John Lennon: The Life (85 page)

“Instant Karma” was in the minimalist, sing-along style John had developed with the Plastic Ono Band, similar to “Cold Turkey” in tempo but far more relaxed and humorous. Indeed, one of the effects of Spector’s production was to give his voice a taut expressiveness it had not had since “Norwegian Wood.” The idea was quintessential Lennon—the age-old Buddhist law of cause and effect turned into something as modern and synthetic as instant coffee and, simultaneously, into a bogey under the stairs that can get you if you don’t watch out. Its warning, couched in the hippie catchphrase of the moment, was obviously not to be taken literally: “You better get yourself together / Or pretty soon you’re gonna be dead….” The chorus returned to peace campaigning and nonviolent, optimistic togetherness. Henceforward, any group of young dissidents, menaced by batons or water cannons, could draw strength and unanimity from its chant of “We all shine on / Like the moon and the stars and the sun.”

The track was finished in just ten takes, with background vocals provided by Yoko, Mal Evans, and several complete strangers who, on a sudden whim of John’s, had been rounded up at Hatchetts, a West End club. It was released on Apple just six days later, with
PLAY LOUD
printed across the label. (The B-side, a Yoko vocal called “Who Has Seen the Wind?” was inscribed
PLAY QUIET
.) It went to number five in the United Kingdom and number three in America, becoming the first single by a solo Beatle to sell a million copies there. As John played it on BBC-TV’s
Top of the Pops
, Yoko sat beside him, wearing a white blindfold and knitting.

This new epoch also saw John’s one-man crusade on behalf of the oppressed and disadvantaged increasingly focus on those rendered so by the color of their skins. It was perhaps the greatest of all mental turnarounds for someone raised on the idea of black people as comi
cal inferiors, who not long since had been getting laughs at the expense of “Negroes” and “Mister Wabooba.” Part of the reason was the vicious racism that underlay so much public hostility to Yoko. A significant part was the rise of America’s militant Black Power movement and the emergence of highly articulate and literate demagogues like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. Nearer home there was the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, a member of the British Commonwealth, which, despite growing condemnation and isolation, continued to send its all-white national sports teams on overseas tours. In February, heavy fines were imposed on a group of antiapartheid protesters who had disrupted a rugby match between a Scottish side and the South African Springboks the previous December. All the fines were paid by John.

The gesture inevitably brought him into the sights of Britain’s nascent Black Power movement and its chief spokesman, Michael Abdul Malik, aka Michael X. Born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, Malik had dominated black politics in Britain since the mid-Sixties, converting to Islam in emulation of his American counterparts and styling himself X after their charismatic young leader Malcolm X, who had been assassinated in 1965. A would-be writer and poet and a dedicated social climber, Michael X was adept at raising funds from affluent whites by playing on their guilty liberal consciences. This gambit paid off handsomely when he approached John and Yoko for money to support the Black House, a welfare center for delinquent teenagers that he ran in Holloway, North London. He announced that the Beatles’ music had “stolen the rhythms of black people,” and it was payback time. A remorseful John offered him an advance to write a book called
A Black Experience
and also agreed to help fund a soup kitchen at the Black House.

After John and Yoko’s drastic barbering in Denmark, they had gathered up all their shorn hair and brought it home with them. Now they presented it to Michael X, to be divided into small portions, put into boxes, and sold in aid of the Black House. He in return gave them a pair of bloodstained boxing trunks allegedly belonging to another celebrity pal, Black Power Islam’s most famous convert, Muhammad Ali. They made an appearance together on ITV’s
Simon
Dee Show
, and John was seen around the Black House so much that he took to calling it “Black Apple.”

His major commitment in the first half of 1970 was to have been the two-day Montreal Peace Festival in July. With his personal endorsement, the festival promised to out-Woodstock Woodstock several times over. An audience of between one and two million was projected, to hear a roster of performers headed by John and some if not all of his fellow Beatles, plus Bob Dylan, even possibly the resurgent Elvis Presley. There was talk of a stage shaped like a giant bed, commemorating John and Yoko’s bed-ins, and of a “peace vote” in which every festivalgoer would register opposition to the Vietnam War.

