To celebrate John’s fortieth and Sean’s fifth birthday on October 9, Yoko hired five skywriting planes to inscribe HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN AND SEAN LOVE YOKO nine times in the sky over Manhattan. A group of well-wishers gathered outside the Dakota with birthday cards and tributes, hoping John would come out and receive them, but they were told he was asleep. Later, he and Yoko posed for an official birthday snapshot, and their assistant, Fred Seaman, announced that they would be touring the United States, Japan, and Europe “next Spring.”
That summer saw the end of the famous rock concerts at Central Park’s ice-skating rink. Over the decade, major names like Fats Domino, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Who, and Bruce Springsteen had performed against the backdrop of trees and skyscrapers, just a few hundred yards from the Dakota. Bob Gruen had photographed most of them, and so he did this last-ever bill, topped by the Pretenders. Afterward, the band’s vocalist, Chrissie Hynde, asked Gruen to give her best wishes to John, who was still working at the Hit Factory. “When I told John there’d would be no more concerts, he said ‘Good…thank goodness they’re finally stopping…it keeps Sean awake,’” Gruen remembers. “I was stunned to hear this from John Lennon, Mister Rock ’n’ Roll. That was a sign of how much he’d grown up.”
“(Just Like) Starting Over” was released as a single in the United Kingdom on October 24 and in America three days later. With it, John’s life was thrown open wide to the media again. There had been widespread rumors that his retirement had brought terrible physical changes, which might prevent his ever reappearing in public. Some reports said he had gone completely bald; others that the septum of his nose had been destroyed by cocaine.
Yet here he was, the same old John, if a little thinner and more lined of face, his hair still almost Beatlishly abundant, his accent unchanged despite the Americanisms that peppered it. Here were the same articulateness, honesty, and irresistible wit, but all somehow calmer and mellower, as if deep inside him a storm had finally blown out. And—defying the heaped-up insults, defamations, and curses of the past decade—here was Yoko, still with him at every moment.
The “new man” concept had yet to born, and the revelation of his child care and bread baking generated as many column inches as any nude record cover or Jesus analogy ever had. At the time, he had never considered himself a pioneer, but was now widely so perceived, not at all to his displeasure. Thanks to his example, the word househusband entered general usage on both sides of the Atlantic. “It’s the wave of the future,” he said. “And I’m glad to have been in the forefront of that, too.”
But any idea that he and Yoko had turned into a staid, middle-aged couple, sipping Ovaltine and watching Masterpiece Theatre, was soon confounded. On November 23, they went to the Sperone Gallery in SoHo to shoot a video sequence for a music track yet to be decided. As the camera turned, they undressed, climbed onto a bed, kissed each other, then simulated having sex. It was the scenario everyone had expected at their bed-ins all those years ago, and not even the wildest punks and postpunks had yet dared stage one like it.
Double Fantasy was scheduled for release on November 24. The main prepublicity was to be a Playboy interview, a twenty-thousand-word slot at the front of the magazine, given to only a select few in the arts, literature, and politics. As ever, the conversation had to be with Yoko also. Playboy’s interviewer, David Sheff, having been pronounced astrologically sound, received even more time than Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, ten years before. The sessions took place in the Dakota apartment, in Yoko’s office, at the Record Plant, and at John’s favorite café, La Fortuna. Around his neck he wore the heart-shaped diamond necklace he had bought her after their bust-up over the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. She had given it back to him—a symbol of reconciliation forever.
To Playboy he represented himself as a kind of rock-’n’-roll Rip van Winkle who had awoken from a long slumber, feeling more refreshed and energized than ever in his life before. “The experience of being a full-time parent gave me the spirit again. I didn’t realize it was happening. But then I stepped back for a moment and said, ‘What has been going on? Here we are. I’m going to be forty, Sean’s going to be five. Isn’t it great? We survived.’…I am going to be forty and life begins at forty, so they promise. Oh, I believe it, too. Because I feel fine. It’s like twenty-one…you know, hitting twenty-one. It’s like, wow, what’s going to happen next?”
