The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  • • •

  Each day, the Mike Douglas Show began with a song, something perhaps appropriate for the cohost. In the case of Lennon, Douglas opened the Monday, February 14, show with a well-intended if ill-chosen selection.

  The stage had been set, the cast in place while an announcer welcomed the studio audience and America to the day’s show. Douglas held a microphone onstage and performed the day’s first number.

  “In the wings, I’m standing beside John,” Gary Van Scyoc says. “The show begins and all of a sudden we hear Mike Douglas singing ‘Michelle.’”

  Douglas or his staff failed to recognize that the Lennon-McCartney byline on Beatles compositions was often deceptive; many songs were effectively solo pieces, such as Lennon’s “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or McCartney creations including “Yesterday” and “Michelle.” The music hall melody, French verse, and floating vocal of “Michelle” were very much the work of Paul McCartney, and not necessarily one of Lennon’s favorites.

  Lennon shook his head. “Fuckin’ hell,” he scowled.

  “You could hear somebody’s face drop,” Van Scyoc says. “John couldn’t believe it. He was totally nervous anyway, going on television for millions of people, but Mike comes out and does a Paul song. Just a terrible way to start the week.”

  The viewing audience—the studio crowded with friends-of-friends, Beatles fans, and FBI agents, plus millions of housewives at home—was unaware that Lennon had been spewing a string of curses moments before he strode onstage. Always the pro, Lennon accepted Douglas’s gracious introduction, which may have made matters worse by crediting Lennon for the composition.

  John and Yoko appeared on cue, smiled, and shook hands with Douglas while the audience cheered. The central stage area featured an arc of seats for Douglas and his guests, and John and Yoko made themselves comfortable before their microphones. Lennon gently made note of the true authorship of “Michelle,” and allowed that he did help write part of the song, just to make Douglas feel better.44

  After the introductions Lennon offered a simple yet broad statement as keynote for the week: “We’d like to talk about love, peace, communicating, women’s lib, racism, war. That’s what’s going on now.”

  The first day’s guests included Ralph Nader, whom Lennon introduced as “the kind of guy who sets an example, he does something.” When asked by Lennon about any political plans, Nader said he would “not ever” be interested in running for president, even though Lennon volunteered his service as minister of music.

  The hour went easily with performances by the Chambers Brothers and Louis Nye, John and Yoko sang “It’s So Hard,” and Yoko exhibited two interactive art pieces whose titles were self-explanatory: Mending a Broken Teacup and Reach Out and Touch Someone in the Audience. Douglas had no preshow concerns about the first day’s talk or topics, and thought the episode went well.

  But the following day was not one that Douglas looked forward to, not with a guest list that included a man he described as “an unrepentant anarchist.”

  Before Jerry Rubin was brought onstage, Douglas explained his reservations: “My feelings are quite negative about this young man. But John wanted him on the show.”

  Ever the diplomat, Lennon introduced Rubin by acknowledging that he understood the reputation of the Chicago Seven and the Movement’s hard-core radicals; he, too, had wondered if they were “bomb-throwing freaks” to be avoided.

  “When I first met Jerry Rubin I was terrified,” Lennon said. On the other hand, Lennon had a soft spot for people who may have been misrepresented in the press, having been subjected to that once or twice: “We thought we’d give them a chance to show what they think now, not two years ago or three years ago, and what their hopes are for the future. They do represent a certain part of the youth. I think it’s time they spoke themselves.”

  Which Rubin did, and confirmed Douglas’s worst fears by immediately launching into anti-Nixon rants. He blamed the president for creating an automated war, “so that it’s machines killing people,” and claimed that Nixon’s storm-trooper mentality was demonstrated at Attica and Kent State.

  Lennon interviewed Rubin on the “Movement,” and where it stood. Rubin said that the cause was more necessary than ever “because the repression is so heavy that anyone who does anything gets arrested, jailed, killed.”

  Douglas interrupted: “This is the only country in the world where a man can say something like that on television.”

  Rubin said he himself faced prison time for speaking his mind, for saying the harsh truths that needed to be heard. Douglas changed the subject to one that he hoped would shine a more positive light, a topic that was agreed upon before the broadcast. Douglas said he heard Rubin was now against drugs, a reversal of positions.

  “That’s not true,” Rubin responded, mugging for the cameras and audience. “I’m not against drugs; just heroin.” According to Jerry Rubin, heroin was a tool employed by the police to keep minorities in their place.

  “He just got on my nerves,” Douglas later said, frustrated by Rubin’s predictable antigovernment rant.

  Lennon steered the conversation toward voting and the need to encourage now-eligible eighteen-year-olds to register and participate. Rubin, of course, said the voting should only be done to remove Nixon, and that young people should vote as a bloc.

  After a commercial, Rubin encouraged young people to attend both the Democratic and Republican conventions, “and nonviolently make our presence felt.”

  “Nonviolently,” Lennon repeated the qualifier, although Rubin couldn’t resist explaining why nonviolence was the only wise course.

  “Because if we do anything any other way we’ll be killed,” Rubin said. “That’s the kind of country we live in.”

