The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  But now she feels it’s gone on long enough. Although it’s been more than six months since John left for LA, Yoko’s been in constant communication with him. And with May Pang. And with several other friends, such as radio DJ Elliot Mintz and photographer Bob Gruen.

  May finds the calls from Yoko increasingly controlling.

  “First they were directives to keep our relationship quiet, which was fine with me,” recalls May. But John was too openly affectionate with her for that to last long. Once that news got out, Yoko’s “crisis mode kicked in. She would call with instructions of what to say, that she had thrown John out. She’d call every day to remind us what to say. One drama after another,” May says in exasperation.

  Yoko’s explanation for calling John so often was much simpler: “We missed each other. We were calling each other every day. Some days he would call me three or four times,” Yoko tells reporters.

  And while by all accounts John isn’t nearly as unhappy or out of control as some people make him out to be, he has never expressed anything other than a desire to reconcile with Yoko. “The sense with him all the time was ‘What do I have to do to get out of here and back to her?’” says Mintz.

  Now that she’s convinced John’s “lost weekend” must come to an end, Yoko needs advice. In addition to the psychics and numerologists she’s always consulted, she begins making recurring appointments with her tarot card reader, John Green. Green, who joins Yoko’s staff in 1974, is able to provide multiple readings a day on any subject of her choice.

  She also reaches out to John’s friends to ask for help.

  * * *

  “Yoko came to our house in England and asked if I would do her a favor,” Paul says in 2019. “When I went to LA, would I mention to John that she was prepared to take him back as long as he would make the effort to court her?”

  When Paul conveys that message to John privately, he can see the relief on his old friend’s face.

  On April 2, 1974, when the Oscar statuette for Best Song is handed out at Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to “The Way We Were” rather than to “Live and Let Die,” John is waiting backstage to console Paul.

  Though music insiders spin visions of a renewed partnership, Paul’s role as an envoy for Yoko remains under wraps.

  By late April, the Hollywood glitter is fading. John can no longer resist the powerful pull of New York.

  * * *

  John returns to New York, but not to Yoko. Instead, he and May stay at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue, in a suite right above Elton John’s. He remixes Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats and starts work on a new album, Walls and Bridges.

  John stays up late watching TV, wondering if he’ll ever have another hit record. Paul, George, and Ringo have all achieved multiple number-one hits as solo artists (including Paul’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and “My Love,” George’s “My Sweet Lord” and “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” and Ringo’s “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen”)—but John hasn’t had any, and the exclusion stings. “I’m out of favor at the moment,” he laments to Elton.

  John flips the channels, stopping on Reverend Ike, a thirty-nine-year-old black minister who preaches out of a converted Loews movie theater uptown, on 175th Street.

  “Let me tell you, guys, it doesn’t matter,” Reverend Ike is saying. “It’s whatever gets you through the night.” John takes down the minister’s words and starts writing.

  On June 17, 1974—shortly after Paul slips in a third US number-one single with Wings’ “Band on the Run”—John’s at the Record Plant working on the rough mixes for his new album, Walls and Bridges. As he’s “fiddling about,” Elton John and Tony King walk in. John plays them several of the new songs, including “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” inspired by that line from the TV evangelist. It’s not his favorite of the songs, but Elton seems to like it.

  John’s producing the record himself, and since Elton likes how he works—“fast, and he got bored easily, which was right up my street”—he pipes up.

  “Say, can I put a bit of piano on that?”

  “Sure, love it!” John replies. Though the two of them are good friends by now, this is the first time he’s ever actually seen Elton play the piano, and he’s blown away.

  “He zapped in. I was amazed at his ability,” John recalls. “We had a great time.”

  Elton also adds piano and harmony to “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox),” John’s love note to May, but it’s “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” that he thinks has real hit potential.

  “That’ll be your Number One,” Elton predicts.

  John scoffs, but Elton is serious. He’s so sure of it, in fact, that the two friends make a steep wager as to just how high it will chart.

  If the single hits number 1, John has to perform live onstage at one of Elton’s upcoming tour dates.

  “He sang harmony on it and he really did a damn good job,” John explains. “So, I sort of halfheartedly promised that if ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ became No. 1, which I had no reason to expect, I’d do Madison Square Garden with him.”

  When Apple releases the album, on September 26 (October 4 in the UK), critics marvel at the pairing. “Elton John—Elton John????—on keyboards and back-up vocals,” New Musical Express announces, picking up on “a real, desperate rocking edge to” the song, which Rolling Stone calls “the ice cream that follows a tonsillectomy.”

  On October 9, 1974, John celebrates his thirty-fourth birthday. A series of music milestones follows in fast succession: Walls and Bridges is certified gold on October 22, and then on November 16, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” tops the Billboard charts at number 1, just as Elton predicted.

  Elton calls John up. “Remember when you promised…”

  To make good on his bet, John will be working on Thanksgiving. At Madison Square Garden.

