The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  Lennon’s life had for some time been an open book that he freely shared. The FBI wondered about his drug use, but he and the other Beatles had acknowledged their experiments, and each in time their reasons for putting drugs in the past. Whether or not that made them role models was another question entirely: “I never felt any responsibility, being a so-called idol,” Lennon said after McCartney had admitted to trying LSD. “It’s wrong of people to expect it. What they are doing is putting their responsibilities on us. They should have been responsible enough and not printed it if they were genuinely worried about people copying [us].”

  Lennon had been honest—bluntly so at times—on most every aspect of his life; spiritual matters, fame, his partnership with the Beatles, and relationship with Yoko had all factored in his art and interviews. He was news, and the INS hearings and search for Kyoko were public knowledge.

  The deportation effort was fueled by politics, he said, and the tragedy was that the government’s desired result would split up a family.

  “There was no arrangement made for the child,” Lennon said of the agreement between Anthony Cox and Yoko. Disregarding the evident motivations of Cox trying to capitalize on his ex-wife’s new wealth, Lennon made it seem as if the conflict was just like the battles fought in any divorce: “You know how those things get, and they got worse and worse until it came that we couldn’t see Kyoko anymore.”

  Lennon broke the “fourth wall” between viewer and performer. He stared at the camera and spoke directly to Cox . . . and the INS: “We’re saying it now if you’re watching—we couldn’t hide her anywhere. Yoko always said she thinks the child should be able to see both parents, have the benefit of both parents. Immigration’s policy has always been not to split a family: Let us stay here because her daughter’s here.”

  Ever conscious of public and government perceptions, Lennon clarified the reputation of his attorney, Leon Wildes. “He’s not a radical,” Lennon said. Wildes was a seasoned immigration specialist and not a civil rights activist like Chicago Seven counsel William Kunstler.

  “It’s very ironic that the government approved our application as outstanding artists whose presence is beneficial to US cultural interests and welfare,” Lennon said. His attorney had been quite surprised by the maneuverings. “It’s the only time he’s had to go to court to force the government to consider an application like that.”

  Cavett read highlights from the letters of support received by the INS from diverse sources that included United Auto Workers boss Leonard Woodcock. MacLaine added her agreement, telling Lennon: “You’re more responsible for the expression of love and peace in the arts than anyone practically in the twentieth century.”

  As Lennon told anyone who asked, he believed that his deportation was based on political motivations and not a marijuana conviction. His opinions hadn’t changed from “All You Need Is Love” through “Give Peace a Chance.” What was different, he said, was who his friends in New York were. The assumption of guilt by association made Lennon bridle and he hastened to set the record straight: “We want peace; we said the same thing for two years. [But] we’re getting blamed for the Chicago convention now. They think we’re going to San Diego or Miami or wherever it is. We ain’t going. There will be no big jam with us and Dylan, there’s too much going on.”

  That statement was not reported by the FBI agents in the audience. Instead, a memo cited Lennon’s passing reference to a gathering at the Washington Square Methodist Church, a small benefit concert where Elephant’s Memory was slated to perform: “After Lennon plugged it on the Dick Cavett Show, the benefit concert for the Attica Defense Committee turned a larger crowd than expected.” The event “netted $2,000 for the Defense Command [and] $200 for the WSM Church.” Even by early 1970s economic standards, hardly a sum worth the trouble to report.63

  • • •

  What scared the network most was the song title’s single, six-letter word: “Nigger.” Would John Lennon get away with breaking existing broadcast standards?

  “I remember talking about it with my wife before we went over to the studio,” Gary Van Scyoc says. “I wasn’t sure it was going to fly, and John might change his mind at the last minute and do something else. But he didn’t.”

  The song itself took about five minutes to perform; preliminary discussion of the lyrics took much longer.

  “When that song hit, it was like a bomb going off, it was a mess,” Van Scyoc says. “John didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He was kind of naïve, I guess, as were we all. He just didn’t think it was going to get that kind of reaction.”

  Cavett knew the response it would get: the FCC was very clear on certain things. Lennon couldn’t expect to perform, for instance, “Working Class Hero” on TV, not with the word “fuck” in the lyrics. Even the allegedly progressive FM stations hesitated to send the f-bomb through their transmitters; record store owners wondered if the printed lyrics on album covers violated obscenity laws. Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres had addressed the prevailing attitudes: “Stations around the country say they want to play ‘Working Class Hero’ . . . But, with very few exceptions, they’re all too fucking scared.”64

  What they were scared of was unclear: penalties were little more than a slap on the wrist, and that was only if someone actually complained. FCC broadcast analyst June Herrick did not recall any specific backlash about “Working Class Hero,” or even Jefferson Airplane’s “up against the wall, motherfuckers” when PBS aired a San Francisco concert performance. The bigger challenge was identifying which lyrics advocated drug use through the use of ever-changing slang terms. Herrick said that about 1,500 letters a month made claims about “drug songs,” most of which were red-herring alarms such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and claims that the “LSD” acronym was intentional. Lennon had said he was surprised at the discovery and started checking through old lyrics just to be sure. (When the Beatles wanted to sing about drug use, they did: code-breaking skills were not needed to decipher “I get high with a little help from my friends.”)