  The audience was not of the same mind, and responded with some booing, catcalls, and jeering; the gentle talk show atmosphere turned tense. Lennon tried to tone things down as he had the David Frost conversation about Attica. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion,” Lennon said. “Whatever is going on, we’re all responsible for.”

  In hindsight, Douglas recognized a born peacemaker. “John picked up the mantle of Kind and Gentle Host and he did it quite well, reinterpreting Jerry’s comments to take some of the sting out and adding a little humor to keep things cool.”45

  The Rubin show came and went, an exercise in rhetoric where few viewpoints were changed, some confirmed. Certainly the FBI agents in the audience took note of a man focused on the removal of a president.

  Politics aside, Lennon’s personal highlight for the week was on Wednesday, when the former Beatle jammed with rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry.

  “John was just in heaven,” Gabriel says. “He’d never worked with Chuck Berry; he was in awe of Berry the way everyone else was in awe of Lennon.”

  Lennon and the Elephants joined Berry for two songs: “Johnny B. Goode,” one of the cornerstone riffs that made the electric guitar rock and roll’s instrument of choice, and “Memphis.” Like Lennon, Berry had his own stubborn, defiant streak. Van Scyoc says some adjustments were needed when Berry began the song differently than he had in rehearsal.

  “He proceeded to do the song in his key, even after we all agreed on what key to play in,” Van Scyoc says. “John wasn’t very happy. The look he gave when we started the song said it all. We were in a panic, not only performing live on national television but starting in the wrong key. I thought we did a good job; John was straining a little with his voice because of that.”

  Another voice caught Berry by surprise during “Memphis.” The first verse went fine. When the chorus came around, the background singing included Yoko’s unique, piercing vocalizations. Berry’s eyes popped wide for a moment, but the veteran entertainer took it on the chin and continued unfazed.

  A close-up captured Berry sharing the microphone for a duet with Len
non, whose smile summed up the experience. No matter the radical politics of the week, John Lennon’s heart was captured in those few minutes. Douglas said a grinning Lennon told him that, no matter what else, playing with Berry was “worth the whole gig, eh?”

  Yet it was a guest on the fourth episode who provided the most nervous anticipation of the week: it was time for the housewives to meet a Black Panther. Douglas, hardly a stranger to the civil rights movement, admitted that his audience might not have been ready for some guests.

  “After the trying experience with Jerry Rubin, I was hardly looking forward to Bobby Seale,” Douglas said. “The public viewed the Black Panthers as heavily armed, white-hating militants. Talk about the perfect way to alienate my core viewing audience.”

  Douglas expected attitude from a man likely to use the word “pigs” to describe police officers or phrases such as “up against the wall” to raise militant anger. Instead, Douglas heard descriptions of Panther clothing drives, breakfast programs for inner-city students, and other community-based activism.

  Lennon explained that when he met the Panther leader he was surprised by what he learned.

  “He had a lot to say,” Lennon said. “He’s doing a lot that was not what I’d read in the paper about him. The Foundation, giving food to people, the programs of education . . . and we thought, well, let’s see that side of these people.”

  Seale discussed the Panthers’ ten-point program, a controversial doctrine yet one that contained a philosophy of empowerment and local responsibility.

  Douglas readily admitted his surprise, and pleasure: “All I can say is, God bless Bobby Seale. There was no trace of the rancor I expected.” Douglas welcomed Seale’s descriptions of programs to collect shoes for the needy, and film clips showed the Panthers giving out bags of groceries. What was said seemed less important than how it was presented—with civility and genuine passion.

  By week’s end, Douglas realized “the headaches were minor,” and the respect he held for Lennon the musician was matched by his assessment of the man. “He was smart, funny, gregarious, and beguiling,” Douglas said. “He was as good a listener as a talker, with a genuine compassion for other people and respect for other philosophies.”

  As a bonus, Douglas was given a look at what some still considered the mystery of the ages: “I came to understand something about John’s affection for this woman,” Douglas said of Yoko Ono. “She was strange and could be difficult, but she was a powerful character.”

  Throughout the week Yoko showcased her music and art, including telephoning random numbers and telling whoever answered, “We love you,” or what Douglas called a “baffling” piece, a mirror-lined box for people to hold and grin at themselves. “Collecting smiles” was the concept, and Yoko passed the box around for all to try.

  “John turned to me and said, ‘I live with her and I still don’t get a lot of this stuff,’” Douglas recalled. “You had to like the guy.”

  Not everyone appreciated Yoko. People who adored John, including fans and colleagues, often made her the scapegoat for the Beatles’ breakup and Lennon’s seemingly strange stunts like the bed-ins or bagism. She was perhaps an easy target for critics, and the bandsmen saw some who took advantage of that. Rehearsals for Yoko’s singing performances generated harsh laughter and comments from the show’s crew.

  “She was crying during rehearsal,” Ippolito says. “That had to be smoothed over.”

  Yoko wore a brave broadcast face even when—as legend has it—the crew kept her microphone muted during musical segments. Ippolito recognized that, as a musician, Lennon may have given her the benefit of the doubt, a case of the things you do for love.

  “He knew what she sounded like,” Ippolito says. “He was also into freedom of expression and art, and was taken by her mystique.”

