John Lennon: The Life (107 page)
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 interview. 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.
John spent the next six hours working on a Yoko song, originally meant for
Double Fantasy
, called “Walking on Thin Ice.” During the early evening, David Geffen dropped by to say that, despite its apparent mixed reception, the album was about to go gold. John also found time to telephone Aunt Mimi and talk further about his imminent homecoming. He was pleased with the night’s work, and had cassettes of the track made to take away with him. When they stopped work, at around 10:30, Yoko suggested having dinner at the nearby Stage Deli, but John wanted to return to the Dakota first. “The last thing he had on his mind,” she remembers, “was getting back and seeing Sean before he went to sleep.” On his way out of the Record Plant, he paused to sign an autograph for the switchboard operator, Rabiah Vincent.
There seemed no safer direction to be heading than home.
The December night was exceptionally mild, and shadowy figures could be seen at the corner of West Seventy-second as usual. Instead of driving through the arch to the safety of the inner courtyard, the limo drew up at the curb. As John got out, Chapman came forward, still clutching his autographed copy of
Double Fantasy
. He softly called “Mr. Lennon,” then produced a .38 handgun, dropped into the two-handed combat stance familiar from innumerable cop movies, and fired five shots. John kept walking, went up the stairs into the porters’ vestibule, then collapsed on the floor, scattering the cassettes he had been carrying. A few seconds later, Yoko burst in, screaming, “John’s been shot!” The young duty porter, Jay Hastings, rang the alarm that connected to the police, then knelt beside John with thoughts of trying to administer a tourniquet. This being clearly futile, Hastings gently removed John’s glasses and covered him with his porter’s jacket.
Two cruising police cars were at the scene within minutes. Unlike later specimens of his kind, Chapman had not taken his own life, but was leaning against the Dakota’s brickwork, calmly reading
The Catcher in the Rye
, on whose flyleaf he had written “This is my statement.” His gun and copy of
Double Fantasy
lay nearby. John was put into one of the squad cars and taken to Roosevelt Hospital on West Fifty-ninth Street, with Yoko following in the second car. He was rushed into the emergency room, but, at 11:07, was pronounced dead.
F
or days afterward, up in apartment 72, whenever the kitchen door opened, three cats came bounding forward to greet him.
It’s a nice memory, just floating around in the ocean with my dad and this capsized boat.
I
meet Sean Lennon in a small, cluttered apartment in the quiet part of London’s Chelsea known as “World’s End.” Though he has become a songwriter-performer like his father—and a brilliant one, if in a totally different way—there is nothing grandiose about his gigs. A few weeks earlier, I had watched him play at a converted pub in downmarket Shepherds Bush before he moved on to Russia and Eastern Europe. Sean and his manager stayed at an anonymous tourist hotel in the suburbs while his three-piece backing band lived together in a tiny trailer parked outside the hall.
Now aged thirty-two, he is like his father circa 1969—the same restless brown eyes behind circular glasses; the same nose; the same dark, curly beard; even the same wreaths of cigarette smoke. Only in his profile do you also see Yoko and the Japanese side of his ancestry. He has John’s vivid turn of phrase and chronic inability to resist a pun (“My parents were transparent…trans-
parent
…”). The mellifluous American-accented voice at times can sound almost British,
at times almost Liverpudlian, as if some indestructible part of John still remains at his core And, just as John once did for
Rolling Stone
or
Red Mole
, he sits back, puts his stockinged feet up, and lets everything out.
His time with his father lasted for only five years and ended at a point where, for most children, memory is barely functioning. He admits that, before my arrival, he has been trying to retrieve as much as possible from that unconnected, inevitably self-centered toddler’s-eye-view. “I remember my Dad teaching me how to make a paper airplane, which I still know how to do in the way that he taught me—and flying paper airplanes. I remember we used to watch
The Muppets
together, and
Jekyll and Hyde
, but I wasn’t allowed to watch any other television. And when we did watch those shows which were, I think, back-to-back once a week, he would turn off the TV during the commercials which was really frustrating to me because often we’d have missed a bit of the show when he turned it back on.”
Yet even at that tender age, he glimpsed “the little child inside the man,” to quote one of John’s last pieces of self-analysis: “I remember that Alice, our black cat, had jumped out the window after a pigeon and died, and I remember that was the only time, I think, I ever saw my dad cry.”
So many of the memories involve water: the warm, blue ocean of Bermuda; the chill, gray waves of Long Island Sound; or the chlorinated shallows at the YMCA. “I remember swimming, a lot, in Bermuda, in the ocean especially. That was on the famous trip when he did the whole boat thing and also wrote a bunch of songs for what turned into
Double Fantasy
. I remember some strange kind of house that he was writing songs in. I remember swimming a lot in the pool at Cold Spring Harbor and I remember that he really enjoyed watching me swim. He was proud of the fact that I was a good swimmer.
