John Lennon: The Life (103 page)

Once Yoko had cared little about clothes; now her appetite for couture astonished even the famously spendthrift Elton John. “[She] has a refrigerated room just for keeping her fur coats,” Elton reported after visiting the Dakota. “She’s got rooms full of the clothes-racks like you see at Marks and Spencer. She makes me look ridiculous. I buy things in twos and threes, but she buys them in fifties.” Special friend that he was, he could even publicly lampoon John’s most famous lyric without chilling his welcome:

Imagine six apartments

It isn’t hard to do.

One is full of fur coats

The other’s full of shoes.

 

The same antimaterialist anthem cropped up one day when John was grumbling about the expense of his burgeoning empire to Neil Aspinall. “Imagine no possessions, John,” Neil reminded him. “It’s only a bloody song,” he retorted.

The Dakota having been being thoroughly colonized, Yoko began looking for a base outside New York to which John and Sean could escape during the city’s arctic winters and scorching summers. Initially, the most promising location seemed to be Palm Beach, Florida, with its year-round sunshine, gorgeous beaches, and inaccessibility to all but the megarich. During March 1979, they vacationed at a rambling oceanfront mansion named El Solano, which had once belonged to the Vanderbilt family and which Yoko would eventually buy. “It was a beautiful old Art Deco place,” she says. “One room had
a high ceiling like a ballroom. John used to love just sitting at the window and looking out at the ocean.”

The large family group also included John’s son Julian and Yoko’s three young nieces, Reiko, Akiko, and Takako. Photographs of Julian during his visit show a boy clearly bewildered at being transplanted to Vanderbilt luxury from his mother’s small house in Ruthin, northern Wales. Nor do Yoko’s efforts to entertain him by demonstrating origami, Japanese paper folding, win his undivided attention. To celebrate his imminent sixteenth birthday, John chartered a yacht for a surprise party. Unfortunately, details of the event leaked out in advance and a group of young women began to circle the yacht in a speedboat with screams of “We love you, John!” forcing the jollifications to be cut short. This holiday would be the last time Julian ever saw his father.

As John’s retirement had never been formally announced, there was intense puzzlement among the international media as month after month, then year after year passed with no new single or album from him, no madcap new ideas to mock, no new controversies to pump up, no new witticisms to relish. Interview requests continued to pour into Studio One, all of them given the same polite turndown on notepaper crested by a line drawing of the Dakota. Clearly some statement needed to be made, and eventually it was, via a paid insertion in the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and other major newspapers, headed “A Love Letter from John and Yoko to People Who Ask Us What, When and Why.” This thanked people for their good vibes and for “respecting our quiet space” and said their silence was “a silence of love, not indifference.”

That fall of 1979, in addition to his written journal, John sat down with his cassette recorder and announced “Tape one in the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon.” The date was September 5, and he was waiting to accompany Yoko on an expedition to find a second home somewhere nearer to New York than Palm Beach. His initial intention seemed to be an exploration of childhood memories for the autobiography in David Niven mode he had mentioned to Bob Gruen. The tape begins with a description of 9 Newcastle Road, the terrace house near Penny Lane where he lived as a toddler with his
parents and grandparents—its redbrick facade, its formal front parlor, the picture of a horse-drawn carriage on the wall, which ended up at his Aunt Nanny’s home in Rock Ferry. He ponders about the first thing he can ever remember, decides it was “a nightmare,” then suddenly complains, “This is boring. I can’t be bothered doing it.”

Instead, he turns to the musician who, more than any other except Paul McCartney, kept him on his creative mettle during the Sixties. A new Bob Dylan album,
Slow Train Coming
, has just been released, saturated with Dylan’s new Christian consciousness. John finds its vocals “pathetic,” its lyrics “just embarrassing,” and mocks a particular track, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” for evoking cafeterias rather than churches. But his main feeling is one of relief that such old rivals no longer have the power they once did to goad and unsettle him.

