The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  John is floored by the double cross. “Oh, Christ,” he shouts into the phone. “He gets all the credit for it!”

  Let It Be goes on sale May 8.

  The next day, New Musical Express publishes a searing review titled “Have the Beatles Sold Out?,” which decries the album, with its doubled sticker price and funereal black cover, as a “cardboard tombstone.”

  “Musically, boys, you passed the audition,” assesses the critic for Rolling Stone, harking back to John’s closing line atop the Apple roof before concluding that the flaw of overproduction “somehow doesn’t seem to matter much anymore anyway.”

  Paul defends himself to the press: “I didn’t leave the Beatles. The Beatles have left the Beatles, but no one wanted to be the one to say the party’s over.”

  * * *

  The next time John sees his former bandmate, he’s larger than life.

  With McCartney atop the US Billboard charts on the strength of the anticipation of Paul’s solo effort, which includes the ballad “Maybe I’m Amazed,” John and Yoko travel to San Francisco to meet with twenty-four-year-old Rolling Stone writer Jann Wenner about booking an interview.

  The three of them (and Jann’s wife, Jane) slip unrecognized into a nearly empty theater to see Let It Be. Though the film (which goes on to win an Oscar and a Grammy for Best Original Score) had premiered in New York on May 13, none of the Beatles attended. John is seeing it now for the first time. At the sight of Paul singing on the rooftop of Apple records, first John, then Yoko, dissolves into tears.

  “He’s crying, she’s crying, and we’re just trying to hold on to ourselves,” Wenner says. “You’re there helping come to the emotional rescue of the Beatles.”

  * * *

  Murder defendant Charles Manson gives a jailhouse interview that appears in the June 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. “This music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment,” Manson says. “The Beatles know [what’s happening] in the sense that the subconscious knows.” At his trial, Manson says “Helter Skelter” is about confusion. “It’s not my conspiracy. It is not my music.…Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

  John also protests that he didn’t write the song. Although he’s on the witness list, he refuses to appear at the trial, asking, “What’s ‘Helter Skelter’ got to do with knifing somebody?” then offering, “I’ve never listened to the words properly, it was just a noise.”

  Chapter 42

  That’ll be the day when I die.

  —“That’ll Be the Day”

  At Tittenhurst Park, John and his son, Julian, row across the lake and explore the grounds on weekends. They drink Dr Pepper while they play on a Mellotron. Julian would later fondly remember this time: “When Dad moved to Tittenhurst, it was the first time he’d called me in quite a long time,” he reflected. “It was an exciting thing for me to go and see him again after not seeing him for such a while. Tittenhurst was this enormous, palacelike place with 99 acres, golf-cart buggies, a lake, a little island. It was like a house of fun.”

  At seven years old, Julian possesses a curious mind.

  “If you die, will I ever see you again?” Julian asks.

  “If I can communicate from the dead, I will float a white feather straight across the room to you.”

  Julian smiles at his father’s answer.

  At Capitol Records in Los Angeles, executives couldn’t be grimmer. In 1970, the year of the Beatles’ breakup, they record a loss of $8 million (nearly $54 million today).

  Still, John reveals in the second part of his first published interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, “America is where it’s at. I should have been born in New York, I should have been born in the Village, that’s where I belong.”

  * * *

  In early 1971, John is in bed at Tittenhurst, reading Grapefruit, Yoko’s book of poetry from tiny Wunternaum Press, in Bellport, New York. She’d underscored her chosen American identity by selecting July 4, 1964, as her publication date.

  John lands on a poem titled “Tunafish Sandwich Piece.”

  “Imagine one thousand suns in the / sky at the same time,” Yoko writes.

  The concept is simple, artful.

  He reads another of Yoko’s poems. This one is called “Cloud Piece.”

  “Imagine the clouds dripping,” she writes.

  John walks downstairs and over to the in-house Ascot Sound Studios. The word imagine is swirling in his head.