“I remember that at Cold Spring Harbor there was a green sailboat and I think in my mind that I named it
Flower
…I remember Fred Seaman accidentally flipping the boat over and us all being in the water, my dad swimming next to me, and I remember seeing my flip-flops that I’d got in Japan floating away. I was very upset be
cause I loved those flip-flops, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you another pair…’ I said, ‘Are there any fish in the water?’ and he was like, ‘Yes,’ which really scared me. So I remember my dad protecting me in the water. It’s actually a nice memory, just floating around in the ocean with my dad and this capsized boat.”
As a rule, the only memorable childhoods are unhappy ones. Sean was idyllically happy with John, yet their hours, days, and months together linger in a thousand vivid impressions, often of simply doing nothing in particular together in the Dakota apartment’s wide, white rooms, with Central Park’s treetops like a variegated salad basket outside. “I remember that around the house he always wore a blue-and-white floral patterned
yukata
, which is like a casual kimono, and he always had a ponytail. He burned incense a lot as well, and I remember his glasses. I remember him playing guitar and hitting the strings myself and us singing together. He used to sing this song about ‘Popeye the sailor man, lives on the Isle of Man’…
“I remember that he was always barefoot, he rarely wore shoes and if he did it was mostly flip-flops. And for some reason he was very interested in teaching me now to pick up pens and other things between my toes. He would do that all the time because he was double-jointed and a very, very flexible man. I remember him putting his leg over his head in the passenger seat of our Mercedes station wagon. I remember jumping on the bed a lot. Oh…I remember one time he accidentally let one of the heavy wooden doors at the Dakota slam on my finger. And he was very upset about that. My fingernail eventually fell off about two weeks later.”
At times, John’s presence is so close, one feels almost an intruder for listening. “He was a very thin man at that point, and I remember the look of his ankles and his legs, they were very sharply defined in my mind—his knees and his ankles and his legs. I don’t remember his hands but I remember his face, his neck, his hair, his calves, and that bump on the right side of your ankle. I remember the feel of the stubble on his chin very clearly, and wondering about the scar I could see underneath it. I remember him telling me that he got that scar through a car accident with Kyoko, my sister. I don’t think he told me the whole kidnapping story at that point, only that she was
with her father, Tony. I found out about all that after my dad passed away. And I think he told me that he never drove again after the accident.”
There were also rather strict lessons in table manners, an area where John had never previously distinguished himself. “I remember him teaching me how to cut and eat steak, which was a mystery to me at age four; how to stick the fork in and cut behind it, and that was how you got a piece in your mouth. I think it was that night when he got very upset with me, I think because of something I did very cheekily with the steak. He did wind up yelling at me very, very loudly to the point where he damaged my ear, and I had to go to the doctor. I remember when I was lying on the floor and hurting, and him holding me and saying, ‘I’m so sorry…’ He did have a temper, though; I don’t think that’s a secret.”
Not surprisingly, the dearest memory is the sound of John’s voice. “Every night when I was going to sleep, he’d come in the room and say, ‘Good-night, Sean,’ and he’d flick the light switch in the rhythm of his words, so that they’d wink in time. There was always something very comforting about that. I had a bunkbed even though I was the only child in the house, and a mobile of silver airplanes above my head. And I very much remember the shadows that were cast on the wall by the cars going along Central Park West, seven flights down. I remember watching those shadows move by, from left to right, and I remember thinking of the words ‘watching shadows on the wall’ from ‘Watching the Wheels.’ When he wrote and recorded that song, I remember thinking somehow that he’d been watching the same shadows I had.”
Sean had been oblivious to everything late on the night of December 8, 1980, when John returned from the Record Plant at that particular moment just to snatch a good-night kiss from him. Initially he could make no sense of what greeted him the next morning—the grim-faced strangers coming and going through those formerly safe white rooms; his father’s unexplained absence and the pandemonium below on West Seventy-second Street; the police barriers; the TV crews; the flowers; the moan of grief that would reverberate all around the world.
“I remember being in [my] bedroom and someone telling me my mom wants to talk to me, and sensing the very strange atmosphere in the house and there are all these crowds of people outside. My mom is sitting in bed under the blanket, and I swear I remember seeing a newspaper, and almost understanding something about the headline. I remember standing there and her telling me, ‘Your dad’s been shot and killed,’ and I remember that the thing that felt most important to me was that I didn’t want her to see me cry. I remember saying to her, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, you’re still young. You’ll find somebody else,’ because at five years old I thought that sounded like a very mature thing to say.”
The multitude in the street below, and in Central Park, chanting his father’s peace anthems between tears, only added to Sean’s fear and bewilderment. “In retrospect I find it very sweet that we were able to mourn with everybody, but at the time it was terrifying. So I remember walking away slowly out of the room, and it being so hard for me not to cry, and as soon as my mom couldn’t see me, running down the hall and bursting into tears and slamming the door, throwing myself on the floor and crying and crying. I think for days I cried.”
