The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  By day, he plays with Sean on the sun-splashed beach, searching for sea glass and building castles in Bermuda’s famous pink sands.

  With the evening serenade of whistling tree frogs, he sits alone on the veranda with his Ovation acoustic guitar—the one he’s avoided for so long. He sets up two Panasonic boom boxes to record his music.

  He dedicates a song called “Nobody Told Me” to Ringo, speaking into the demo tape, “This one’s for Mister Starkey.”

  John fights to get rid of his self-consciousness, the scolding inner voice that for the last five years has relentlessly criticized: You can’t do that. That song’s not good enough. Remember, you’re the guy who wrote “A Day in the Life.” Try again.

  It’s a lonely battle. He calls Yoko in New York. She doesn’t answer.

  He’s plunged into emotional distress, then remembers a song he started and abandoned more than ten years earlier. He reworks the music and lyrics to “Stranger’s Room” into “I’m Losing You,” a passionate reflection on love in its final throes, adding a powerful guitar riff.

  “I’m getting all this stuff,” he says when he finally reaches Yoko. She listens quietly as he plays back the tape of John singing directly to her, “Don’t want to lose you, now.”

  “Incredible song,” Yoko says. “It’s so beautifully written and the emotion is so powerful.”

  Two hours later, John’s phone rings. Yoko has written a companion song to “I’m Losing You”—“I’m Moving On,” her personal take on the complexity of adult relationships.

  Suddenly, John’s feelings of despair lift into free-form creativity. “I like it to be inspirational—from the spirit,” he says, and as the calls fly between Bermuda and New York, they keep making songs.

  John is feeling so good that he goes out to a dance club—“for the first time since 1967,” he says. The DJ is spinning a song from an American group’s debut album. “I suddenly heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52’s for the first time,” John says, and he feels an instant connection. “It sounds just like Yoko’s music.”

  This person’s studied her, he thinks. They’ve finally caught up to where we were.

  Not knowing that the B-52’s had indeed created the song as a “tribute to Yoko,” John takes the similarities as another sign that it’s time to get back in the studio.

  More inspiration appears. When John takes Sean to the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, a sanctuary for local foliage that dates from the turn of the twentieth century, they walk through cedar and palmetto trees to enter a flowering garden.

  He bends down to inspect a bed of sweet-smelling trumpet-shaped blossoms. FREESIA DOUBLE FANTASY, he reads from the identifying plaque.

  Double Fantasy—that’s a great title, he thinks to himself.

  He and Yoko talk it over and share the excitement over the phrase, with its layered meanings. Not only is it a flower, John points out, but also, “without really saying anything, it says everything.”

  Yoko likes that it references “a dream that we have—which we share.”

  John is almost ready to go home.

  Chapter 56

  Our life together

  Is so precious together.

  —“(Just Like) Starting Over”

  I’m interested in doing something extra special,” John tells producer Jack Douglas.

  He’s calling from Bermuda with some highly unusual directions for the recording wizard, who engineered Imagine and who throughout the 1970s was making records with the Who, Miles Davis, and Patti Smith as well as Aerosmith and Cheap Trick.

  John directs the curious producer to a noon seaplane landing at Manhattan’s 30th Street pier. Douglas boards the plane, which is routed to Cold Spring Harbor and comes in for a landing on an unfamiliar beach. When Yoko meets the plane with a message, Douglas realizes he’s at Cannon Hill.

  “John wants to do a record; he wants you to produce it.” She hands him an envelope marked “For Jack’s ears only.”

  Douglas listens to the cassettes, mesmerized by the primitive yet affecting sounds of John playing his guitar and singing into two Panasonic cassette recorders, keeping time on pots and pans. Douglas can’t resist taking on the project. Once John is assured of Douglas’s participation, he reels off his requirements for recruiting the session musicians. They all have to be around John’s age, and they can’t know who’s behind the new record.

