by Peter Brown
In December of 1974 Rolling Stone magazine printed a revelatory article, in which the dirty mechanics of John’s deportation saga were described in detail for the first time. Encouraged by this, John began attending court hearings himself, fighting for his own cause for the first time. He even cut his hair short and wore a tie to the courtroom. In June of 1975 John’s lawyers lodged a suit against former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell and former U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, charging that deportation actions they took against him were improper.
On October 7, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the order to deport John Lennon. In a thirty-page ruling, the court noted that “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream.”38
Two days later, at one in the morning, on John’s thirty-fifth birthday, Yoko went into premature labor and had to be rushed to the hospital, where she went into convulsions. John stayed by her side through the night, as they kept her alive with transfusions. Late that morning she gave birth to a healthy, eight-pound, ten-ounce baby boy. They named him Scan Ono Lennon.
Sean Lennon gave John renewed hope; here was a tiny mortal through whom he could recreate his own life, solve all the mysteries, and soothe all the hurt of his own childhood. Baby Sean became the Next Big Thing, one of the few that would never fail him. John gave himself over to Sean’s childhood. “I wanted to give five solid years of being there all the time,” he said. “I hadn’t seen my first son, Julian, grow up ... I was not there for his childhood at all. I was on tour. And my childhood was something else. I don’t know what price one has to pay for inattention to children. And if I don’t give him attention from zero to five, then I’m damn well gonna have to give it from sixteen to twenty, because it’s owed, it’s like the law of the universe.”
John woke each morning at six to get the household chores started and to fix Sean and Yoko’s breakfast. He cared for the child all day and bathed with him at night. As the boy got older they had romps in the park, and John fretted over his diet. He began the boy’s education by answering all his questions, tenderly and carefully. Sean was showered with all the love and attention and material comforts a child could want. He even had Elton John as a godfather.
As John started to learn how to bake bread, Yoko gravitated to the business end of things. Yoko turned out to be a canny investor and formidable negotiator. She dug into the Beatles’ various lawsuits and negotiated a reported five-million-dollar settlement with Allen Klein. Klein credits this completely to Yoko’s diplomacy; but there were also times when Yoko very undiplomatically wore Arab costumes to a meeting with six Jewish lawyers. Yoko also made a series of profitable, if sometimes peculiar, investments. She began buying up apartments in the Dakota as they became available, until they owned five of the choicest layouts in the building. They opened up a production office in a professional office on the ground floor, called Lennono Music. Yoko went to work here every day in an office with a ceiling painted in blue clouds. Yoko also purchased a 316-acre farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, along with homes in Japan, Oyster Bay, Long Island, and Palm Beach. She also invested in cattle, and one of their cows sold on the auction block for a record-breaking $250,000. John’s worth soared to $250,000,000 under Yoko’s guidance.
Yoko’s business acumen was a combination of street smarts, guts, and the forces of magic. Yoko had always been very into astrology, numerology, psychics and mediums, but never more so than at this period. Everywhere she turned, the psychics all saw trouble ahead. “They said that John had lots of bad luck,” Yoko said, “and we needed to give him all the luck we could.” This luck came in the form of “directional moves.” Yoko, like a sorceress with a formula for a spell, would send John around the world in forty-eight hours or tell him he had to be 1,843 miles to the northeast, or sometimes she would send him to a specific spot. They spent four months in Japan in the Hotel Okura’s Presidential Suite on such a directional trip, while John waited impatiently till the numbers and spirits said it was good luck to go home.
Yoko talked of one such trip, to Flong Kong and Macao. “I knew that astrologically, directionwise, Hong Kong was a good trip, that it would put him in the best possible position, so I told him to go, alone.”
John said. “Really? By myself? Hong Kong? Singapore? ... I hadn’t done anything by myself since I was twenty. I didn’t know how to call for room service, check into a hotel...”
John arrived in his hotel room in Hong Kong in a state of high anxiety at being so isolated and so far from Yoko and Sean. “So sitting in this room,” he said, “taking baths, which I’d noticed Yoko do, and women do, every time I got nervous, I took a bath. It’s a great female trick ... I must have had forty baths ... and I’m looking out over the Hong Kong bay, and there’s something that’s like ringing a bell, it’s like what is it? And then I just got very, very relaxed. And it was like a recognition. God! It’s me! This relaxed person is me. I remember this guy from way back when! This feeling is from way, way, way back when. I know what the fuck I’m doing! I know who I am—it doesn’t rely on any outside agency or adulation, Or nonadulation, or achievement or nonachievement, or hit record or no hit record. Or anything.”
This epiphany—so long overdue—brought John tremendous peace and relief. For the first time, he experienced serenity and confidence in the future. He didn’t have to prove himself anymore; the pressure was off him; he could create when he felt like it and become the public persona of John Lennon at times and the househusband at others. “The feeling in the music business,” John said later, “is that you don’t exist if you’re not in the gossip columns, or on the charts, or at Xenon with Mick Jagger or Andy Warhol. I just wanted to remember that I existed at all.”
