The Love You Make (66 page)

“Oh hello,” John said coyly, smiling. “Were you here tonight?”

Yoko smiled back at him as if she were still very much in love.

May Pang, dressed in black from head to toe, like an oriental leopard, sat in a corner of the dressing room and watched her job and relationship ending before her eyes. “Nobody likes to see their situation disappearing,” Yoko says diplomatically.

John’s return to the Dakota was not immediate. Two more months of bartering and demands between them were necessary, during which he spent Christmas at Disneyworld in Florida with May Pang and Julian. Some of the agreements they came to during this period were old promises, ones that somehow had to stick this time; no drugs, no drinking, a healthy diet. The last prerequisite was that John give up smoking his Gitanes. He went to a hypnotist for this, and the snide joke in Beatles circles was that Yoko had John hypnotized into coming back to her. But nothing could have been further from the truth. John started smoking again, but he and Yoko will always be together in history. As of this writing May Pang is a secretary at a record company.

In one of his last interviews, John told Barbara Graustark, a
Newsweek
magazine reporter, that “[a] baby thinks that when you go out of the room you vanish … the moment that overwhelmed me, that I couldn’t get through to [Yoko] on the phone, it was overwhelming—I just felt completely out there… It described that situation, too, of being kicked out of the nest and being dead. Or being not connected is like being dead. There’s that difference—being alone and being lonely is two different things. Something I’ve learned in the past ten years. What I did in the past ten years was rediscover that I was John Lennon before the Beatles, and after the Beatles, and so be it.”

chapter Twenty-one

When John finally returned home
to the Dakota he was completely detoxified. He and Yoko went on a forty-day liquid fast to cleanse their bodies. John emerged whippet-thin but strong. For the most part, it was the end of his drug use. Grateful to be back in the womb, he was just as anxious for Yoko to take over in her role as earth-mother. Yoko consulted a Chinese acupuncturist who put them on a diet of fish and rice, gave them acupuncture treatments, and promised that if Yoko followed his regimen, she would become pregnant again, although she was now forty-two. John was only home a few days when, just as predicted, Yoko became pregnant early in 1975. John had been planning to return to the studios to record a new album, but when Yoko told him this last chance at parenthood together had blessed them, he changed his mind. He arrived home from the studios one night and said, “I’ve got a surprise for you, Mummy.” They had taken to calling each other Mother and Father upon John’s return.

“What is it, Daddy?” Yoko asked him.

“I’m going to cancel the new album and stay home with you while you’re pregnant.”

“Oh, goooood, Daddy!” Yoko said.

This was the beginning of what was to evolve into John’s “househusband” stage. The doctors insisted that Yoko have complete bedrest, and John took care of her from morning to night. When she had to leave the bed, John pushed her around the Dakota in a wheelchair. He took over all the household chores and began running the kitchen.

It was during Yoko’s pregnancy that John’s long immigration battle with the government came to a triumphant end. The Nixon White House, embroiled in Watergate, had already fallen. On John’s return to New York that previous summer, his lawyers had applied to U.S. District Court Judge Richard Owens for permission to see his confidential immigration files. In his affidavit John claimed, “I have been the subject of illegal surveillance activities on the part of the government; that as a result my case and the various applications filed in my behalf have been prejudged for reasons unrelated to my immigration status.” But the Department of Immigration lawyers insisted that John’s files were privileged information.

In December of 1974
Rolling Stone
magazine printed a revelatory article, in which the dirty mechanics of John’s deportation saga were described in detail for the first time. Encouraged by this, John began attending court hearings himself, fighting for his own cause for the first time. He even cut his hair short and wore a tie to the courtroom. In June of 1975 John’s lawyers lodged a suit against former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell and former U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, charging that deportation actions they took against him were improper.

On October 7, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the order to deport John Lennon. In a thirty-page ruling, the court noted that “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream.”
³⁸

Two days later, at one in the morning, on John’s thirty-fifth birthday, Yoko went into premature labor and had to be rushed to the hospital, where she went into convulsions. John stayed by her side through the night, as they kept her alive with transfusions. Late that morning she gave birth to a healthy, eight-pound, ten-ounce baby boy. They named him Scan Ono Lennon.

