John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  One Christmastime, when Paul and Linda paid a visit to John and Yoko, Elliott Mintz was there also. The five went out for a meal to Woody Allen’s favorite restaurant, Elaine’s, on Second Avenue. As they didn’t like anything on the menu, they asked if they could send out for pizza. That the legendarily fierce Elaine should have allowed this is testament to their combined magic. Later, back at the Dakota, says Mintz, “The conversation [between John and Paul] became less rhythmic, the words more sparse…it was obvious to me that the two of them had run out of things to say to each other.”

  While John reared their child, Yoko handled their finances, embarking on an ambitious program of investment and wealth creation, in case music alone should not be enough. That once dedicatedly anticommercial artist underwent a transformation into astute businesswoman, which, to anyone who knew her family background, was not so surprising. The long-suppressed genes of the Yasuda banking and trading dynasty had won through at last.

  Her first step was acquiring additional space in the building where it had been so hard to gain a foothold. By 1979, five more units at the Dakota had been added to the Lennon domain: apartment 71, adjoining their original one and used purely for storage, a room on the eighth floor immediately above it, a second-floor studio, and a pair of large storerooms in the basement. The most important territorial gain was Studio One, two high-ceilinged ground-floor rooms just off the main vestibule that had formerly belonged to theatrical designer Jo Mielziner. One of these became the office of Lenono Music, the other a private sanctum for Yoko, emphasizing her detachment from the nursery world seven floors above. Here she worked a nine-to-five day at an enormous, gold-inlaid desk, under a trompe l’oeil ceiling of cloud-drifted blue sky.

  Studio One’s business was not always carried on by strictly conventional means. Yoko placed great reliance on her Japanese numerologist, Takashi Yoshikawa, and took few decisions, either business or personal, without first consulting him. Always central to her thinking was the necessity of traveling in certain directions at astrologically significant moments. During her separation from John, she had made the “ring around the world” that Yoshikawa counseled as a safeguard from evil, whose cycles were never-ending. When John returned home, he, too, wanted to make a ring around the world, even though, his directional coordinates differing from Yoko’s, he would have to do it alone. Some time later, Neil Aspinall in London received a postcard from Hong Kong, addressed in a familiar scrawl. “What the hell’s he doing there?” Neil said to his wife, Suzy, then turned to John’s message. “What the hell’s he doing there?” it read.

  Yoko had always read tarot cards to foretell the future, sometimes with surprising accuracy. As a backup to Tashikawa’s astrological, numerological, and directional counsels, therefore, she would regularly consult psychics. “I had five altogether,” she says. “But never more than three at one time. We also had normal advice from lawyers and accountants, so it wasn’t like I was listening to just one person—and in the end, I always made up my own mind.” One psychic, a man named John Green, was on the permanent staff, living in the Lennons’ Broome Street loft and receiving a stipend on a level with the lawyers and accountants. Renamed Charlie Swan—because there couldn’t be two Johns around the Dakota—he spent several years in their employment, tasked with anything from predicting the outcome of their latest expansion scheme to staging the renewal of their wedding vows.

  Through John Green they met a figure even more crucial to Yoko’s business plan, also coincidentally with the surname Green. This was Sam Green, a Manhattan art dealer whose impressive circle of friends included the Rothschild family, Andy Warhol, and Greta Garbo. Sam Green had known Yoko in the early Sixties, and on her first visits to New York with John, made sure they were invited to Warhol’s parties at the Factory. But he really won his spurs in 1977, when the Democratic Party returned to the White House in the person of a former peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter. With only three days notice, Green managed to get Yoko, John, and himself tickets to Carter’s inaugural gala in Washington. Thereafter he outranked even the psychics as their “acquisitions guru.”

  The first major acquisition via Sam Green was a painting by the great French Impressionist Auguste Renoir. Titled Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (Young Girls at the Seaside), it had belonged to the French opera singer Lily Pons, who had recently died in Dallas, Texas. The problem was that most of John’s money remained tied up with Apple in London and—for the kind of lifestyle he maintained—his U.S. dollar reserves were comparatively low. Green’s solution was to have the Renoir shipped to London, where he paid for it in sterling, then brought it back to America. The idea was that after a decent interval, John and Yoko would sell it in dollars at a healthy profit. But they loved it so much that they couldn’t bear to part with it.

