John Lennon: The Life (101 page)

A
particular memory of the Japanese trip was to haunt Yoko in years to come. One day, leafing through a magazine, John happened on an old photograph of her maternal great-grandfather, Zenjiro Yasuda. Since the deal had always been that they talked only about his family, he knew nothing of the great Zenjiro, the Emperor’s de facto banker, who enjoyed national fame at a pop-star level half a century before such things were dreamed of. Nor had Yoko herself ever put together the several ways in which Zenjiro’s life paralleled John’s—coming from the north of the country, being a musician and poet as well as a moneymaking phenomenon, having his portrait hung in homes and workplaces as an inspiration to others, always insisting on full partnership with his tiny but dynamic wife. Though Yoko did not learn this until much later, Zenjiro even had the same birthday as John. The only thing which, seemingly, marked him as from a different culture and more dangerous times was his fate at the hands of a young man professing to be his admirer.

John was fascinated by Zenjiro’s photograph, which—especially since his conversion to Japanese clothes and manners—seemed to bear a more than passing likeness to himself. “That’s me in a former life,” he told Yoko.

“Don’t say that,” she replied. “He was assassinated.”

A
ccording to legend, John spent the next three years as a virtual recluse walled up in the Gothic heights of the Dakota building, increasingly bereft of self-confidence or self-reliance and prone to weird fancies and delusions calculatedly fed to him by his wife. Like most legends, it has grains of truth, or half-truth. But overall, this vision of rock ’n’ roll’s answer to Howard Hughes is flatly contradicted by his real friends, as opposed to former employees with axes to grind.

“A recluse? Well, yes and no,” Bob Gruen says. “The kind of recluse that can go to Bermuda or Long Island when he feels like it. Some people who stay at home are kinda pack-rats among their magazines. But John had a nice big expanse live in. He could take a half-a-block walk inside his home. There’s a lot of places where the corner news stand is a shorter walk away than his kitchen was from his bedroom. It’s true he sometimes didn’t go out for days at a time,
but that didn’t mean he was cloistered like a hermit. If ever I called him up, he always asked me to stop by.”

Elliot Mintz, his confidant and minder during the Lost Weekend, remained close to him and Yoko, and spent long hours with them at the Dakota. “There certainly were moments in those years when John wasn’t exactly the life of the party,” Mintz says. “He had his mood swings, as he always did, but for most of the time he was in good spirits. One certainly could never have called him a depressive. In general he seemed happy with the more modest, moderate way of life he’d chosen.”

Much of the time he devoted to child care, determined to be there for Sean as his own father had not been for him—and as he had similarly neglected to be for his firstborn. Anyone who has looked after a child knows how totally it revolutionizes one’s life and changes ones ideas of what is and is not important. Where once John had demanded novelty and diversion every other moment, his existence now became an unchanging cycle of mealtimes, bath-times, and bedtimes—much like the routine his Aunt Mimi had once built around him—the days crowded, demanding, often joyful and triumphant, but with little or nothing to differentiate them once they had gone.

In other ways, he took care to make his regime the opposite of Mimi’s. Remembering—still bitterly—how she used to raid his bedroom and throw away his drawings and writings, he treated every creative effort by Sean with the reverence due a Rembrandt. “Even if he makes a paint mark on a napkin, I keep it, I save it,” visitors like Gruen and Mintz were told. “It’s Sean. It’s part of him.” As the little boy learned to talk, he was initiated into John’s world of comic voices and names, and recollections from the country named England they were going to visit together someday, though a certain epoch was never mentioned. One day while visiting a friend, Sean happened to see
Yellow Submarine
on TV. Afterward, he came running back into the apartment and shouted, “Daddy…were you a Beatle?”

At that time, the great fear on both John’s and Yoko’s minds was that Sean might be kidnapped. Despite the Dakota’s stout defenses, it was not impregnable; now and then, an intruder managed to evade the copper-boxed sentry at the front gate, slip past the well-staffed in
ternal reception desk, get into the right wood-paneled elevator, and reach the hallway outside apartment 72. However, late-seventies paparazzi were nowhere near as ruthless in hounding celebrities, and celebrities’ children, as they would later become. No press pictures of Sean appeared until he was well into toddlerhood.

When it came time for the nanny to take over, John would retire into his and Yoko’s bedroom overlooking the park and put on a bathrobe or Japanese kimono, content for “Mother” to wear the pants. In contrast with adjoining rooms, the décor here was simple, even spartan. The bed was a plain king-size mattress rigged between a pair of old wooden church pews. On the wall above the headboard pew hung a state-of-the-art “bodyless” electric guitar, a large number 9, and a dagger made from a Civil War–era kitchen knife intended, so he said, “to cut away the bad vibes…to cut away the past symbolically.” Visitors were not allowed to come around to his side of the bed, a sacred area where he kept his writing and drawing materials, his Gitane packs and ashtray.

