John Lennon: The Life (104 page)

As they sat there with the purring cats, the all-night Manhattan traffic a distant murmur, the picture of Mr., Mrs., and Baby Superman soaring up the wall, he would endlessly wonder just what magic facility it was that his old partner possessed and he did not. “He’d say, ‘They always cover Paul’s songs—they never cover mine,’” Yoko remembers. “I said to him, ‘You’re a good songwriter. It’s not just June-with-spoon that you write…. Most musicians would be a bit nervous about covering your songs.’” His one crumb of comfort was that all those vexatious cover versions might never have existed but for him. “He always said he’d had two great partnerships,” Yoko recalls. “One with Paul McCartney, the other with Yoko Ono, ‘And I
discovered both of them,’ he used to say. That isn’t bad going, is it?

Sometimes, Yoko recalls, she would awaken and find him crying, smitten by terror that she would die before he did—a logical thought because she was older. Once she heard him murmur in the darkness “Those bastards will throw you and Sean out on the street if I die and I don’t know what to do…”

New York had become progressively less violent during the seventies, but it still could not be called a safe place to live. A week after John’s thirty-ninth birthday, he and Yoko donated $1,000 to a fund for equipping the city’s police with bulletproof vests. In November, he made his will, appointing Sam Green as Sean’s guardian if Yoko should happen to have predeceased him. At year’s end, the Beatles old record producer, George Martin, happened to be in New York, and had dinner with John at the Dakota. They had not seen each other since the miserable
Let It Be
sessions in 1969 nor had they communicated since John’s belittlement of Martin in
Rolling Stone
magazine a year later. “Yoko quite tactfully kept out of the way for the whole evening, and we just reminisced about the good old times,” Martin remembers. “I tackled him about the
Rolling Stone
interview. I said, ‘What was all that shit about, John? Why?’ He said, ‘I was out of me head, wasn’t I?’ And that was as much of an apology as I got.

“He also said, ‘You know, George, if I could, I would record everything the Beatles did all over again.’ I blanched. ‘Blimey, John, rather you than me. Everything?’ He said, ‘Everything.’ I searched my mind for all the wonderful things we’d done, and said, ‘What about “Strawberry Fields”?’ He looked at me over his specs and said, ‘
Especially
“Strawberry Fields.” ’”

J
ohn celebrated New Year’s 1980 quietly at home. In the spare apartment next to number 72, he had decorated a room as what he called an “old-fashioned gentlemen’s club,” with an ancient leather couch and 1930s kitsch bought from downtown flea markets. The centerpiece was a bubble-topped Wurlitzer jukebox that Yoko had given him on his thirty-eighth birthday, stocked with big old 78 rpm records by all his favorite balladeers, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Guy Mitchell.

This so-called Club Dakota boasted just one other charter member: Elliot Mintz. On New Year’s Eve, John wrote Yoko a formal invitation to join them and had it delivered to her on a silver salver, accompanied by a white gardenia. She put on a black evening gown; he wore a secondhand tuxedo, set off by a white T-shirt and his Quarry Bank school tie. At midnight, they danced to “Auld Lang Syne” on the jukebox while Mintz took Polaroid snapshots, then the trio watched the fireworks burst like gunshots over Central Park.

The music business of 1980 was unrecognizable as the one John had left five years before. In Europe, it had been transformed by punk rock, a term first coined in New York during the early seventies but redefined by the mounting anger and nihilism of Britain’s youth as the decade progressed. This punk rock was an uprising against the smug grandiosity of “supergroups” like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer—a declaration of how it really felt to be a teenager amid endemic urban decay, inflation, and unemployment. Punk bands negated all the skill and musical ambition that had built up since
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, playing a version of early rock ’n’ roll whose sole appeal was its ferocious volume and aggression.

They had names that made that long-ago controversy over “Beatles” seem laughable—the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers, the Vibrators, the Damned. They and their followers, both male and female, wore their hair greased into asymmetric spikes or planed into fluorescent red or orange Mohawks, assembled their wardrobes from bondagefetishist catalogs and street-corner dumpsters, festooned themselves with murderous-looking chains and buckles, covered their generously exposed flesh with tattoos and pierced it with rings, studs, or outsize safety pins. Not since the Beatles’ arrival in 1963 had such raw energy coursed through the British charts, nor such screams of anguished disgust arisen from older generations. The Sex Pistols’ singer, Johnny Rotten, was said to have touched a new nadir by screaming abuse and even spitting at his audience, though customers of Hamburg’s Kaiskerkeller Club might have recollected something similar from another Johnny as early as 1960.

The triumph of feminism meant that females could move into the male preserve of fronting bands, and deal in equally uncensored aggression, subversion, and sexual explicitness. With their unkempt coiffures,
Bride of Frankenstein
makeup, and glass-splintering vocal attack, punk chanteuses made Yoko’s derided stage performances of the late Sixties look positively restrained. Back then, one of the kinder critical comments used to be that she “howled like a Banshee”; now the howlingest of the woman-led bands was named Siouxsie and the Banshees.