  Another investment strategy gave John his biggest dose of Liverpool déjà vu since exploring downtown New York. Just like his beloved Uncle George, he became a dairy farmer. America’s milk producers at the time received generous tax breaks, and investigation showed that a cow of the premier Holstein-Friesian breed could appreciate in value almost as spectacularly as a French Impressionist. An expedition was mounted to Delaware County in upstate New York to inspect farms and herds currently for sale. Yoko preferred to stay in the limo with Sean, but, accompanied by Sam Green, John tramped over the fields, lost in memories of Uncle George in his milkman’s peaked cap and brown overalls on the early-morning Woolton rounds with Daisy the cart horse. “He got really enthusiastic, talking about houses he’d like to build,” Green remembers. “I got the feeling he wanted to live in the country more than anything.” Subsequently Yoko bought four farms—“old McLennon’s farms,” John instantly dubbed them—and a herd of 122 Holstein cows and 10 bulls.

  Sam Green’s main advice was that they get into ancient Egyptian artifacts. The market for such things was still almost nonexistent, and remarkable treasures, two and three thousand years old, continually turned up in international salerooms or in the land of the pharaohs itself. Green viewed the exercise as a purely practical one, at a time when John happened to be facing heavy demands from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Hearing that a twelve-foot stone statue of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess, was available, he arranged to buy it for $300,000, but with an accompanying valuation of $1,000,000. The statue was then to be donated to a public park in Philadelphia, making its paper value tax-deductible.

  Yoko’s fascination with the relics as art, and her belief in their mystical and supernatural powers, turned what was to have been a cold-blooded investment into a personal passion. In 1978, Green learned of a gold sarcophagus that had lain in a Swiss bank vault for the past seventy years. Inside was the mummy of an unnamed young woman, evidently dating from Egypt’s Greek period, as the inscription was in Greek, Egyptian, and Hittite. The only clue to her identity in any of the three tongues was that she had been “a princess who came out of the East to marry a man of great power”—a CV eerily similar to Yoko’s. The sarcophagus was purchased, shipped to New York, and became the centerpiece of a dedicated Egyptian Room at the Dakota.

  Inevitably, even the canny Yoko fell victim to the occasional scam. Early in 1979, she was told that a cache of extraordinary finds would shortly come on the market from a newly excavated site in Egypt. No such site really existed; her informant was planning to sell her some inferior items already long in circulation, dusted with a dramatic patina of desert sand. But, to the informant’s dismay, she and John immediately set off for Cairo to view the alleged site, summoning Sam Green from London to meet up with them there. They checked into the Nile Hilton, unluckily just as it was about to be visited by America’s new secretary of state, Cyrus Vance: for the first time ever, John had to give up his suite to someone more important.

  As it chanced, a fellow hotel guest was Thomas Hoving, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, who had been a key character witness for John at his immigration trial. Hoving now found himself a witness to the f
rantic attempts to stop John and Yoko from heading off into the desert to view the nonexistent dig. “Yoko had been very nice after the immigration case, and sent me and my wife a huge bunch of flowers,” he remembers. “But now she seemed very cold. I later learned that some guy back in New York was telling her I had an evil aura, and she had to get home right away.”

  “Then all the hotel phones went out of order,” Sam Green recalls. “It was four days before Yoko could contact the numerologist to find out in which direction we should fly back to the States. John used the time to visit every genuine archaeological site and every museum I could get him into. He felt he’d been here in a previous life, and wanted to learn everything he possibly could.”

  Once Yoko had cared little about clothes; now her appetite for couture astonished even the famously spendthrift Elton John. “[She] has a refrigerated room just for keeping her fur coats,” Elton reported after visiting the Dakota. “She’s got rooms full of the clothes-racks like you see at Marks and Spencer. She makes me look ridiculous. I buy things in twos and threes, but she buys them in fifties.” Special friend that he was, he could even publicly lampoon John’s most famous lyric without chilling his welcome:

  Imagine six apartments

  It isn’t hard to do.