During one interview session at the apartment, a loud scream came from the street below. “Another murder at Rue Dakota,” John quipped.
In fact, it was not Playboy but Newsweek that carried the first interview with him about his retirement and revival. To make up for spoiling Playboy’s scoop, he sat down with David Sheff and went over dozens of songs in the Lennon-McCartney oeuvre, identifying which had been written by him, which by Paul, and where and how much they had collaborated. “This,” he told Sheff, “will be the reference book.”
“(Just Like) Starting Over” received massive airplay, was generally liked rather than loved, and soon appeared in the middle reaches of the singles charts. Double Fantasy inspired more equivocal feelings, particularly in Britain. People were not sure how they felt about this new house-trained Lennon, and Yoko’s involvement still presented a problem to many. In the music press, now written for punks by punks, some reviews were downright savage. Melody Maker said the album “reeked with self indulgent sterility” and summed it up as “a godawful yawn.” Along with its herald single, it would be number one all too soon.
John was still renting Underhill, and had meant to return to Bermuda—by plane this time—once the first wave of promotion was over. But the superfocused Hit Factory sessions had laid down twenty-two tracks, only fourteen of which could be used on Double Fantasy. Still on overdrive, he decided he wasn’t yet ready for another vacation and instead went back with the same producer and musicians to begin a follow-up, to be called Milk and Honey. At the same time, he wanted to produce a solo album for Yoko, named after a recent SoHo Weekly News headline about her—Yoko Only.
He also began seriously thinking about the return to Britain he had been promising his family there since 1975. Just lately, his nostalgia for his homeland had increased to the point where he’d choke up if he so much as read the name Liverpool. His ban on seeing old cronies was relaxed only once—when a bit of unspoiled Liverpool in the person of Ringo Starr visited New York that autumn. They met at the Plaza for what was supposed to be an hour but ended up as five. By the time they parted, John had promised to play on Ringo’s new album, Can’t Fight Lightning, the following January.
His Aunt Mimi had no doubt that she would be seeing him again soon, after a separation of nine years. “He used to tell me that he would sit sometimes night after night, looking out of the window and facing in the direction of Liverpool,” Mimi remembered. “He used to say he could see ships leaving New York. He would see their lights twinkling and he would wonder whether they were coming back to Liverpool…. John was wanting to come home on the QE2…he wanted to sail up the Mersey. He was very homesick towards the end.”
Mimi was still just as unabashed by his fame and wealth, and as disapproving of his extravagance, even—especially—if she herself was the object. To mark the release of Double Fantasy, he sent her a matching pearl necklace and brooch. “You’re daft,” she told him next time they spoke on the phone. “Go on, Mimi, spoil yourself…just for a change,” John laughed.
Making a triumphant homecoming to Liverpool on the QE2 was no idle fantasy. One night at the Hit Factory, he received a surprise transatlantic call from an old Liverpool friend he had not seen in more than fifteen years. It was Joe Flannery, Brian Epstein’s former love, who used to keep open house for the Beatles when they were earning a few pounds a night. John was delighted to hear from “Flo Jannery” and pumped him for news of the entertainment agency he now ran with Brian’s younger brother, Clive. Flannery, too, heard of the plan to charter the QE2, and promised to find out whether the Mersey could h
andle such a big ship these days. To other people, John said that after his exploits on the Megan Jaye, he fancied sailing across the Atlantic.
The interviewers kept on coming, with John’s greatest media champion oddly in the rearguard. It wasn’t until December 3 that Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott visited the Dakota, accompanied by photographer Annie Leibovitz. For the formidably talented and persuasive Leibovitz, John and Yoko would parody the popular conception of their relationship, she lying on the floor fully clothed while he clung to her, naked and vulnerable, like a baby ape with its mother. A second shoot at the apartment was arranged for December 8.
