John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The title, Mind Games, suggested a retreat from all the causes and victims they had championed together and a return to the therapist’s couch, this time on the subject of marriage rather than parentage and childhood. Certainly, the polemical fire of Some Time in New York City seemed to have sputtered out, but for a few familiar nostrums, such as “make love nor war,” “free the people now” (plus one heartfelt ad-lib of “jail the judges”). John’s favorite press description of the album was “Imagine with balls,” but, in fact, it is equally melodic and optimistic, even its psychologically suggestive title track—destined to become a first-echelon Lennon classic—pouring over the listener as reassuringly as a hot, scented shower. And adoring references to Yoko crop up throughout: “I was born just to get to you” (“Out the Blue”); “I’m a fish and you’re the sea” (“One Day at a Time”); “Today I love you more than yesterday” (“Only People”); and “Wherever you are, you are here” (“You Are Here”). “Aisumasen”—“I’m sorry” in Japanese—might have been an apology for that night at Jerry Rubin’s, or what was soon to come. The “Nutopian International Anthem” (three seconds of silence) acknowledged the tricky diplomatic mission they still faced together.

  The question of giving John “space” outside the studio, however, remained unresolved. Though eager to accept the sexual freedom Yoko was offering, he felt squeamish about doing anything under her nose in New York. “So then I suggested L.A.,” she remembers, “and he just lit up.” The problem was that, since his earliest days as a Beatle, he had never traveled anywhere alone or had to fend in any serious way for himself. Somebody would have to be found to go with him.

  With a view to bagging two birds with one stone, Yoko looked over the various young females in their circle. Her choice was May Pang, a twenty-two-year-old Chinese American who had worked as an assistant to both of them since before the move to America and who, in addition to being highly competent, was extremely pretty. “I said to John, ‘What about May?’ He said, ‘Oh no, not May!’—it was like ‘doth protest too much.’ So I went to May and said, ‘Look, I think you have to accompany John to L.A. I have things to do here, and I’m not a very good wife, you know.’ I didn’t say ‘Do it’ or anything. It was just to be an assistant, to go there. But I knew what might happen, because he was never without anybody.”

  On John’s side, the possessiveness that had dominated his relationship with Yoko disappeared completely—or seemed to. He insisted that during their separation she must go out with other men so both of them would be equally guilty—and because he’d read that women who did not stay sexually active ran a higher risk of cancer. He also said he’d feel more comfortable if any affair she had was with a brother musician. They even discussed a possible candidate, the Mind Games guitarist David Spinozza, who had also played on Yoko’s album Feeling the Space. As she recalls, Spinozza’s extraordinary good looks seemed somehow to make him less of a threat. “‘David’s so beautiful,’ John said. ‘I wouldn’t mind having sex with him.’”

  On September 18, he flew to Los Angeles with May Pang, for what May thought would be only a two-week stay. “I’d never been a bachelor since I was 20 or something, and I thought, ‘Whoopee!’” he would recall. “But it was god-awful.”

  27

  TROUBLE WITH HARRY

  I’m in Lost Arseholes for no real reason.

  John was to call these next fourteen months his Lost Weekend, borrowing the title of the most famous film ever made about alcoholism and urban loneliness. Billy Wilder’s 1945 noir classic follows a young writer, played by Ray Milland, as he struggles through a solitary Friday to Monday in New York wrestling with demons of temptation and self-loathing. Alcohol certainly loomed large in John’s West Coast version, as did loneliness and self-loathing, but the script would contain much else besides. “It wasn’t by any means a lost weekend,” his friend Elliot Mintz says. “Just a very long one.”

  Mintz had gotten to know John while working as a disc jockey on station KLOS in Los Angeles. His first contact was with Yoko, whom he interviewed on his show by phone from New York, proving so sympathetic that he afterward built up a friendship with her the same way. A face-to-face meeting did not come until the summer of 1972, when John and Yoko decided finally to kick their lingering methadone habit with the help of a Chinese acupuncturist in San Francisco. Feeling that they should take a proper look at the country from which they might soon be banished, they made the trip by road, chauffeured by their assistant, Peter Bendry. Rather than the usual limo, they chose an ordinary station wagon without the integrated stereo system John usually regarded as essential. Instead, he played singles on a portable record player whose needle jogged with a horrible scrunch whenever the car hit a pothole.

