John Lennon: The Life (79 page)

They were fully visible in an experimental music festival held at a Cambridge college on March 2. Yoko occupied the foreground, screaming and keening as she’d once heard her family servants do when discussing the horrors of childbirth, while John stood in the shadows behind her, vamping guitar chords with heavy feedback. The arty Cambridge crowd were as shocked and affronted to discover a pop star in their midst as the Beatles’ constituency had been by Yoko.

On March 12, Paul married Linda Eastman at Marylebone Register Office in London, amid scenes of hysterical grief from his female fans. None of the other Beatles was present. The news reached John as he and Yoko were driving down to visit Aunt Mimi in Poole. Yoko’s divorce decree had become final a few weeks earlier, and, in a resurgence of Beatle copycat spirit, John told her they, too, must get married as soon as possible.

Initially Yoko was far from enthusiastic. “I’d never really wanted to be married the other two times,” she recalls. “It was just something I’d fallen into. Having a child wasn’t something I’d wanted either, but had all come from Tony. I didn’t particularly like the thought of limiting myself to one guy again. And I still had that strange thought at the back of my mind that if I stayed with John, some terrible tragedy was waiting.”

He won her agreement by promising that, unlike Paul’s, their marriage would be the quickest, simplest, and most private of ceremonies. For his initial plan, he had to thank his upbringing in a seaport and knowledge of the powers traditionally invested in master
mariners. “On the drive down to Mimi’s, John slid back the partition and told me they wanted to be married at sea by a ship’s captain,” his chauffeur Les Anthony remembers. “‘Can you get us on a ship, Les?’ he said. ‘I don’t care where it’s going. And don’t say anything to Mimi.’” While the pair were at Mimi’s, Anthony drove to nearby Southampton and discovered there was a P&O Line cruise to the Bahamas departing at eight that evening. “Book us on it,” John ordered. But by that time, P&O’s reservations office had closed for the day.

It then struck John that any ship’s captain must be empowered to perform weddings, even those commanding the humdrum ferries that plied across the English Channel to the Continent. He and Yoko drove posthaste to Southampton and tried to book tickets on a Sorensen Line ferry to France, intending to seek out the skipper and persuade him to marry them as soon as the vessel left dock. But because of an irregularity in Yoko’s passport, they were turned away. What made it doubly galling was that when Paul had gone to France to film “The Fool on the Hill” for
Magical Mystery Tour
two years earlier, he had forgotten his passport but been allowed to travel anyway.

Having failed to reach France as a humble day-tripper, John said, “Fuck it,” hired a private jet, and took Yoko to Paris, hoping that instant nuptials might be procurable somewhere or other in continental Europe. It so happened that Peter Brown, the Beatles’ fixer-in-chief, was spending that same weekend in Amsterdam. At John’s request, Brown tried to arrange a quickie wedding there, but found that Dutch law required a minimum two weeks’ residency beforehand. After further research, he reported back that the only place in Europe where such regulations did not apply was Gibraltar, off the south coast of Spain. Not only did it grant instant marriage licenses but it was an historic British possession and military base. To be granted entry, John would not even need a passport.

The plan was kept secret from everyone at Apple but Neil Aspinall. A photographer named David Nutter, whose brother Tommy lived with Brown, was flown to Gibraltar under cloak-and-dagger conditions, having no idea why. On March 20, 1969, John and Yoko, clad in matching white, made the three-hour flight from Paris by private
jet. They drove straight to the British Consulate, where they were joined in matrimony by the elderly Registrar, Cecil Wheeler, with Peter Brown as best man. David Nutter did some quick pictures of them on the Consulate staircase surrounded by bemused staff, and on their own outside, with Yoko steadying her wide-brimmed hat in the Mediterranean wind. In less than an hour, they were heading back to Paris to reveal their coup to the world’s media. John explained they had picked Gibraltar because it was “quiet, British and friendly…. Intellectually, we knew marriage was a stupid scene, but we’re romantic and square as well as hip and aware.” Looking down from their hotel window on the French newspaper placards that trumpeted the story, Yoko burst into tears to think Kyoko might see similar ones in English.

If the wedding had been quiet, the reception would be something else. Les Anthony was waiting in Paris with John’s Rolls-Royce and, next day, drove them two hundred miles north through the Low Countries to Amsterdam, where they had originally hoped to tie the knot. There they dispatched Anthony back to England with the Rolls, checked into the ninth-floor Presidential Suite of the Hilton hotel, and announced they would hold a weeklong “bed-in for peace.” “Yoko and I decided that we knew whatever we did would be in the papers,” John later explained. “We decided to use the space we would occupy anyway with a commercial for peace. We sent out a card ‘Come to John and Yoko’s honeymoon….’ The press seemed to think we were going to make love in public because we made an album with us naked—so they seemed to think anything goes.”