  “I don’t want to make a rock album,” John says. “What I want to make here is a record about a middle-aged man. I want it to have that feel, a man who’s putting together his life, who’s survived, for me. The Beatles. And all of this other crap that’s going on in my life. I survived it all, I’m now a family man. I’m facing middle age, I’m looking at forty.”

  Douglas rehearses bassist Tony Levin and Hugh McCracken on lead guitar, then leads them to an astonishing destination. At the Dakota, John Lennon greets the musicians: “I’ve been a househusband for the last five years and I want to get back to the music.”

  And he’s relentless about the details. To Levin, John says, “They tell me you’re good, just don’t play too many notes”—and he hears every one of them. Levin comes away from the session marveling, “John Lennon had more of a clear vision of what he wanted from the bass than anybody.”

  McCracken feels like he’s back in October of 1971, when John asked him to “pretend it’s Christmas” to set the mood for his session work on “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Tonight, John’s getting a feel for the new track, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” stopping McCracken on a guitar figure he’s improvised. “I like that a lot, don’t forget it.”

  There’s no chance.

  The meeting at the Dakota is winding down when John calls the departing musicians over to his portable Fender Rhodes electric piano, saying, “Wait, I just wrote it.”

  He plays “(Just Like) Starting Over” and asks Douglas, “Do you think it’ll make the record?”

  “I think it’s a smash,” Douglas says. “Probably the first single.”

  * * *

  Photographers compete for position outside the Hit Factory on 48th Street and Ninth Avenue. It’s August 7, 1980, more than four years since John has recorded new music. Paul Goresh is among the lucky ones who capture a shot, though John’s face is obscured by a wide-brimmed hat.

  Only one cameraman is allowed inside—someone outside the New York music scene whose date of birth is approved by Yoko’s astrologers. “Secrecy was the No. 1 issue,” Boston’s Roger Farrington confirms. “I was the first photographer authorized to photograph John Lennon in five years.”

  Farrington likes the Lennon he sees through his lens. “He was energized, witty, and looked fit and tan—he had been sailing in Bermuda. And with the long hair he looked every bit a rock star.”

  For the album cover, Yoko chooses Japanese high-art photographer Kishin Shinoyama. His depiction of Double Fantasy is a black-and-white portrait of the couple, eyes closed and lips touching in a sensual kiss.

  On August 10, John calls videographer Jay Dubin. Dubin answers, but he doesn’t trust the sound on his newfangled mobile phone. He assumes the street noise where he’s standing, in front of the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, is making him mishear the name of the caller.

  “Okay, let me sing a little bit of a song for you,” John says.

  The celebrity sound check sends Dubin on his way to the Hit Factory.

  Chapter 57

  Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

  —“Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”

  Two days later, on August 12, John and Yoko announce their new project. They pitch the fourteen tracks (seven are his; seven are Yoko’s) as “dialog songs, meaning that we were writing as if it were a play and we were two characters in it.”

  Executives vie for the rights to release Double Fantasy. The benchmark is Paul’s 1979 contract. Columbia had paid him $10.8 million to make the switch from Capitol (the US distribution arm of Apple). Paul even negot
iated a secret (until 2005) clause that would allow for a hypothetical Beatles reunion.

  Ringo has also signed with the label, which is angling to represent all four ex-Beatles. “Whatever John wants for this record, we’ll give it to him!” one Columbia executive tells Jack Douglas.

  Thirty-seven-year-old David Geffen is equally motivated. As a cofounder of Asylum Records in 1971 and a former vice chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures, he has an impressive pedigree and shrewd business instincts. He understands that if he is to win the deal, Yoko is the one he needs to convince.

  He sends her a telegram, and she invites him to a meeting at the Dakota. He arrives dressed all in white—Yoko’s favorite color, according to his research.

  Yoko, wearing all black, makes a positive assessment of Geffen, determining that he has “good numbers.” He also boasts a roster of top talent, including five-time Grammy winner Donna Summer, the first singer to sign with the label.