  Some Time in New York City was just about to be released, with its eulogies to the Black Panthers and the IRA. When Elliot Mintz finally met John and Yoko in the flesh, John gave him an early pressing and said he was to have the privilege of breaking it in the L.A. area. Mintz played the entire album on KLOS without commercials or interruption, a bravura gesture that cost him his job at the station. He had since moved from radio to become an entertainment reporter for ABC-TV’s Eyewitness News. This was to prove ironic, as the confidential nature of his relationship with John and Yoko would prevent many extraordinary scenes to which he was an eyewitness from finding their way onto the air.

  Mintz was waiting at Los Angeles Airport when John arrived on the flight from New York, accompanied by May Pang and carrying $10,000 in traveler’s checks, which he had borrowed from Capitol Records for their immediate subsistence. As Mintz recalls, there was no suggestion that he and Yoko had parted by mutual agreement or that their separation was other than permanent. “He said she’d kicked him out and he didn’t know when or even if they’d be getting back together.”

  To all media interviewers he told the same story, as he would undeviatingly over the next twelve months: that Yoko and he were simply taking a break from each other, and there was nothing wrong with their relationship. “Now that she knows how to produce records and everything about it, I think the best thing I can do is keep out of her hair. We’re just playing life by ear, and that includes our careers. We occasionally take a bath together and occasionally separately, just how we feel at the time.”

  As it happened, too, he had plausible professional reasons to be in Los Angeles. Mind Games was scheduled for release in November, and Capitol had scheduled various meetings with its West Coast marketing and promotion departments. Besides, L.A. had long since taken San Francisco’s position as the happening place in white American pop, thanks to the new singer-songwriter breed headed by Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, and the modish country-rock style of Neil Young and Jackson Browne. If John wanted more hit albums, it was only wise to take careful soundings here.

  Nor would he be friendless and neglected like the protagonist of Lost Weekend. Mal Evans, the Beatles’ roadie who had always acted as nursemaid and bodyguard to him in particular, was now living in L.A., forgetful of a cash-strapped wife and children back in Britain.

  And Ringo Starr frequently came into town, as much a “bachelor” in his own marriage as John could wish to be. Despite the unresolved legal questions among them, the other three ex-Beatles could still put aside their differences in mutual fondness for Ringo: on his new, eponymous album, John had written one track, “I’m the Greatest,” and sung harmonies with George playing lead guitar, while another, “Six O’Clock,” featured Paul and Linda McCartney. Ringo had also recently bought Tittenhurst Park, in the same obliging spirit that a Liverpool pal might take over some old banger of a car. John hated the thought that his rolling parklands and lake had gone forever, and drew comfort from Ringo’s promise that a bedroom would always be kept for him there.

  He had been loaned a small duplex apartment in West Hollywood by Harold Seider, the lawyer representing him in the Allen Klein lawsuit. Soon after arriving, however, he bumped into an old friend from Beatlemania days, the
Rolling Stones’ former manager, Andrew Loog Oldham (who had many tales of his own about litigation with Klein). Oldham was staying at the Bel Air home of the record producer Lou Adler while Adler was away for an extended period. As he was about to return to Britain, he suggested that John and May should borrow the house in his place.

  From the moment John reached L.A., according to Elliot Mintz, his one thought was returning to Yoko. “He called her every day, saying, ‘When can I come home?’ She’d also call me every day, to see how he was doing and check that he wasn’t harming himself or making a fool of himself, though at that stage she certainly wasn’t looking for steps to get him back. Most of the time, John was in denial. But when he got drunk or high, he couldn’t stop talking about Yoko and how much he needed her. The sense with him all the time was ‘What do I have to do to get out of here and back to her?’”

