The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  When the couple complains to Wildes about “two guys interminably fixing a bike, a broken bike across the street” as well as “two guys in a car” following their driver, the lawyer can only surmise that the FBI was being so blatant on purpose because they “wanted them to feel that they were under surveillance.”

  John agrees, saying as much when he appears on The Dick Cavett Show.

  “I felt followed everywhere by government agents,” John tells the host. “Every time I picked up the phone, there was a lot of noise…I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in the car and they’d be following me and not hiding…They wanted me to see that I was being followed…”

  Wildes, who regards John as “a guy of major principle,” relates that his client “understood that what was being done to him was wrong. It was an abuse of the law, and he was willing to stand up and try to shine the big light on it.” It was a case of the government abusing power, of “the Nixon administration [making] life intolerable for John Lennon and Yoko Ono.” Never, Wildes later says, had he seen “the government so determined to remove anyone from the United States.”

  John and Yoko gain another fighter in their corner in their simultaneous ongoing search for Kyoko. Outside their Immigration and Naturalization Service hearing on April 18, John elaborates on what he told reporters in March. “We want to stay permanently because New York is the center of the earth and also because we want to find Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko.” John gives an interview to Geraldo Rivera, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter for ABC-TV Eyewitness News, explaining that it’s because Yoko “is married to an English citizen”—referring to himself, of course—“and that’s caused all the trouble” before reiterating, “But we love to be here.”

  Rivera has earned praise and notoriety (and a Peabody Award) for his March 1972 investigative exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, detailing the inhumane treatment of residents at a Staten Island school for the mentally disabled. That same month, Willowbrook parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the facility (though it would be another fifteen years before the state ultimately shut it down, in 1987).

  John and Yoko, Rivera says in 2019, “appreciated the work I was doing on behalf of the developmentally disabled and vowed to help.”

  But first it would be Rivera who, they hoped, could help them.

  JOHN & YOKO WAIT & WAIT is the New York Daily News headline on July 14. The paper reports that after months of immigration hearings, a decision on the couple’s status will be postponed until September.

  The delay allows them more time to search for the missing Kyoko. From August 3 to 6, accompanied by Rivera and his Eyewitness News camera crew, John and Yoko fruitlessly scour San Francisco, unknowingly following the trail of the FBI (who in late May had responded to an informant’s claim that Kyoko was in the vicinity of Monterey—“I know the whereabouts of Kyoko Cox”—only to dismiss the assertion as the “vision” of a “flower child”).

  Unfortunately, they are no more successful than the FBI had been. “I could tell they were very distressed by what was happening to them,” Rivera says, “but also [by] what was happening around the country because of Nixon’s endless war.”

  John and Yoko seek treatment from a Chinese acupuncturist introduced to them by the editor and publisher of SunDance magazine. Visits to the healer’s family home in San Mateo, are kept secret by referring to John “as J. L. so people wouldn’t know who we were talking about.”

  When they return to New York, John and Yoko begin preparing right away for what they call the One to One concert (their answer to George’s Concert for Bangladesh) to benefit the mentally disabled, especially those Willowbrook State School residents for whom Geraldo Rivera continues to crusade. Like George’s concert, this one will feature a lineup of other guests—including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Sha Na Na—and consist of two Madison Square Garden performances, a movie, and a record. Rivera tells the New York Post, “We raised about a quarter of a million dollars.” John rewards volunteer fund-raisers and students from the school with $60,000 worth of tickets to the shows and has tambourines distributed so that concertgoers can shake the percussion instruments in time to the music.

  * * *

  “Now more than ever, baby, Nixon now!” Sammy Davis Jr. is onstage at Miami Marine Stadium. It’s August 22, the second day of the 1972 Republican National Convention, and Davis, a former Kennedy Democrat, is debuting for delegates the incumbent president’s campaign song. (“Hate to get personal about it,” a Rolling Stone reporter observes, “but the only other time I ever saw the fellow [Davis] was back in San Francisco” at a fund-raising event for a losing effort by an Old Left judicial candidate.)

  “I don’t think the youth vote is in anybody’s pocket,” Nixon tells the assembled party delegates. In Flamingo Park, five thousand “nondelegates” are amassing, though John and Yoko are not among them, being back up in New York furiously getting ready for their charity concert. These “zippies, Yippies, hippies, crazies,” according to a local resident, are protesters reclaiming the ground they’d recently occupied when Miami Beach had also hosted the Democratic National Convention, from July 10 to July 13.

  “People who want to have bloody hands go over to the tent on my right,” an antiwar organizer announces from a Flamingo Park soundstage. “People who want death masks go over just behind that. We still need people for the bombing and the dike building.”

  When John appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, months earlier, he’d made it clear that he was bowing out of any protest activities planned around the Republican National Convention and would not be attending. Nevertheless, the FBI has agents scouring Miami Beach for the man identified in Senator Strom Thurmond’s report as “a member of the former musical group known as ‘The Beatles.’”

