John Lennon: The Life (102 page)

Despite his continued abstinence from
Billboard
magazine, John still kept abreast of what was happening in pop music. He admired
the professionalism of the Bee Gees, would-be Beatles in the Sixties now riding the disco wave with their sound track to
Saturday Night Fever
. Among the newer British bands, he liked the Electric Light Orchestra, even if their symphonic-electronic style felt like “son of I Am the Walrus.” He watched the continued transatlantic success of Bowie and Elton John without rancor, was amused by the way the Stones somehow still kept on rolling, surprised and scornful when Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian, and amazed that an apparently heterosexual band could have the nerve to call itself Queen. His main source of information was Bob Gruen, who photographed almost every major rock act that came through town and often urged him to come out and see some hot new attraction like Blondie or the New York Dolls. But putting Sean to bed always took precedence. “At one point I said, ‘Am I bothering you by telling you about all this?’” Gruen remembers. “John said, ‘No, I like to know what’s going on. And some night, you never know, I may want to change my mind.’”

Still less inclined was he to socialize with any old cronies who might tempt him back to his former ways. Nor was it only overtly bad influences like Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson who found him permanently unavailable. In 1977, Mick Jagger moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side, within sight of the Dakota. Yet all his friendly overtures to John were ignored—an experience that even the hard-boiled head Stone found hurtful. “Does he ever call me?” Jagger complained. “Does he ever go out? No. Changes his number every 10 minutes. I’ve given up…just kowtowing to his bleedin’ wife, probably.”

In fact, he was sometimes almost tempted to join Jagger at the new disco club on West Fifty-fourth Street where all New York’s
haute bohème
gathered. “He’d tell me he’d read in the papers about Mick and Bianca at Studio 54 and thought to himself, ‘Shouldn’t I be there, too?’” Elliot Mintz remembers. “It was the same when he read the bestseller lists in the
New York Times Book Review
, and was disappointed not to see his name. I’d say, ‘But you haven’t written a book.’ ‘That’s not the point,’ John would say.”

Of all the books he read in this period, none had more effect than
David Niven’s autobiography,
Bring On the Empty Horses
. “Niven had been friends with all the wild stars in Hollywood, and had been to all the crazy parties, but he’d come out sane at the end,” Bob Gruen says. “After John read that book was when he started taking Polaroids of everyone who came to visit. He once told me, ‘I’m gonna be David Niven. They’re all gonna go on getting drunk, but I’m gonna stay home and write the book.’ His plan was to live beyond the wild days and be the one to reminisce. He was gonna be the one that survived.”

With the other ex-Beatles—“the in-laws,” as Yoko drily called them—all issues were long since settled. He remained as fond as ever of Ringo, and felt intermittent concern that the simple, happy-go-lucky character who had so often kept him on the rails was now spectacularly plunging off them. After
Rotogravure
in 1976 (on which John broke retirement to play), Ringo had no more hit albums, lived mainly in a seafront condominium in Monte Carlo, and performed only on TV talk shows, frequently incoherent and always avoiding the subject of the Beatles, which did not leave very much else.

George, too, had failed to sustain his early solo success, following
All Things Must Pass
with a succession of uninspired albums (uninspired, that is, by Lennon and McCartney), alienating concert audiences by his humorlessness and tendency to preach, eventually diversifying into movies as backer of Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
and cofounder of the HandMade Films production company. For some years, he felt resentment toward John for not supporting him on his 1974 American tour and for supposed dilatoriness in signing the Beatles severance contract. Even now that they were all right again, John felt George somehow regarded him as “the daddy who left home.”

Between Paul and him, as he once told Elliot Mintz, “the wounds” had all healed. One might have expected a new mutual empathy now that John was leading the same domesticated existence he had once despised Paul for doing—a life of “pizza and fairy tales” no less. Instead, he put Paul and Linda in the same disruptive category as Jagger or Moon, resenting it hugely if they turned up at the Dakota while he was getting Sean off to sleep. Remote though the chance of
Lennon and McCartney ever working together again, it once almost happened. In 1976, the producer of the
Saturday Night Live
TV show, Lorne Michaels, humorously offered $3,000 if the Beatles would reform and do three songs. John and Paul happened to be watching the show at the Dakota, and considered taking a cab to the SNL studio for a surprise walk-on. But in the end, they couldn’t be bothered.

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.”

W
hile 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 pha
raohs 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 frantic 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.”