The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  As for the music, “It’s rock at different speeds. It’s not a political album, or an introspective album,” John says of Mind Games. “Someone told me it was like Imagine with balls, which I like a lot.”

  In Los Angeles, John is relaxed, reconnecting with dozens of old friends and making scores of influential new acquaintances. Although he would eventually come to characterize the following year and a half as a “lost weekend” of depression and debauchery—and there are bouts of both—there’s also a great deal of creativity, productivity, and fun.

  For the first time in his adult life, John is defined neither as a Beatle nor as the husband of Yoko Ono. “He reached artistic heights and healed a lot of his personal relationships,” recalls May. “Most important,” she adds, in contrast to the way media reports present it, “he wasn’t miserable for 18 months.” Journalist Larry Kane concurs, revealing that in 1975, John tells him his months with May were among the “happiest times of my life.”

  John finishes three solo albums and produces two others for friends. “It wasn’t by any means a lost weekend,” says Elliot Mintz. “Just a very long one.”

  “I know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all,” agrees Elton John, who meets Lennon for the first time in Los Angeles early that fall of 1973 through their mutual friend Tony King—Apple’s US manager at the time, though he soon leaves to manage Elton’s fledgling Rocket Records.

  Elton is spending a month in Los Angeles in advance of MCA’s October 5, 1973, US release of his double (and seventh studio) album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. “Elton John and his wordsmith Bernie Taupin,” Creem magazine says in its review, “now have perched a short tier below the BeatleStones on the mass pop scale (not enough heterosexual good looks; too many ballads).”

  The two men have more in common than simply being chart-topping British rock stars. “Elton’s notorious for being a very fast writer,” says his guitarist Davey Johnstone, “and also a little impatient in the studio.” Yellow Brick Road was recorded in two weeks; Lennon has clocked some even faster speeds in the studio (his single “Instant Karma!” and the Beatles’ Please Please Me were both done in a single day).

  At their first meeting, Elton recalls walking into the Capitol offices to find Lennon waltzing with Tony King, who’s dressed in full drag as Queen Elizabeth, complete with tiara, shooting a TV ad for John’s new album, Mind Games.

  “I took to him straightaway,” Elton recalls. Not only because the Beatles were among his idols, but also specifically because Lennon “was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: we’re going to get along like a house on fire. And I was right.”

  Elton teasingly calls the pair of them “Fred Astaire and Ginger Beer” (i.e., queer) and snaps a few Polaroids.

  “I’m gonna impound all those pictures till I get me green card,” John jokes.

  “Behave yourself, Sharon Cavendish!” Tony King calls out to Elton. “It’s her drag name,” he explains to Lennon, who looks puzzled, then intrigued.

  “I want to be Morag,” John declares.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Elton chides. “You can’t choose your drag name—someone has to give it to you. She’s the one who named me Sharon Cavendish,” Elton says, pointing at King, who nods and adjusts his tiara.

  “‘Cavendish’ comes from a keyboard player in the fifties called Kay Cavendish, who was always billed as ‘Kitten on the Keys,’” King explains with a laugh.

  “I love giving people drag names,” says Elton, declaring to Lennon, “You’re…Carol Dakota!”

  * * *

  May encourages John to reestablish a relationship with his son, Julian, whom John hasn’t seen since he and Yoko moved to the United States. Julian and Kyoko are the same age, and seeing Julian is a painful reminder for Yoko of her missing daughter, so John has limited himself to occasional phone calls.

  Very occasional.

  “It was thanks to my mum that we started having conversations again,” Julian later says, but it’s never easy closing the gaps that open when too much time passes between communications.

  So Cynthia doesn’t know what to expect when she reaches out in early 1974 to inform John that she and Julian are planning to come over on the SS France, a luxury liner launched by Madame Charles de Gaulle in 1960, now making its final crossing from Southampton to New York.

  To Cyn’s relief, John not only encourages it but also upgrades their passage and makes sure that he and May are at the dock to meet the ship in New York when it arrives. Upon discovering that Elton John and Tony King will be aboard for the same voyage, John requests that they watch over his son and ex-wife along the way, and they oblige.

  When the ship docks, ten-year-old Julian immediately embraces his father, easing the tension for all of them. Though it’s been years since they were last together, Julian’s relieved to find his father as “charming, funny, and warm” as he remembered. John, May recalls, is “shocked to see ‘a little man’ and not the small child he remembered.”

  The four of them head back to Los Angeles, where John and Julian spend “a lot of time getting reacquainted as father and son, playing the guitar and making music,” going swimming, and taking repeated trips to Disneyland. When asked by an interviewer around this time if he has any regrets in life, John hesitates, then admits that “if he had his time over, he’d be different to Julian.”

  Says friend Elliot Mintz, “He realized he should have been there more for him, but as he once said to me, ‘some of us just can’t handle that.’ And I think when he realized it, a part of himself was able to forgive his own father, who hadn’t been there for him.”

  John is a warm host to Julian and, with May’s encouragement, accommodating to Cynthia, for which she remains forever grateful. “May was wonderful, even though she was young and inexperienced in having to deal with such sensitive and emotional issues,” Cyn says. “May was open, caring, and compassionate to me and my son Julian.…She was a good friend when my son and I needed one.”

