John Lennon: The Life (98 page)

He had promised to join Elton onstage if this should happen and, as Elton jovially made clear, there was to be no wriggling out of it. Two years ago, with Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band at his side,
he could have walked into any arena with anyone. But the months adrift had sapped his never robust self-confidence, and the prospect of facing a new, young, glam-rock audience, never mind competing with such a mythic showman and extrovert, was terrifying.

Reluctantly, he agreed, or half-agreed, to keep his word at the final show of Elton’s current U.S. tour, which was to be at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night, November 28, 1974. In an attempt to prepare himself, he went to Boston a few days earlier to see Elton play the Garden, and almost gave up the idea there and then. Watching his co-duettist don the various guises of a cosmic pantomime dame, a Las Vegas chorus girl, and a camp Mad Hatter, all he could think was “Thank God it isn’t me.” And the audience reaction brought on weird déjà vu. “It was like Beatlemania,” he would recall. “I was thinking ‘What is this?’ ’cos I hadn’t heard it since the Beatles. I looked round and saw someone else playing the guitar.”

On Thanksgiving Eve in New York, he joined Elton for a rehearsal that ended up lasting barely an hour and a half. Elton wanted him to sing “Imagine,” but John didn’t want to “come on like Dean Martin, doing my classic hits. I wanted to have some fun and play some rock ’n’ roll, and I didn’t want to do more than three because it was Elton’s show after all.” They agreed on “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and “Lucy,” and, as a second choice from the Lennon-McCartney songbook, Elton suggested “I Saw Her Standing There,” from the Beatles’ very first album. This appealed to John for its antiquity and because its lead vocal always used to be sung by Paul.

There had been no official announcement of his appearance, but rumors were rife, the show was sold out, and Elton’s right-hand man, Tony King, was besieged by illustrious claimants for the VIP front rows. One of the first calls King received was from Yoko: she requested seats for herself and David Spinozza, stipulating they should be near the stage, but out of John’s direct sight line. And no one must let him know she intended to be there.

At the last moment, he almost chickened out, but old Beatle campaign reflexes triumphed, and he reported to the Garden’s backstage area on schedule in a plain black suit, looking as if he were about to mount the scaffold. During the countdown to showtime, a mes
senger arrived with two boxes, one for him and one for Elton. Each contained a white gardenia from Yoko. She had taken care to choose identical blooms and express no favoritism in the accompanying cards, both of which read “Best of luck and all my love.” Her instructions had been obeyed; John had no idea she was in the audience. “Thank goodness Yoko’s not here,” he said at one point. “Otherwise I know I’d never be able to go out there.”

He was scheduled to appear about two thirds into the show, which meant hanging around for something like an hour and a half, listening to Elton’s audience being ratcheted higher and higher. Stage fright struck in the usual place, and he had to rush to the men’s room to throw up. In his agitation, he even forgot how to tune his guitar and had to ask Davey Johnstone from Elton’s band to do it for him.

The audience was kept on tenterhooks until well into the second hour, when Elton suddenly sat back from his piano. “Seeing as it’s Thanksgiving,” he said casually, “we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us onto the stage.” Waiting in the wings with Elton’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin, John very nearly lost his nerve again. “He said, ‘I’m not going on unless you go on with me,’” Taupin remembers. “So I just went forward a little way with him, then he sort of hugged me and I said, ‘You’re on your own.’”

As John walked onstage, the house lights went up and eighteen thousand people rose to their feet with a roar and thunderous stamping that shook even that applause-hardened edifice to its core. “The audience gave him a terrific reception,” Yoko remembers. “But when he bowed, it was too quickly and too many times. And suddenly I thought, ‘He looks so lonely up there.’”

To the audience, he seemed back in his element, lead-vocaling the surprise party hit that still had a sting in its tail (“…don’t need a gun to blow your mind…”), then, on reggae rhythm guitar, helping Elton put Lucy in the Ska with Diamonds. There was a whisper of Royal Variety Show mischief when he announced “a number [by] an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul”—no one yet knowing the estranged fiancés were long reconciled. By the time the John-John partnership had done with “I Saw Her Standing There,” Madison
Square Garden was beside itself. “Everyone around me was crying,” remembers Margo Stevens, one of the large British contingent flown in especially for the occasion. “John was hugging Elton, and Elton seemed to be crying, too.” It was a measure of Elton’s generosity that he let the pandemonium go on and on, despite facing the uphill task of restarting his own set and continuing for another forty minutes. John would never make another stage appearance, but in this final one he never felt more loved.