At this point John and Yoko became frantically private, almost secretive. They drifted apart from many of their friends and acquaintances. Those who were loyal understood and waited patiently for an unexpected phone call, others were insulted and went away angry. When not living in some hotel room on a “directional trip,” John spent almost all of his time in the bedroom of their apartment at the Dakota. This room was decorated all in white, with white stereo speakers, a white “staircase to nowhere” leading into a blank wall, and a white, king-size bed. The only other furniture in the room was a wicker chair for Yoko on her side of the bed. John’s side of the bed was his little inner sanctum, with his ashtray and cigarettes and a Sony Stratocaster TV set that was inevitably always turned on.
The summer of 1980 John took a “directional trip” to Bermuda. He enjoyed it so much he asked Yoko to send Sean, who arrived with a nanny. One day John and Sean were strolling through the Botanical Gardens, when John noticed a lovely, white flower called “Double Fantasy.” The pretty name inspired him to write a song, and back in his hotel room, he called Yoko and played it for her over the phone. She said she had been writing a song also, and she played it for him. Suddenly John decided that they would make an album together, his first in nearly six years. Yoko was thrilled at the prospect and set about making a recording deal with a major company for them. On the eve of John’s fortieth birthday, they signed a deal with Geffen Records to distribute the album, and John spent the early fall at the Record Plant studios recording the Double Fantasy album.
The release of the album was greeted by a flurry of publicity and renewed interest in John and Yoko. Newsweek did a special interview with them, Playboy asked them to be the interview of their big Christmas issue, and Esquire did a cover story. The single from the album, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was headed right for the top of the charts. The album itself was fresh, upbeat, and critically well received. John was so pleased with the response that he returned almost immediately to the studios to work on a new single, “Walking on Thin Ice.” Things couldn’t have been more perfect. His career had had an unexpected resurgence, he loved his wife and his child, and he felt at peace with himself. For a brief moment, it looked as if John had everything he wanted.<
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2
On October 23, 1980, as “(Just Like) Starting Over” was shooting to the top of the record charts, a twenty-five-year-old security guard named Mark David Chapman signed out of his job at a high-rise condominium in Honolulu. The name he signed was “John Lennon.” Later that day he called his employment counselor and quit his job. “Are you looking for something else?” she asked him.
“No,” Mark said, “I already have a job to do.”
On the surface, Mark Chapman was just like millions of other kids who had worshipped John Lennon and the Beatles while growing up. There was no way of telling that one day he was to split apart and become two people, himself and John Lennon, and then feel the compulsion to reduce the number to one again. Chapman fit the psychological profile of many presidential assassins. They are men of low self-esteem, bitterly disappointed with their lives. They attach themselves to heroes with what historian Christopher Lasch has called “a deadly intimacy,” first as a fan, then as an imitator, inevitably as a killer.
Chapman was born on May 10, 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of a retired air force sergeant, but he grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, where his father worked as a credit manager at an Atlanta bank. Chapman was an average, quiet teenager, whose interests ranged from flying saucers to the Beatles. He loved the Beatles, much to his parents’ distress, and grew his hair long and learned to play the guitar. In high school he joined a local band and worked as a camp counselor at the South DeKalb branch of the YMCA. His aspiration was to become a YMCA director.
Then in 1969 Chapman underwent a radical transformation. Introduced to psychedelic drugs in high school, he took every kind of hallucinogen he could get his hands on, often having bad trips. His parents tried to put a stop to it, but it only ended up with Chapman running away for two weeks. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped, and Chapman became a fifteen-year-old Jesus freak. He sold his Beatles records, cut off his long hair, put on a white shirt and black tie, and wore a large wooden cross around his neck. His friends remember him spouting passages from the Bible, which he now carried around with him. At school he spent free periods studying the Bible, and at prayer meetings Chapman once renounced the Beatles because John Lennon had once said they were more popular than Jesus. The song “Imagine” became one of the prayer group’s pet peeves, and they sang it with the lyrics, “Imagine John Lennon was dead.”
After graduating from high school, Chapman enrolled at the DeKalb Community College for a short time and then dropped out. He went to work at the YMCA camp for a while, until a friend told him of an available full-time job at the YMCA in Beirut, Lebanon. Chapman saved enough money for his airfare by washing cars and bagging groceries, and by June of 1975 he was off. Chapman wasn’t in Lebanon two weeks, when a fierce civil war started, and he had to be evacuated with other Americans. He taped the sound of gunfire on a cassette recorder before he left and played the tape over and over again for his friends back in Atlanta.
It was later that year that he fell in love, with a pretty girl with long dark hair named Jessica Blankenship. It was a thoroughly unrequited relationship, and Chapman went to all sorts of extremes to impress her, including having “Happy Birthday Jessica” spelled out on the marquee of the local Holiday Inn. He even enrolled at Covenant College, a strict, Presbyterian school, to impress her. His dream was that they would become Christian missionaries together and go off to some exotic place to live. But Covenant College was too hard for him, and when he dropped out Jessica saw him as a failure. A job at the Fort Chafee Vietnam refugee placement center in Arkansas buoyed his spirits temporarily, but when that was over, in December of 1975, he was lost.