As punk in turn gave way to foppish “new romantics,” robotic synthesizer wizards, white ska and reggae, and pioneer rappers, most of the great rock names of yesteryear cowered in their châteaux like French aristocrats during the Terror. But one enjoyed the same charmed afterlife as ever. In December 1979, the BBC announced a “Beatles Christmas” on the nation’s TV screens, with showings of six of their films including the 1965 Shea Stadium concert and that erstwhile yuletide superflop,
Magical Mystery Tour
.

Newspapers full of new tattle about the Sex Pistols, the Specials, the Pretenders, or the Police still cleared headline space for yet another rumored Beatles reunion. Sid Bernstein, the promoter who had put them on at Carnegie Hall and Shea, took out regular full-page ads in the
New York Times
, offering more and yet more millions for what, even after all these years, would still be the hottest ticket on earth. Paul, George, and Ringo were reportedly not unamenable; the stumbling block was always said to be John. However, during the mid-seventies, an offer came in that even he could not refuse. “One guy wanted to pay something like $50 million for just one show,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “Paul was ready to do it, even though he was busy with Wings at the time, and when I told John, he said, ‘I’d stand on me head in the corner for that kind of money.’ But the promoter wanted rights to an album and a film as well, so it all fell through.”

When visions of dazzling wealth seemed unable to lure the ex-Beatles back together, appeals to their collective conscience took over. In September 1979, an international relief operation was launched for the refugees fleeing Communist-held Vietnam in armadas of leaky boats. Sid Bernstein put forward a plan for three Beatles concerts, in New York, Cairo, and Jerusalem, which would raise an estimated $500 million for the Vietnamese boat people and also be a significant peace gesture in the troubled Middle East. Despite his good relations with Bernstein—whom he frequently saw around Columbus Avenue—John felt unfairly pressured and accused the promoter of schmaltzily going down on one knee “like Al Jolson” to persuade him. He also pointed out, quite fairly, that every concert he and Yoko had given since the end of the Beatles had been for some good cause or other.

In December, the United Nations announced a relief program for victims of the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, renamed Kampuchea. Paul McCartney out-Bangladeshed George Harrison by organizing four Concerts for Kampuchea at London’s Hammersmith Odeon and a live album, featuring Wings, the Who, and Queen, along with punkish parvenus like the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, and the Clash. Once more, the media buzzed with expectation that the other ex-Beatles would join Paul onstage. But John would not pledge himself, even after a personal plea from the UN’s Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. The band had given the world their all for ten years, he said—and anyway if they tried performing together now after so long they would be “just four rusty old men.” Rumors that he was secretly watching the shows from the wings sent ticket prices sky-high, though unfortunately into the pockets of scalpers rather than Kampucheans. When a toy robot wobbled across the stage during Wings’ set, Paul took mild revenge for the Elton John Thanksgiving show by announcing, “It’s not John Lennon.”

The halo was soon to slip from the McCartney brow. On January 16, 1980, when he arrived in Japan to tour with Wings, customs officers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport discovered 219 grams (almost half a pound) of marijuana in Paul’s luggage. He was arrested, handcuffed, and held in custody for nine days before intense diplomatic efforts secured his release. John, who had been labeled a drug criminal despite never knowing the touch of handcuffs or spending a single night behind bars, was amazed by this atypical lapse in caution—and obscurely offended that it should happen on what he regarded as home ground. Paul and Linda had even been bound for the Hotel Okura, thus, he felt, threatening to spoil the karma of the place for Yoko and him.

Nor was this the only intrusion by a fellow Beatle on territory he regarded as his. Despite all his intentions to become a David Niven memoirist, George stole a march on him in August 1979 by publishing an autobiography. Entitled
I Me Mine
, it came in a lavish limited edition of two thousand leather-bound, slipcased copies, signed by the author, illustrated by facsimiles of handwritten song lyrics (complete with coffee stains and cigarette burns) and priced at an as
tounding £148. John was hurt and angered by the book, feeling it had barely mentioned everything he had been to George, and done for George, since 1957. “By glaring omission, my influence on [George’s] life is absolutely zilch and nil…. In his book which is purportedly this clarity of vision of each song he wrote, he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years…I was just left out as if I didn’t exist.” Actually, John receive eleven mentions, more than Paul, the Beatles, Eric Clapton, or even George’s second wife, Olivia.

Yoko’s forty-seventh birthday in February 1980 was celebrated by a trip back to the Palm Beach mansion El Solano, which by now had been added to their property portfolio. “When I woke up on my birthday morning, there was a gardenia beside my bed,” she remembers. “Another one was lying near the door, another one was outside the room, there was a trail of them down the stairs and the whole hallway was full of gardenias. John had bought so many that the local florists had to get in supplies from outside the state. He did that for me because he knew gardenias were my favorite flower. And I felt so guilty because I’d gone back onto heroin and he didn’t know.”