  Despite John’s being one of the world’s most recognizable celebrities, a flyer is distributed so that he can be easily identified by the police and FBI. Except it’s not even John’s face pictured on the cheat sheet but rather a publicity still of David Peel (who has his own FBI file) saying, in a speech balloon, “The pope smokes dope”—the title of his 1972 album, released by Apple. In later years, Peel remarks that it was “rock’s greatest flattery” to have been confused with John, though the closest resemblance between them is that both sport long hair and round eyeglasses.

  * * *

  On election night, November 7, John and Yoko can barely watch as the incumbent, Richard Nixon, defeats fifty-year-old South Dakota senator George McGovern in a landslide, carrying forty-nine out of fifty states for a second term in the White House.

  “I just really trust him, you know?” a youthful Nixonette says of the chief executive.

  John never has and never will.

  The one benefit to him from Nixon’s reelection, however, is that the administration no longer seems to consider him a “political enemy.” On December 8, the special agent in charge of New York’s FBI office notifies the Bureau’s acting director that “in view of subject’s inactivity in Revolutionary Activities and his seemingly [sic] rejection by NY Radicals, captioned case is being closed in the NY Division.”

  Within a month of Nixon’s reelection, John’s FBI file is closed. But his visa troubles continue.

  Chapter 46

  We gotta get out of this place

  If it’s the last thing we ever do.

  —“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”

  It’s time to move.

  In February of 1973, John and Yoko’s Bank Street apartment is robbed, which leaves them shaken. They have next to no security at their bohemian loft, plus the lingering effect of the FBI surveillance on top of a decade of international fame and its invasion of privacy—it’s all left John feeling too exposed in Greenwich Village. “You just couldn’t go out the front door, because there would be something weird at the door,” he complains.

  His social circle in the Village is also not what it once was. He’s disillu
sioned with his ability to have an effect on American politics, and his friendship with the Yippies, especially Jerry Rubin, has soured. “As he didn’t lead the revolution, I decided to quit answering the phone,” John states. He’s been feeling used, manipulated, taken advantage of—and his own recent behavior has been worst of all.

  Rubin hosted a party on the night of what turned out to be Nixon’s landslide win over McGovern. He recalls John “came into the house screaming” about the defeat, “crazy with rage.”

  “I can’t believe this is fuckin’ IT,” John explodes, and when other guests encourage him not to lose heart and to throw himself back into organizing, saying that people will listen to him, John shoots back, “Listen to me? Man, where’ve you been? They haven’t been listening to me!”

  John’s devastated by the loss, and though Yoko usually monitors his alcohol intake, on that night he gets uncharacteristically drunk and high on cocaine. By the time they arrived at Rubin’s apartment, “John was totally out of his head with drugs and pills and drink because he couldn’t stand the fact that George McGovern lost,” Yoko explains. To the shock of all the party guests—especially his wife—John walks into the room, immediately targets a woman (purportedly Rubin’s girlfriend), and takes her into the bedroom. “She didn’t come on to him at all,” says Yoko. “He just pulled her [up] and went into the next room. And then they were groping and all that, and we were all quiet.”

  Someone tries to cover the noise by putting on a Bob Dylan record, to no avail. “We heard it anyway. And everybody had their coats in the next room, where John and this girl are making out, so nobody can go home.”

  “It was very embarrassing,” Yoko tells journalist friend Ray Connolly.

  An understatement.

  The next day John is remorseful, but Yoko needs to take some time to mull over how best to handle his behavior. Meanwhile, they get word that an apartment on the Upper West Side is available at 1 West 72nd Street: the Dakota, the 1884 structure regarded as the city’s first luxury apartment building. They’d noticed and admired the building before, but nothing had been available then. Now the seventh-floor apartment across the hall from Roberta Flack is being vacated by actor Robert Ryan after the death of his wife. Its twelve rooms and sweeping views of Central Park immediately captivate the couple.

  Most important, the Dakota has guards and robust security in place. While the building is “chockablock full of famous people”—in addition to Flack, other residents include Leonard Bernstein, Rex Reed, and Lauren Bacall—it offers a sense of privacy, too.

  That April, John and Yoko pass a stringent co-op board review and move uptown. John happily tells a German reporter, “It is a big apartment, and it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have grounds…you know, it’s secure.”

  * * *

  Although moving uptown may have eased some of the couple’s concerns, it certainly hasn’t addressed their biggest problems. The episode at Jerry Rubin’s place has been festering.

  “That situation really woke me up,” Yoko says. “I thought, ‘Okay, we were so much in love with each other and that’s why we sacrificed everything, my daughter, everything. It was worth it if we were totally in love with each other. But if he wants to make it with another girl or something, what am I doing?’”

  Yoko confides in their twenty-two-year-old assistant, May Pang. “Listen, May,” she says. “John and I are not getting along. We’ve been arguing. We’re growing apart.”

  The rift has also been apparent to lawyer Leon Wildes. “They had a loving relationship and it broke down because of all that pressure,” he says, “Nixon being reelected and so on.”