  He sits at the Steinway piano, spray-painted white and inscribed “For Yoko, Happy Birthday, love John.” He’d bought his wife the exquisite instrument when she turned thirty-eight, on February 19.

  The sun is gently lifting over the trees, beaming through Tittenhurst’s east-facing windows and reflecting off John’s yellow-tinted glasses. Yoko sits close by while he presses the keys and begins to hum.

  * * *

  Late one foggy night in June, John summons session musicians to his mansion to work on his new album.

  “I quickly jumped into a white Rolls-Royce with Nicky Hopkins [who’d played electric piano on the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’],” acoustic guitarist Ted Turner recalls.

  Another guitarist, Rod Lynton, marvels at John’s fine collection of instruments, though he’s shocked to find that the strings on John’s Epiphone Casino are “crusty.”

  “It’s a piece of wood with strings on it. You just play it, OK?” Lennon tells him.

  * * *

  A troubled American named Curt Claudio has been writing to John. In the midst of these sessions, Claudio shows up in person, wearing a shabby coat. A film crew on hand to record the making of Imagine documents his arrival.

  In the entryway of Tittenhurst, John agrees to have a chat with the intruder. Claudio, who has matted, scraggly brown hair and has come all the way from California, claims to be a traumatized Vietnam vet in search of some kind of universal truth.

  “I’m just a guy who writes songs,” John tells him. “I’m just a guy.”

  “At Tittenhurst, there was no particular security,” Yoko recalls. “John always felt responsible for these people because they were the result of his songs.”

  If he assaults me right now, there’s no stopping him.

  * * *

  On July 3, John and Yoko fly to New York. They’ve booked the Record Plant, on West 44th Street, for more sessions on July 4 and 5.

  A reporter from The New Yorker tours the facility and pronounces its contemporary furnishings and state-of-the-art equipment as having “the air of a luxurious space capsule” that is “designed specifically for rock musicians.”

  While Phil Spector mixes Imagine in quadraphonic sound, Yoko listens closely to the contrasting guitar work.

  “George Harrison’s guitar playing was more classically beautiful,” she later observes. “But John’s was restless—beautiful restless stuff.”

  * * *

  Phil Spector is also helping George with another project.

  George is taking up his guitar for a cause: the Concert for Bangladesh, with all proceeds going to a cause dear to Ravi Shankar. Shankar, George’s musical mentor, was born in India to a Bengali family and is dedicated to aiding victims suffering from the multiple assaults of cholera, child hunger, and the war against Bangladeshi independence.

  George invites all three of his former bandmates to join the all-star roster for two concerts at Madison Square Garden—at 2:30 and 7:00 p.m. on August 1, 1971.

  Only Ringo accepts.

  John worries the concert is a ruse to trick him into a Beatles reunion and refuses to appear, though Yoko is inclined to perform in support of the charity event—despite not having been included in the invitation. The couple fights over it bitterly. “She wants to go onstage at George’s Bangladesh thing. I’m not gonna do it,” John complains to Yoko’s friend Dan Richter (now serving as the couple’s butler at the Tittenhurst estate). “If she wants to go on without me, let her. I’ll be in Paris.”

  In the
end, neither goes, and the story circulates that John snubbed the invite because George hasn’t included Yoko.

  “We are not trying to make any politics,” Shankar says when he greets the twenty thousand concertgoers who attend each sold-out show. “We are artists. But through our music we would like you to feel the agony…in Bangladesh.”

  When Bob Dylan steps forward, the mood at the Garden rises from elated to euphoric. He’s making a surprise appearance after a self-imposed four-year absence from live performances to play an acoustic set of his beloved older songs, including “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Originals and covers by renowned session keyboardists Leon Russell and Billy Preston, along with Eric Clapton, Shankar, Ringo, and George, make enough music to fill a triple album.

  “What Woodstock was said to be,” states a glowing review, “the Madison Square Bangladesh concert was.”

