John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  He even drank in the recording studio, something he’d never done during his whole career as a Beatle. “He’d sit there on a stool in his headphones,” drummer Jim Keltner remembers, “and down on the floor beside him would be what you’d think was a joke-size container of Smirnoff vodka.”

  Phil Spector, too, had changed from the respectful éminence grise of the Plastic Ono Band albums. Back on his home turf, Spector began to live up to his most lurid Sixties legend, arriving for work flanked by bodyguards and ostentatiously flashing a pistol in a shoulder holster. Sometimes he would be in fancy dress, costumed as a surgeon in the operating theater, a karate champion, a priest, or a blind man with dark glasses and a white stick; in answer to John’s vodka flagon, he kept a bottle of Courvoisier brandy always within reach. Word quickly spread of the nightly party at A&M Studios, and celebrities like Joni Mitchell, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson constantly dropped by. Meanwhile, Jim Keltner and the other session musicians became progressively more unhappy about what was being put on tape. “There were some flashes of brilliance—with Phil and John working together, there had to be. But mostly the music crashed and burned.”

  Keltner and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis were called on to restrain John one night when the cocktail of vodka and 100-proof rock ’n’ roll unlocked all his pent-up anguish over Yoko, and he went literally berserk. “We had to hold him down in the back of the car to stop him kicking the windows in, and the two of us could hardly do it,” Keltner recalls. “He was lashing out at Jesse, and pulling my hair and screaming Yoko’s name.” Back at the house he was borrowing from Lou Adler, the two musicians tried to immobilize him by trussing him up with neckties while May fled to seek refuge in the nearby Bel Air Hotel. Escaping his flimsy bonds, John went on a rampage through the house; he broke furniture, smashed Adler’s prized collection of Platinum Albums (for chart toppers like the Mamas and Papas and Carole King) and uprooted a palm tree on the patio.

  Even the slightly built, fastidious Elliot Mintz was not safe when these drunken paroxysms hit. “There were two occasions when I suffered physical abuse from John. On one of them, he grabbed me by the throat so hard, I thought he seriously meant to throttle me. A couple of other times, I was the victim of his verbal hatchets, and there were plenty of days when he was just low-level surly and mean. But against that I have to set two or three hundred instances of his selflessness, kindness, generosity and affection.”

  In the studio, Phil Spector’s total artistic control was becoming ever more uncontrollable. One night, to emphasize that he would brook no arguments, he drew his pistol and fired it into the air. Jim Keltner, who had gone out to get a soda, returned to find Mal Evans standing on a metal cabinet and trying to pry the bullet from the ceiling. “Listen, Phil, if you’re gonna kill me, kill me,” John protested. “But don’t fuck with me ears. I need ’em.” Even for L.A. in the early seventies, this was going too far; A&M served an immediate eviction order, and the sessions had to move to another studio, the newly opened Record Plant West.

  Insecure as ever, John was plagued by doubts about recording macho rock ’n’ roll when all that young people seemed to want was camp, glittery glam rock. Even the Rolling Stones—who had managed to hang together when the Beatles could not—took the stage these days behind a lead vocalist in full makeup who danced like a Soho stripper. Just before Christmas, Mick Jagger blew through town: a married man now and a Somerset Maugham–ish tax exile in France. He stopped by the Record Plant and recorded a track, produced by John, called “Too Many Cooks.” Ready as ever to look and learn, John had bought a ticket for a Stones East Coast gig but then had left for L.A., so he could only watch it on television. “It was a master performance,” he told one interviewer, “and that’s what Mick is—a master performer.” Quite a change of heart from his gripe to Rolling Stone in 1970 about “Mick and all that fag dancing.”

  “John thought he was considered unhip for not doing the same androgyny thing as the Stones,” Yoko says, “He was kind of tortured about that because he wanted the gay crowd to love him. But he picked up a little bit from Elton and the others in L.A. When he came back, they’d given him a woman’s name, too. He was Catherine.”