To Jonathan Cott, John said he was essentially no different from the angry, self-flagellating refugee Beatle whose bile had filled two issues of the magazine ten years earlier. “I get truly affected by letters from Brazil or Poland or Austria—places I’m not conscious of all the time—just to know somebody is there, listening. One kid living up in Yorkshire wrote this heartfelt letter about being both Oriental and English and identifying with John and Yoko. The odd kid in the class. There are a lot of kids who identify with us. They don’t need the history of rock ’n’ roll. They identify with us as a couple, a biracial couple who stand for love, peace, feminism, and all the positive things of the world.
“You know…give peace a chance, not shoot people for peace. All we need is love. I believe it. It’s damned hard but I absolutely believe it. We’re not the first to say ‘Imagine no countries’ or ‘Give peace a chance’ but we’re carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it from hand to hand, to each other, to each country, to each generation. That’s our job…. I’ve never claimed divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answer to life. I can only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can, but only as honestly as I can, no more, no less.
“I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owed me something, and that either the conservatives or the socialists or the fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews were doing something to me, and when you’re a teenybopper that’s what you think. I’m 40 now. I don’t think that any more, ’cause I found out it doesn’t fucking work. The thing goes on anyway and all you’re doing is jacking off and screaming about what your mommy or daddy or society did…I have found out personally…that I am responsible for it as well as them. I am part of them.”
On December 6, he did a long interview with BBC Radio 1 deejay Andy Peebles, giving the same generous measure he had to Playboy and Rolling Stone. Peebles asked about his “sense of security,” living in what was still a hazardous city by comparison with London. John replied that the great thing here was that people left you alone. “It took me two years to unwind. I can go right out this door now and go in a restaurant. You want to know how great that is? Or go to the movies. I mean, people come up for autographs and say ‘Hi,’ but they don’t bug you, you know. It’s just…‘Oh, hey, how you doin’?’” After the interview, Peebles said he hoped there would soon be another Lennon show in Britain. John asked if he really thought there’d be any interest.
For those who set store by such things, the great puzzle must be why the numerologist on permanent watch for dangers to John did not at this point send him away on a journey to the far side of the world, and why none of the psychics in Yoko’s employ foresaw what was about to happen. Later, she would realize that in the weeks beforehand she had received two different warnings, both equally oblique and ambiguous. “This one female psychic told me, ‘There’s going to be a woman and I see that she’s crying like crazy. I think she’s your sister because she looks very much like you, with very long hair, and she’s going to go through some terrible situation, and she has a young son, and she’s holding him and she’s going to be devastated about something. She’s probably your sister, so you’d better be very nice to her and console her.’ I said, ‘I have a sister but she doesn’t have long hair and she doesn’t have a child.’ But that was me she was talking about.”
Another psychic, a male, went off on a surprising tangent when she went to him with a routine staff problem. John wanted to dismiss Fred Seaman, but Yoko hoped to find an excuse not to. “And the guy said, ‘Something incredible is going to happen and your life is going to change, so don’t do anything now, just leave it alone and wait.’ That was enough for me to convince John not to let Fred go, and instead I sent him to the house in Bermuda to relax.”
During that weekend of December 6–7, Bob Gruen dropped by the Record Plant, and was struck by how happy John seemed. “We sat on the floor for a couple of hours, just shooting the shit and talking…about how he was going to put a new band together and go back on the road…how he wanted me to go with him, and who we’d meet in London, and his favorite restaurants in Paris and favorite shops in Tokyo. He seemed to have such a positive vision and a sense of hope for the future. He was about to come back with the conclusions to all his screaming and his searching and his wandering and his therapies. He’d discovered he could be grounded with his family and sober, and still put out a message people could relate to. He seemed finally to understand what it was to be alive and to be a leader, in the sense that he could think and express what everyone else was feeling.”