In 1977 he moved to Hawaii, where his mother had moved after divorcing his father. Shortly after his arrival, he attached a pipe to the exhaust of a car, fed it to the interior, and tried to kill himself. He was found in time and was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment at the Castle Memorial Hospital, but he was soon released. He later worked at the local Y and in the print shop at Castle Memorial. In 1979, with some money his father gave him, he took a trip around the world and visited various YMCAs in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Paris, and London. Upon returning to Hawaii in June of 1979, he married Gloria Abe, a Japanese woman four years his senior who had booked his world tour for him at a local travel agency. Although he held only a four-dollar-an-hour job as a security guard, he managed to bankroll enough money to collect lithographs. His first was a Salvador Dali called Lincoln in Dalivision, which Chapman purchased for five thousand dollars. He later traded that in for a Norman Rockwell litho, entitled Triple Self-Portrait.
By this time something had transformed Chapman into an overweight, irrascible young man. He was curt and snubbed coworkers and developed a sudden interest in firearms and guns. At home he became testy with his wife, refusing to let her listen to the radio or read a newspaper. Scientology became a favorite hate for him, which he saw as a type of brainwashing. His security job was across the street from a Scientology headquarters, and every day someone would call them and whisper into the phone, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.” He was also once seen wearing an identification tag at work with the name John Lennon written on a tape and placed over his own. But there was nothing Mark David Chapman had said or done that would have led anyone to believe he was going to kill John Lennon.
Sometime in October, Chapman read the latest issue of Esquire magazine, the one with John as the cover story. The article, a piece of nonjournalism in search of a subject who had refused to be interviewed or cooperate, portrayed Lennon as “a forty-year-old businessman who watches a lot of television, who’s got $150 million ($250 million according to the Fortune 400), a son whom he dotes on, and a wife who intercepts his phone calls.” John had sold out. “That phony,” Chapman thought.
On October 27, Chapman went into J&S Sales, Ltd in Honolulu and purchased a Charter Arms .38-special revolver. He had applied for a gun permit earlier that month for his job as a security guard and had no problem obtaining the gun.
In November Chapman made a pilgrimage to Atlanta, Georgia, to see his father and friends. Then he went to New York. He spent a few days at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, before checking into the Hotel Olcott, not far from the Dakota. Chapman allegedly later told a minister that during this period he was wrestling with “good” and “evil” spirits. Evidently the good spirits won out, for the time being, because Chapman suddenly boarded a plan for Atlanta, staying there only a few days before he went home to Hawaii. Finally, Mark headed for New York for a second time on December 5. His total journey at this point had taken him 17,000 miles.
The first night he checked into the Sixty-third Street YMCA, just nine blocks south of the Dakota, and then into the Sheraton Centre Hotel at Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. The next day he took up vigil in front of the Dakota. He carried with him some cassettes of Beatles songs, a copy of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and his .38 revolver. Chapman was not noticed in the changing guard of fans who often waited outside the Dakota, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lauren Bacall or Gilda Radner on their way in or out.
Monday, December 8, was an unusually warm winter’s day in New York, the perfect day for waiting in front of the Dakota and celebrity watching. No one is quite certain how long Mark Chapman was there that day. When John and Yoko left for the Record Plant at five P.M. John’s limousine was at the curb, instead of inside the entrance gates of the Dakota, and as he strode to his car, Chapman thrust a copy of the new album, Double Fantasy, into his hands. John obligingly stopped and signed the cover for him, “John Lennon, 1980.” Another fan ran up and snapped a picture. Mark Chapman was ecstatic as John and Yoko got into the limousine and rode off. “Did I have my hat on or off?” Chapman asked excitedly. “I wanted to have it off. Boy, they’ll never believe this back in Hawaii.”
John and Yoko returned to the Dakota at 10:50 P.M. in the limousine, John carrying the “Walking on Thin Ice” tapes. The tall security gates
were still open, but again the limousine pulled to the curb, and John had to walk from the sidewalk. Yoko preceded him into the entranceway. Just as they passed into the dark recesses of the archway, John heard a voice call to him, “Mr. Lennon?”
John turned, myopically peering into the darkness. Five feet away, Mark Chapman was already in combat stance. Before John could speak, Chapman fired five shots into him.
Yoko heard the shots and spun around. At first she didn’t realize John had been hit, because he kept walking toward her. Then he fell to his knees and she saw the blood. “I’m shot!” John cried to her as he went down on his face on the floor of the Dakota security office.
The Dakota doorman, a burly, bearded, twenty-seven-year-old named Jay Hastings, dashed around from behind the desk to where John lay, blood pouring from his mouth, gaping wounds in his chest. Yoko cradled John’s head while Hastings stripped off his blue uniform jacket and placed it over him. John was only semi-conscious, and when he tried to talk, he gurgled and vomited fleshy matter.
While the police were called, Hastings ran outside to search for the gunman, but he didn’t have far to look. Chapman was calmly standing in front of the Dakota, reading from his copy of Catcher in the Rye. He had dropped the gun after the shooting. “Do you know what you just did?” Hastings asked him.
“I just shot John Lennon,” Chapman said quietly.
