John Lennon: The Life (93 page)

Such an album was clearly not the most diplomatic thing to have released just as John and Yoko’s lawyer, Leon Wildes, was trying to convince the immigration courts that they presented no threat to
America’s internal security. While Wildes could not influence what John put on record, he urged him soften his persona by public charitable works in the mold of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. An opportunity arose through a friendly TV reporter named Geraldo Rivera, who was helping to organize a fund-raiser for Willowbrook State School, a children’s psychiatric hospital on Staten Island. John and Yoko volunteered to perform at the event at Madison Square Garden on August 30, alongside Steve Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Sha Na Na. Even for such an obviously respectable occasion, the FBI surveillance team turned out in force, ostentatiously photographing an audience that included Mayor John Lindsay, Princess Lee Radziwill, and the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern.

Backed by Elephant’s Memory, John and Yoko played a chaotic medley, ranging from “Come Together” and “Hound Dog” to “Mother,” which John introduced as “from one of those albums I made since I left the Rolling Stones.” A famous film sequence shows him alone at the piano, in tinted glasses and olive-green shirt, screaming into the Garden’s huge auditorium what most people would hesitate even to whisper secretly into their pillows: “Mother, you had me…but I never had you….” However long ago and far away, it is still almost too painful to watch.

B
ack in Britain, what sent teenage girls crazy these days was glitter or glam rock. In reaction to the old decade’s washed-out hippie smocks and quest for higher meanings, early seventies bands dressed in shiny suits and tottery platform heels, used female jewelry, hair dye, and even makeup, and gave themselves up to flashiness, triviality, and self-mockery. The latest to be hailed as “new Beatles” were T-Rex, whose lead singer, Marc Bolan, wore eye shadow and face paint; instead of Beatlemania, the press now talked about TRextasy. Bolan’s run of self-penned hits like ‘Ride a White Swan,” “Telegram Sam,” “Jeepster,” and “Get It On,” the
Melody Maker
said, made him “as important as Lennon or Dylan.”

The statement brought swift reaction from a transatlantic migrant who had supposedly left all such considerations far behind. “I
ain’t heard ‘Jeepster,’ tho’ I heard and liked ‘Get It On’ and [Bolan’s] first hit,” John wrote to the paper, trying—not very successfully—to adopt a benign elder statesman air. “Anyway, we all know where those ‘new licks’ come from—right, Marc?” Another correction came winging from New York after
Melody Maker
ran an interview with George Martin in which he said the Beatles’ first British hit, “Please Please Me,” had been cowritten by John and Paul and reordered a little by himself. “I wrote ‘Please Please Me’ alone. It was recorded in the exact sequence in which I wrote it. ‘Remember?’ love John & Yoko.” Like its predecessor, the letter was meant for publication, even coming tagged with the words “LP Winner”—
Melody Maker
’s traditional award to the week’s pithiest correspondent.

John’s feud with his former other half staggered on for a little longer in this same arena. Late in 1971, Paul told an
MM
interviewer that the ex-Beatles’ financial disputes would soon be resolved if the four of them got together, without Allen Klein, Yoko, or Linda, and simply signed a piece of paper—“but John won’t do it…. Everyone thinks I’m the aggressor, but I’m not, you know. I just want out.” At the time, the
Imagine
album had just appeared, with its anti-Paul-and-Linda tirade, “How Do You Sleep?” Paul laughed it off as “silly,” though the jibe about “Yesterday” had obviously hurt him. “So what if I live with straights? I like straights. I have straight babies.”

Claiming “equal time” on the letters page, John sent a lengthy reply (headed “Dear Linda, Paul and all the wee McCartneys…”) from which nine lines had to be cut for fear of legal repercussions. The remainder was still headline-making stuff with its suggestion the other ex-Beatles might buy Paul’s share of Apple, and brusque dismissal of the summit-conference idea.