Afterward Yoko came backstage and they sat for a long time, catching up and holding hands, while their respective escorts, May and David, hovered uneasily in the background. A passing photographer snapped them together, as lost in each other as two virgins on a first date.

I
t wasn’t quite that straightforward. “Backstage at the Elton show John was like he wanted to eat me up or something,” Yoko remembers. “But I said, ‘Oh, ple-ease don’t start this again.’ I really didn’t want to come back together so much because I thought it would be the same thing all over again…the entourage…people being so jealous, whispering to him…and the whole world hating me. And also I lost my artistic credit. I couldn’t make anything without people attacking it. My career was killed and my dignity as a person was totally gone.

“And do I want to go back to that because I love that guy? And he’s lost credit too, because people are saying he’s crazy. I was thinking it’s like a doomed love affair that could kill both of us. I thought we could be friends, though that never happened with either of my other ex-husbands. I thought, ‘We’re artists, we can just work together,’ that’s how naive I was.”

John had already been begging for months to move back into
the Dakota, using every possible emotional lever. Yoko almost succumbed when he came over to the apartment from Fifty-second Street and played “Bless You,” the
Walls and Bridges
track most pointedly addressed to her. Almost but not quite. “It was such a beautiful song. I cried, John cried and we hugged each other. I had to be so strong-willed about it. I said ‘Go,’ he said ‘Okay’ and didn’t try to fight it.”

Another pretext for a visit was that Yoko had managed to give up smoking and he wanted to use the same method. Again she tried to keep it friendly and businesslike, making him inhale Gitane after Gitane until the ashtray overflowed with acrid butts and he was almost nauseous. “We were in our bedroom and John said, ‘So I really burnt the bridge, right? You won’t let me come back.’ And it was said in such a sad way that I said, ‘Okay, you can come back.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘What am I saying?’ but I couldn’t help it.”

The reconciliation was made public when they appeared together at the 1975 Grammy Awards ceremony, broadcast live from New York. John presented one of the awards, bizarrely attired in a floppy black beret, a velvet smock with
ELVIS
embroidered on it, a white evening scarf, a dangling medallion inscribed
DR. WINSTON O’BOOGIE
, and another white gardenia in his buttonhole. “Thank you, mother, thank you…” he replied to the ovation from his music-industry peers, including David Bowie, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Andy Williams, and Roberta Flack, as if that old music-hall comic Sandy Powell had possessed him again. He himself did not figure in the awards, though Paul McCartney and Wings won two (for Best Pop Vocal Performance and Best Produced Non-Classical Recording), and the Beatles received a special Hall of Fame citation. At the after-awards party, Bob Gruen photographed him with Yoko in a state of euphoria that made any official communiqué redundant.

During the Lost Weekend, he had kept a diary, faithfully recording every chaotic studio session, drunken binge, public humiliation, and act of gratuitous vandalism. This he now showed to Yoko, then burned in front of her as a symbol of his resolve to turn over a new leaf. A further token was a formal renewal of their wedding vows in a candlelit White Room at the Dakota, both of them dressed all in
white as they had been for the original quickie ceremony in Gibraltar, and surrounded by candles and banks of white carnations.

It was as if both had been born again. John came home with all the demons seemingly exorcized from his system—the drunkenness, the sexual ravenousness, the jealousy and possessiveness—everything but the insecurity and self-doubt that nothing and no one could change. Yoko, too, seemed different: less relentless in driving her own career forward, and more able, as John was, to enjoy the moment. Though they seemed to pick up where they had left off, there was now a deeper level of love—and liking—between them. “A lot of people when they separate get angry with each other,” says Bob Gruen. “John and Yoko were never angry with each other, so when they reconciled they seemed better friends than before.”

After Yoko’s life-threatening miscarriages, they had given up hope of ever having a child together, despite being offered an unexpected ray of hope by their acupuncturist, Dr. Hong, in San Francisco three years earlier. “He told us, ‘You’re always together. If you separate for a while and then come together, you can have a baby,’” Yoko remembers. “We said, ‘How dare you suggest that? We’ll
never
separate. What are you talking about!’ Then we did separate; when John came back we had great sex, and immediately I became pregnant.”