  But while May is a positive influence on John, many things remain beyond her control. She is sorely lacking, for example, the ability to prevent John from doing just about anything.

  She can show him the right path, but she can’t stop him from going down the wrong one.

  Chapter 48

  It’s better to burn out

  Than to fade away.

  —“My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”

  The trouble begins even before Phil Spector pulls out the gun.

  John’s so pleased to be working with the legendary producer of Imagine again—on an oldies album this time—that he cedes total control to Spector, something he’s never done before. He also starts drinking in the recording studio, something he’s never done before, either, but Spector encourages it. Besides, who’s going to stop him? May? Hardly.

  The mood in Spector’s LA studio couldn’t be more different from the one at the studio in London. Far from the serious, private affairs John’s used to—where even the presence of wives and girlfriends had been frowned upon—Spector holds open-door sessions at A&M Studios that double as parties, with alcohol and celebrity visitors flowing nonstop. The producer himself shows up in costumes—as a priest or surgeon or karate champion—and wears a gun in a shoulder holster.

  “The guys were all drinking—and John was being one of the guys,” May says. “Everyone was as blitzed as he.”

  “John was exercising all his bad habits, as were we all, including Phil,” admits drummer Jim Keltner. “The only problem with that was that Phil was the producer, and somebody had to be, you know, sane.”

  Spector doesn’t inspire confidence on that front. Privately, John calls him “the Vampire.” May worries about the gun, but John assures her it’s just for show—until the night Spector pulls it out and shoots
it into the ceiling.

  Fellow producer Mark Hudson recalls, “Spector pulled out a large gun and started chasing John through the hallways. John was trying to laugh it off but it was horrible.”

  “Listen, Phil, if you’re gonna kill me, kill me. But don’t fuck with me ears. I need ’em,” John deadpans.

  When Spector later disappears with the recordings and can’t be found, it’s almost a relief.

  * * *

  Another notorious group John falls in with also includes vampires: the Hollywood Vampires.

  “The original Hollywood Vampires was a drinking club, a last-man-standing kinda thing,” says the club president, Alice Cooper. “People started calling us the Hollywood Vampires because we’d never see daylight. We figured instead of drinking the blood of the vein, we were drinking the blood of the vine.”

  The club is made up of Hollywood rockers such as Cooper, Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s songwriting partner), Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, and Keith Moon of the Who (often clad in outrageous costumes, including a Queen Elizabeth getup). Whenever he’s in town, Ringo is a welcome member. They all congregate for endless rounds of late-night drinks in the upstairs loft at Hollywood’s Rainbow Bar & Grill, which is adorned with a plaque reading THE LAIR OF THE HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES.

  John finds his way into the club through his good friend Harry Nilsson, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter famed for his version of the folk-rock song “Everybody’s Talkin’” (from the Oscar-winning 1969 film Midnight Cowboy) and his more recent orchestral smash-hit cover of “Without You,” a ballad by the Beatles’ Apple label signees Badfinger.

  Alice Cooper—who’s just covered the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” during the tour promoting his Billion Dollar Babies album—often falls into the uneasy role of mediator between Harry and John. “They were the best of friends, but when they drank, they liked to get political and talk about religion and everything else that causes fights.”

  Cooper notes, “Everybody’s personality changes a little bit when they drink.” In John and Harry’s case, “It was funny because neither one was a fighter; they just had a belligerent streak in them every once in a while. Most of the time they were laughing.”

  “The difference between the two was that Harry loved to drink and was good at it,” explains Elliot Mintz. “John also loved to drink, but was no good at it. At the beginning of an evening with the two of them, the conversation would be brilliant…Then suddenly it would flip, and the insanity would start.”

  * * *

  One such night is March 12, 1974, when John and Harry show up at the Troubadour, a favorite nightclub in West Hollywood, for a midnight comedy show.

  Sitting next to them is Rat Pack actor (and fellow Brit) Peter Lawford, whose former beach house John is currently renting in Santa Monica.

  “Brandy Alexanders for the table!” Harry orders. He and John are already pretty blitzed.

  “What’s that?” John asks. He’s never heard of the drink, let alone tried one.

  “Brandy and cream with chocolate liqueur. Don’t worry, you’ll love it,” Harry assures him.

  “They taste like milk shakes,” John exclaims when they arrive. Several more rounds of the unexpectedly potent cocktails go down with dangerous ease.

  May Pang sits by, helpless. “Harry would keep feeding John drinks until it was too late.”

  The Smothers Brothers come onstage to perform a comedy routine.

  Tommy Smothers is an old friend of John, having sung in the chorus on “Give Peace a Chance.”

  Instead of giving them a friendly greeting, John and Harry start heckling Tommy and Dick Smothers. “I think we almost screwed up the act,” John later admits.

  “It was horrendous,” recounts Tom Smothers. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.’ He didn’t think I had an act. Well, they start heckling, and it was some of the worst language I’ve ever heard—and they had a real buzz on…It was a mess.”

