The Love You Make (63 page)

There was another film that John and Yoko made that disturbed one person in particular: Tony Cox. This was a short film made to commemorate Kyoko’s seventh birthday, which she celebrated at Tittenhurst Park. Only instead of a birthday party and cake with candles, it was a film of Kyoko and John bathing nude together in the same tub. Cox was reportedly furious over this film, and he vowed not to let John and Yoko get near his daughter again.

Things had been deteriorating anyway over the past year. Intermittently, Cox would call to say he needed money to pay his bills. In exchange for whatever sum of money was needed at the time, Cox would allow Yoko a few days with her daughter but always under his careful supervision. Then he would vanish for a time, only to resurface a few months later when he needed more money. By mid-1971 Cox and Kyoko had disappeared altogether, and John and Yoko were determined to find them.

They hired an elite team of private detectives to track Cox down, but he kept hopping from continent to continent in an effort to evade them. In April they were tipped off that he was living on the island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, attending a course given by none other than John’s old friend, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. John and Yoko rented a plane, and along with Dan Richter, Yoko’s American friend, they slipped onto the island of Majorca. Without attracting any attention, they managed to check into a suite at the Melia-Mallorca Hotel and started to search the island for Kyoko. They learned that during the day, while Cox studied with the Maharishi, Kyoko stayed in a communal children’s camp just outside of town, guarded by the Maharishi’s disciples.

John and Yoko arrived at the camp later that day to find Kyoko frolicking in a playground with the other children. According to Yoko, all she did was extend her arms to the child, who ran toward her. They then spirited her to their rented car, and with Dan Richter at the wheel they sped off through the countryside with the Maharishi’s disciples chasing after them on foot. Fearful of road blocks by police, John and Yoko lay down in the rear of the car with Kyoko between them so it looked as if Richter were driving alone. They made it back to the hotel with no trouble and rushed the little girl up to their suite. It was only then that they realized that Kyoko wasn’t wearing any shoes, and they sent Richter out to buy some. By the time the elevator brought him down to the lobby, the hotel was crawling with police.

The following day the London tabloids carried a front-page picture of John carrying the frightened nine-year-old Kyoko over the threshold of the police station, with Yoko, Cox, and a phalanx of police close behind. John and Yoko were kept fourteen hours on suspicion of kidnapping “I’m not exactly being detained,” John told reporters who assembled outside the courthouse. “I’m trying to sort this matter out.”

Cox was furious at the alleged kidnapping. “I’ve got John by the balls this time,” he said at the station house. “This will cost him millions.” When the Lennons were finally permitted to leave the station, it was without Kyoko. The judge pulled the same rotten test on them that Freddie and Julia Lennon had pulled on John when he was a little boy; he asked Kyoko whom she wanted to stay with. Kyoko said, “My daddy.”

“We will be back for her, wherever she is,” Yoko told the reporters, her voice quavering emotionally. “But now we must get a legal ruling. How can you kidnap your own baby?” she demanded. “I did what any mother would have done.”

“We’ve done everything we can to come to an amicable agreement with the father,” John said. “In all it’s cost us a lot of money and a shaft of broken promises. Yoko loves her daughter, and I can’t let her suffer like this any longer. What effect can all this be having on Kyoko? I remember it was happening to me … I was shattered.”

The Lennons jetted back to London, where their lawyers advised them to get a legal writ of custody in the same court where the original divorce had been granted in the Virgin Islands, a U.S. possession. Late that August they flew to the Virgin Islands, where an attorney entered a plea for a custody order, which was summarily granted. Now all they had to do was collar Tony Cox. Cox had now reportedly moved to America. Cox’s move to the U.S. was to their great advantage, for the writ obtained in the Virgin Islands was good only on U.S. territory. This meant, of course, that in order to continue the search for Kyoko, the Lennons would have to move to America themselves.