  To the media, manager Allen Klein—whom George asks to help produce the concert—declares that the entirety of the $250,000 ($1.5 million today) they’ve raised in ticket sales will go to charity. “It was so much easier for me to say I’m not taking anything, so I don’t have to answer any questions to anybody. Isn’t that easy? If you do it, you do it; if you don’t, you don’t. I made it clean. It was easy,” Klein boasts. (All very well in theory, though in reality Klein takes so much that he’s eventually embroiled in several lawsuits—including one filed by George—and eventually serves prison time for making false statements on a tax return.) Furthermore, Apple plans to have Spector rush out a concert album, whose proceeds will all go to support the cause, as well as a concert film. Apple’s The Concert for Bangladesh hits number 1 in the United States, number 2 in the UK.

  Though John sits out both Woodstock and George’s Concert for Bangladesh, he’s still searching for ways his music can make a difference. Just such an opportunity may present itself with the September release of Imagine.

  Chapter 43

  I think I’m falling

  In love too fast.

  —“Help Me”

  You could say I fell in love with New York on a street corner,” John declares.

  He and Yoko have been living in New York since August 13, 1971, a few weeks after George’s Madison Square Garden event, on six-month B-2 tourist visas issued by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to “Mr. and Mrs. John W. Lennon,” who are classified as “visitors for pleasure.”

  Despite the short-term visas, their intent has always been to stay.

  “Yoko and I were forever coming and going to New York, so finally we decided it would be cheaper and more functional to actually live here…so that’s what we did!” John tells reporters.

  Yet there’s also a more painful, personal reason. Although Yoko has been given custody of her daughter, Kyoko, after a series of legal battles, her ex-husband Tony Cox has repeatedly absconded with the eight-year-old girl.

  As best as John can determine, “Tony’s attitude was, ‘You can have my wife, but you can’t have my child.’”

  And now Yoko and John cannot find Kyoko or Tony anywhere.

  The most reliable information they have is that Cox may have taken Kyoko to America, and therefore it makes sense for Yoko and John to base themselves somewhere in the United States.

  Besides, John has been wanting to move to New York anyway. After all, “We love it, and it’s the center of our world,” John says of the city. “America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself. New York is at my speed.” He also feels a kinship to New Yorkers’ brusqueness. “They’re like me…they don’t believe in wasting time.”

  Yoko agrees. “John has a New York temperament in his work. Liverpool is very much like New York, for an English city.”

  John credits Yoko, who lived in New York during her teens and twenties, with selling him on it. “She made me walk around the streets and parks and squares and examine every nook and cranny.”

  They both appreciate the “unbelievably creative atmosphere” and diversity of the city, where their interracial marriage doesn’t stand out as much as it does in England.

  “Everywhere’s somewhere, and everywhere’s the same, really, and wherever you are is where it’s at,” John muses. “But it’s more so in New York. It does have sugar on it, and I’ve got a sweet tooth.”

  * * *

  John and Yoko encounter the kind of creativity they particularly enjoy while taking a Sunday walk in Washington Square Park.

  “I’m proud to be a New York hippie!” they hear a raspy-voiced street singer declare. It’s artist and activist David Peel, staging his weekly “happening.”

  Immediately charmed, John says, “We started singing with him in the street. And we got moved on by the police, and it was all very wonderful. He was such a great guy, you know.”

  Although Peel “can’t sing, or he can’t really play,” John admits, it doesn’t dampen the former Beatle’s enthusiasm. “Picasso spent 40 years trying to get as simple as that.”

  He and Yoko offer Peel a contract with Apple Records. “We loved his music, his spirit, and his philosophy of the street,” John says. “That’s why we decided to make a record with him.” The record, The Pope Smokes Dope, by David Peel and the Lower East Side, peaks at number 191 on the Billboard 200, but Peel pronounces John an “excellent” producer. “He was deadly serious, but he knew how to have fun,” Peel says, and he expresses his gratitude in music.

  “John Lennon, Yoko Ono,” he declares in a song titled “The Ballad of New York City,” “New York City is your friend”—and John returns the favor by namechecking David Peel (and his record) in his own song “New York City,” on his 1972 album with Yoko, Some Time in New York City.