  Yoko, too, found the separation hard, but was determined not to weaken. “For the first two weeks, my whole body was shaking, I couldn’t stop. Because before that I was never without him, and now I was alone here [at the Dakota]. But I didn’t want to tell that to John because then he would have come back. I thought, ‘I have to get over this because I can’t be in a position where my existence relies on being with somebody.’” On the telephone, John’s mood would veer between euphoria at his newfound freedom and reproachful homesickness. “In L.A., when things were going well, he’d say, ‘Oh, you’re such a great, great wife, I can’t believe it,’” Yoko remembers. “When things were not going well, it was, ‘How could you send me out here?’” A telegram he sent to Derek Taylor revealed the extent of his desperation amid the usual Lennon punnery: “I’m in Lost Arseholes for no real reason…Yoko and me are in hell but I’m gonna change it….”

  May Pang’s precise role in the scenario would never be clear, least of all to May herself. Her later book, Loving John, portrays a young woman of strong Catholic scruples who was at first scandalized by the suggestion that she become John’s mistress (even though, by her own account, they had been having a surreptitious fling in New York). She was indisputably his only public female companion during the Lost Weekend, sharing all the various temporary addresses he had in L.A., then back in New York. Without exception, everybody who knew them as a couple remembers May as a wholly positive influence at a time when John most needed it: kind, sweet, and almost supernaturally unselfish.

  Yet as Elliot Mintz recalls, she never quite attained the status of a rock star’s “old lady”; one day John would be all over her in public, the next she would seem no more than his PA. And, as May would admit in her book, there was never a moment when she did not feel that Yoko, back in New York, was watching, even directing, the plot’s development. “It wasn’t like he left his wife for the mistress and then went back to the wife,” says the photographer Bob Gruen. “He left his wife for wild times that his secretary oversaw. May talks about that period as if it was her time with John, but there are dozens of other women who can dispute that. It’s fascinating to me that in all these years, not one of them has come forward or tried to cash in on their story. I tend to think they really treasure that hour, that ten minutes, that night with John Lennon, and they have their memory and it’s private.”

  The great pop sensation in America that year was the British glam rocker Elton John, who had played a sold-out national tour recalling the Beatles in their heyday, and topped the charts with his album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Coincidentally, as Reggie Dwight from Pinner, Middlesex, he had been discovered by the Beatles’ former music publisher, Dick James, proving that once-in-a-lifetime luck can strike twice. Twenty-six-year-old Elton stood for everything thirty-one-year-old John might have been expected to dislike, with his outsize glasses, flamboyant stage costumes, and seeming mission to kick the Fab Four into history. Yet he would be the one mainly responsible, not just for stabilizing the Lost Weekend, but eventually bringing it to an end.

  They met in L.A. in October 1973, a couple of weeks after John’s arrival. The intermediary was Tony King, who had been a song-plugger at Dick James’s company, DJM, then gone on to work for Apple. Underneath his Liberace hubris, the glam rock icon was funny, honest, and self-deprecating, as well as a besotted Lennon fan, and John took to him immediately. If he found Elton’s music a bit too kitschy and derivative, he envied his facility as a songwriter, his virtuoso piano playing, and, most of all, his stamina. Where a Beatles live set used to be twenty minutes, Elton was onstage for two and a half hours. “How the fuck do you do it?” John asked, apparently forgetting his own all-night sets with the Beatles in Hamburg.

  Nor was he totally averse to the camp private world of Elton and his circle, where men were commonly referred to as “she” and nicknames like Sharon and Ada freely bestowed. A promotional film sequence was shot for Mind Games, in which Tony King, looking strangely like Queen Elizabeth II in a ball gown and tiara, danced an old-fashioned waltz with John while Elton looked on, calling them “Fred Astaire and Ginger Beer” (Cockney rhyming slang for “queer”) and taking Polaroid photographs. “I’m gonna impound all those pictures till I get me green card,” John was heard to mutter.