  John’s a fan. He plays The Wanderer—Summer’s eighth studio album and Geffen Records’ inaugural release—over and over again. Its title single is out on September 27. He brings a 45 into Yoko’s office so she can hear Summer’s vocal technique. “Listen! She’s doing Elvis!”

  Without hearing Double Fantasy, Geffen agrees to Yoko’s terms. John and Yoko’s album will be a Geffen Records release.

  Yoko has one final condition. She wants control over where the record is made. “You can do it anywhere in the world except for the Record Plant,” she tells Jack Douglas’s business partner, Stan Vincent, “and not California” (referencing her disagreements with the Record Plant’s owner as well as John’s “lost weekend”).

  John and Yoko take over the Hit Factory’s sixth floor, equipped with keyed private elevators for security.

  Sean later remembers those special days. “Everything’s there; it’s carpeted and warm; the lighting is dim. It’s very cozy. My parents are both there. The music’s loud and clear and exciting. It’s a very magical environment for a kid.”

  On the days Sean can’t be in the studio, John tapes a color photo of his son inside the glass-paneled control booth. “He was looking at me all the time,” John says, struggling with guilt over their first extended separation. He keeps a tight watch on the clock so he can be home in time to take part in their beloved good-night ritual.

  When John rehearses the song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” he decides to perform the closing lyric in a whisper. “Good night, Sean, see you in the morning.”

  * * *

  “Here’s David Sheff,” John sings to the tune of “Eleanor Rigby,” “come to ask questions with answers that no one will hear.”

  After a summer of legwork, the reporter has opened the door to the Dakota with his words. As David Geffen had done during the bidding for the rights to Double Fantasy, Sheff impressed Yoko with a compelling telegram. September 10 is the first day of a conversation that will run three weeks, the interviews to be published in Playboy magazine.

  “This will be the reference book!” John predicts.

  John’s certainty is warranted, and it underscores security specialist Doug MacDougall’s deepest fear—that John and Yoko will be dangerously revealing of their daily schedule.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve done this kind of thing,” Yoko tells Sheff of his access to the couple. But she’s also, for the first time since the spring of 1975, granted sit-downs with the BBC, Newsweek, and other media outlets.

  A parallel concern for MacDougall is the surge in the number of fans who have recently taken to congregating outside the Dakota, clamoring for John’s attention as he travels between the Dakota and the Hit Factory. All MacDougall’s years of FBI experience have failed to prepare the former agent for the complexity of a rock star’s popularity.

  Chapter 58

  Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.

  —“Fame”

  John Lennon wakes up, reaches for his eyeglasses. At first the day seems like any other until he realizes it’s a special one. October 9, 1980, is his fortieth birthday—and Sean’s fifth.

  Over morning tea, he indulges in a moment of happy reflection, counting “only two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than a one night’s stand, as it were: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.” He takes a little credit, too, joking, “So, I think as a talent scout I’ve done pretty damned well!”

  Yoko laughs, and moments later, John’s hearing another of those two familiar voices. He picks up the kitchen phone to greet his old songwriting partner, who’s called to wish him all the best for the record launch.

  “I believe the last time I spoke to John was when I was in England and we spoke on the phone,” McCartney says in 2019. “It was a pleasant conversation about mostly domestic matters. We had been experiencing a bread strike in England, so I was into making my own bread. He told me he was also doing the same thing around that time in New York, so we talked bread.”

  Five-year-old Sean, whose diet is strictly macrobiotic—sugar-free and dairy-free—doesn’t want baked bread today. He wants birthday cake and ice cream.

  And he’ll have his treats, as soon as his parents make a big announcement: in the spring of 1981, “John and Yoko will be touring Japan, USA, and Europe.”

  But the family has an earlier flight to catch.