  Regardless of their marital troubles, the couple’s shared revulsion for Nixon—who has maintained since June 22, 1972, that the White House had no involvement in the failed attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate—is stronger than ever. The Watergate hearings begin on May 17, 1973, and a month later, on June 18, John and Yoko are given an opportunity to attend in person.

  They accept, surely pleased at the chance to observe the people who’ve been persecuting them being held to the fire.

  John and Yoko travel together to Washington, DC, to witness testimony from John Dean, who has been ousted as White House counsel over his role in the Watergate scandal. In the first row of spectators sits Dean’s wife—Mrs. Maureen “Mo” Dean, who’s wearing a towering hairdo—and just behind her is Elvin Bell, an adviser to Nixon during his negotiations with Soviet Union general secretary Leonid Brezhnev (resulting in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, a.k.a. SALT). Bell has a security clearance high enough to win him a second-row seat, but while he is craning his neck to see around Mrs. Dean, a woman taps him on the shoulder and says, “Pardon me, please,” as she moves past.

  He glances at her and is startled to notice that she and her male companion look familiar.

  Suddenly, Bell makes the connection. It’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the famous antiwar artists, who’ve taken the two seats beside his.

  John and Yoko strike up a conversation with Bell during a break in the testimony, and their back-and-forth continues throughout the day, mostly a barrage of questions, from the benign—“Are you a baritone or bass when you sing?”—to the more pressing: “Why is your country fighting in Vietnam?,” a concern that Bell can’t fully answer.

  Several photos are snapped of John and Yoko in the Washington, DC, audience that day. They will be the last taken of the two of them together for quite some time.

  Chapter 47

  I can’t live

  If living is without you.

  —“Without You”

  The thing to do, Yoko decides, is give them both some time apart.

  “I needed a rest. I needed space,” she tells The Telegraph many years later. “I was very aware that we were ruining each other’s careers and I was hated and John was hated because of me. We did everything together and we did everything publicly together. The Bed-In was our work for peace but we weren’t liked for it,” she reflects. “It was a very difficult time.”

  As for John’s recent behavior, “I started to notice that he became a little restless on top of that, so I thought it’s better to give him a rest and me a rest.”

  Though stories vary, Yoko maintains that she’s the one who orchestrates the next steps. It’s obvious they’ll never really succeed in staying apart as long as John remains in New York, “So then I suggested L.A., and he just lit up,” Yoko says.

  She also knows that being left to his own devices would not be good for John. He doesn’t know how to be single; he’s never been fully on his own. Yoko decides he needs someone to look after him, a woman to keep him interested (and in line). So she casts about and decides to approach one of their assistants—the always friendly and helpful May Pang, who is single and pretty—to take on the role of John’s new girlfriend. “May Pang was a very intelligent, attractive woman and extremely efficient. I thought they’d be OK,” Yoko reasons.

  She pitches the idea to May. “John will probably start going out with other people. Who knows who he will go out with? I know he likes you a lot. So…?”

  Twenty-two-year-old May—a Chinese American woman from Spanish Harlem, who is first and foremost a “gung-ho rock fan”—is startled and confused by the proposition.

  “I just looked at her and said, ‘Not me. I’m not interested,’” May tells interviewers in 2008. But Yoko is undeterred. “I know you’re not after him, but you need a boyfriend,” May recalls Yoko telling her. “I let that pass because I thought this is one of those crazy moments, and I had hoped her idea would pass.”

  The thought of having an affair with her boss, a married man, has never even crossed the young Catholic girl’s mind.

  Though monumentally out of her depth, once John approaches her himself to make it clear that he is in fact interested in her, May decides she’s willing to be part of this strange situation. In the late summer of 1973, John and May decamp for Los Ang
eles—but not on Yoko’s orders, May insists—because there are obvious benefits for the new couple in another city. Plus, John has recording projects lined up in LA, so Capitol Records fronts the expense of the trip with a loan to John of $10,000 in traveler’s checks.

  Friend and local radio DJ Elliot Mintz picks them up at the airport. With John and Yoko, Mintz was accustomed to talking “not about me or them but the state of the world.” Now John surprises him by cutting straight to the state of his marriage and telling Mintz that Yoko has “kicked him out and he didn’t know when or even if they’d be getting back together.”

  Meanwhile, John’s with May and finishing up a new album he recorded at the Record Plant before leaving New York. He’s self-producing it under the title Mind Games.

  Over a steady stream of his signature French cigarettes—unfiltered brands such as Gauloises and Gitanes, which he feels make his voice deeper—John tells a reporter for Melody Maker that his intention is “to sit on Capitol, to do the artwork and to see to things like radio promotion.”

  The sitting part was certainly accomplished. “It was a big blow when they [the Beatles] split up, of course,” says Don Zimmerman, executive director of Capitol Records. “But after that, we got to know them more on an individual level. When John was splitting up with Yoko, he spent time at the Tower [the Capitol Records Building]. He’d come in and put his feet up on the coffee table, the only problem being that you couldn’t get any work done.”