  Before the Elton John show on November 28, John’s stage fright comes roaring back, and he’s gripped with nausea. Elton gives John an onyx medallion inscribed with the name Dr. Winston O’Boogie, an alias John sometimes used, and Yoko sends both musicians gardenias, her favorite flower. When John makes his unannounced appearance, he’s wearing the medallion and has Yoko’s gardenia affixed to his lapel.

  The crowd cheers, stunned at the sight of the superstar, who’s about to amaze them one more time.

  “I just went up and did a few numbers”—the first being “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night”—“but the emotional thing was me and Elton together,” John says.

  The two then sang “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” a Lennon song from Sgt. Pepper that Elton had just covered (with Dr. Winston O’Boogie on guitar and backing vocals) and released as a single. For the concert finale, “we thought we’d do a number of an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul,” John Lennon tells the crowd. “This one I never sang, it’s an old Beatle number, and we just about know it.”

  Elton’s band launches into “I Saw Her Standing There.”

  After the show, Yoko joins the concert after-party at the Pierre, and she and John are photographed sitting together, talking and holding hands. The barriers between them are crumbling.

  * * *

  Although John and Yoko do not reconcile immediately after the Elton John show, the stage is set for a reunion.

  But even as the two of them are coming back together, the Beatles are moving further—forever—apart.

  A few weeks after John’s show with Elton, George Harrison is in New York, also booked to play Madison Square Garden to promote his album Dark Horse. Paul is in town as well. (For once, Ringo is the only Beatle not in attendance.) They plan to meet at the Plaza Hotel on December 19, 1974, along with their lawyers, to sign the papers that will formally dissolve the Beatles.

  It’s the last step in a legal process that Paul began on December 31, 1970, when he filed a lawsuit in London’s High Court, an action that turned “these true buddies of mine from way way back, these truest
friends of mine” into “my firmest enemies overnight.” Despite the trauma, though, Paul maintains “I had to do it. It was either that or [let] Klein have the whole thing, all the fortune we’d worked for all our lives since we were children.”

  And for the most part, the hurt feelings have begun to dissipate over the past four years. After that jam session in LA, Paul and John are on good terms again. John has accepted George’s invitation to perform with him onstage at the Garden tonight. Ringo is friendly with all of them and is now on the phone, having already signed the papers in England. George and Paul are at the Plaza, waiting for John so they can all sign and be done.

  But John doesn’t show up. There’s a tax issue that he’s worried will disproportionately affect him. Yet when his lawyers finally reach him, at home with May, John gives them the message that he can’t sign because the stars aren’t properly aligned. “I didn’t sign it because my astrologer told me it wasn’t the right day,” he later explains. (As friend and journalist Ray Connolly points out, “This was the first anyone had ever heard of him having an astrologer. But Yoko had one.”)

  The group at the Plaza is shocked and annoyed—especially George, who immediately lets John know he’s no longer wanted onstage tonight. (George has been having an especially rough time; the tour has not been a success, and his wife, Pattie Boyd, has left him for his best friend, Eric Clapton.) Paul, the peacemaker, comes over to John and May’s apartment to work out what—other than astrology—is at issue.

  Luckily, the hurt feelings blow over quickly, even for George, who reconciles with John the next day.

  “Everybody changes,” May reflects. “With John things changed on a daily basis. It’s a question of time. Five years earlier,” in 1969, when John was the one pushing for a breakup, “was not the same situation. In 1974 he had just seen everyone. The friendship was still there. They were brothers. There was no animosity.”

  While the lawyers revise the documents, John and May take Julian, now eleven and visiting the United States for the holidays, down to Florida.

  “We wanted to give Julian a good time for his Christmas holiday, somewhere warm,” May tells the Palm Beach Post in 2018. They stay in a borrowed unit at the Sun and Surf condominiums on Sunrise Avenue. “We were there for a week. A few days in Palm Beach, a day or two at Disney World, then we came back to Palm Beach and then home to New York.”

  In Palm Beach, they swim and relax, go to a few restaurants, attend a few parties on the island. On Worth Avenue, John buys May some jewelry. It’s a nice break. Just as he enjoyed Disneyland, in California, John enjoys Disney World (especially the Pirates of the Caribbean ride), but he especially appreciates the benign anonymity the crowds afford him. “I don’t like being famous,” he tells a Palm Beach photographer. “I just want to be like you guys.”

  On December 29, 1974, while they’re at the Polynesian Village Resort at Disney World, the lawyers catch up to John.

  With the revised documents in front of him, he hesitates, aware of what he’s about to do.

  “Take out your camera,” John suggests to May.

  And then he hesitates again, looking out the window. “I could almost see him replaying the entire Beatles experience in his mind,” she says.

  “Even though they all felt they had to break up to get to the next level of their musical careers, John had started this band that changed the world. It changed pop culture. It changed how we live and how we dress. And he knew that. So when he sat down to sign, he knew that this was it. His was the last signature. As he had started the group, he was the one to end it.”

  And so it comes to an end in the Magic Kingdom: with a final autograph placed just under the other three, John Lennon signs away the Beatles.

  Chapter 50

  Gotta be rock and roll music

  If you wanna dance with me.