  Yoko entices John and Sean onto the rooftop of the Dakota. A small plane flies in from the north. Yoko waves at the pilot. He’s Wayne Mansfield, whom she first hired to skywrite “War is over! If you want it” over the city during their 1969 antiwar campaign.

  The skywriter spells out HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN AND SEAN—LOVE YOKO. He skillfully traces the letters until they are repeated in full nine times, for the shared birth date and for John’s lucky number 9.

  John tells his son, “We’re almost like twins.”

  * * *

  On a walk down Central Park West, the Lennons bump into Geraldo Rivera.

  “There they were, John, Yoko, and their child,” Rivera recalls in 2019. “I couldn’t have been happier to see them and how happy and lighthearted they were. They reminded me of college kids or honeymooners. His love for her cannot be overstated. John was head over heels for Yoko. They were a beautiful family, and we had a great chat.”

  After the Upper West Siders share a few laughs in front of the entrance to Geraldo’s apartment building, on 64th Street, they bid one another farewell.

  “Here was one of the Beatles and one of the most famous people in the world walking around New York City without security, without bodyguards,” Rivera remembers. “I did not have a good feeling about that.”

  * * *

  John’s still making records with old friends. He and Yoko have produced David Peel and the Super Apple Band’s new single, “John Lennon for President,” to be released by Peel’s Orange label in November.

  John’s feeling nostalgic, too, for the music that inspired him. “This one’s for Gene, and Eddie, and Elvis.…and Buddy,” he says of “(Just Like) Starting Over,” the first single off Double Fantasy.

  “It’s a fifties song made with an eighties approach,” John says, likening the sensibility to “Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’—which I think is a great record—is, to me…it’s the same kind of period-sound as ‘Starting Over.’”

  John’s target listeners send the single to number 4 on the Billboard charts.

  * * *

  In San Francisco, Jann Wenner is in his office preparing a new cover story about John. The Rolling Stone editor and publisher is on the phone to New York. He’s assigned the shoot to his chief photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and he has a particular look in mind.

  “Please get me some pictures without Yoko,” Wenner says.

  Leibovitz objects. “You never tell me what to do.”

  Wenner won’t back down.

  He’s dishing out the tough treatment to the entire staff. Panicked editors are talking to friends at other music magazines. “Two different writers had been sent to cover Lennon,” the gossip go
es, “but neither had gotten the hard story [Rolling] Stone wanted.”

  The reason is Double Fantasy: “They like the album too much.”

  Chapter 59

  Still I look to find a reason to believe.

  —“Reason to Believe”

  I’m happy to be forty years old,” John says when he calls producer Jack Douglas on November 10, one week ahead of the worldwide release of Double Fantasy. “I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life and I feel the best I ever felt.”

  Critics pounce on John’s advanced age in rock ’n’ roll years—“The old bugger still has a wonderful voice by the way,” says New Musical Express. John, still celebrating, is unfazed. One recipient of his generosity is Paul Goresh. On their way to the Hit Factory, John and Yoko pose for the photographer in front of the Dakota.

  In Poole, England, John’s aunt Mimi receives an extravagant gift. She opens the fancy silver box labeled CARTIER to discover an exquisite pearl necklace and matching brooch. An engraved card reads, “Double Fantasy—Christmas 1980—NYC—John and Yoko.”

  “You’re daft!” Mimi scolds John when she reaches him on the phone at the Dakota.

  “Go on, Mimi, spoil yourself,” he says, “just for a change.”

  December 8, 1980

  Mark is standing outside the Dakota when he is joined by a familiar face: the woman he met his first day there, Lennon superfan Jude Stein.

  “Jeri and I came to meet you the other night,” Jude says. “What happened?”

  He feels a lie tingling on his lips. But no, he’ll tell the truth this time. Keep them guessing.

  “I went back to my room and fell asleep.” He changes the subject. “We both missed seeing a glimpse of Lennon earlier this morning.”

  “And you missed seeing John the other night.” With great delight, Jude describes her conversation with Lennon.