Shout! (79 page)

He was certainly no recluse, as would later be claimed: each day he
saw dozens of people and spoke to dozens more on the telephone. He made regular trips with Yoko to their other properties and took extended overseas vacations with her and Sean (sometimes traveling under the alias “Fred and Ada Gherkin”). But for most of his former friends in the music business, he had disappeared from the radar screen. When Mick Jagger moved into a Central Park apartment within sight of the Dakota, he dropped John a note, asking him to telephone. But no reply ever came. The only exception was Elton John, who continued to bask in the Lennons’ gratitude for bringing them back together and whom they asked to be Sean’s godfather.

Elton returned from his first visit to the Dakota complex acknowledging that the world now held an even bigger shopaholic than himself. “I couldn’t believe it. Yoko has a refrigerated room, just for keeping her fur coats. She’s got rooms full of those clothes racks like you see at Marks and Spencer. She makes me look ridiculous. I buy things in threes and fours, but she buys things in fifties. The funny thing is, you never see her wearing them. She’s always got up in some tatty old blouse.” Yoko bore no resentment for such observations, nor did she even when Elton poked gentle fun at her in a birthday card to John:

Imagine six apartments

It isn’t hard to do
.

One is full of fur coats

The other’s full of shoes
.

John was equally cut off from the Beatles’ old circle, though the fate of Mal Evans, their former roadie, caused him a certain macabre amusement. In 1976, Mal died a bizarre death in Los Angeles, shot through a motel-room door by police who feared he was about to harm a young girl he had with him. His wife, Lil, who still lived in England, afterward received a bill from the motel for dry cleaning the carpet on which he’d died. Without reference to Lil, Mal’s body was cremated and the ashes were mailed to her—but en route the package got lost. It was a sickly appropriate footnote, since Mal had been working for the post office in Liverpool when he first joined the Beatles’ entourage.

The general mellowing of John’s character finally encompassed even Paul McCartney. Though still nothing like a fan of Paul’s solo output, he could not help but admire his old estranged fiancé’s steely
determination in creating a new band, Wings, in controversial partnership with his wife, Linda, and winning it a worldwide fame almost comparable with the Beatles’ own in their heyday. Paul, too, had been mellowed, by matrimonial stability as much as by solo success and, around 1978, decided it was time to make up with John. The way John later told it, Paul took to showing up on his doorstep unannounced with a guitar, as if hoping to re-create their schoolboy songwriting sessions in Allerton twenty years earlier. John, however, had more pressing grown-up concerns, like putting Sean to bed at his scheduled time. “I’d let [Paul] in, but finally I said to him, ‘Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same any more.’”

In fact, John and Yoko and Paul and Linda spent several evenings together, in a friendliness one would never have predicted for that uneasy foursome of the late Apple era. The McCartneys happened to be visiting one evening when
Saturday Night Live
, America’s seminal TV satire show, turned its mocking gaze on the continuing multimillion-dollar offers for a Beatles reunion. Producer Lorne Michaels jokingly put up a fee of $3,200 if the four would reconvene before his cameras. John and Paul happened to be watching, and for a moment considered jumping in a cab and turning up at the
SNL
studios; then they decided they were too tired to bother.

John’s retirement ended as impulsively as it began. He had been intrigued to see how the British punk rock movement of the late seventies had filled the charts with noises wilder than any he and Yoko ever had created on their private tapes. Postpunk female vocalists like Lene Lovich, Chrissie Hynde, and, especially, the keening and warbling Kate Bush, seemed to John to be “doing Yoko’s act from ten years ago.” The clincher, he said, came one night in a Bermudan dance club when he heard the B52s” “Rock Lobster.” “I said to meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old axe and wake up the wife.’”

Pulling down the barely used guitar from above his bed, he began to write new songs at frenetic speed. But this was no longer the angry, insecure John of the early seventies, obsessed with making propaganda points and settling scores. It was a man approaching forty with most of his old demons apparently exorcised, celebrating the joys of parenthood, home, and monogamy as he had once so despised Paul McCartney for doing. “Beautiful Boy” was a song about Sean and all the
bedtimes and bath times they had shared. “Watching the Wheels” was a view from his Dakota retreat, thankful he was “no longer in the game.” “Woman” was both an apology and a tribute to Yoko (“after all, I’m forever in your debt”) while “Starting Over” affirmed that for him their love was “still special.”