Thoughts pop up at random, literary as well as musical: a recent piece by Truman Capote in Andy Warhol’s
Interview
magazine, a saying about George Bernard Shaw, worthy of
A Spaniard in the Works
, that “his brains went to his head.” A snatch of bagpipe music recalls boyhood stays in Edinburgh (“one of my favorite dreams”), the annual military display under the castle ramparts, and his emotion during the closing recital by a lone piper. He remarks how the freedom he always felt in Scotland—and has felt in Japan, also—came largely from being an anonymous foreigner. The current house hunting with Yoko, he admits, is an attempt to re-create Scotland “within an hour from New York.” But so far nothing has come close to the real place, which he intends to visit as soon as astrology and numerology permit. “In 1981, I’ll take Sean there,” he promises himself, “’cause that’s a good year to go.”

Thence to a memory that has lurked at the back of his mind for twenty-five years and been replayed to Yoko more times than she could count: “the time when I had my hand on my mother’s tit in number 1 Blomfield Road.” He recalls his fourteen-year-old self, lying beside Julia on her bed as she took a siesta in her black angora (or maybe cashmere) top and “dark green and yellow mottled skirt.” He still feels the electric thrill of their accidental contact, still wonders if he should have tried to go further and whether Julia would have allowed it.

The Truman Capote article in
Interview
also receives further attention. Later published in Capote’s essay collection
Music for Chameleons
, it features the gay author in nocturnal conversation with himself about his fatal addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sex. At one point there is a reminiscence of E. M. Forster, one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, who lived into his nineties but never became reconciled to homosexuality. Forster always hoped that when he reached old age, his sexual urges would vanish—but, instead, he told Capote, they seemed even more of a burden “I just thought ‘shit!’” John comments. “’cause I was always waiting for them to lessen. But I suppose it’s gonna go on for ever.”

Soon after making the tape, he did find himself in possession of a second home “an hour from New York” but otherwise as unlike his idealized memories of Scotland as could be. Cannon Hill was an extensive property in Cold Spring Harbor, a chic summer resort on the north shore of Long Island. The rambling wooden house dated from the eighteenth-century whaling era and took its name from the antique cannon embedded beside the swimming pool. With it went a private beach and dock, looking out on a panorama of motorboats, sailboats, and skiffs, much like the scene Aunt Mimi saw from her bungalow in faraway Poole.

Yoko was often too immersed in business matters to leave New York, so John’s most frequent companion on trips to Cold Spring Harbor with Sean would be his latest assistant, Fred Seaman. A journalism graduate from the City College of New York, discreet and cat-footed, Seaman bore an honored surname in the Lennons’ inner circle: his father, Eugene, was a concert pianist, his uncle Norman was a classical music promoter who had staged some of Yoko’s early performances, and his aunt Helen was Sean’s nanny. His own employment was allegedly clinched by the fact that John’s father had also been called Fred and had been a seaman—though the mariner in question was actually a steward, known then as Alf.

Anyone who stays in Cold Spring Harbor but doesn’t go sailing is liable to feel exceedingly left out. Despite never having sailed in anything smaller than a Mersey ferry, John decided it would be nice for Sean, and enlisted the help of a boatyard named Coneys Marine in
nearby Huntington. The owner’s young son, Tyler Coneys, recommended a fourteen-foot Javelin-class sailboat named
Isis
and offered a course of personal tuition. Learning to sail after a certain age is never easy, particularly for someone as physically indolent as John had always been. But Tyler Coney remembers how determinedly he set out to master practical skills, and how cheerfully he performed drudging chores that he’d spent his whole life avoiding. One day, on an outing with Sean and nanny Helen, Fred Seaman offered to steer and demonstrated the fallacy of his surname by promptly capsizing the boat. Fortunately, everyone was wearing life jackets, and Sean was quite comfortable in the water, thanks to all those swimming lessons at the Y. Even so, John made the whole crew swear not to tell Yoko.

Before long, he was confident and competent enough to sail the
Isis
without Tyler Coneys’s guardianship. Weeks of salt air and healthy exercise turned him lean and tanned, the picture of health in all but the Gitane drooping from his lips. Out in “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound,” as he found it called in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
, no one noticed the modest little sailboat bucking and tacking, or the anonymous, oilskin-clad figure with the little boy beside him. Other celebrities lived along the shore, including Louis Comfort Tiffany, the stained-glass artist, and the singer Billy Joel, whose hit ballad, “Just the Way You Are,” was a favorite of John’s. Identifying Joel’s all-glass mansion one day, he cupped his hands to his mouth seadog-style and shouted, “Billy—I have all your records!”