But by spring, the epic project had hit trouble. Though initially content for the promoters to charge reasonable admission—as several previous festivals had without detracting from their mystique—John suddenly changed his mind and insisted it must be free. With commercial sponsorship of rock events still unknown and merchandising only in its infancy, that virtually guaranteed a horrendous financial loss. In addition, Montreal’s city council had vetoed Mosport Park as a site, and no alternative had yet been found. The last straw was the involvement of two wacky friends of Tony Cox’s, who announced that, to vary the musical program, real flying saucers would land. John pulled out, and the festival was canceled forthwith.

He and Yoko were both still struggling to stay off heroin, a relatively easy task amid bed-ins and prime-ministerial summit conferences when every moment brought its own “rush,” but harder now they had time on their hands. During March, the journalist Ray Connolly met up with them in London, while Yoko was briefly an inpatient at a Harley Street clinic. “She’s a junkie, you know,” John told a startled nurse who came in with some medication. Connolly deduced that they were both taking the heroin substitute methadone and that, for John at least, the rigors of cold turkey were being alleviated by his new connection to the Black Power movement. During the journalist’s increasingly off-the-record visit, Michael X arrived with a friend, bringing a large plastic bag of marijuana hidden in a suitcase. However, even Connolly did not cop the next printable
Lennon headline, nor did anyone in Fleet Street. On March 29, John sent a telephone message of support to eight thousand people taking part in a nuclear-disarmament rally in East London. In the course of it, he revealed that Yoko was pregnant again.

S
haring one’s history is a part of any new relationship, all the more necessary if the partners come from widely different cultures. But with John and Yoko, the process was almost entirely one-sided. After months together, he still knew almost nothing of Yoko’s early years in Japan, the privileged loneliness of her life surrounded by genuflecting servants, or the wartime hardships when she was left virtually alone to fend for two younger siblings as well as herself. She, on the other hand, knew every twist and turn of his infancy in gray, bomb-torn Liverpool: how his father had disappeared from his life when he was six, and his mother, Julia, had handed him over to Aunt Mimi, then gone on to have two children out of wedlock with John “Twitchy” Dykins.

More than anything else, he talked about Julia: how beautiful, fascinating, and funny she was, how she had stayed close to him throughout his boyhood yet never properly been “his,” and what a horrendous gap had been torn in his eighteen-year-old life when a car knocked her down just yards from Mimi’s front gate. To the unshockable Yoko he repeated a confession that had only ever slipped out once before, in conversation with his “Richmal Crompton woman,” Maureen Cleave. “He told me that when he was in his teens, he sometimes used be in Julia’s room with her when she had a rest in the afternoon. And he’d always regretted he’d never been able to have sex with her…. “At that point, I didn’t know that he needed so much therapy as he did. I knew there was a crazy side of him, but I was like Peggy Guggenheim—thinking Jackson Pollock is great because he’s crazy. At the opening of his show, Pollock would pee all over his painting or something. I didn’t think of John as someone who should be boxed in and get therapy. I thought that fame had relieved the pressure for him a little bit. But that Liverpool childhood was still very scary for him.”

One late-March morning, the post brought a bulky packet from
the American publishers G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It was a new book by a California therapist named Arthur Janov, which Putnam’s was circulating to various big names, hoping to garner some prepublication endorsements. Its title was
The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis
. When John saw the first three words, he instantly thought of Yoko’s vocal technique. “He passed me over this book,” she remembers, “and said ‘Look…it’s you.’”

Janov’s thesis was that almost all neurotic behavior derived from the traumas of childhood. Adults who had been denied the child’s basic, crying need for love, security, and attention tended to blot out the memory, finding apparent consolation in the sweets of adulthood—fame, wealth, or sex. But as long as those long-ago, unfulfilled needs were suppressed, their behavior remained essentially unreal and thus prone to neurosis in every form. Primal scream therapy was designed to break down “the force of years of compressed feelings and denied needs” by taking the patient back to childhood to confront the pain, articulate it as “primally” as babies do on first leaving the snug womb for the cold world, and so finally be cleansed of it.