John was delighted at the prospect of moving to New York. He wasn’t very much liked at home, and he had recently begun what would be a long-term love affair with Manhattan. Since his visit to Los Angeles for primal therapy, the United States Department of Immigration had let up on him and was allowing him into the country on a temporary basis. On these numerous trips to New York, John met with Jonas Mekas, the dean of underground filmmakers, and made several films. One, called
Up Your Legs,
consisted of a camera pan of bare legs up to a bare behind. Three hundred volunteers were assembled to be photographed, and John met a whole spectrum of New York society, including actor George Segal and artist Larry Rivers. He was suddenly exposed to a whole new cast of characters, more artists, poets, musicians, and assorted loonies in one single city than in all of Great Britain. In John’s two-part
Rolling Stone
“Working Class Hero” interview, he virtually spouts odes to New York. “America is where it’s at. I should have been born in New York. I should have been born in the Village, that’s where I belong. Why wasn’t I born there? Paris was ‘it’ in the eighteenth century. London—I don’t think had ever been ‘it’ except literary-wise when Wilde and Shaw and all of them were there. New York was ‘it.’ I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. That’s where I should have been… this is where it’s happening…”

At the end of August 1971, John’s immigration lawyers had arranged a six-month visitor’s visa for John, and in September he arrived in New York to settle. He checked into the St. Regis Hotel for a few weeks until he rented a brownstone apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. He was never to see England again.

By the time John and Yoko
moved to Manhattan, I was already living in New York in my position as president of the Robert Stigwood Organization. RSO, as it was known, had become as diversified and sprawling as Apple had been, and in many ways it was much more successful. There was an RSO recording label, which featured many RSO-managed acts, including the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton; there was a TV division that produced “Movies of the Week” and licensed such American TV shows as “Sanford and Son” and “All in the Family”; a stage division produced
Jesus Christ Superstar and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
for the theater; and a film company produced the movies of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Tommy
while I was with the company. As the chief operating officer in America I traveled extensively between Los Angeles and London, but I considered New York my new home, and I took an apartment there overlooking the park on Central Park West. I remained a close friend to all of the Beatles, particularly John and Paul, and saw all of them frequently as they passed through the city.

Life in New York held great promise for John and Yoko. New people. A chance at starting over, a city where you could be anonymous if you wanted to be, even if you were John Lennon. A place where the press would leave him alone if he didn’t call attention to himself. John was also in a vulnerable position in America. He was an already controversial figure with many illegal vices and addictions. He was allowed into the United States only by the good graces of the Bureau of Immigration, even though he was a convicted pot felon. So what does John do? Sit back and keep his mouth shut so he can look for Yoko’s kid?

John took on the U.S. Government. He became, overnight, one of the most vocal political activists in the country, a powerful and feared rock and roll rabble-rouser. It wasn’t John’s fault, it was just the Next Big Thing.

The Next Big Thing happened “right off the boat,” as John put it. “I landed in New York,” John explained, “and the first people to get in touch with me were Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. It’s as simple as that. It’s those two famous guys from America callin’, ‘Hey, yeah, what’s happenin‘, what’s goin’ on?…’ And the next thing you know, I’m doin’ John Sinclair benefits and one thing and another. I’m pretty movable as an artist, you know. They almost greeted me off the plane and the next minute I’m
involved
.”

John forgot to mention that “those two famous guys from America” were also two of the most rabid political activists in the United States. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had gained international fame as two of the convicted members of the “Chicago Seven,” the group that was blamed for disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Hoffman and Rubin were aggressive, unattractive, and intentionally aggravating at every turn. In retrospect they may seem absolutely benign, but at the time they were an alarming example of radicalism for the so-called “Silent Majority” and considered a direct threat to national security by the Nixon administration.

John was just ripe for this far left, publicity-conscious brand of politics. His personal failure in his peace endeavors with Yoko had hardened his line. His early vision of a pacifist revolution—“All You Need Is Love” or “Imagine”—was slipping into a more active mold. The public had already tasted this new, aggressive political stance in a single released that spring called “Power to the People,” a proletarian anthem that begins with a chorus of marching feet. Politics was also one of John’s ways of struggling with being rich. In a sense, being rich to John was selling out. He was by instinct part socialist, part right-wing Archie Bunker; to be an indolent, wealthy rock star would have made him feel guilty as sin. Yet the passionate politician he was to become was also a phoney pose, possessed with the guilty enthusiasm of a hypocrite. Years later John would disclaim the radicalism of this period, saying that an ideological breach between him and the other activists existed from the start, but if this was John’s attitude at the time, it was impossible to tell by his actions.