Day or night, there were generally a few people waiting outside the Dakota’s West Seventy-second Street entrance, beside the Gothic arch and the copper sentry box. John called them “Dakota groupies,” though these days they were likelier to be male than female. A few had shared the Sixties with him, but the majority tended to young men and woman who had grown up well after the Beatles’ heyday but not found anything in their own pop heritage remotely as magical. John as a rule was friendly and patient, always pausing to sign autographs and chat, but from time to time a pushy or overdemanding individual would annoy him. This weekend, there had been such an addition to the group, a pudgy twenty-five-year-old named Mark David Chapman. John never knew his name—indeed, he would not be known as such until after becoming bracketed in the public’s mind with Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth.
Chapman had been born in Fort Worth Texas, the son of an Air Force sergeant, and spent a rootless childhood in Texas, Indiana, and Virginia. An archetypal nerd, overweight and without distinction, he was mocked and bullied at each school he attended, and took to seeking refuge in an imaginary world of “little people” who gave him the affection and feeling of power he otherwise lacked. As a teenager, he got into drugs, experimented with LSD, and then became a devout Christian. But his main solace for the joylessness of his life was Beatles music.
To begin with, he seemed to have impulses John would have applauded; he worked on a YMCA program for the resettlement of Vietnamese boat people and spent time in Beirut during the midseventies Lebanese civil war. He received commendations for his work and once had his hand shaken by President Gerald Ford. Later, he migrated to Honolulu in Hawaii, where he began to have psychiatric problems and on one occasion attempted suicide. In 1979, in weird symbiosis with John, he married a Japanese American woman several years his senior.
The media reports of John’s emergence from retirement and substantial new wealth turned Chapman’s former fan-worship into ferocious hatred. He felt that, by acquiring large houses and pedigreed cattle, John had betrayed the ideals of the Beatles—and therefore betrayed him personally. As later with many a school and college campus mass-assassin, “voices” in his head dictated that these grievances could be avenged only by blood. His parallel obsession was with Holden Caulfield, anarchic narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He came to believe that if he made an end to John, he would be able to step into the book’s pages, transfigured into Holden.
On Friday, December 5, Chapman flew from Honolulu to New York, wearing a rucksack containing fourteen hours of Beatles music on cassette. He checked into the Sixty-third Street YMCA (later switching to the Sheraton Hotel) and bought a copy of Double Fantasy and the issue of Playboy containing John’s interv
iew. He hung around outside the Dakota for most of the weekend, but did not see John until Sunday. Breaking the Dakota groupies’ convention of politeness and distance, he came overly near and began to take photographs. “John got angry and ran after him to try to take the camera, though I shouted to him not to do it,” Yoko remembers. “He didn’t get the camera, and when he came back he said, ‘If anyone gets me, it’s going to be a fan.’”
On Monday, December 8, John had breakfast at La Fortuna on Columbus Avenue, then had his hair cut in fifties Teddy Boy style for Annie Leibovitz’s second Rolling Stone shoot. Back at the Dakota, he and Yoko gave another extended interview, this time to RKO Radio. “We’ve been together longer than the Beatles, do you know that?” he said at one point. “People always think in terms that John and Yoko just got together and then the Beatles split. We’ve been together longer than the Beatles!” He said Double Fantasy was for “the people who grew up with me. I’m saying ‘Here I am now, how are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Weren’t the Seventies a drag? Here we are, well let’s try to make the Eighties good because it’s still up to us to make what we can of it.’”
Afterward, he posed for Leibovitz with his Teddy Boy cut, wearing a black leather blouson, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. Except for the backdrop of skyscrapers and treetops behind him, he could have been ready to go onstage at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller.
At about four p.m., he set off with Yoko for the Record Plant, hitching a ride with the RKO team after the nonappearance of their own limo. As John got into the car, Chapman appeared, held out his copy of Double Fantasy, and was rewarded by a scribbled autograph. “Is that all you want?” John reportedly asked him. The moment was captured by an amateur photographer from New Jersey named Paul Goresh, who habitually staked out the Dakota (and had once conned his way inside posing as a video repair man). Chapman would later say that he had meant to deliver his retribution then, but John’s niceness temporarily disarmed him.
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