In the terrible days that followed, there were times when the five-year-old felt completely alone. “Afterwards, my mom seemed very tired, I’ll put it that way. She stayed in bed a long time. I remember different people trying to comfort me. But my mom and dad didn’t really maintain family relationships, they’d ‘burned a lot of bridges,’ as my mom would put it. So it’s not like we had a lot of other people around who were like parental figures. My dad was gone: that was it. Everyone else was just an employee. And so I just remember not being able to be comforted by anyone.”
Years were to pass before he pieced together who and what that ponytailed, flip-flopping tutor in table manners and singer of lullabyes had actually been. “Many of the impressions of my dad that I have are through the media. And I share those impressions with the rest of the world. I think that on some level when I was a kid I did feel jealous of the world for having known and spent more time with him than I got. But in a way the experience of someone that you can
get through their work is really not comparable to the experience you can get from just sitting on someone’s lap. That is more than songs and words and stuff can really explain. And that’s reality—the way that the light hits someone’s hair, the sound of their voice, the sound of their footsteps in the hallway.”
As Sean grew older, he found the best way of coming close to John was through playing music. “I remembered him playing the piano, so I started playing, too. And when I did I always felt like I was communing with him, like a sacred prayer or something. Like somehow I was with him. Every time I’d make progress musically, I felt I was making progress in my relationship with him. And that was the case when I was a teenager: the better I got at playing guitar, the more I understood music. And now the more I understand songwriting, the more I feel I understand him, because he was a songwriter above all things.”
Despite all the blandishments of the music industry, Sean refused to be turned into a John Lennon clone, as his half brother Julian briefly was in the mid-1980s. His main talent is as a lead guitarist where John usually stuck to rhythm; in his songs, thoughts and chords alike constantly spring off in unpredictable directions, more like early David Bowie than anything. His music resembles his father only in humanitarian spirit; for instance, his latest album,
Friendly Fire
, echoing the pernicious military doublespeak of Afghanistan and Iraq. “People sometimes think I’m trying to separate myself from John Lennon as a musician, but I’m not at all. The only reason I make music is because my dad was a musician and a songwriter. It’s like I’ve inherited a craft, in the way an ironmonger’s son might also become an ironmonger.”
His mature assessment of his father’s talent would delight John on many levels. “I think he had insecurities about everything: about grammar and writing, about knowing how to write and read music, about all the established ways of knowing things. And that was a handicap he turned to his advantage. He invented insecure songwriting—‘I’m a loser and I’m not what I appear to be’ or ‘Help!’
“He said that Bob Dylan taught him to write in the first person about his real life, but Dylan never wrote a song that revealed his
emotions like that. Dylan always observed other people’s emotions; it’s like he’s a journalist—he’s not saying it’s good or bad—just articulating something that’s in the air and jotting it down. That was an aspect of my dad’s work but, to me, not the best one. ‘Give Peace a Chance’ is great, but that’s not the one I want to go home and listen to; it’s not as good as ‘Hide Your Love Away’ or ‘Girl’ or ‘In My Life.’ To me, those songs are on a whole other level. For a man to feel insecure and question himself the way my dad did in songs is a post-modern phenomenon. Artists like Mozart or Picasso never did; it’s something that’s only happened since the Second World War. And that’s something he owns, that feeling of insecurity so many other songwriters since have tried to copy. He invented that.”
The Beatles, Sean says, were an essential springboard for John, however irksome his life with them became. “I don’t think my dad would have been commercial at all without Paul and the management and George Martin. I mean in the sense of making himself palatable to the masses, I don’t think that was his area of expertise. I think he was very edgy and interesting, and ‘edgy’ and ‘interesting’ don’t always cut it for the populace. I think the sugar around the Beatles with my dad as this core of intensity made them the ultimate package.
“When he turned his back on the Beatles and formed the Plastic Ono Band with my mom, that to me was like when Matisse turned his back on painting and decided that everything he wanted to say artistically from now on could be said by a few simple shapes cut out of paper. It was as if Elvis had left Vegas in the seventies and started to play with the punks. That
Plastic Ono Band
album, for me, is the greatest rock album any man ever made. That’s why he’s so much more for me than just a Sixties rock figure like a Jagger or a Clapton.”
What are his favorite John Lennon songs? “[Those] have changed as I became more of a musician. The ones that I loved when I was a kid, loved, loved, LOVED, were ‘Watching the Wheels.’ And ‘Woman.’ Oh…‘Woman’! It just sort of shimmered, it felt like a dream. There’s something so sweet and sparkly about that major chord change. And I remember knowing that he wrote it about my
mom, and feeling just love, almost like a golden light, the love he had for my mom.
