John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Dan Richter, for one, was always urging John to reopen communication with Paul. “I said, ‘You guys have had your divorce, you did so much wonderful stuff together…you should be talking.’” But John still felt that Paul’s attitude to Yoko created an unbridgeable gulf and that, anyway, Lennon and McCartney had both been too much changed by their respective spouses ever to find common ground again. “John used to say, ‘Paul will always be a performer.’” Richter remembers. “‘I’ve been a rock-’n’-roll star. I’ve done it. I want to move on.’”

  Early in 1972, the two finally came face-to-face. Paul visited 105 Bank Street and they had a brief, guarded chat, agreeing not to dump on each other anymore, either in songs or through the media. But that slight thaw did not develop. When Paul was in New York, he would usually telephone John, sometimes to be greeted in friendly though distant fashion, other times by “Yeah, what the fuck do you want, man?” in an accent sounding more and more American. One way in which he continued to give offense, he recalls, was talking about his growing brood of young children, how he loved to read them bedtime stories and take them out for pizza. In a phrase that should have titled an album, John accused him of being “all pizza and fairy tales.” During another such conversation, John’s “vitriolic” mood caused Paul to lose his famous aplomb; he snapped, “Fuck off, Kojak,” and slammed the receiver down.

  Autumn was dominated by the presidential election. John pinned high hopes on the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, senator for South Dakota—an omen if ever there was one—who stood on an unequivocal pledge to end the Vietnam War. During the campaign, in what seemed a recurrent motif of American public affairs, a rival Democrat contender, Alabama’s racist Governor George Wallace, was shot five times with a handgun by a twenty-one-year-old loner named Arthur Bremer, but survived, to be confined to a wheel-chair for life. Despite McGovern’s popular platform, the incumbent’s diplomatic triumphs in Russia proved decisive. The voter surge of eighteen-to twenty-one-year-old voters, supposedly mobilized by John, failed to happen. Turnout was the lowest since 1948, and on November 7, Nixon won by a landslide.

  John and Yoko had now been together for four years, spending almost every minute of every day in each other’s company. Though they still constantly astonished and exhilarated each other on a creative level, their physical relationship had inevitably lost some of its initial blaze. John’s sexual drive remained intense, but Yoko was finding herself less and less able, or inclined, to deal with it. “In lovemaking, I don’t do much. John used to say, ‘You’re like one of those Victorian ladies—you just lie there and think of England.’”

  They had often discussed the raging randiness which he freely confessed to, and which had been so easy to indulge during his years on the road with the Beatles. “Even when we first got together and were madly in love, John would say, ‘I don’t understand it, I’m madly in love, but why do I still keep looking at these girls on the street?’” Yoko remembers. “He always said that the difference with women was they could not separate sex and love. After we came to New York, I started to think there was a side of him that was feeling repressed a little.”

  The night of Nixon’s reelection victory, they were invited to a party at Jerry 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. He’d already started in the studio, when we were remixing something…. When we walked in to Jerry’s, there was a girl there. She was the kind of girl you’d never think John would be attracted to, I don’t want to describe her but anyway she was sitting there. She didn’t come on to him at all, he just pulled her and went into the next room. And then they were groping and all that, and we were all quiet.

  “Then one of the other guests was very kind and put a record on, Bob Dylan or something, so that we don’t hear it. But 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. Then one girl was brave enough to get her coat, and the others followed her. And I was there and Peter [Bendry], our assistant, was there, and John and the girl were still in there. I said to Peter, ‘Please take this flower to them and say to John I love him and don’t worry.’ I didn’t like the situation. But I felt sorry for him. Peter said, ‘No, I’m not going to bother them.’

  “That situation really woke me up. 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?’ And physically I was starting to feel like I didn’t really want to get into it with him.”

  With so much else currently absorbing both their energies, the matter rested there for the present. Early in 1973, they came uptown to have lunch with Peter Brown, the former Beatles fixer-in-chief who was now running Robert Stigwood’s New York operation and living in an elegant apartment building named the Langham, on Central Park West. John took an instant fancy to Brown’s spacious pad with its sweeping views over the park and decided on the spot that he wanted to give up gypsy life in the West Village and move here. When the Langham proved to have no space available, he simply tried the building next door.

  It was called the Dakota, but the place it suggested, even more powerfully than those cobbled SoHo alleys, was Liverpool. Some similar quasi-Gothic sandstone pile might have housed a bank or insurance company in North John, Tithebarn, or Water Street: the wealth and confidence of Mersey shipbuilders might equally have conceived its seven-story facade, embellished with balconies and terra-cotta moldings, its Germanic gables and steep copper roof, weathered to pale green, its street frontage of black iron lamps, flower urns, and decorative sea serpents. The very name suggested a touch of Liverpudlian sarcasm. When it was built, in the 1880s, this part of the Upper West Side was still so sparsely populated that fashionable people thought it as remote as North or South Dakota.