Sean Lennon gave John renewed hope; here was a tiny mortal through whom he could recreate his own life, solve all the mysteries, and soothe all the hurt of his own childhood. Baby Sean became the Next Big Thing, one of the few that would never fail him. John gave himself over to Sean’s childhood. “I wanted to give five solid years of being there all the time,” he said. “I hadn’t seen my first son, Julian, grow up … I was not there for his childhood at all. I was on tour. And
my
childhood was something else. I don’t know what price one has to pay for inattention to children. And if I don’t give him attention from zero to five, then I’m damn well gonna have to give it from sixteen to twenty, because it’s owed, it’s like the law of the universe.”

John woke each morning at six to get the household chores started and to fix Sean and Yoko’s breakfast. He cared for the child all day and bathed with him at night. As the boy got older they had romps in the park, and John fretted over his diet. He began the boy’s education by answering all his questions, tenderly and carefully. Sean was showered with all the love and attention and material comforts a child could want. He even had Elton John as a godfather.

As John started to learn how to bake bread, Yoko gravitated to the business end of things. Yoko turned out to be a canny investor and formidable negotiator. She dug into the Beatles’ various lawsuits and negotiated a reported five-million-dollar settlement with Allen Klein. Klein credits this completely to Yoko’s diplomacy; but there were also times when Yoko very undiplomatically wore Arab costumes to a meeting with six Jewish lawyers. Yoko also made a series of profitable, if sometimes peculiar, investments. She began buying up apartments in the Dakota as they became available, until they owned five of the choicest layouts in the building. They opened up a production office in a professional office on the ground floor, called Lennono Music. Yoko went to work here every day in an office with a ceiling painted in blue clouds. Yoko also purchased a 316-acre farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, along with homes in Japan, Oyster Bay, Long Island, and Palm Beach. She also invested in cattle, and one of their cows sold on the auction block for a record-breaking $250,000. John’s worth soared to $250,000,000 under Yoko’s guidance.

Yoko’s business acumen was a combination of street smarts, guts, and the forces of magic. Yoko had always been very into astrology, numerology, psychics and mediums, but never more so than at this period. Everywhere she turned, the psychics all saw trouble ahead. “They said that John had lots of bad luck,” Yoko said, “and we needed to give him all the luck we could.” This luck came in the form of “directional moves.” Yoko, like a sorceress with a formula for a spell, would send John around the world in forty-eight hours or tell him he had to be 1,843 miles to the northeast, or sometimes she would send him to a specific spot. They spent four months in Japan in the Hotel Okura’s Presidential Suite on such a directional trip, while John waited impatiently till the numbers and spirits said it was good luck to go home.

Yoko talked of one such trip, to Flong Kong and Macao. “I knew that astrologically, directionwise, Hong Kong was a good trip, that it would put him in the best possible position, so I told him to go, alone.”

John said. “Really? By myself? Hong Kong? Singapore? … I hadn’t done anything by myself since I was twenty. I didn’t know how to call for room service, check into a hotel…”

John arrived in his hotel room in Hong Kong in a state of high anxiety at being so isolated and so far from Yoko and Sean. “So sitting in this room,” he said, “taking baths, which I’d noticed Yoko do, and women do, every time I got nervous, I took a bath. It’s a great female trick … I must have had forty baths … and I’m looking out over the Hong Kong bay, and there’s something that’s like ringing a bell, it’s like what is it? And then I just got very, very relaxed. And it was like a recognition. God! It’s me! This relaxed person is me. I remember this guy from way back when! This feeling is from way, way, way back when. I know what the fuck I’m doing! I know who I am—it doesn’t rely on any outside agency or adulation, Or nonadulation, or achievement or nonachievement, or hit record or no hit record. Or anything.”

This epiphany—so long overdue—brought John tremendous peace and relief. For the first time, he experienced serenity and confidence in the future. He didn’t have to prove himself anymore; the pressure was off him; he could create when he felt like it and become the public persona of John Lennon at times and the househusband at others. “The feeling in the music business,” John said later, “is that you don’t exist if you’re not in the gossip columns, or on the charts, or at Xenon with Mick Jagger or Andy Warhol. I just wanted to remember that I existed at all.”