For someone reputedly so dedicated to self-advancement, Paul had not fared nearly as well as John these past two years. Though the public smile never left his face, he had suffered a dark period immediately after the Beatles’ breakup, starting to drink heavily and wonder if he really could go on without them. His decision to form a band named Wings with his wife in the lineup had been met with ridicule that even Yoko in the Plastic Ono Band never suffered. Unable to defeat the UK media’s prejudice, he was reduced to touring
Wings in a small van, like pre-1962 Beatles, playing surprise gigs at provincial colleges. His post-Lennon-McCartney songs were increasingly criticized for being bland and cutesy, yet if he attempted to step out of character—as with his own comment on the Ulster Troubles, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”—people threw up their hands in horror. While the Plastic Ono Band had hit after hit, Wings were far slower to take flight.

Dan Richter, for one, was always urging John to reopen communication with Paul. “I said, ‘You guys have had your divorce, you did so much wonderful stuff together…you should be talking.’” But John still felt that Paul’s attitude to Yoko created an unbridgeable gulf and that, anyway, Lennon and McCartney had both been too much changed by their respective spouses ever to find common ground again. “John used to say, ‘Paul will always be a performer.’” Richter remembers. “‘I’ve been a rock-’n’-roll star. I’ve done it. I want to move on.’”

Early in 1972, the two finally came face-to-face. Paul visited 105 Bank Street and they had a brief, guarded chat, agreeing not to dump on each other anymore, either in songs or through the media. But that slight thaw did not develop. When Paul was in New York, he would usually telephone John, sometimes to be greeted in friendly though distant fashion, other times by “Yeah, what the fuck do you want, man?” in an accent sounding more and more American. One way in which he continued to give offense, he recalls, was talking about his growing brood of young children, how he loved to read them bedtime stories and take them out for pizza. In a phrase that should have titled an album, John accused him of being “all pizza and fairy tales.” During another such conversation, John’s “vitriolic” mood caused Paul to lose his famous aplomb; he snapped, “Fuck off, Kojak,” and slammed the receiver down.

Autumn was dominated by the presidential election. John pinned high hopes on the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, senator for South Dakota—an omen if ever there was one—who stood on an unequivocal pledge to end the Vietnam War. During the campaign, in what seemed a recurrent motif of American public affairs, a rival Democrat contender, Alabama’s racist Governor George Wal
lace, was shot five times with a handgun by a twenty-one-year-old loner named Arthur Bremer, but survived, to be confined to a wheel-chair for life. Despite McGovern’s popular platform, the incumbent’s diplomatic triumphs in Russia proved decisive. The voter surge of eighteen-to twenty-one-year-old voters, supposedly mobilized by John, failed to happen. Turnout was the lowest since 1948, and on November 7, Nixon won by a landslide.

John and Yoko had now been together for four years, spending almost every minute of every day in each other’s company. Though they still constantly astonished and exhilarated each other on a creative level, their physical relationship had inevitably lost some of its initial blaze. John’s sexual drive remained intense, but Yoko was finding herself less and less able, or inclined, to deal with it. “In lovemaking, I don’t do much. John used to say, ‘You’re like one of those Victorian ladies—you just lie there and think of England.’”

They had often discussed the raging randiness which he freely confessed to, and which had been so easy to indulge during his years on the road with the Beatles. “Even when we first got together and were madly in love, John would say, ‘I don’t understand it, I’m madly in love, but why do I still keep looking at these girls on the street?’” Yoko remembers. “He always said that the difference with women was they could not separate sex and love. After we came to New York, I started to think there was a side of him that was feeling repressed a little.”

The night of Nixon’s reelection victory, they were invited to a party at Jerry Rubin’s apartment. “John was totally out of his head with drugs and pills and drink because he couldn’t stand the fact that George McGovern lost. He’d already started in the studio, when we were remixing something…. When we walked in to Jerry’s, there was a girl there. She was the kind of girl you’d never think John would be attracted to, I don’t want to describe her but anyway she was sitting there. She didn’t come on to him at all, he just pulled her and went into the next room. And then they were groping and all that, and we were all quiet.

“Then one of the other guests was very kind and put a record on, Bob Dylan or something, so that we don’t hear it. But we heard
it anyway. And everybody had their coats in the next room, where John and this girl are making out, so nobody can go home. Then one girl was brave enough to get her coat, and the others followed her. And I was there and Peter [Bendry], our assistant, was there, and John and the girl were still in there. I said to Peter, ‘Please take this flower to them and say to John I love him and don’t worry.’ I didn’t like the situation. But I felt sorry for him. Peter said, ‘No, I’m not going to bother them.’