  One is full of fur coats

  The other’s full of shoes.

  The same antimaterialist anthem cropped up one day when John was grumbling about the expense of his burgeoning empire to Neil Aspinall. “Imagine no possessions, John,” Neil reminded him. “It’s only a bloody song,” he retorted.

  The Dakota having been being thoroughly colonized, Yoko began looking for a base outside New York to which John and Sean could escape during the city’s arctic winters and scorching summers. Initially, the most promising location seemed to be Palm Beach, Florida, with its year-round sunshine, gorgeous beaches, and inaccessibility to all but the megarich. During March 1979, they vacationed at a rambling oceanfront mansion named El Solano, which had once belonged to the Vanderbilt family and which Yoko would eventually buy. “It was a beautiful old Art Deco place,” she says. “One room had a high ceiling like a ballroom. John used to love just sitting at the window and looking out at the ocean.”

  The large family group also included John’s son Julian and Yoko’s three young nieces, Reiko, Akiko, and Takako. Photographs of Julian during his visit show a boy clearly bewildered at being transplanted to Vanderbilt luxury from his mother’s small house in Ruthin, northern Wales. Nor do Yoko’s efforts to entertain him by demonstrating origami, Japanese paper folding, win his undivided attention. To celebrate his imminent sixteenth birthday, John chartered a yacht for a surprise party. Unfortunately, details of the event leaked out in advance and a group of young women began to circle the yacht in a speedboat with screams of “We love you, John!” forcing the jollifications to be cut short. This holiday would be the last time Julian ever saw his father.

  As John’s retirement had never been formally announced, there was intense puzzlement among the international media as month after month, then year after year passed with no new single or album from him, no madcap new ideas to mock, no new controversies to pump up, no new witticisms to relish. Interview requests continued to pour into Studio One, all of them given the same polite turndown on notepaper crested by a line drawing of the Dakota. Clearly some statement needed to be made, and eventually it was, via a paid insertion in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers, headed “A Love Letter from John and Yoko to People Who Ask Us What, When and Why.” This thanked people for their good vibes and for “respecting our quiet space” and said their silence was “a silence of love, not indifference.”

  That fall of 1979, in addition to his written journal, John sat down with his cassette recorder and announced “Tape one in the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon.” The date was September 5, and he was waiting to accompany Yoko on an expedition to find a second home somewhere nearer to New York than Palm Beach. His initial intention seemed to be an exploration of childhood memories for the autobiography in David Niven mode he had mentioned to Bob Gruen. The tape begins with a description of 9 Newcastle Road, the terrace house near Penny Lane where he lived as a toddler with his parents and grandparents—its redbrick facade, its formal front parlor, the picture of a horse-drawn carriage on the wall, which ended up at his Aunt Nanny’s home in Rock Ferry. He ponders about the first thing he can ever remember, decides it was “a nightmare,” then suddenly complains, “This is boring. I can’t be bothered doing it.”

  Instead, he turns to the musician who, more than any other except Paul McCartney, kept him on his creative mettle during the Sixties. A new Bob Dylan album, Slow Train Coming, has just been released, saturated with Dylan’s new Christian consciousness. John finds its vocals “pathetic,” its lyrics “just embarrassing,” and mocks a particular track, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” for evoking cafeterias rather than churches. But his main feeling is one of relief that such old rivals no longer have the power they once did to goad and unsettle him.

  Thoughts pop up at random, literary as well as musical: a recent piece by Truman Capote in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, a saying about George Bernard Shaw, worthy of A Spaniard in the Works, that “his brains went to his head.” A snatch of bagpipe music recalls boyhood stays in Edinburgh (“one of my favorite dreams”), the annual military display under the castle ramparts, and his emotion during the closing recital by a lone piper. He remarks how the freedom he always felt in Scotland—and has felt in Japan, also—came largely from being an anonymous foreigner. The current house hunting with Yoko, he admits, is an attempt to re-create Scotland “within an hour from New York.” But so far nothing has come close to the real place, which he intends to visit as soon as astrology and numerology permit. “In 1981, I’ll take Sean there,” he promises himself, “’cause that’s a good year to go.”