John threw himself into the world of radical causes with all the enthusiasm he had poured into previous Next Big Things. The mayor of the East Village, David Peel, who sang “The Pope Smokes Dope,” threw a Welcome-to-New York parade for John and Yoko through the streets, singing “You also met an underground, welcome to a freaky town.” They began hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, a once superhip club patronized by Andy Warhol that had turned into the home of underground rock, where John began practicing with an unknown band called Elephants Memory. They set up command headquarters in the bedroom of their Bank Street apartment and turned it into a salon for the leaders of every potentially unpleasant political and social cause in America. No matter how far-out you were, John and Yoko would embrace you. They did all their business from bed, and they quite literally invited the diminutive Jerry Rubin into bed with them, right in front of a delighted reporter. “You should be a member of the band,” John told Rubin. “If you’re gonna work with us, you should play music with us.”

Under Hoffman and Rubin’s tutelage, John “came out” politically. In October he appeared at a protest on behalf of the American Indian’s civil rights; in November he appeared at the Attica Relatives Benefit at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for the relatives of the men in the bloody prison riots. He wrote guest columns for an underground magazine called
Sundance
and made the trip all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to appear at a John Sinclair rally. Sinclair, founder of the White Panthers, had been given ten years in jail for selling two joints to an undercover cop. John also wrote for the
Gay Liberation Book
and spoke out to the press loudly in support of Angela Davis, the accused murderer and Black Panther leader.

Then John made a near-fatal mistake; he took on the paranoid Nixon White House directly. Rubin and Hoffman were working on a master plan for a demonstration at the Republican National Convention, which was going to be held in San Diego in the summer of 1972. Rubin and Hoffman intended to sponsor a rock concert, which they hoped would draw upwards of 300,000 antiwar demonstrators, bringing the convention to a standstill. Of course, gathering a few hundred thousand war demonstrators together, convention or not, wasn’t going to be easy without a big-name drawing card for the rock concert.

Enter superstar John Lennon.

In the autumn of 1971 John and Yoko attended a meeting about such a concert to be held in San Diego. Present at the meeting were Rubin, Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and John Sinclair. Says John, “When they described their plans, we [he and Yoko] just kept looking at each other. It was the poets and the straight politicals divided. Ginsberg was with us. He kept saying, ‘What are we trying to do, create another Chicago?’ That’s what they wanted. We said, ‘We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence—so you can overthrow
what?
—and replace it with
what?
”

But if John and Yoko refused at the time to go along with the plan, that wasn’t the way it was reported to the press. According to John, it was Jerry Rubin’s fault for blabbing about the concert to
Rolling Stone,
which published a small piece about it. John was angry with Rubin for announcing his presence at the concert, but he never denied his participation, and thus he gave the plot his tacit consent.

The Nixon administration immediately labeled John a threat and set about to remove him from the country. In January of 1972 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee researched and wrote a classified memo on John Ono Lennon and his wife. It was six paragraphs long and delivered to Senator Strom Thurmond. It listed all of John’s activist causes and his alliances with Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, Leslie Bacon, Jay Craven, and “others.” The memo stated that “This group has been strong advocates of the program to ‘dump Nixon.’ They have devised a plan to hold rock concerts in various primary election states for the following purposes: to obtain access to college campuses; to stimulate eighteen-year-old registration; to press legislation to legalize marijuana; to finance their activities; and to recruit persons to come to San Diego during the Republican National Convention in August 1972 … Davis and his cohorts intend to use John Lennon as a drawing card to promote the success of the rock festivals and rallies. The source feels that this will pour tremendous amounts of money into the coffers of the New Left and can only inevitably lead to a clash between a controlled mob organized by this group and law enforcement officials in San Diego. The source felt that if Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategy counter-measure.”