At this point John and Yoko became frantically private, almost secretive. They drifted apart from many of their friends and acquaintances. Those who were loyal understood and waited patiently for an unexpected phone call, others were insulted and went away angry. When not living in some hotel room on a “directional trip,” John spent almost all of his time in the bedroom of their apartment at the Dakota. This room was decorated all in white, with white stereo speakers, a white “staircase to nowhere” leading into a blank wall, and a white, king-size bed. The only other furniture in the room was a wicker chair for Yoko on her side of the bed. John’s side of the bed was his little inner sanctum, with his ashtray and cigarettes and a Sony Stratocaster TV set that was inevitably always turned on.

The summer of 1980 John took a “directional trip” to Bermuda. He enjoyed it so much he asked Yoko to send Sean, who arrived with a nanny. One day John and Sean were strolling through the Botanical Gardens, when John noticed a lovely, white flower called “Double Fantasy.” The pretty name inspired him to write a song, and back in his hotel room, he called Yoko and played it for her over the phone. She said she had been writing a song also, and she played it for him. Suddenly John decided that they would make an album together, his first in nearly six years. Yoko was thrilled at the prospect and set about making a recording deal with a major company for them. On the eve of John’s fortieth birthday, they signed a deal with Geffen Records to distribute the album, and John spent the early fall at the Record Plant studios recording the
Double Fantasy
album.

The release of the album was greeted by a flurry of publicity and renewed interest in John and Yoko.
Newsweek
did a special interview with them,
Playboy
asked them to be the interview of their big Christmas issue, and
Esquire
did a cover story. The single from the album, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was headed right for the top of the charts. The album itself was fresh, upbeat, and critically well received. John was so pleased with the response that he returned almost immediately to the studios to work on a new single, “Walking on Thin Ice.” Things couldn’t have been more perfect. His career had had an unexpected resurgence, he loved his wife and his child, and he felt at peace with himself. For a brief moment, it looked as if John had everything he wanted.

On October 23, 1980,
as “(Just Like) Starting Over” was shooting to the top of the record charts, a twenty-five-year-old security guard named Mark David Chapman signed out of his job at a high-rise condominium in Honolulu. The name he signed was “John Lennon.” Later that day he called his employment counselor and quit his job. “Are you looking for something else?” she asked him.

“No,” Mark said, “I already have a job to do.”

On the surface, Mark Chapman was just like millions of other kids who had worshipped John Lennon and the Beatles while growing up. There was no way of telling that one day he was to split apart and become two people, himself and John Lennon, and then feel the compulsion to reduce the number to one again. Chapman fit the psychological profile of many presidential assassins. They are men of low self-esteem, bitterly disappointed with their lives. They attach themselves to heroes with what historian Christopher Lasch has called “a deadly intimacy,” first as a fan, then as an imitator, inevitably as a killer.

Chapman was born on May 10, 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of a retired air force sergeant, but he grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, where his father worked as a credit manager at an Atlanta bank. Chapman was an average, quiet teenager, whose interests ranged from flying saucers to the Beatles. He loved the Beatles, much to his parents’ distress, and grew his hair long and learned to play the guitar. In high school he joined a local band and worked as a camp counselor at the South DeKalb branch of the YMCA. His aspiration was to become a YMCA director.

Then in 1969 Chapman underwent a radical transformation. Introduced to psychedelic drugs in high school, he took every kind of hallucinogen he could get his hands on, often having bad trips. His parents tried to put a stop to it, but it only ended up with Chapman running away for two weeks. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped, and Chapman became a fifteen-year-old Jesus freak. He sold his Beatles records, cut off his long hair, put on a white shirt and black tie, and wore a large wooden cross around his neck. His friends remember him spouting passages from the Bible, which he now carried around with him. At school he spent free periods studying the Bible, and at prayer meetings Chapman once renounced the Beatles because John Lennon had once said they were more popular than Jesus. The song “Imagine” became one of the prayer group’s pet peeves, and they sang it with the lyrics, “Imagine John Lennon was dead.”