They planned a double album of his-and-her songs, naming it
Double Fantasy
after the freesia John had seen in Hong Kong’s botanical gardens. To symbolize the new beginning, he chose not to release it on the Apple label, as all his previous solo albums had been. Instead, he went to David Geffen, creator of the Asylum label and, later, the inspirational driving force behind the hugely successful Warner-Elektra-Asylum conglomerate. Geffen won John to his new, eponymous label, not with huge cash advances but with a guarantee of personal care and sensitivity.

With
Double Fantasy
set for release, the doors of the Dakota, shut and padlocked for so long, were thrown open wide. The journalists who stampeded there from every corner of the world were equally astonished and charmed by the new John. Yoko had got his weight down and—for Sean’s sake—even persuaded him to give up his incessant Gauloises cigarettes. Posing for
Rolling Stones
star photographer Annie Leibovitz, he looked more youthful than at any time since Brian Epstein first buttoned him into a round-collared suit. Even Yoko, not one for idle flattery, was moved to exclaim, “Hey—you’re even better looking now than when you were a Beatle.”

To every interviewer, from
Newsweek
magazine to BBC Radio One, he sounded the same top note of reenergized optimism. “I am going to be forty and life begins at forty, so they promise. And I believe it, too. Because I feel fine. I’m, like, excited. It’s like twenty-one—you know, hitting twenty-one. It’s like, ‘Wow! What’s going to happen next?’”

The only middling sales of
Double Fantasy
did not dampen John’s spirits. His fortieth birthday behind him, he and Yoko started work on a follow-up album at New York’s Hit Factory studios—a home-away-from-home for the Lennons now that Yoko had decorated one of its rooms like an Egyptian temple. The backing musicians were expected to share John’s new healthy regimen, exchanging their normal drugs, cigarettes, and booze for sushi, green tea, and shiatsu massages.

The evening of December 8, 1980, John had set aside to work on one of Yoko’s new tracks at the Hit Factory. Ordinarily, he preferred to hop
in a yellow cab to the studio, but tonight Yoko had called up one of the limousines she kept on permanent twenty-four-hour standby. Outside their building’s Gothic front arch stood a little knot of the fans that John called “Dakota groupies.” As he walked out to the car a pudgy young man in a Russian-style fur hat proffered a copy of
Double Fantasy
and asked him to autograph it. A bystander photographed John scribbling a signature while the pudgy young man looked on.

His name—henceforward destined always to be spoken in full like those of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald—was Mark David Chapman. And his twenty-five-year life history, when it came to be written, would show he was almost as perfect an example as Charles Manson of the way the sunny, smiling sixties could turn bad.

Born in 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of an air force sergeant, he had spent a rootless childhood and adolescence living variously in Texas, Indiana, and Virginia. A lonely, introverted boy, mocked and bullied by his schoolfellows, he sought refuge in his imagination, inventing a world populated by “Little People” where he could enjoy both status and control. As a teenager, he got into drugs, experimented with LSD, and became a devout Christian. But what colored his mind above all was the music of the Beatles.

He was no graceless, hopeless nerd, as he would often later be portrayed. Despite meager academic qualifications, he became for a period a valued worker for the YMCA organization, helping to resettle Vietnamese refugees, or boat people, and spending a hazardous time in Beirut during the first stages of Lebanon’s mid-seventies civil war. He received commendations for his work, and on one occasion had his hand shaken by President Gerald Ford. Settling in Honolulu, he was hospitalized for depression after a suicide attempt, but seemed to make a full recovery. In 1979—in an eerie unconscious emulation of his still-unchosen victim—he married a Japanese-American woman several years his senior.

John Lennon’s emergence from retirement turned Chapman’s former near worship of him into contempt first, then hatred. He felt personally betrayed that the man who had sung “Imagine no possessions” now had accumulated costly real estate and herds of prize cattle. His parallel obsession was with Holden Caulfield, the anarchic sixteen-year-old narrator-hero of J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
. The fantasy grew in his mind that once he had made an end to John, he would step into the pages of Salinger’s novel, transfigured into Caulfield.