  John’s son, Julian, was now eleven. He had not seen his father for more than two years, and in all that time they had spoken only a couple of times on the telephone. His mother felt he had left childhood behind too quickly in his concern to protect her, and sometimes saw in his little moon face the abstracted sadness of a figure on a medieval tomb—the same look that John’s used to wear, if she but knew, when private thoughts would carry him away from the hell of Beatlemania.

  Life after John had not been easy for Cynthia. Her marriage to Roberto Bassanini had ended in divorce, and she had returned to her homeland, taking a small house in Meols on the Cheshire Wirral and trying to make a career as an interior designer. Reading of John’s separation from Yoko, she wondered if it might presage a thaw in his relations with Julian—and herself. In February 1974, she was invited to join a group of friends crossing to New York on the liner France. Nervously she contacted John and asked if she could bring Julian over to see him. To her surprise, he not only welcomed the idea but offered to provide first-class tickets. Also on board was Elton John, who went out of his way to be charming to Cyn and invited Julian to his cabin to see his collection of enormous glasses.

  John met them on the dock in New York, accompanied by May Pang and clearly in a state of trepidation almost equal to Cynthia’s. It was Julian who broke the ice, flinging his arms around him as if the two-year gap had never been. May also helped to lighten the moment, having been Julian’s occasional playmate at Tittenhurst Park, and clearly finding John’s first wife a great deal easier to fathom than his second. The reunion passed off so well that John offered to take Julian back to Los Angeles for a holiday while Cynthia stayed in New York with her old friend Jennie Boyd. When this arrangement fell through, he invited her to join the expedition to L.A. On the flight, however, her seat was at the rear of the cabin, as far as possible from John’s, May’s, and Julian’s. Time had done little to harden Cyn and, in the privacy of her remote seat, she burst into tears.

  May continued to be an emollient factor throughout the holiday, insisting, for example, that John should book Cynthia a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel rather than boarding her out with his drummer, Jim Keltner, as he first intended. To build on the rapprochement with Julian, he had planned they should spend a day together at Disneyland—a wonder which, at that time, few British children had experienced. But Julian refused to go without his mother and grew so tearful that John had no choice but to acquiesce. Cyn, therefore, spent an uncomfortable few hours trailing around the rides with May and Mal Evans, aware of John’s constant fear that they might lag behind the others and have to make conversation.

  The ever-amiable “Big Mal” also helped matters by encouraging John to reminisce about old times in Liverpool and so again become somebody Cyn could connect with and understand. Additional healing infusions of normality came from Jim Keltner, a good-natured, unflappable man whose wife also happened to be named Cynthia and who had a son of Julian’s age. There was little “Lost Weekend” about John’s evenings at the Keltners’ home, where he would be relaxed and charming, and praise Cynthia Keltner’s dinner-table setting like a perfect guest from Emily Post’s etiquette manual.

  But etiquette could falter. One evening, about halfway through Julian’s visit, John went with May and the Keltners to the Troubadour, the famous club on Santa Monica Boulevard that had given Elton John and many others their first big break. Headlining that night was Ann Peebles, a rather dour soul chanteuse whose single, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” had lately been on the U.S. and British charts. Before going to the club, John’s party ate dinner at Lost on Larra-bee, a restaurant popular with the rock crowd. As they were leaving, he slipped into the women’s room and rifled a cabinet full of Kotex sanitary pads. When he reached the Troubadour, he took a Kotex from his
pocket and clamped it to the center of his forehead like an unwieldy Indian caste mark. (Even this may have been a symbol of missing Yoko. Not long after their first meeting in 1966, she had sent him an artwork called Mend Piece, consisting of some Kotex and a broken cup, which he’d unwrapped in the presence of both his then wife and mother-in-law.)

  As Jim Keltner recalls, Ann Peebles’s appearance onstage was slightly delayed, so the club’s whole VIP section had ample opportunity to share in the joke. According to hallowed legend, John snapped at a dilatory waitress, “Do you know who I am?” and she snapped back, “Yeah, an asshole with a Kotex on his head.” Neither May nor the Keltners recall any such words being said.