  Lawford tries and fails to intervene, then John gets into a scuffle with a local photographer, who claims he hit her.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” he shouts to the parking attendant when he’s hauled out of the club. “I’m Ed Sullivan!”

  Waking up full of regret, with the story splashed across the tabloids, John sends a bouquet of flowers to Tommy and Dick Smothers, along with an apology: “With Love & Tears!”

  In New York, Yoko has even less to say to the reporters who come calling: “No comment!”

  In Los Angeles, the district attorney investigates the events surrounding John’s highly publicized night at the Troubadour. Though there is insufficient evidence to justify criminal charges, with his visa still in limbo, he settles out of court with the photographer who’s accused him. “I had to pay her off,” John says, “because I thought it would harm my immigration.”

  * * *

  At Burbank Studios, John is dealing with a different kind of damage. With Phil Spector still on the lam, John is instead producing his friend Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats. But in the midst of the first recording session, it’s clear that Harry’s famously gorgeous voice is shot. Drummer Jim Keltner recalls him saying that he and John had been out “doing a lot of screaming the night before, which John is really good at.”

  “Where is all that yooooooo-deeeee-dooooo-dahh stuff?” John asks.

  “Croak” is all Harry Nilsson can manage.

  John suggests they wrap it up and get back home for the night.

  “Home” is a clubhouse of sorts—for months after arriving in LA, John and May hotel- and house-hopped around town, but now they’ve landed a Santa Monica beach house large enough to accommodate a good portion of John’s fellow Hollywood Vampires. At his suggestion, in an effort to avoid the kinds of troubles that beset the earlier recording sessions with Phil Spector, half the people playing on the new album are also shacked up together.

  John’s old friend Klaus Voormann has joined them. So has the always outrageous Keith Moon. And Ringo Starr, along with his business manager, Hilary Gerrard, is there to both help his friends and escape his own marital troubles (George Harrison has confessed that he and Ringo’s wife, Maureen, are having an affair. A distraught Ringo leaves Tittenhurst, which he’s recently bought from John, and heads to see his friends in LA).

  The two-story white stucco beach house has an impressive pedigree. Originally built in the 1930s by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, the five-bedroom villa then belonged to actor Peter Lawford back when he was married to Patricia Kennedy, one of John F. Kennedy’s younger sisters. Lawford is known to have let the president (and possibly his other brother-in-law Bobby) use the house, allegedly for trysts with Marilyn Monroe.

  “John and I took the master bedroom,” May says. “When we first saw it, he said, ‘So, this is where they did it,’ referring to the former presidential guest and Monroe.” It’s a piece of trivia that John delights in sharing with visitors. Chris O’Dell, a tour manager and former Apple employee who was a frequent visitor to the beach house, recalls, “We were all sort of spooked by the legend of Marilyn, especially John, who was convinced that her ghost haunted the house. He said something woke him up every morning, and we all just assumed it was Marilyn.”

  Harry, Keith, Klaus, and Hilary take the other four bedrooms, and the library, “complete with an official portrait of President Kennedy on the wall,” is converted into Ringo’s room.

  With May as den mother, the group settles into a surreal sort of domesticity: days full of visitors, nights in the studio, and not infrequent wild after-hours.

  John’s starting to feel worn down.

  “This is my brilliant idea, to have us all live together and work together. And we’d all be in tune,” John recalls. “But it was a madhouse.”

  The situation he’s in finally lands on him. “I’ve got this great singer with no voice, and a house full of drunken lunatics. So, I sudde
nly got sober in the middle of it. I’m responsible, I’m the producer, man! I’d better straighten out. So I straightened out.”

  * * *

  On March 28, a new session musician drops in to the studio.

  Paul McCartney.

  It’s been years since they’ve seen each other—ironically, just as John’s old drug conviction stands in the way of his visa application, effectively trapping him in the United States (he fears he won’t be allowed back in if he were to leave), Paul’s own arrests for cannabis possession have been keeping him out. But now Paul’s in town for the forty-sixth Academy Awards: his Wings song “Live and Let Die” (cowritten with Linda and produced by George Martin) is nominated in the Best Music (Original Song) category.

  The tuxedos can wait. He picks up a set of sticks and sits behind the drum kit. Both Ringo and Keith Moon are absent, but prodigy Stevie Wonder, who’s been recording in a different studio nearby, comes over to sit in.

  They play “Midnight Special,” a song that takes them back to Liverpool days.

  “Don’t get too serious, we’re not getting paid,” John tells his friends. It turns into a spirited jam session with Paul and Linda, Stevie Wonder, and May Pang on tambourine, among other session musicians.

  It’s been more than four years since the former bandmates have played together, and while a bootleg recording of the session—eventually released under the title A Toot and a Snore in ’74—reveals a set heavy on the blues and sloppily executed, “they made joyous music together that night,” May remembers.

  They certainly make history. And everyone there is acutely aware of it. Even though others were also playing, John notes, “they were just watching me and Paul.”

  Chapter 49

  Light of the love that I found…

  —“Fool in the Rain”

  The affair was something that was not hurtful to me,” Yoko insists. From the start, she says, “I was prepared to lose him, but it was better he came back. I didn’t think I would lose him.”