

  “We would sell our production, which we call ‘peace.’ And to sell a product you need a gimmick, and the gimmick we thought was ‘bed.’ And we thought ‘bed’ because bed was the easiest way of doing it, because we’re lazy.”

  Wilson dashes to the hotel, where he joins two dozen or so reporters and photographers on the way up to room 902, John and Yoko’s honeymoon suite. They’re in bed, wearing pajamas.

  “Why not Saigon or Dallas if peace is the cause?” Wilson asks.

  “Because I’m dead scared of Saigon or Dallas,” John replies. “There’s less chance of getting shot or crucified here.”

  On March 21, while John and Yoko are on their honeymoon, Allen Klein is appointed Apple’s business manager. He begins firing Apple staff in anticipation of his new three-year arrangement, which allows him to collect 20 percent of Apple revenues (though none on existing Beatles contracts).

  On the final day of John and Yoko’s bed-in, March 31, George and Pattie stand trial. Rumors are swirling that Pilcher and his Drug Squad planted a stash in their home—“I’m a tidy sort of bloke. I don’t like chaos. I kept records in the record rack, tea in the tea caddy, and pot in the pot box,” George insists of the hash the police say they found on his floor—but the Harrisons plead guilty, are fined £250, and are sentenced to a one-year probation.

  * * *

  John and Paul meet at Paul’s house on Cavendish Avenue. As songwriting partners, they take a walk in the garden.

  On April 14, the two newly married men start recording “The Ballad of John and Yoko” at Abbey Road studios. Though neither Ringo nor George is available that day, to the two original Beatles, it seems like the best of old times.

  Over seven hours, John takes the lead on guitar and vocals while Paul handles the bass, the drums, and even the maracas.

  “Go a bit slower, Ringo,” John jokes.

  “Okay, George,” Paul replies with a cheeky smile.

  Engineer Geoff Emerick is watching from the control room. “It was a great session, one of those magic times when everything went right and nothing went wrong.”

  The May 1969 single becomes the Beatles seventeenth number-one UK hit—and their last to top the charts in that country.

  Chapter 39

  A time to be born, a time to die…

  —“Turn! Turn! Turn!”

  This is my story both humble and true,” John writes in a poem he’s calling “Alphabet.” One line reads, “T is for Tommy who won the war.”

  There is a poetry stand in People’s Park, a community garden created by students protesting for peace on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. To clear the crowd, on May 15, 1969, police had turned guns loaded with bird shot and buckshot on the students, killing one and seriously wounding many more.

  When John reads about Bloody Thursday, as it’s called, his devotion to the peace cause only intensifies. “When I first got the news it stooned me, absolutely stooned me,” he says.

  He’s eager to return to America, to advise the demonstrators. But his repeated requests for a visa are all denied on the basis of his 1968 conviction for marijuana possession.

  John’s British passport grants him access to the Bahamas, but when he and Yoko arrive there, on May 24, they feel that the American press is too distant, so they fly to Toronto, where immigration authorities at first detain them before granting a ten-day visa.
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br />   On May 26, they check in to suite 1742 of Montreal’s stately Queen Elizabeth Hotel to stage an eight-day bed-in—in close proximity to the New York press corps.

  “What about talking to the people who make the decisions, the power brokers?” a reporter asks.

  “Talk about what?” John answers. “It doesn’t happen like that. In the US, the government is too busy talking about how to keep me out. If I’m a joke, as they say, and not important, why don’t they just let me in?”

  American and Canadian radio hosts welcome the Beatle to the airwaves. When he phones KSAN in San Francisco, members of the psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service are listening. “The advice you gave was right on! Violence really does beget violence,” the band writes John. “But the way the People’s Park issue is being handled is not cool. I know your advice will save a lot of broken bones.”

  When he talks to a reporter from Rolling Stone, John seems less than certain. “Yes, we’re really scared to go to the US because people have become so violent, even our sort of people.”

  In the face of fear and uncertainty, his passion for songwriting never deserts him. “Why isn’t somebody writing one for the people now?” he asks Yoko. “That’s what my job is. Our job is to write for the people now.”

  On May 31, a full moon rises, illuminating John and Yoko’s hotel room, where John scatters flower petals daily.

  The next day, an impromptu recording session happens at the site of the bed-in. The equipment—four microphones and four-track Ampex recorder—is spartan in comparison to the setup at Abbey Road studios, but John is looking for a simple sound in the new song he’s written with Yoko to promote peace.

  “Sing along,” he instructs his celebrity guests as he strums his acoustic guitar.

  Some of them—including Yoko, comedian Tommy Smothers, LSD guru Timothy Leary, poet Allen Ginsberg, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and a dozen members of a local Hare Krishna temple—are namechecked in the lyrics of John’s first solo single, which he records in a single take.

  John is in his element leading this hopeful plea to the citizens of the world, but he makes it clear that the peace movement is bigger than any one person. “Like Pete Seeger said, we don’t have a leader but we have a song—‘Give Peace a Chance.’”

  * * *

  Although the Let It Be sessions and rooftop concert have yet to be prepared for release, on July 1, 1969, the Beatles begin recording a new album.

  Without John.

  On July 4, Apple releases “Give Peace a Chance” (it carries the Beatles’ standard Lennon and McCartney credit as well as a new one—the Plastic Ono Band) in the UK.

  John misses its rise up the charts. He’s in a Scottish hospital after swerving his Austin Maxi (carrying Yoko and their children, Kyoko and Julian) away from an oncoming car and into a roadside ditch. John jokes with the press—“If you’re going to have a car crash, try to arrange for it to happen in the Highlands”—even through the pain of seventeen facial stitches.

  On July 9, engineer Geoff Emerick sees movement at the studio doorway, where John and Yoko have appeared “like two apparitions dressed in black.”