  Thence to a memory that has lurked at the back of his mind for twenty-five years and been replayed to Yoko more times than she could count: “the time when I had my hand on my mother’s tit in number 1 Blomfield Road.” He recalls his fourteen-year-old self, lying beside Julia on her bed as she took a siesta in her black angora (or maybe cashmere) top and “dark green and yellow mottled skirt.” He still feels the electric thrill of their accidental contact, still wonders if he should have tried to go further and whether Julia would have allowed it.

  The Truman Capote article in Interview also receives further attention. Later published in Capote’s essay collection Music for Chameleons, it features the gay author in nocturnal conversation with himself about his fatal addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sex. At one point there is a reminiscence of E. M. Forster, one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, who lived into his nineties but never became reconciled to homosexuality. Forster always hoped that when he reached old age, his sexual urges would vanish—but, instead, he told Capote, they seemed even more of a burden “I just thought ‘shit!’” John comments. “’cause I was always waiting for them to lessen. But I suppose it’s gonna go on for ever.”

  Soon after making the tape, he did find himself in possession of a second home “an hour from New York” but otherwise as unlike his idealized memories of Scotland as could be. Cannon Hill was an extensive property in Cold Spring Harbor, a chic summer resort on the north shore of Long Island. The rambling wooden house dated from the eighteenth-century whaling era and took its name from the antique cannon embedded beside the swimming pool. With it went a private beach and dock, looking out on a panorama of motorboats, sailboats, and skiffs, much like the scene Aunt Mimi saw from her bungalow in faraway Poole.

  Yoko was often too immersed in business matters to leave New York, so John’s most frequent companion on trips to Cold Spring Harbor with Sean would be his latest assistant, Fred Seaman. A journalism graduate from the City College of New York, discreet and cat-footed, Seaman bore an honored surname in the Lennons’ inner circle: his father, Eugene, was
a concert pianist, his uncle Norman was a classical music promoter who had staged some of Yoko’s early performances, and his aunt Helen was Sean’s nanny. His own employment was allegedly clinched by the fact that John’s father had also been called Fred and had been a seaman—though the mariner in question was actually a steward, known then as Alf.

  Anyone who stays in Cold Spring Harbor but doesn’t go sailing is liable to feel exceedingly left out. Despite never having sailed in anything smaller than a Mersey ferry, John decided it would be nice for Sean, and enlisted the help of a boatyard named Coneys Marine in nearby Huntington. The owner’s young son, Tyler Coneys, recommended a fourteen-foot Javelin-class sailboat named Isis and offered a course of personal tuition. Learning to sail after a certain age is never easy, particularly for someone as physically indolent as John had always been. But Tyler Coney remembers how determinedly he set out to master practical skills, and how cheerfully he performed drudging chores that he’d spent his whole life avoiding. One day, on an outing with Sean and nanny Helen, Fred Seaman offered to steer and demonstrated the fallacy of his surname by promptly capsizing the boat. Fortunately, everyone was wearing life jackets, and Sean was quite comfortable in the water, thanks to all those swimming lessons at the Y. Even so, John made the whole crew swear not to tell Yoko.

  Before long, he was confident and competent enough to sail the Isis without Tyler Coneys’s guardianship. Weeks of salt air and healthy exercise turned him lean and tanned, the picture of health in all but the Gitane drooping from his lips. Out in “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound,” as he found it called in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, no one noticed the modest little sailboat bucking and tacking, or the anonymous, oilskin-clad figure with the little boy beside him. Other celebrities lived along the shore, including Louis Comfort Tiffany, the stained-glass artist, and the singer Billy Joel, whose hit ballad, “Just the Way You Are,” was a favorite of John’s. Identifying Joel’s all-glass mansion one day, he cupped his hands to his mouth seadog-style and shouted, “Billy—I have all your records!”