  Its central component being unmentionable in print, the story did not reach the media, or the ears of Cyn and Julian. The holiday ended on a resoundingly successful note, with John taking Julian to Disneyland twice more and (at May’s insistence) promising to phone him twice a week from now on. “Around this time, a radio interviewer asked John if there was anything about his life that he’d change if he had the chance,” Elliot Mintz remembers. “John said there was nothing—then he paused, thought for a little and finally said that if he had his time over, he’d be different to Julian. He realised 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 realised it, a part of himself was able to forgive his own father, who hadn’t been there for him.”

  For every day of drunken irrationality, there were dozens when, in Mintz’s words, John was “as clear as a bell,” scathingly observant and funny about his adopted city and determined to stay in touch with the world beyond its sun-soaked, brain-softening lifestyle. In this era before personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, CNN, and cable television, there were only limited ways of keeping up with current affairs. He read the New York Times from cover to cover each day, and waited impatiently for CBS’s Evening News, fronted by Walter Cronkite (the same lordly anchorman who had grumped over the Beatles’ American debut in 1964). When John was not lurching around with a Kotex stuck on his forehead, Mintz noted the rather old-fashioned civility of his speech and his personal neatness and fastidiousness. “He prepared tea with utmost care, and didn’t like to see crumbs left on the kitchen-table or newspapers strewn on the couch. If he was reading any kind of manuscript, all the sheets had to be kept in alignment. I once asked him, ‘Are all British people that way?’ John looked at me and said, ‘What way?’”

  Besides missing Yoko, he clearly missed Britain enormously; after an interview with the Melody Maker’s L.A. correspondent, Chris Charlesworth, he turned the tables and quizzed Charlesworth at length about the Royal Family, what the new decimel currency was like, and how much a bottle of milk cost nowadays. If no kindred-spirited Brit happened to be in town, the next best thing was Sharon Lawrence, an anglophile journalist–turned–PR rep, who had lived in London and been a friend to many top musicians, notably Jimi Hendrix. She was now running the West Coast arm of Elton John’s Rocket record label—an enterprise that in every way seemed to have learned the lessons of Apple. In her office was a chintz love seat, where John would curl up and talk for hours about byways of British culture that few other Americans understood: music hall, wireless soap operas of the 1950s, the Royal Worcester china that was always the centerpiece of his Aunt Mimi’s spotless household.

  Once, the talk turned to Ringo Starr, and John revealed the almost parental concern he felt for his old bandmate in this harsh post-Beatles world. “He told me ‘I’m always going to look after Ringo and make sure he wants for nothing as long as he lives,’” Sharon remembers. “I’d never thought John big-headed, but I was sometimes amazed at his lack of confidence in himself. More than once, he sat there and asked me, ‘Do you think I’ll ever have a hit record again?’”

  Elliot Mintz believes John never really felt at home in L.A., and certainly never considered settling there permanently. “There was too much missing from the place for John. The people he was associating with didn’t think about anything outside of music and getting drunk and high, and never read anything more cerebrally demanding than Rolling Stone. And the relationship he’d left behind had so many facets—intellectual stimulation, genuine love, a shared artistry. If there had been another Yoko out on the West Coast, things might have ended very differently. But he didn’t meet any woman who could hold a candle to her.”

  Yoko herself seemed to have had no trouble in adjusting to single life: besides producing art with her usual energy, she gave regular performances as a musician, appearing for a week at a fashionable Manhattan nightspot named Kenny’s Castaways, fronting Elephant’s Memory on the Mike Douglas Show, giving a Christmas Day concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine accompanied by David Spinozza, and later taking a Super Plastic Ono Band on a short tour of Japan. She and John still spoke constantly on the telephone; in a single day, May Pang once counted twenty-three calls, some running into hours. Via the “Karmic Messenger Service” of Elliot Mintz (in Mintz’s own dry phrase) John continued to make clear how desperately he wanted to return, but the answer that always came back from Yoko was “He isn’t ready yet.”