At the foot of the bed was a Sony giant-screen TV set that he’d seen in Japan and had specially imported long before they were available in New York. As always, this was left permanently on at low volume, the murmur of newscasts scarcely distinguishable from that of weather forecasts, game shows, movies, and soaps. With it was one of the new videotape players and a stock of tapes, mostly classic movies and comedy shows from England like
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
and
Fawlty Towers
. (He often said he’d rather have been one of the Monty Python team than a Beatle.) The room was equipped with a five-button telephone console that never rang, only winked with soundless red lights as calls were directed elsewhere in the apartment. Half-watching, half-listening, reading, writing, doodling, he might have lost track of time altogether but for the changing treetops outside, from winter skeletons to frothy springtime pink and white, from summer’s green to the blazing reds and russets of autumn.

Despite his pact with Yoko, and his duty to Sean, he had not cut himself off completely from music making, as he would one day claim. The apartment was full of expensive sound equipment, much of it not working properly, some not even unpacked from its cartons.
“John was always buying the latest high-tech stuff, but he never had the patience to follow the assembly manuals, and always had to call in a studio engineer to put it together for him,” Elliott Mintz remembers. “Basically he didn’t really like listening to stuff in stereo or quadraphonic, because they weren’t what he’d grown up with. He used to wear a badge—as did Phil Spector—saying
I PREFER IT IN MONO
.”

On the table beside his bed was a cheap cassette tape recorder on which he was always roughing out new songs, or revisiting old ones, with guitar or piano accompaniment, as well as extemporizing comedy routines or simply talking to himself in the thick northern accent of his childhood music-hall favorite Al Read. Dozens of Lennon compositions and performances were put on tape, some mere fragments, others fully formed, with all the power and charm of his greatest past. One told how he had been “saved by a TV preacher” after a black mood of depression that made him seriously contemplate jumping from his seventh-floor window. Another, entitled “Free As a Bird,” might have been prompted by Central Park’s grimy sparrows, possibly by memories of Liverpool’s Liver Birds. Yet another was a loving recreation of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”

In his retreat, he was not at all averse to being compared with Howard Hughes, particularly since the title of world’s richest, most enigmatic recluse was currently up for grabs. Hughes had died in 1976, the cause of his resignation from the human race still unexplained, his fabulous wealth unable to save him from an end of awesome loneliness, squalor, and neglect. Elliot Mintz, who had studied his life extensively, lent John several books about him, and they often discussed the myriad Hughes phobias and obsessions—the terror of germs that made him wear Kleenex tissue boxes on his feet; his refusal to cut his hair or nails or to take any nourishment but sips of soup or ice cream; his fixation on a single film,
Ice Station Zebra
, which he would watch in his darkened, disinfected hotel suite on an endless loop.

But the analogy never really stood up. Whereas Hughes was terrified of human contact, John saw people and interacted with them every day. Whereas Hughes’s mental processes were a mystery, John maintained a constant flow of correspondence with Aunt Mimi and
his British family, and notes and memoranda to his staff. He also began to keep a journal again, in a series of leather-bound
New Yorker
desk diaries, recording his new quiet domestic life as scrupulously as he previously had his West Coast bachelor spree. Whereas Hughes lurked in eternal twilight, John was constantly out and about, both the city and the world. Though he failed to keep a promise to his cousin Liela to return to Britain in 1976, the green card continued to get plenty of exercise. In July 1978, he flew Yoko and Sean by private jet for a holiday on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman. He made a second trip with them to Japan that August, and a third and—and final—one in the same month the following year.

Through his son, indeed, he was more connected to ordinary people and things than at any time since before the Beatles became famous. Several times a week, he took Sean swimming at the Y—the YMCA on West Sixty-sixth Street—preferring the cheery clamor of its pool to the many luxury hotel spas within easy reach. Rather than pay an instructor, he taught Sean to swim himself, making him totally confident in the water by the age of four. “John used to tell me, ‘That’s the one thing he’ll always remember,’” Yoko says. “His Dad taught him to swim like a fish.”

He was also often to be seen pushing Sean’s buggy or arm in arm with Yoko in the meadows and dells of the great garden outside his door. After decades as a virtual no-go area, Central Park had been opened up by the new crazes for jogging, cycling, and skating, and John made full use of it. His thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth birthdays, and Sean’s third and fourth, were celebrated by lavish parties at the parkside restaurant, Tavern on the Green, whose owner, Warner LeRoy, was his downstairs neighbor at the Dakota.