  Though once the acme of luxury, the Dakota was no longer in Manhattan’s premier real-estate league and had become the haunt of middle-range actors, film directors, and similar bohemian types. It had a slightly spooky ambience, the more so since being used as a location for Roman Polanski’s satanic horror film Rosemary’s Baby. Apartments were held on long, relatively inexpensive leases, and fell vacant only rarely. But it chanced that when John and Yoko’s assistant, Jon Hendricks, made inquiries, the actor Robert Ryan was about to vacate number 72 on the seventh floor, owing to the recent death of his wife.

  A single look at the Ryan apartment was enough to sell John on it. Running half the length of a block, it had four bedrooms, stunning views over Central Park’s treetops and—the clincher for him—a distant view of the Lake. He loved the feel of the whole building, so like Victorian Liverpool with its heavy brass light switches, sit-down elevators, and mahogany, oak, and cherrywood paneling. In that crime-and violence-ridden metropolis, it seemed exceptionally well guarded: the entrance arch from West Seventy-second Street had an immense black iron gate and was watched around the clock by a security man in a copper sentry box.

  For all the Dakota’s bohemian ambiance, taking up residence there was not easy. The board of residents who ran the building maintained a blanket ban against diplomats (for their fly-by-night tendency) and rock stars. In parallel with the “Save John and Yoko” petitions he was compiling for their immigration case, Hendricks had to organize a campaign to persuade the Dakota’s co-op board that they would not disrupt the place with wild parties or deafening music. Letters were submitted from character witnesses, including the head of the American Episcopal Church, Bishop Paul Moore, and they appeared before the board as neatly dressed and circumspect as in the immigration court. Eventually, they were accepted. The real-estate agent later admitted to Hendricks that he thought they hadn’t stood a chance.

  What did not already remind John of home in apartment 72, he was quick to add. The rather murky woodwork th
at had previously killed much of the Central Park light was replaced by brilliant white paintwork and some of the white carpets from Tittenhurst Park; the cramped kitchen was enlarged to one almost as spacious as Tittenhurst’s. The main living room became a drawing room, as formal and spotless as Aunt Mimi’s old one at Mendips, with huge white couches and ottomans and clusters of silver-framed family photographs—Mimi, his mother, his aunts and cousins, his beloved and never-forgotten Uncle George. Humorous brass plaques appeared on doors, identifying the kitchen as “Honey world” and an adjacent cloakroom-toilet as “Albert.” Nor could it be a proper home for him until there were cats about the place. Yoko was not a cat person but, as ever, deferred to his wishes.

  He remained in constant communication with the smaller counterpart of apartment 72 across the Atlantic, telephoning Mimi at least once a week and writing to her once a month or so. “I used to get to know by the way the phone would ring that it was John,” she would remember. “When he rang, he would always say, ‘It’s Himself.’ He would sign his letters like that, too.” The calls were not mere dutiful check-ins. “He would always want to talk about what he had been doing and about the old days. He missed this country, of course he did.” Now that he had a home in which he could entertain Mimi properly, he urged her to come and stay, but without success. “He was always on at me to go to New York,” she would recall, “but I told him straight, ‘I’m not going to a land where there’s guns, John.’”

  Safely returned to the White House for another four years (as he thought), Richard Nixon had nothing more to fear from the likes of John. The chief stoker of government paranoia, J. Edgar Hoover, had died in 1972, his penchant for wearing ladies’ dresses still unrevealed. Nixon’s first priority was to scale down the commitment to Vietnam, and on March 29, 1973, the last U.S. troops were withdrawn after a war that had cost 58,178 American dead—not to mention an estimated 3,800,000 Vietnamese, 800,000 Cambodians, and 50,000 Laotians. With virtually all the steam thus taken out of the national protest movement, FBI surveillance on alleged subversives, including John, was dropped.

  But the Immigration and Naturalization Service continued to press for his deportation, seemingly deaf to any evidence his lawyer offered in his favor. The main plank of Leon Wildes’s case was that since, unlike marijuana, cannabis resin was not illegal in America, John’s 1968 conviction had no validity here. However, despite expert medical testimony, and even contemporaneous press reports of the case, the immigration judge refused to accept that the substance involved had not been marijuana under the letter of the law. On March 23, John was again ordered to leave the country, but granted a further limited stay pending appeal.

  Months had now passed without any pronouncement from the INS on his and Yoko’s dual claim for third-preference status, as creative artists whose presence benefited the nation’s cultural life. Finally, Wildes went to the U.S. District Court and obtained a writ of mandamus, in effect compelling the INS’s New York district director to do his duty and deal with the matter. It would later emerge that Immigration Commissioner Raymond Farrell in Washington had sent a confidential memo to the district director, ordering him not to adjudicate John and Yoko’s application “until after we’ve gotten rid of them.”

  Remote though the chance of melting such officials’ hearts with humor, they had a try. On April 1, the media gathered for a press conference at the office of the New York Bar Association, eager to know what John had devised to celebrate April Fools’ Day. Flanked by Yoko and an indulgent Leon Wildes, he announced the creation of a “conceptual” country called Nutopia with “no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” Its national flag was a Kleenex, and anyone who heard of its existence automatically became both a citizen and an ambassador. As ambassadors-in-chief, he and Yoko claimed diplomatic immunity from normal immigration procedure and legal process, and the prerogative to stay in America for as long as Nutopia’s national interests should warrant. On the service door of their Dakota apartment kitchen appeared a plaque reading NUTOPIAN EMBASSY.