  On trips back to New York, he would often call at the Dakota but, she recalls, was always “too proud” to ask if he could stay. (Aunt Mimi could have cited a similar situation fifteen years earlier, after he had tired of his student flat and wanted her steak-and-kidney pie and his old bedroom at Mendips.) Forgetting his wish that Yoko remain sexually active, both to share the guilt and as a medical safeguard, he became more possessive than ever. Once when she was in Philadelphia, he returned to their apartment, found a new vase in her bedroom, and, assuming it was a gift from another man, smashed it to pieces, then disappeared again. Yoko’s first act on returning home was to change all the locks.

  Meanwhile, crisis had hit Oldies and Mouldies, the rock-’n’-roll covers album that John expected to be so relaxing. Having shown up at the studio in the varied guises of karate champion, surgeon, and trigger-happy cowboy, Phil Spector suddenly ceased showing up at all. He gave no explanation for his absence nor indication of when or if he intended to reappear. Telephone calls by the dozen were made to his office and his barbed-wire-encircled mansion near Sunset—many of them by John personally—but none was ever returned. On the musicians’ grapevine, it was rumored that Spector had left the city, possibly even the country, or had suffered a horrendous accident and was lying somewhere in intensive care or maybe even dead. After two or three weeks of fruitless inquiry, John decided to take over producing the album himself, as he had done successfully with Mind Games, and called for the tapes of the sessions, which had been chaotically going on since the previous October. It then emerged that Spector had been in the habit of taking them home with him every night, and still had them. Short of starting again from scratch, nothing could be done until he chose to resume work or could be persuaded to hand the tapes over.

  One dangerous accomplice had no sooner thus stepped out of John’s life than another stepped in. He and May were currently staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in a duplex apartment that Ringo maintained there. Three fellow musicians were sharing the accommodation: Klaus Voormann, Keith Moon, and Harry Nilsson.

  Nilsson—known professionally by surname only—was one of the more oddball characters in early-seventies pop. A New York–born singer-songwriter, he combined outstanding melodic and verbal talent with a voice whose operatic high register was matched only by Art Garfunkel’s. Yet ironically, his two most successful singles, “Ev’rybody’s Talkin’” (theme-song of the film Midnight Cowboy) and “Without You,” had been written by other people, and the singer-songwriter wave seemed to have left him high, although not dry. Once beautiful and sylphlike, he was now paunchy, bearded, and apparently resigned to being (in Elliot Mintz’s phrase) “the Orson Welles of rock ’n’ roll.”

  He was already a crony of Ringo’s and (like all three other ex-Beatles) had contributed to the hugely succes
sful Ringo solo album. In the frat-house atmosphere of the Beverly Wilshire apartment, he and John now became inseparable. He was not only wildly funny but a brilliant mimic who could “do” John to the life—a novelty that John adored. And no one was better equipped to help lose a weekend, if not a lifetime. “The difference between the two was that Harry loved to drink and was good at it,” Mintz remembers. “He could down triple Courvoisiers all night without any problem. 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, like being at Dorothy Parker’s Round Table. Then suddenly it would flip, and the insanity would start.”

  On the evening of March 12, the two went to watch the Smothers Brothers begin a “comeback” engagement at the Troubadour. It was a glitzy occasion, attended by Hollywood royalty like Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Peter Lawford. John that night had discovered Brandy Alexander—Cognac shaken with milk, ice cubes, crème de cacao, and nutmeg to taste as harmlessly refreshing as a milk shake. During the after-midnight wait for the curtain to rise, he began singing “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” the theme song of his recent Kotex fashion statement, in which Nilsson raucously joined. It so happened that, of the two Smothers Brothers, John liked Tommy but had never been able to stand Dickie—and in any case, understandably, was violently opposed to comebacks of any kind. When the brothers appeared, Dickie Smothers received a torrent of heckling from John. Their manager came over and began to remonstrate angrily; security people were called, John overturned a table, and he, Nilsson—and the blameless May—were ejected.