  “Yes, I’m okay,” John tells Emerick, George Martin, and the worried Beatles.

  Then he places an order with Harrods and has a double bed installed at Abbey Road so that John can be close to Yoko while she recuperates from having fourteen stitches and a back injury. “Can you put a microphone up over here so we can hear her on the headphones?” he asks the astonished recording staff.

  When a policeman patrolling the studio grounds makes his way into the control room during a late-night session, John is plunged into a terror reminiscent of his 1968 drug bust. “It’s your job to keep people out of here!” he orders roadie Mal Evans.

  Some people, such as Yoko’s friend the American actor Dan Richter, are allowed in. “I couldn’t help thinking that those guys were making rock ’n’ roll history,” Richter recalls, “while I was sitting on this bed in the middle of the Abbey Road studio, handing Yoko a small white packet.”

  Not long after their car accident, John starts writing a song he’s calling “Come Together.” Or, rather, rewriting it: the song had originally been intended for Timothy Leary’s derailed campaign that year for the California governorship.

  When recording begins, on July 21, John says to the band, “I’ve got no arrangement for you, but you know how I want it. Give me something funky.”

  He’s taking all the vocals. When Paul asks him, “What do you want me to do on this track, John?” he replies, “Don’t worry; I’ll do the overdubs on this.”

  “It’s an upbeat, rock-a-beat-a-boogie, with very Lennon lyrics,” George says, and even Timothy Leary can’t argue with the metaphor John gives him for repurposing the song—“he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.” (Despite the song’s pronounced Lennon flavor, he is sued for its similarity to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” which includes the lyrics, “Here come a flat-top, he was movin’ up with me.” As part of a settlement, John agrees to cover three songs from Berry’s publisher for a mid-’70s oldies album.)

  * * *

  Between sessions, John rests at home, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata on the piano.

  Inspiration strikes. “Can you play those chords backward?” he says.

  She does, and John writes “Because” around them.

  “‘Because’ is one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done,” George says. “It has three-part harmony—John, Paul, and George.”

  All four Beatles need to agree on a name for the album. Everest, after the world’s highest mountain and also a popular brand of British cigarette, is the leading contender, but Paul is the only one enthusiastic about an international photo shoot.

  “Well, if we’re not going to name it Everest and pose for the cover in Tibet, where are we going to go?” he asks.

  Ringo offers an easy solution. “Let’s just step outside and name it Abbey Road.”

  He’s only joking, but Paul is inspired. He makes some rough sketches of an album cover showing the four of them walking a zebra crossing on Abbey Road.

  John contributes the photographer, Iain MacMillan. Yoko had commissioned him to document her 1966 show at the Indica gallery, the same one where she and John met.

  On the morning of August 8, MacMillan hauls a stepladder into the middle of the London street and waits while a police officer stops traffic. John, dressed all in white, leads a dark-suited Ringo, a barefoot Paul with cigarette in hand, and a denim-clad George on six passes back and forth while the photographer snaps away.

  Only one photograph shows them stepping perfectly in time.

  * * *

  The next night, more than five thousand miles away in Los Angeles, three disciples of a thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed messiah named Charles Manson follow a winding private road in the exclusive Benedict Canyon enclave in the Hollywood Hills.

  Armed with a gun and knives, they enter the home at 10050 Cielo Drive. Manson, an aspiring singer and guitarist, knows the address as that of twenty-eight-year-old Terry Melcher, the record producer and son of film and recording star Doris Day. The two men had met the previous summer at the home of the Beach Boys drummer, Dennis Wilson. Following an audition, Melcher told Manson he “wasn’t impressed enough to want to make a record.”

  Though Melcher had lived at 10050 Cielo Drive from May of 1966 until January of 1969, the current residents are film director Roman Polanski—whose most recent hit is Rosemary’s Baby, starring Mia Farrow—and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. The twenty-six-year-old star of Valley of the Dolls is eight and a half months pregnant and in the company of three friends while Polanski is working on a new script in London.

  Sharon Tate pleads for the life of her unborn child, but the murderers show no mercy, smearing the word pig in Tate’s blood on the white front door of the house. The next ni
ght, in central Los Angeles, the killing spree continues, claiming the lives of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. On a refrigerator at the LaBianca home, the killers leave another startling message in blood—a misspelling of “Helter Skelter,” the title of a Beatles song off the 1968 smash White Album.

  Paul wrote the intense hard-rock number in response to an interview that ran in Melody Maker with the Who’s Pete Townshend proclaiming he’d just recorded “the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ’n’ roll record you’ve ever heard.” (It was “I Can See for Miles.”)

  “So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’”

  Look out, warns the chorus. Coming down fast.

  Though “Helter Skelter” is a song about a fairground slide, it also hints at the dark progression from innocence to violence.

  Chapter 40

  Johnny’s in the basement

  mixing up the medicine.

  —“Subterranean Homesick Blues”

  Leave John alone!”

  At Tittenhurst Park, a seventy-two-acre Ascot estate that John and Yoko purchased in May of 1969 for £150,000, Yoko is showing photographer Ethan Russell a disturbing package she’s received from one of John’s fans. It’s a doll in her likeness, pins piercing the torso, with the message attached.

  These are not happy times for them. Or for the band.

  The Abbey Road sessions close on August 20 with a final recording of John’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”

  “Louder! Louder!” he yells at engineer Geoff Emerick. “I want the track to build and build, and then I want the white noise to take over and blot out the music altogether.”

  He succeeds. The response from the other Beatles is silence.

  The mood hasn’t lifted two days later, when the band gathers at Tittenhurst Park, graced with flowering gardens and a man-made lake stocked with ducks and fish, for a promotional photo shoot.