On October 9, he entered his fortieth year. The awful realization dawned that time no longer stretched ahead in unlimited quantities, that more of his life might be behind than ahead, that the weeks were starting to fly by like days used to do, the months like weeks used to, the years like months. He began to fret that Sean’s childhood was passing too quickly and that before he knew it, he’d no longer be needed to supervise bath-time, sing lullabyes, or tie up a little life jacket. “He used to say ‘When we’re 80, we’ll be in rocking-chairs, waiting for Sean’s postcards,’” Yoko remembers. He even speculated about what the two of them might do to fill the void in their lives
after Sean had gone away to college. One idea he often mentioned was to return to Britain and join the famous artists’ colony in the Cornish village of St. Ives.

He remained completely faithful to Yoko—so far as she knew, or wanted to. “There was one time when he and another guy went off together to the ocean. Later on, John was showing me photographs of the two of them and I said, ‘Wait a minute—someone else had to be there to take the photographs.’ He just laughed and said, ‘I can never get anything past you.’ Then he told me there had been a young girl, she had long hair and she was so passionate about art, she reminded him of me when we first met. Later on, I believe a letter came in to the office, but I never asked him about it.”

As middle age beckoned, he became increasingly nostalgic about his homeland, pining for British institutions and values he had once so angrily spurned. A strenuous outdoor weekend in Cold Spring Harbor would end with Sunday night back at the Dakota, watching
Masterpiece Theatre
on Channel 13, New York’s Public Broadcasting System channel. The plays were classic BBC serials, introduced by the veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke from a red leather buttonback armchair. With Yoko and the three cats, surrounded by the detritus of the
New York Times
’s mammoth Sunday edition, John would settle down to watch Robert Graves’s
I, Claudius
or Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
.

Another ritual, unflaggingly maintained, was the regular letters and phone calls to Aunt Mimi. “He used to write me pages and pages, pouring out his thoughts, and they had little drawings and bits of his silliness all over them,” Mimi remembered. “And always signed in the same way, ‘Himself.’” On the phone, he still liked to tease her with the thicko Liverpool accent, which turned
th
into
d
, reciting the Scouser’s litany “Dis, dem, dere” like some classical conjugation. Despite her financial dependence on him, aunt and nephew could still have furious rows. A dispute about the repainting of her bungalow, for instance, ended with Mimi shouting “Damn you, Lennon!” and slamming the receiver down. As she was still fuming to herself, the telephone rang. “You’re not still cross with me, Mimi, are you?” John’s voice said anxiously.

During one call, he suddenly asked for the chinaware that was her pride and joy when they lived together at Mendips: the Royal Worcester and Coalport teapots, teacups, and dinner plates, kept on display in the mock-Tudor front hall, never sullied by the tiniest speck of dust. “I sent him parcel after parcel of stuff,” she would remember. “He just seemed to want to have it all with him over there.” He also wanted the elegant Victorian wall clock from the morning room, its dial inscribed “George Toogood, Woolton Tavern,” on which his Uncle George (whose ancestors were Toogoods) had taught him to tell the time. Mimi even had to root out and pack up his once-hated uniform blazer from Quarry Bank High School, and his black-and-gold striped school tie. If ever obliged to wear a suit, he often set it off with the school tie half-unknotted and askew, as if baiting long-gone headmasters.

However he might pretend otherwise, it did occasionally get to him that Paul McCartney’s Wings were among the biggest stadium attractions in the world, that Paul’s “Mull of Kintyre” had sold more copies in the United Kingdom than the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” and that Paul’s “Yesterday” was overtaking Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” as the world’s most covered song. As usual, such insecurities struck coldest in the middle of the night. If Yoko were not already awake, he would rouse her, and they’d go into the huge white kitchen. “I would make tea, John would sit down, and the cats would all come to him. Whenever he was with a cat, sitting there and stroking its coat, he always looked just like Mimi.”