  * * *

  John and Yoko gravitate to Greenwich Village, where, John says, “everybody seems to know everybody.” Though they initially take three hotel rooms (numbers 1701, 1702, and 1703) at the St. Regis in Midtown for themselves and their personal assistant, May Pang, after a couple of months they choose to instead rent a two-room apartment at 105 Bank Street in the West Village, as well as a studio in SoHo for work. Before they leave the St. Regis, however, they are able to film cameos of several celebrities—including Dick Cavett, Jack Palance, and dapper Hollywood dance legend Fred Astaire, who insists on more than one try at his cameo (walking Yoko to a hotel-room window), pleading, “I can do the scene better”—for the film they’ve been making to accompany Imagine.

  The Bank Street apartment is where the counterculture activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (cofounders of the Youth International Party, known as Yippies) come calling. “The close friendship between Jerry Rubin and John Lennon (and Yoko),” Rubin’s biographer says, “can’t be underestimated.” During 1971–72, the activist’s personal calendars show “more often than not” that the three of them are “hanging out.”

  Rubin likes to tell the story of this symbiotic friendship: “Yoko Ono told me and Abbie that they considered us to be great artists.” Abbie replied, “That’s funny. We always thought of you as great politicians.” Further connecting them is the fact that when Rubin brings John and Yoko to his own apartment, they discover that it’s in the same building where a decade earlier, as a struggling young artist in the city, Yoko had once been the superintendent. The three of them and Hoffman talk about combining forces, organizing a singing and speaking tour to raise political awareness.

  President Richard Nixon worries about just such a plan. Nixon, who is universally reviled by the Yippies, is up for reelection in 1972 and fears that John Lennon (whom he opened an FBI inquiry on back in 1969) and his friends will wield their considerable influence with the youth culture against him. The president feels especially vulnerable on that front, since he’s recently signed into law the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, granting teenagers the right to vote for the first time.

  * * *

  On John’s thirty-first birthday, October 9, 1971, Yoko achieves a personal victory—the art show tha
t Allen Klein had promised. Her first major exhibit, This Is Not Here, is mounted at Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art.

  Ostensibly it’s a solo show, though the catalog features numerous collaborative pieces, including Baby Grand Guitar—an oversize instrument of her own creation plus the neck of a second guitar displayed with Yoko’s invitation to “imagine the body.”

  “She thinks up beautiful pure concept things, and I come up with a gimmicky reaction,” John tells the New York Times in answer to the interviewer’s question “Is Syracuse ready for Yoko Ono and John Lennon?”

  Not entirely. “There was going to be a secret Beatles reunion concert, with everyone except Paul in the theater at the Everson,” David Ross, then assistant to the museum’s director, remembers. “One of my jobs was to get equipment ready, and have it ready, secretly.”

  On opening day, six thousand guests tour the exhibit, spreading rumors of the chance to see all four Beatles together again (and Yoko in “a black velvet hotpants suit”).

  The only other Beatle to attend, however—as was often the case—is Ringo.

  He’s not the only celebrity friend, though: in addition to Ringo and his wife, Maureen, there’s Phil Spector, Klaus Voormann, Eric Clapton, and poet Allen Ginsberg on hand.

  When the increasing size and frenzy of the crowd makes officials in the upstate city of 197,000 begin to fear a riot, John and Yoko move his birthday party over to the Hotel Syracuse, where the famous friends give a raucous semiprivate performance of more than twenty songs—including “Give Peace a Chance” and for George, in absentia, his “My Sweet Lord”—“commonly recognized,” according to The Guardian, as “the single of the year.”

  * * *

  John and Yoko have already been in New York for a few weeks when John’s second solo album, Imagine, goes on sale in the United States, on September 9 (October 8 in the UK). It’s both a critical and commercial success, and it becomes the most celebrated album and single of John’s solo career, reaching number 1 on the UK album charts and number 3 as a US single.