“That situation really woke me up. I thought, ‘Okay, we were so much in love with each other and that’s why we sacrificed everything, my daughter, everything. It was worth it if we were totally in love with each other. But if he wants to make it with another girl or something, what am I doing?’ And physically I was starting to feel like I didn’t really want to get into it with him.”

With so much else currently absorbing both their energies, the matter rested there for the present. Early in 1973, they came uptown to have lunch with Peter Brown, the former Beatles fixer-in-chief who was now running Robert Stigwood’s New York operation and living in an elegant apartment building named the Langham, on Central Park West. John took an instant fancy to Brown’s spacious pad with its sweeping views over the park and decided on the spot that he wanted to give up gypsy life in the West Village and move here. When the Langham proved to have no space available, he simply tried the building next door.

It was called the Dakota, but the place it suggested, even more powerfully than those cobbled SoHo alleys, was Liverpool. Some similar quasi-Gothic sandstone pile might have housed a bank or insurance company in North John, Tithebarn, or Water Street: the wealth and confidence of Mersey shipbuilders might equally have conceived its seven-story facade, embellished with balconies and terra-cotta moldings, its Germanic gables and steep copper roof, weathered to pale green, its street frontage of black iron lamps, flower urns, and decorative sea serpents. The very name suggested a touch of Liverpudlian sarcasm. When it was built, in the 1880s, this part of the Upper West Side was still so sparsely populated that fashionable people thought it as remote as North or South Dakota.

Though once the acme of luxury, the Dakota was no longer in Manhattan’s premier real-estate league and had become the haunt of middle-range actors, film directors, and similar bohemian types. It had a slightly spooky ambience, the more so since being used as a location for Roman Polanski’s satanic horror film
Rosemary’s Baby
. Apartments were held on long, relatively inexpensive leases, and fell vacant only rarely. But it chanced that when John and Yoko’s assistant, Jon Hendricks, made inquiries, the actor Robert Ryan was about to vacate number 72 on the seventh floor, owing to the recent death of his wife.

A single look at the Ryan apartment was enough to sell John on it. Running half the length of a block, it had four bedrooms, stunning views over Central Park’s treetops and—the clincher for him—a distant view of the Lake. He loved the feel of the whole building, so like Victorian Liverpool with its heavy brass light switches, sit-down elevators, and mahogany, oak, and cherrywood paneling. In that crime-and violence-ridden metropolis, it seemed exceptionally well guarded: the entrance arch from West Seventy-second Street had an immense black iron gate and was watched around the clock by a security man in a copper sentry box.

For all the Dakota’s bohemian ambiance, taking up residence there was not easy. The board of residents who ran the building maintained a blanket ban against diplomats (for their fly-by-night tendency) and rock stars. In parallel with the “Save John and Yoko” petitions he was compiling for their immigration case, Hendricks had to organize a campaign to persuade the Dakota’s co-op board that they would not disrupt the place with wild parties or deafening music. Letters were submitted from character witnesses, including the head of the American Episcopal Church, Bishop Paul Moore, and they appeared before the board as neatly dressed and circumspect as in the immigration court. Eventually, they were accepted. The real-estate agent later admitted to Hendricks that he thought they hadn’t stood a chance.

What did not already remind John of home in apartment 72, he was quick to add. The rather murky woodwork that had previously killed much of the Central Park light was replaced by brilliant white paintwork and some of the white carpets from Tittenhurst Park; the
cramped kitchen was enlarged to one almost as spacious as Tittenhurst’s. The main living room became a drawing room, as formal and spotless as Aunt Mimi’s old one at Mendips, with huge white couches and ottomans and clusters of silver-framed family photographs—Mimi, his mother, his aunts and cousins, his beloved and never-forgotten Uncle George. Humorous brass plaques appeared on doors, identifying the kitchen as “Honey world” and an adjacent cloakroom-toilet as “Albert.” Nor could it be a proper home for him until there were cats about the place. Yoko was not a cat person but, as ever, deferred to his wishes.