  Yoko Ono was a woman of mystery, which may have been Joseph Blatchford’s assessment after they shared a stage. Blatchford was largely unaware of Lennon’s politics and knew the man primarily for his art. “I had not followed him much other than as a musician with the Beatles,” Blatchford says. “It came up during the show.”

  On air, Lennon interviewed Blatchford about volunteerism. What the audience may not have seen was Blatchford’s exchange with Yoko during a commercial break. Blatchford recalls Yoko, polite and friendly, discreetly taking his hand.

  “She passed me a note, secretly, written in red pen,” Blatchford says. “Her personal phone number; and she either wrote or whispered to me that she was looking for help with the authorities for John. She wondered if I could help them.”

  Blatchford didn’t give too much thought to Yoko’s request; there really wasn’t anything he could do from the humble Peace Corps office. He found Lennon to be “very pleasant and very nice,” and thought the show went well.

  He soon learned that the Nixon administration put Lennon in the same category as what they considered “provocateurs with secret missions to undermine our security.” Given his experience with an increasingly paranoid administration, Blatchford found it sadly believable that a presidential staff would place a musician under surveillance, consider him a threat, and try to force deportation.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if those guys were saying, ‘Let’s get the FBI on this guy,’” Blatchford says. “They overdid it.”

  Footnotes:

  37Bob Gruen, John Lennon: The New York Years (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2005), 52.

  38The research in this and other FBI sections is largely based on publicly available documents from the FBI’s declassified files: “John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault, http://vault.fbi.gov/john-winston-lennon. Additional contextual and background information can be found in Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  39Stu Werbin, “John & Jerry & David & John & Leni & Yoko,” Rolling Stone, February 17, 1972.

  40Transcripts and correspondence from the Nixon-Presley meeting on December 21, 1970, can be found at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/elvis/elnix.html.

  41Mike Douglas, with Thomas Kelly and Michael Heaton, I’ll Be Right Back: Memories of TV’s Greatest Talk Show (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 257–262.

  42Hunter Davies, ed., The John Lennon Letters (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012).

  43Night Owl Reporter, “Here They Come Again,” New York Daily News, February 15, 1972.

  44Mike Douglas Show, February 14–18, 1972.

  45Douglas, I’ll Be Right Back.

  Chapter 4

  “A Thorough Nuisance”

  “If the man wants to shove us out we’re gonna jump and shout: the Statue of Liberty said, ‘Come!’” —John Lennon, “New York City”

  The Nixon administration’s attempt to send John Lennon packing began with the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization. On March 1, 1972, the Lennons were informed that their visitor visas would not be renewed, and that they must depart these shores no later than March 15.

  A second notice went out just five days later, after the INS district director concluded that the Lennons “had no intention to leave,” and they were notified that deportation proceedings would soon begin.46

  Washington observers believed the matter was settled, and that the election-motivated “counterstrategy” suggested by Senator Strom Thurmond appeared successful. Thurmond was told by White House aide William Timmons that Lennon wouldn’t be around by August convention time. The perceived threat to presidential security had been addressed: “You may be assured the information you previously furnished has been appropriately noted.”

  The Lennons had several valid reasons for being in the country, the most compelling of which had been so Yoko could be near her daughter, Kyoko
, who was in the custody of her former husband Tony Cox. Beginning in early 1971 John and Yoko had made several trips to America seeking clarification on parental rights from Texas courts; both Cox and Kyoko were US citizens believed to have a Houston residency. Yoko’s custody quest sparked thoughts of making America their home, hand-in-hand with Lennon’s need to distance himself from London bitterness in his post-Beatles world.

  Attorney Leon Wildes says that renewing passport papers should have been a relatively routine matter, and the family issue alone qualified for extensions. “I was surprised by the whole thing,” Wildes says. “They really weren’t asking for much.”

  Wildes had been a law school classmate of Alan Kahn, who served as house counsel to Apple Records. When Lennon, one of Apple’s founding artists, was served with deportation papers, Kahn thought first of Wildes & Weinberg, among the best and most INS-experienced firms in New York. He called his old friend to offer him the case, and was amazed by Wildes’s first question: “Alan, tell me, who is John Lennon?”

  “Never admit that you asked me that question,” Kahn advised.

  Born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, Wildes was more familiar with classical music and his beloved opera than contemporary music styles. While it’s difficult to imagine living in New York City through the late ’60s unaware of Lennon and the Beatles, Wildes instead viewed John and Yoko as he did the East-West romance in Verdi’s Aida.

  “I didn’t know who John Lennon and Yoko Ono were,” Wildes says. “I knew even less about their music. I just saw a beautiful couple, a beautiful marriage that seemed to go beyond the usual. When I found out who they were, how important they were, I grew to appreciate it even more.”

  Wildes went to Bank Street for an initial consultation. Most guests hung out in laid-back fashion in the largest room—space organized around a central bed and sprinkled with guitars and peace signs like any groovy Village pad, except for the Academy Award (Let It Be) on a crowded bookshelf—but business was business and the Lennons paid due courtesies to the attorney. “They came out to a back room, and that was kind of a respectful stand,” Wildes says.