John read the book in a single gulp, after his usual fashion, and decided he must meet Arthur Janov and undergo primal scream therapy without delay. A few nights later, Janov was telephoned at his California home by Yoko and asked to come to England to administer the treatment. He replied that he had a busy practice and could not abandon his other patients for the sake of just one, however famous. “Then afterwards when I told my two children, they said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s John Lennon!’” Janov remembers. Since generous travel expenses were offered, he decided to make it a family trip, taking both children out of school and including his then wife and professional partner, Vivian. In the usual spirit of togetherness, John wanted Yoko to have the therapy also, so it was agreed that Vivian Janov would take charge of her.

John’s psychological state came as a profound shock to Janov. “The level of his pain was enormous…as much as I’ve ever seen. He was almost completely nonfunctional. He couldn’t leave the house, he could hardly leave his room. He had no defenses, he was decom
pensating [falling apart], he was just one big ball of pain. This was someone the whole world adored, and it didn’t change a thing. At the center of all that fame and wealth and adulation was just a lonely little kid.”

To maintain professional distance, Janov stayed at the Inn on the Park hotel in London, traveling down to Tittenhurst each day with his wife by chauffeur-driven limousine. While Yoko’s sessions with Vivian took place in the main house, John elected to have his in the still-unfinished recording studio, hoping its insulated walls would muffle the noises he had to make. From the title of Janov’s book, he imagined himself rolling on the floor and shrieking uncontrollably, much like teenage girls had once done for the Beatles. “He told me he didn’t know how to scream,” Janov remembers. “He’d had to ask Yoko to give him lessons.”

In fact, the sessions merely consisted of long talks with a ruggedly good-looking, curly-haired man whose quiet voice and low-key questions stripped away his past, layer by layer, almost without his realizing it. “[ Janov’s] thing is to feel the pain that’s accumulated inside you ever since your childhood,” he would later recall. “In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life—it’s excruciating…. There’s no way of describing it…what you actually do is cry. Instead of penting up emotion or pain, feel it rather than putting it away for some rainy day. It’s like somewhere along the line, we were switched off not to feel things…. This therapy gives you back the switch, locate it and switch back into feeling just as a human being, not as a male or a female or a famous person or not famous person, they switch you back to being a baby and therefore you feel as a child does….”

They talked about his abandonment, as he saw it, by his father that sunny Blackpool day in 1946 when he had been forced to choose either Mummy or Daddy. They talked about Julia, her beauty and magnetism, about his feeling that she had never fully belonged to him and that she, too, had left him just when he needed her most. They talked about the two other great tragedies in his young life, the deaths of Uncle George and Stu Sutcliffe—to both of which at the time he could respond only with hysterical laughter but which both
now encouraged healthy, healing tears. They touched on the sexual feelings he had had for his mother, which to Janov squared perfectly with his choice of Yoko as a wife. “I’d had other patients with very seductive mothers who ended up with non-Caucasian wives, so as not to be too close to the incestuous thing.” They talked about Mimi (“a lot,” according to Janov): about the magnificent care and protection she had given, but her lack of the quality John craved most. “He’d had a seductive mother who was more like a girl friend, a father he viewed as just a bum, and an aunt who did the right thing by him, but who always seemed very tough and unfeeling. There had been a terrible lack of softness in his life.”

They talked, too, about Brian Epstein, the fourth and last crucial figure whom John felt had, almost neglectfully, “died on him.” “He knew Brian had adored him, and there was a lot of guilt there about the way he’d depended on Brian yet mistreated him,” Janov recalls. They talked about John’s notorious Spanish holiday with Brian in 1963 and the (to John) insignificant physical encounter that had resulted. The more Janov heard about Brian, the more he longed to have had him as a patient. “God, that was a tragic story. There was someone who needed therapy even more than John did.”