At first, she was not sure she wanted to go through with it—or that John would—and was prepared to have an abortion. “I didn’t want to trap him. I wanted him to be there because he wanted to be there. I said ‘What do you want to do about it? It’s up to you.’ John said ‘We’re gonna have it, we’re gonna have it….’ I wanted to make it up to him for all the suffering I had caused him because of the separation. He wanted the baby, so I was determined to have it.”

Yoko was forty-two, an age then considered dangerously late for childbearing. With her history of miscarriages, the doctors advised that to be absolutely safe she ought to remain in bed throughout her pregnancy. From the moment he discovered her condition, John treated her with a tenderness and solicitude that would have astonished his first wife, Cynthia, waiting on her hand and foot, refusing to let her lift or carry the smallest weight. He accompanied
her to all her medical consultations and prenatal classes—as yet by no means common practice for fathers-to-be—and made heroic efforts, yet again, to give up smoking. They decided on the natural childbirth method, without drugs or surgery, in which the fully sensate newborn is laid on its mother’s abdomen for instant bonding to take place. John had no doubt that the baby would be a boy and, months too early, began scouting Manhattan babyware stores, wryly amused to discover one chic emporium called Lady Madonna, invoking the McCartney Beatles A-side of 1968. But after their previous heartbreaks, both Yoko and he were afraid to buy too much, for fear coming home from the hospital empty-handed again.

The Lost Weekend’s musical legacy, his problematic rock-’n’-roll covers album, had appeared in February 1975. Even while trying to work his way back to Yoko, he had stayed focused on the finally reordered and rerecorded version, anxious to discharge his legal obligation to Morris Levy once and for all. To show that he and his band were not slipping back into old L.A. ways, he broke an iron rule and sent Levy several tracks in a rough mix. But, tired of waiting around for his royalty cut, the Octopus issued the unfinished tracks as an album on his own Adam VIII label, titling it
Roots: John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits
, jacketing it with a garish head shot from the
Let It Be
era and marketing it as a cheapo TV special offer. The result was a second round of litigation, with Levy suing John for defaulting on the judgment from their earlier court case and John countersuing for release of inferior product under his name without his authorization.

Bob Gruen attended the court hearing for John’s action, taking a small camera in his pocket. When John was called to the witness stand, Gruen managed a couple of furtive shots without being seen. (Despite the strict illegality of this, the presiding judge later acquired a print and hung it proudly in his chambers.) “John had to explain why a rough-mix tape was not meant to be sold on the market, and he integrally described the difference between that and a final mix and how it was made,” Gruen says. “He was incredibly clear and coherent and I remember thinking, if I was a musician this was the best description I could possibly have.” Whereas Levy received damages
of only $6,795 John was awarded more than $144,700 and succeeded in having the Adam VIII compilation withdrawn from sale.

Rush-released before too many TV viewers could send their money to Morris Levy, John’s fully mixed album was entitled simply
Rock ’n’ Roll
. Buyers who expected a straight nostalgia trip in the current mode were in for a surprise. Some of the tracks, like Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” and Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” certainly were just as he used to play them with the Quarrymen and first-draft Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg. Others, like Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” and Larry Williams’s “Bony Moronie,” were slowed down almost beyond recognition; Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” seemed to have collided with the Coasters’ “Little Egypt,” while “You Can’t Catch Me” sounded like the Beatles’
Come Together
—subtle payback for Levy’s original complaint that John’s lyric had plagiarized Berry’s. The Ben E. King ballad “Stand by Me,” destined for release as a single, had a faintly reggae feel, testifying to Elton John’s influence, and an edge of passion—desperation even—missing from all the other safe old chestnuts.

The final track, Lloyd Price’s “Just Because,” wound up with a monologue in fruity faux-American tones: “Why, I must have been thirteen when that came out…or was it fourteen or twenty-two? I could have been twelve actually…This is Doctor Winston O’Boogie saying goodnight from Record Plant East, New York. We hope you had a swell time. Everyone here says hi. Good-bye.” The cover was a black-and-white photograph of John taken during the Beatles’ Hamburg days by their
exi
friend Jurgen Vollmer. In his leather jacket and Teddy Boy forelock, he leaned in a doorway while indistinct figures flashed by and a blur of red neon glowed overhead.