In hindsight, she blames the combined pressures of being a conventional wife and mother, trying to build up John’s fortune to the promised $25 million alongside Paul McCartney’s, and, most of all, keeping their mutual vow to suspend all creative work. “If I even so much as sat down at the piano in my office, John would come in and say ‘A-ah, you’re doing it!’ like he’d caught me out. To stop all that constant effort as an artist was impossible for me. I may have been quite good at doing business, but that wasn’t me at all. I despised it.”

One of the many fixers they employed happened to mention to Yoko one day that he could always get heroin if she ever needed it. “At the time, I was angry with him, like ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Then a few months later, I went to him and said, ‘Okay, let’s see it.’”

She never told John she had slipped back into the habit they had kicked together with such effort almost a decade earlier. “That meant I had to be very clever, but he’s a smart guy and he knows all the signs.” The only person from their shared circle whom she took into her confidence was their “acquisitions guru,” Sam Green. By that
time, according to Green, her habit had become “life-threatening.” But she would not think of seeking professional help for fear that John and then the press would find out, and another wave of anti-Yoko stories be unleashed.

When she resolved to go cold turkey all over again, she sent John off to Cold Spring Harbor with Sean while she stayed in New York or sought sanctuary at Sam Green’s home on Fire Island. “I told John I had really bad influenza and he and Sean mustn’t come back or they’d catch it, too. When I went down to visit them, John still didn’t realise what was going on…but he was so sweet to me. That’s what he wrote the song ‘Dear Yoko.’”

For much of this turbulent time for Yoko, as things turned out, John was not in the same home, the same town, or, finally, even the same country. As spring turned Central Park’s trees into pink-and-white froth, the all-powerful numerologist, Takashi Yoshikawa—presciently but, alas, far, far too prematurely—detected clouds of evil beginning to form above his head and worked out the direction in which he needed to travel to escape them. At the end of May, he flew off alone on the prescribed course, ending up in Cape Town, South Africa.

But flying to Cape Town alone was just a prelude. As John’s fortieth birthday loomed, he felt a desire, common to many men at that stage in life, for some great adventure outside all his previous experience. His voyages with the
Isis
on Long Island Sound had whetted his appetite for life afloat, and with his young sailing mentor, Tyler Coneys, he began discussing the possibility of a yacht trip into more challenging waters. He had no idea where he wanted to go, only that it must be in the direction his numerologist had prescribed to avoid the “clouds of evil”—southeast. From mainland America, the nearest southeasterly destination for sailing craft was the British island territory of Bermuda. Coneys undertook to organize the expedition in early June, to find a crew, and go along himself. When John reached Bermuda, Sean would fly out to join him, and they would spend several weeks there. Such a extended separation was not exactly inconvenient for Yoko at that moment, and she readily gave the plan her blessing.

Originally, her psychics were to have selected the yacht, but in the end Tyler Coneys’s expertise took precedence. The chosen vessel was a forty-three-foot sloop, the
Megan Jaye
, based in Newport, Rhode Island, and skippered by a bearded salt named Hank Halsted. Astrology and numerology could not be denied, though, in the selection of John’s sailing companions. Eventually, only four passed this unusual seagoing test: Tyler, his two cousins, Kevin and Ellen Coneys, and the skipper, “Cap’n Hank.” The journey of seven hundred miles traversed busy cargo and tanker routes and unpredictable weather zones, including the notorious Bermuda Triangle, where ships and aircraft were wont to disappear without a trace. But the
Megan Jaye
was a modern, well-equipped vessel and her crew, though fewer than was usual on such a voyage, seemed more than capable of handling it.

On June 4, John bade Sean a tearful farewell and sailed out of Newport with his new group. The
Megan Jaye
’s equipment included a weather fax, which coughed out regular bulletins from larger craft with satellite forecasting systems. Each spoke confidently of an uneventful crossing, and, for a couple of days, this prediction seemed spot-on. The weather was idyllic, with unbroken brilliant sunshine, flat seas, and schools of dolphins curveting off the bows. John was particularly exhilarated to see a large bank of cloud dropping back behind the stern.

In the communal cabin, he found himself living in closer proximity to other people than he had since traveling around by van with the Beatles. He shared a watch with Tyler Coneys, and acted as ship’s cook, providing a healthy diet dominated by vegetables and brown rice. Though he liked and got along with all three Coneyses, his closest rapport with Cap’n Hank, the shipmate nearest to him in age. Before becoming a charter skipper, Hank had lived through the psychedelic era, promoting rock concerts with acts like Big Brother and the Holding Company, at one stage even running a drug clinic. He treated John with a total lack of deference, mixed with profound respect for the musical talents so long inexplicably on hold. “You just affected 50 million people there to the positive, big boy,” he said in one of their chats. “What are you going to do to follow that up?” The radio happened to be playing a lot of Wings tracks, like “Silly Love Songs”
and “Coming Up.” Tyler Coneys recalls how the sound of Paul’s voice seemed to make “[John] think ‘Jesus, what am I doing, sitting here? I should get up and do something because it’s not that hard.’”