He became a familiar figure on nearby Columbus Avenue, where he would take Sean for pizza or breakfast at a coffee shop named La Fortuna. A favorite afternoon outing was to go down to Columbus Circle and along Central Park South to the Plaza Hotel, where shrieking crowds had besieged the newly arrived Beatles back in 1964, and have afternoon tea in its venerable Palm Court. Whenever he arrived, the string quartet would strike up “Yesterday,” blissfully unaware that it was a Lennon-McCartney song in which he’d had no
hand whatsoever. Occasionally someone would stop him and say, “Aren’t you John Lennon?” “I get told that a lot,” John would reply, or sometimes, “I wish I had his money.”

Even during his longest homebound periods, the Dakota apartment never resembled any habitat of Howard Hughes. “There were always people around—assistants, psychics, tarot card readers, masseurs, maids, acupuncturists, odd-job people,” Mintz says. “I believe there was one man whose sole job was keeping the brass doorknobs bright. Going from his bedroom to the kitchen for John was often like going through a subway station.”

The kitchen was his other main comfort zone, a cavernous white inner space almost immune to noise from the street. His personal whims and fancies were everywhere, from the long, country-style table—like the one at Tittenhurst Park—to refrigerators with glass doors, so he could see what was inside without the trouble of opening them. On one wall was a painting of him, Yoko, and Sean, dressed in Superman costumes and soaring upward, hand in hand. Though he took no illegal drugs beyond the occasional “smoke” or magic mushroom, he remained as addicted to acrid French tobacco as ever. The kitchen was the haunt of three cats, Sasha, Misha, and Charo, respectively white, black, and brindled, who would all bound forward to greet John, rub themselves around his legs, and compete to curl on his knees. Calf’s liver, bought for them from chic uptown butchers at $8 per pound, would often be cooking on the stove, its odor a Proustian memory of Aunt Mimi and Mendips.

Another surprising new pastime developed after both John and Yoko suffered a severe bout of gastric flu, then went on a liquids-only diet for forty days. “John’s way of keeping on the diet was reading cookbooks and fantasizing about the recipes,” Bob Gruen remembers. “He channeled all his craving for food into these amazing fantasies of dishes he’d never heard of, learning how to prepare them and what’s good for you and what’s not. Up to then, he’d always thought getting a bowl of cornflakes was cooking, and, being English, he could make a cup of tea. Yoko was a good cook but suddenly, after reading all these books, John got into it, too. I was at the apartment one night with my son, Chris, and he did a baked fish with steamed rice and vegetables that was really delicious.”

Tormented by scents of warm bread during his diet, he even tried his hand at baking. When the first loaf came out of the oven, perfectly shaped, with an authentic golden-brown crust, he took a Polaroid snapshot of it, feeling he deserved as much applause as for any record (“I thought, ‘Well, Jesus…don’t I get a gold watch or knighted or nothing?’”) For a time he prepared lunch every day, not only for Sean and Yoko but for their whole staff, feeding as many as ten or twelve around the long kitchen table. “The novelty of that wore off rather quickly,” Mintz remembers. “He realized he was just turning himself into a galley-slave.”

Finding himself such a good father to his second son inevitably made John want to be a better one to his first. The uncomfortable hiatus that had lasted since the final months of the Lost Weekend was broken in 1977, when Julian came from England to spend Christmas at the Dakota. A gangling fourteen-year-old in outsize glasses, he had gained little in resilience or self-confidence meanwhile, and arrived full of understandable forebodings. There continued to be little natural warmth between him and Yoko, for whom he was not only a potential rival for Sean but a reminder of her lost daughter. However, John was determined to establish a relationship that would not be broken again, and he seemed well on the way to succeeding. Central Park, that holiday season, lay under a thick fall of snow. Plunging downhill with him on a toboggan, Julian, too, seemed to have the perfect dad at last.

There was to be no corresponding thaw between John and Julian’s mother. In June 1978, Cynthia Lennon published her autobiography,
A Twist of Lennon
(so titled because her third husband’s surname was Twist). Written on a typewriter that Yoko had given Julian, the book was not recriminatory, ending with a quotation from the I Ching: “No blame.” Even so, when John read an advance extract in the
News of the World
, he began legal moves to suppress it for “breach of marital confidence.” The case reached the Appeal Court in London before being thrown out by Britain’s most senior judge, Lord Denning. “It is as plain as it can be,” said Denning, “that the relationship of these parties has ceased to be a private affair.”