  —“Rock and Roll Music”

  In January of 1975, John’s guitar and backing vocals appear on another number-one song in America—Elton John’s reggae-esque cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  That same month, John welcomes Londoner David Bowie back to New York. They’d met a few months earlier, on September 20, 1974, at the twenty-first birthday party Dean Martin threw for his son Ricci in Los Angeles. Other guests had included Ringo, Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Arthur Ashe, and Brian and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys.

  The big draw at the event for John are the stars Dean Martin and Elizabeth Taylor. “He really wanted to go,” May says. “He loved the old-time Hollywood stars.”

  Forty-two-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, in between marriages to Richard Burton, has recently met Bowie and taken a strong liking to him. “Miss Taylor had been trying to get me to make a movie with her,” Bowie says, though he isn’t interested. (He later tells Cameron Crowe, in an interview for Rolling Stone, “I mean she was a nice woman and all, even if I didn’t get much of a chance to know her. She did tell me I reminded her of James Dean.”) She makes the introduction between the two musicians at the party.

  “So John was sort of ‘Oh, here comes another new one,’” Bowie later says, imitating John’s Liverpool accent. “And I was sort of, ‘It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid.’ And he said, ‘Hello, Dave.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got everything you’ve made—except the Beatles.’

  “In the early 1970s,” Bowie admits sheepishly, “that would have been most uncool to actually say you liked the Beatles in any way, shape, or form.”

  Despite that awkward first meeting, the two quickly find common ground and become close friends. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness,” Bowie recalls. “Also, uninvited, John would wax on endlessly about any topic under the sun and was over-endowed with opinions. I immediately felt empathy with that.”

  Bowie says John “was probably one of the brightest, quickest witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in its true definition, not in a fabricated political sense, a real humanist.

  “And he had a really spiteful sense of humour which of course, being English, I adored.”

  Bowie, who on January 8 had celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday (Elvis Presley turned forty that same day), has returned to the Pierre, on Fifth Avenue, where—in two $700-per-week suites—he had built the elaborate sets for his Diamond Dogs Tour, which wrapped on December 1, 1974.

  Though critical and popular perceptions hold that “a new album release by David Bowie is today looked on with as much awe as a release by the Beatles in the sixties,” John enjoys ribbing Bowie about his recent concept albums, including 1972’s multiplatinum The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the story of a fictional rock star named Ziggy, one of Bowie’s many alter egos.

  “What the bloody hell are you doing, Bowie? It’s all so negative, your shit. All this Diamond Dogs mutant crap. Ha, ha, ha.”

  “What do you think of glam rock?” Bowie asks John.

  “It’s just fooking rock and roll with lipstick,” he answers in his Liverpool accent.

  “Very succinct, but not all that accurate,” Bowie says with a laugh.

  Bowie’s latest evolution is a shift toward a style he’s calling “plastic soul,” the same phrase that Paul used in a different context in advance of Rubber Soul. Fascinated by the popular “sound of Philadelphia,” Bowie began recording his new album, Young Americans, at Sigma Sound Studios in that city. Now he’s returned to New York to finish it at the hallowed Electric Lady Studios, which Jimi Hendrix had opened for business in 1970, just three weeks before his death by accidental overdose.

  Bowie hasn’t consulted his producer, Tony Visconti (who later marries May Pang), who’s departed for London under the impression that the album is complete, but he wants to add a cover of “Across the Universe”—the so
ng John brought to the studio in early 1968 (eventually appearing on the final Beatles album, Let It Be), spurred by his irritation one night at his first wife, Cynthia.

  “It’s so interesting,” John says about the songwriting. “‘Words are flying [sic] out like [sings] endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.’ Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It’s not a matter of craftsmanship; it wrote itself.”

  Bowie skips one part of the tune, eliminating the Sanskrit mantra “Jai guru deva om,” which John had learned from his studies with the maharishi and included in the original chorus.

  John likes the cover (“I thought, great,” he says when he heard that Bowie wanted to cover it. “It’s one of my favorite songs, but I didn’t like my version of it”) and accepts Bowie’s invitation to collaborate. They talk for hours about the concept of fame, Bowie breaking down the paralyzing paradox of celebrity as “How much you want to be known before you are, and then when you are, how much you want the reverse: ‘I don’t want to do these interviews! I don’t want to have these photographs taken!’”

  Bowie builds the rhythm around a guitar riff he’d originally earmarked for “Footstompin’” (his cover of the 1961 Flares song, which he eventually released on his 1995 album RarestOneBowie).

  “What was that riff you had?” Bowie asks his longtime guitarist Carlos Alomar, whose motto is “I play any guitar that pays.” John listens to Alomar’s guitar work, then finds his way in, repeating the word aim, which Bowie then morphs into fame, the song’s driving theme, lyric, and title.

  “He goes in with about four words and a few guys,” John says, “and starts laying down this stuff, and he has virtually nothing—he’s just making it up in the studio. So I just contributed whatever I contributed—you know, like, backwards piano and oooohhh [hits a high note] and a couple of things like the repeat of ‘fame.’”