  In the early 1970s language and drug references took a backseat to other broadcast issues. Federal monitors, said program manager Larry Lee of KPFT-FM in Houston, “were more worried about the political content” of rock songs such as Neil Young’s “Ohio,” which took a decidedly antipresidential stance.

  “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” presented so many questions in so short a phrase. Lennon had insisted the song be issued as the first single from Some Time in New York City—against many opposing opinions at Apple—and was equally determined to sing it on the Dick Cavett Show. Lennon wanted people to hear the song, and one method was secured when Apple advertised a telephone number that people could call and listen to the single, a 1972 version of on-demand media.

  The performance was approved on condition that the host read a disclaimer, a previously recorded and approved statement that was inserted into the broadcast. Cavett’s discomfort and distaste was obvious as he read the statement:

  John and Yoko got into something which ABC feels may develop into, in their words, a highly controversial issue. It revolves around the song, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” and the obvious fact that some members of our black audience will or may be offended by the use of that word. In the next segment, John Lennon gives his reason for writing the song and for using the word. I permitted this insertion into the show as the only alternative to a full deletion by ABC of the full segment.65

  “This is a song about the women’s problem,” Lennon said. “Obviously there were a few people who reacted strangely to it, but usually they were white and male.”

  The song’s title was credited to Yoko, who used the phrase during an interview she had given two years earlier to an English women’s magazine. The poetic nature of the comparison struck a note with Lennon, not unlike occasions when Ringo Starr came up with phrases such as “hard day’s night�
�� or “tomorrow never knows” and unknowingly gave birth to Beatles songs. Yoko’s input was more than just a song title, and he’d frequently acknowledged her awakening—often through artistic means—his own guilt in how he regarded women.

  “I was more of a chauvinist than I am now,” Lennon said. “Like everybody else I talked more and more about it in the last two years. It became more of a thing and I had to find out about it myself.”

  The feminist movement may have been the song’s driving force, but Lennon said the word choice prompted a separate battle: “A lot of stations were saying we’re not going to play this because it says nigger and a white man shouldn’t say it.”

  To support the use of the word as metaphor Lennon read aloud a “definition” as penned by Representative Ron Dellums from California, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. The definition had been included in promotional materials for the single, including an Apple Records ad in Billboard magazine.

  “This great guy came out with this, which is fantastic,” Lennon explained before reading Dellums’s proclamation: “If you define niggers as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, then good news!—You don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.”

  Lennon finished, and seemed surprised by the spirited applause that followed. He laughed and reminded people he was just a musical journalist; please don’t deport the messenger: “Oh my goodness: we’ll never get in now.”

  In spite of ABC’s misgivings, Cavett invited “you two menaces to society” to perform, and John and Yoko took the stage with Elephant’s Memory.

  Lennon plugged his guitar into an amp, strummed a chord, adjusted the volume. He turned to his band, kicked the stage four times, counted out loud for another measure. A thump from drummer Rick Frank, wailing saxophone from Stan Bronstein. Lennon belted out the opening lyrics, blues-ballad style: “Woman is the nigger of the world . . . yes she is: think about it.”

  The band enjoyed brief spotlights: Bronstein’s solo ended one verse, Gabriel’s guitar pierced with equal rage after another.

  “We insult her every day on TV,” Lennon sang.

  The song faded to end. John unplugged his guitar and he and Yoko walked down two steps to rejoin Cavett while the band rang out the final notes.

  The response, of course, was not what the corporate suits feared.

  “As I predicted, there was a great deal of protest—about the mealy mouth apology,” Cavett recalled years later. “I don’t think there were any about the song.”66

  • • •

  Ron Dellums was well aware that his definition wasn’t normally discussed on national television, let alone by a Beatle.

  “I had no idea that a guy like John Lennon would use the term to write a major song,” Dellums says. “‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World’ is a very powerful idea.”

  Dellums proudly admits that his definition was influenced by the philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ideology aside, he also knew that he was pushing people’s buttons by defining the word as he did.

  “My interest in writing it was not to be cute,” Dellums says. “It was an effort to make a very serious point to the African American community and to the broader community: that we need to mobilize based on our mutual and enlightened self-interest. Many of us in society are being oppressed, and if we come together we can throw off the yoke of oppression.”

  Born in 1935 in Oakland, Dellums had served in the US Marine Corps during the early days of troop integration in the 1950s before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with the help of the GI bill and whatever part-time jobs he could get. (He had been denied a scholarship after high school; in response he joined the Marines.) He began work both as a psychiatric social worker and campus-based political activist before his 1967 election to the Berkeley City Council. That two-year term led to his election to national office, and Dellums joined the US House as a congressman in 1970, a seat he would hold for nearly thirty years. In 1972 Dellums cofounded the Congressional Black Caucus, which consisted of thirteen members of the House and Senate. Women were equally underrepresented, and accounted for just fifteen seats in that Ninety-Second Congress.