  In ordinary circumstances, John’s manager would have been expected to stand at his shoulder, providing aid and comfort throughout this whole ordeal. But Allen Klein no longer bore even a passing resemblance to a savior. Klein had dreamed of possessing the Beatles but had ended up running the careers of three ex-Beatles, not at all the same thing either in terms of money or mystique. And, as Brian Epstein might have warned, pleasing even three of his boys all the time was a task beyond the canniest operator. The watershed moment for Klein had been the Concert for Bangladesh, which he and George Harrison coproduced. John suspected him of backing George’s refusal to allow Yoko onstage and never felt the quite the same about him afterward. George, too, had cooled on Klein, especially now that questions were being raised about how much of the concert and album proceeds had gone to Bangladesh’s starving and how much been gobbled up by expenses, legal costs, and taxes.

  March 31 brought the end of the management agreement that John, George, and Ringo had signed with Klein in 1969. Back in Britain, the Beatles’ old roadie, Neil Aspinall, heard that John had renewed Klein’s contract, but for one day only—a clear indication of how things stood between them. On April 2, a statement from Klein’s ABKCO organization announced it was cutting all links with the three former Beatles and Apple forthwith. The next day, John talked to the media after filing an appeal against the INS’s March 23 deportation order. Questions about Klein brought only the terse reply “We separated ourselves from him.”

  He unbent a little further a week later in Los Angeles, to an interviewer from London Weekend Television, saying there were “many reasons why we finally gave [Klein] the push…. Let’s say possibly Paul’s suspicions were right, and the time was right….” With this bone of contention with Paul now removed, could a Beatles reunion be imminent? “The chances are practically nil,” John replied. Since Aunt Mimi was bound to see or hear about the program, he signed off with a greeting to her: “Hello Mimi, how are you? We’re eating well and I haven’t given up my British citizenship. I just want to live here, that’s all….” On June 28, by way of limbering up for the legal marathon ahead, ABKCO filed suit against John for $508,000 allegedly paid to him in loans during Klein’s tenure.

  Outside the bedroom, John and Yoko’s relationship seemed as frantically fruitful as ever. When the National Organization of Women invited her to perform at an international conference in Boston, he volunteered to go with her merely as her “band.” Afterward, they visited Salem, Massachusetts, scene of the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials—a place with special resonance for Yoko after her experiences in Britain. Besides writing songs for a new album, John acquired an electric typewriter and began writing the short essays and reflections that would be collected (posthumously) as Skywriting by Word of Mouth. Yoko had also written a new album and, as it happened, was first into the recording studio. “Every day [he] waited for me to bring back a rough mix of what I had done…. ‘You should call me in when you’re ready,’ he said, ‘just like you would call in a session-guitarist, and I’ll come and play.’”

  With summer—a period when, as it happened, both were completely straight, not even smoking grass—the question of sex resurfaced again. “We made love here [the Dakota] and it was very good, he was very good and everything…it had nothing to do with the quality of the lovemaking,” Yoko remembers. “I said, ‘Look, John, it’s getting a little bit like we’re not passionate about each other. Are we just going to be one of those old conservative couples who are together just because we’re married?’”

  They agreed it would do their marriage no harm if John were to find other sexual partners. Promiscuity was, of course, nothing new in rock circles, but for him the conclusive factor was a book, Portrait of a Marriage, describing how the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson and the poet Vita Sackville-West remained a loving, united couple while both having continual (homosexual) affairs. Apart from that one drunken lapse at Jerry Rubin’s, Joh
n had never been unfaithful to Yoko, and had no idea how to go about it, even with her compliance. He talked enviously about a fellow British rock star who simply went to the Plaza Hotel’s bar each night and sat there until some young woman picked him up and they adjourned to a suite. “John kept saying, ‘It’s that simple,’” Yoko recalls. I said, ‘Okay, so do you want me to call the Plaza?’ He said, ‘Are you kidding? You’re Mrs. Lennon, how could you think that?’ I said, ‘Well, what do you want, then?’”

  There was even some discussion, albeit not very serious, of whether he should stick to his own gender. “John said ‘It would hurt you like crazy if I made it with a girl. With a guy, maybe you wouldn’t be hurt, because that’s not competition. But I can’t make it with a guy because I love women too much, and I’d have to fall in love with the guy and I don’t think I can.’”

  The new album he was currently making seemed to underline this desire to cut loose. It would be the first credited to John Lennon alone, without Yoko, Phil Spector, or the Plastic Ono Band; John acted as his own producer and arranger with a new studio lineup, including drummer Jim Keltner, who had played on two Imagine tracks, a talented young guitarist named David Spinozza, and a female backup group appropriately known as Something Different. Yoko’s only credit in the liner notes was for “space.” John also designed the cover, which showed him standing on a wide, grassy plain, suitcase in hand, with her upturned profile behind him like a distant mountain range.