  That prospect seemed as far off as ever. The threat of imminent deportation still hung over his head, and he had to make periodic trips back to New York to consult with Leon Wildes or make yet another appearance before the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Unaware that Nixon’s reelection had ended the FBI surveillance, he believed he was still being watched and followed. “Often when I was driving John somewhere, he’d look in the rear-view mirror and say a car had been behind us for the last seven blocks, and I should make a hard right or left and try to shake it off,” Elliot Mintz remembers. “I didn’t tell him that in surveillance often two cars would be used, so that when you thought you’d lost one, the other would take over. It had become almost like a paranoia with John. And he remained very wary and secretive for the rest of his life.”

  He came to rely heavily on Mintz, who not only had entrée everywhere as an ABC show-business reporter but also shared his love of words and awareness of subjects outside rock. One night, Mintz took him backstage at the Roxy Theater to meet his great teenage rock-’n’-roll idol after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis. Instead of shaking hands, John fell on all fours and began kissing Lewis’s cowboy boots. “Now, now, son,” the discomfited idol protested, “that ain’t necessary at all.” There was a weekend trip to Las Vegas, where John devised an “infallible” system to win at roulette, betting a $10 chip on almost every number on the wheel. Within minutes, he attracted a crowd that the casino’s highest roller could not. He also made Mintz go with him to see Deep Throat, the most explicit erotic movie yet shown in mainstream cinemas. But, despite his attendance record at such entertainments on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, he walked out, bored, after only twenty minutes.

  Allen Klein was not the only litigant he had left behind back east. He had recently been hit by a suit for plagiarism, the first in eleven years as a superabundantly prolific composer. His multiallusional song “Come Together,” on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, had opened with a Chuck Berry-esque line, “Here come old flat-top….” which actually did figure in Berry’s 1957 track, “You Can’t Catch Me.” Four years after Abbey Road, the New York publisher Morris Levy, who held copyright on the Berry song, suddenly noticed this fleeting homage and fired off a writ. The joke was that Levy—aka the Octopus—was notorious for ensnaring gullible young songwriters and putting his own name on their work. Slight though John’s offense, it was still unarguable and he had been forced to settle out of court. As part of the settlement, he undertook to record, and so pay royalties on, three songs owned by Levy, including “You Can’t Catch Me.”

  Despite never writing a single word or composing a note, Levy had managed to stuff his back catalog with almost every rock-’n’-roll classic the embryo Beatles had ever played in Liverpool and Hamburg, from Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” to Larry Williams’s “Bony Moronie.” John still loved ro
ck-’n’-roll music better than any other kind, and so, rather than record three tracks in isolation, he decided to make a whole album of cover versions mostly drawn from Levy’s accumulated plunder. After all those recent sermons to humankind, political tracts, and painful explorations of his psyche, it would be almost a rest cure to record “some ‘ooh-ee, baby’ songs that are meaningless for a change.”

  To set the seal on the project, Phil Spector lived in L.A. (in a famously forbidding Bel Air mansion, ringed by barbed wire) and was currently in residence and available. After two albums at the cutting edge with the Plastic Ono Band, Spector, too, fancied a flight into nostalgia, the more so when John, for the first time, offered him full control, desiring only to be “a singer in the band.” Time was booked at A&M Studios, and top session musicians were recruited, including Leon Russell, guitarists Steve Cropper and Jesse Ed Davis, and John’s favorite post-Beatles drummer, Jim Keltner. Sessions began in mid-October, under the provisional title Oldies and Mouldies.

  Let off the leash as he now felt, John “hit the bottle like I was 19, 20….” And as ever, just a couple of drinks in the American super size changed him in an instant from irresistible charmer and jokester to surly, incoherent, venom-tongued, trouble-seeking, and often violent drunk. “When we were out and about together and John was in that state, it used to be quite pitiful if a fan spotted him and came over for an autograph,” Elliot Mintz remembers. “This was the Beatle who had made us all think, the John Lennon who lifted us onto a higher plane of consciousness with his lyrics, who was always so witty and apropos. And here he is spilling a drink on his pants and not able to form a coherent sentence. The look of letdown on people’s faces was terrible.”