  Dellums’s point—and Lennon’s in his lyrics—was that 1972 America was very much a white man’s world. Change—as always—starts from within and is rarely won alone. The feminist movement required a redefinition for men as well as women; the civil rights movement needed more than just black leadership.

  “Martin Luther King did not die solely for the liberation of black people,” Dellums says. “Martin Luther King died trying to evolve an egalitarian society. The civil rights movement in many ways was the inspiration for every other movement that emerged in the sixties.”

  Dellums says the motivation behind his attempt to redefine a word was an effort to change how people heard it: “The term nigger has been used historically as a derogatory term referring to black people. I decided that somebody black ought to redefine nigger and look at it from a different perspective. Number two was to help people understand the need for coalition politics: we alone—meaning black people—could not change the world.”

  But a shared consciousness might be the first step, and the civil rights movement gave birth to movements on behalf of individual liberties and other minority rights movements—Latino rights and gay rights, environmental activism, and consumer advocacy.

  “A group of people in this country stood up and said, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough, and we’ve got to move toward a just society. We can organize the niggers and change America and change the world,’” Dellums says. “If you’re uncomfortable with the term ‘nigger,’ then insert the term ‘oppressed,’ it’s the same point.”

  Dellums says that carving a wide philosophical path—with admitted shock value to gain attention—was a risky approach. Those taking that avenue could be easily dismissed; few could successfully put it out to a large audience.

  “In walks John Lennon and Yoko,” Dellums says. “Here were people who used their authenticity, their celebrity, and attention to raise issues in different ways. I appreciated and respected that because it was in the aggregate that all of us made our own little contributions that, in the whole scheme of things, added up to significant change.”

  • • •

  As one of the final obsessions of J. Edgar Hoover, the quest to oust John Lennon made a suitable bookend to the FBI director’s career; the case was eerily similar to that of another artist who was both popular and political. In the early 1920s Assistant Director Hoover had made note of Charlie Chaplin’s alliances with allegedly dissident minds, and considered the actor a “parlor Bolsheviki.” By the McCarthy era, Hoover had listed the Britain-born Chaplin as a likely Communist, and when Chaplin flew to London for the 1952 premiere of Limelight, Hoover had the INS revoke the actor’s reentry visa. Chaplin remained exiled from America until 1972, when he was given an honorary Oscar award.

  The similarities with John Lennon’s immigration status did not go unnoticed by the media. “Shades of the Charlie Chaplin fiasco,” the New York Times noted, “for which the country has just got through apologizing.”67 Elsewhere, an ever-broader circle of supporters rallied to Lennon’s defense. Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving told the New York Times in May that if Lennon “were a painting he would be hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, benevolently on the wall.” The Episcopal bishop of New York, the Right Reverend Paul Moore Jr., said he’d gotten to know the Lennons and that he would “welcome and delight in their presence in New York.”68

  INS hearings in May featured in-person testimony on Lennon’s behalf, including an appearance by Dick Cavett. In his book Talk Show, Cavett describes not only his courtroom time but, viewed in proper perspective, the odds against Lennon remaining in Americ
a.69 Cavett recalls an unsettling segment of the infamous Oval Office recordings: “On one of the Nixon tapes, the president’s henchman and lickspittle H. R. Haldeman can be heard educating his boss—who was minimally knowledgeable of popular culture—about Lennon’s vast popularity, with the words ‘This guy could sway an election.’”70

  Having found himself under suspicion from Washington after the Vietnam debate, Cavett was aware of the potential risk in supporting a federal target. Not long after Lennon’s appearances on his show, the IRS audited Cavett’s entire staff. Other similar reports would be heard of Nixon “illegally wielding the IRS as a weapon—sometimes ruining lives,” Cavett said.

  Being under constant watch, subject to telephone wiretaps, and often followed by federal agents became just another fact of life for Lennon and his associates, including the members of Elephant’s Memory.

  “I used to see them in my building all the time,” Van Scyoc says. “It was something going on in the underbelly, but nobody was letting it get in the way of learning the next song or doing our jobs as a backup band and making John happy.”

  Given their own history with Jerry Rubin and other radical souls, they accepted a certain amount of police scrutiny. The intensity of the interest in Lennon, however, was a bit jarring.

  “We talked about maybe there being a file on each of us,” Ippolito says. “But that was pretty much it. Hoover and Nixon were trying to get him out of the country. Nixon, being the maniac that he was, you could imagine what went through his brain when he thought John Lennon would get the vote out for Democrats.”

  • • •

  “I don’t know if there’s any mercy to plead for because this isn’t a Federal Court,” Lennon said to Judge Ira Fieldsteel when INS hearings concluded on May 17. “But if there is, I’d like it, please.”71