A major objective of the
Rock ’n’ Roll
album was to reconnect with those many UK fans who, since 1971, had despaired of ever understanding him again. The promotional campaign included a long interview with BBC2’s
Old Grey Whistle Test
program (for which he was partly recompensed in Chocolate Olivers, a luxurious British-made cookie as yet unavailable in New York). His interviewer, “Whispering” Bob Harris, asked if he planned a return to Britain once his immigration problems were sorted out. “Oh, you bet!” John replied.
“I’ve got family in England. I’ve got a child who has to keep coming over. Hello Julian! I’ve got my Auntie Mimi. Hello Mimi!” To maintain his profile back home, he even recorded a performance for a televised tribute to Lord Lew Grade, archetype of the hated “men in suits,” whose ATV company had gobbled up Northern Songs in 1969.

The burning question for Whispering Bob and every other British interviewer, even after five years of new mega-achievers in the charts, was whether the Beatles might ever return. John’s former fierce antipathy to the idea had by now softened to mere apathy. “If we got in the studio again and we thought we turned each other on again, then it would be worth it…. If we made a piece we thought was worthwhile, it goes out. But it’s such pie in the sky, you know. I don’t care either way. If someone wants to pull it together, I’ll go along. I’m not in the mood to pull it together, that’s for sure.”

At this point he did not resemble a man contemplating retirement but, on the contrary, seemed to derive more pleasure and satisfaction from the music business than since his earliest Beatle days. In Los Angeles, he had chummed up with David Bowie, who now vied with Elton John as glam rock’s premier attraction. Whereas Elton dealt in simple kitsch and pastiche, Bowie intrigued his public with elements of Brechtian theatre, classical mime, even antipop satire, through a comically hubristic alter ego named Ziggy Stardust. On the surface, his whey-faced, androgynous stage persona could not have been more different from the cheerily unpretentious super-icons of ten years earlier. Yet everything about even him—other than the question mark over his gender—was directly traceable back to the Beatles and, in particular, John.

Early in 1975, Bowie had come to New York to record an album called
Young Americans
, which was to include a cover version of “Across the Universe.” John attended the session at Electric Lady Studios and, during a break, picked up a guitar and improvised a three-note riff around the single word “fame.” The word and the riff gave Bowie his first number one single in America and helped launch the strutting, narcissistic disco style that would dominate record charts and pack dance clubs around the world for years to come. From rock
’n’-roll nostalgic, John found himself suddenly catapulted to the cutting edge.

Yoko had long since been granted third-preference visa status as an “alien of exceptional merit”—the final step to a green card. But even after the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been legally compelled to deal with John’s application, it continued to prevaricate, suggesting that his solo musical career had less artistic merit than his Beatle one. He remained in the country on short extensions won by his lawyer, Leon Wildes, afraid even to take an internal flight in case the plane were diverted outside U.S. territory and he would not be allowed back in again. During the seemingly endless round of court appearances, he and Wildes once found themselves waiting in the same room as the INS lawyer. “I knew this guy, so I introduced John to him,” Wildes remembers. “John took out a handkerchief, knelt down, rubbed his shoes with it, and said, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Sir?’”

As Wildes had always hoped—and hoped ever more strongly as the country recovered its senses after the Nixon era—salvation came through the federal courts. Early in October, the Court of Appeals finally ruled on his main submission: that John’s 1968 cannabis conviction in the United Kingdom had been unfair by American standards. The three-judge panel found in John’s favor by two to one, and Judge Irving Kaufman remanded the case back to the immigration court. In legalese, the INS was recommended to use its “discretion”; in practice, it was told to cease all proceedings against John on the basis of an offense now proven to have been legally invalid.

Kaufman’s twenty-four-page judgment said the court “did not take lightly Lennon’s claim that he was the victim of a move to oust him on political grounds,” and characterized the former “subversive” as something like a national hero. “If in our two hundred years of independence we have in some measure realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty, and willing to help implement it. Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream.” The verdict was leaked to Wildes a day ahead of its official publication, but John by then was hardly in a mood to
savor the victory. Yoko had gone into labor, and he was with her at New York Hospital.