So, on the first weekend of December 1980, he said goodbye to his wife, Gloria, and flew out of the Hawaiian sun, bound for New York with a .38-caliber handgun in his baggage. He would later tell his interrogators he had intended to shoot John during their first encounter early on the evening of December 8. But John’s niceness about signing his
Double Fantasy
album temporarily disarmed him.

John that night was in particularly good spirits, feeling that Yoko had at last begun to receive proper respect as a musician in her own right. When they left the Hit Factory and headed back to the Dakota, shortly before 11:00
P.M
., he carried a tape of her new song, “Walking on Thin Ice.” As he climbed out of the limo and walked under the Gothic arch, a voice softly called, “Mr. Lennon?” Mark David Chapman stepped forward with the leveled .38 and pumped five shots into his back.

Inside the Dakota’s entrance hall, the night doorman, Jay Hastings, heard the fusillade of shots. A moment later John staggered in with “a horrible confused expression on his face,” followed by Yoko, screaming, “John’s been shot! John’s been shot!” Hastings thought it was some kind of macabre joke until John collapsed onto the floor, scattering cassette tapes around him. Hastings tore off his own tie to try to use it as a tourniquet to stem the bleeding, but did not know where to begin. He dialled 911, then knelt beside John to give what comfort he could. Within minutes, three police squad cars were at the scene. Chapman still stood on the sidewalk, calmly rereading
The Catcher in the Rye
for the umpteenth time.

When no ambulance arrived, a police car was used to take John to Roosevelt Hospital at West 59th Street and Ninth Avenue. A few minutes after his arrival, he was pronounced dead.

Away across the time zones in Poole, Dorset, his aunt Mimi awoke, switched on the radio, and heard someone talking about him. Mimi’s first thought, as so often down the decades, was, “Oh, Lord! What’s he done
now
?”

Five months later, I walked into the lobby of the Drake Hotel, having just been interviewed about the Beatles on ABC-TV’s
Good Morning America
show. Awaiting me at the front desk was a message to call a number I did not recognize. “Studio One,” said the voice that answered. A moment later, another, so familiar, voice came on the line. “Hi, this is
Yoko. What you said about John was very nice. Maybe you’d like to come over and see where we were living.”

I remember how glorious was that spring afternoon of what now must be termed New York’s good old days. Balmy sunshine lightened even the Dakota’s drab stonework and the heavy iron vases along its Central Park facade, cheerily planted with red geraniums. Outside the Gothic arch on West 72nd Street tourists with cameras lingered around America’s most famous assassination site after Dealey Plaza. Another Liverpool-Victorian touch is a kind of small sentry-box with a coppery metal finish, from which a security guard keeps twenty-four-hour watch. Its occupant was bundled firmly inside it, as though too squeamish to look at the killing place, barely ten feet away.

Everything possible had been done to mitigate the pain and shame of this seemingly ultimate Manhattan tragedy. Despite psychiatric opinion that he might be schizophrenic, Mark David Chapman—arrayed in two bulletproof vests to protect him from tit-for-tat reprisals by Lennon fans—had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was now serving twenty years to life in New York State’s Attica Penitentiary where, seven years earlier, forty-three inmates had died during the worst riot in U.S. prison history. Ironically, one of John’s first stage appearances after settling in America had been a charity concert for the Attica riot’s bereaved wives and children.

I had not seen Yoko since the Apple era’s final days—and, indeed, at first hardly recognized her. Grief had played the cruel trick it does on so many widows of making her look better than her years. The former cloud of black hair was now tied back as neatly as any lady lawyer’s or Wall Street banker’s. In place of miniskirts and hot pants were sleek black trousers, high-heeled boots, a black shirt, and a loosened tie. The face which once seemed so implacably humorless frequently softened into smiles, even when discussing the most painful things. The once flat little voice was full of John’s sayings and phraseology, and cozy north-of-England usages like “cuppa” for “a cup of tea.”