The reporters and cameramen of every nation who stampeded through the doors of suite 902 certainly received a jaw-dropping surprise. Instead of the expected two Virgins–style nude bacchanal, they found the newlyweds propped up by side by side in the double bed, decorously pajama-clad, surrounded by flowers and hand-lettered placards saying
BED PEACE
,
HAIR PEACE
,
I LOVE YOKO
, and
I LOVE JOHN
, with a normally clad Derek Taylor as Groom of the Bedchamber. His thick beard oddly in contrast with his pristine sleep attire, John explained the rationale. Rather than march and fight with the militant counterculture to make a better world, he had resolved to
“do it Gandhi’s way,” but using a power to command attention that the Mahatma had never known.

“Marching was fine and dandy for the Thirties. Today you need different methods—it’s sell, sell, sell. If you want to sell peace, you’ve got to sell it like soap. [The media] have war on every day, not only on the news but on the old John Wayne movies and every damn movie you see, war war war, kill kill kill. We said ‘Let’s get some peace, peace, peace on the headlines, just for a change.’…For reasons known only to themselves, people do print what I say. And I’m saying ‘Peace.’” Along with Gandhi, another, perhaps even more surprising, spiritual ally was invoked. “We want Christ to win. We’re trying to make Christ’s message contemporary. What would he have done if he’d had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let’s use it.”

For seven days, the couple held court in this eighteenth-century salon manner, John talking almost nonstop to the relays of interviewers or over TV and radio hookups, with frequent promptings and interjections from Yoko. They had all their meals in bed, leaving their nest of pillows under the panoramic window only for essential ablutions or when brisk Dutch maids needed to change the sheets.

In later years, pop stars who used their headline-grabbing power to preach humanitarianism, such as Bob Geldof or Bono, would be admired and honored. Yoko and John’s Amsterdam bed-in was the first time such a thing had ever occurred, and they paid the usual price of pioneering. The world’s commentators were at one in dismissing it as fatuous, presumptuous—above all, sublimely pointless. The pajama-Mahatma begged passionately to differ: “In Paris, the Vietnam peace talks have got about as far as sorting out the shape of the table they’re going to sit round. Those talks have been going on for months. In one week in bed, we achieved a lot more…. A little old lady from Wigan or Hull wrote to the
Daily Mirror
asking if they could put Yoko and myself on the front page more often. She said she hadn’t laughed so much for ages. That’s great! That’s what we wanted. I mean, it’s a funny world when two people going to bed on their honeymoon can make the front pages in all the papers for a
week. I wouldn’t mind dying as the world’s clown. I’m not looking for epitaphs.”

The perambulation around European capitals was not over yet. Five months earlier, in the aftermath of Yoko’s miscarriage, she and John had coproduced and codirected their most ambitious film to date. This was a seventy-five-minute piece entitled
Rape
and featuring twenty-one-year-old Hungarian actress Eva Majlata. The rapist was a television camera, which followed Majlata’s character everywhere with the same remorselessness that such devices once had stalked the Beatles—and now did the newlywed Lennons—almost hounding her to her death in front of a truck, finally cornering her in an apartment, impervious to her whimpers for mercy. The film had been commissioned by Austrian television and went out immediately after the Amsterdam bed-in, on March 31.

That same evening, John and Yoko held a press conference in the Red Room of Vienna’s famous Hotel Sacher. Once again, the media found them hidden inside a sack. Despite a chorus of pleas, John declined to come out, explaining “This is a Bag Event—total communication.” Some questioners asked if such reticence wasn’t a little odd for a man who had just invited the world’s press into his bedroom. “We’re showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in the contemporary world,” he replied. “This isn’t just about the Beatles. What’s happening to this girl is happening in Vietnam, Biafra, everywhere.” The bag-in generated considerably more seriousness than had the bed-in.
Rape
was subsequently shown at the prestigious Montreux Festival and received a glowing review in the
London Evening Standard
from the German-born critic Willi Frischauer, who wrote that “it does for the age of television what Franz Kafka’s
The Trial
did for the age of totalitarianism.”

Unfettered though John might now seem, he was still tied to the Beatles’ annual life cycle, which carried on under Apple just as it had under EMI. Spring meant a new single, just ahead of an album that would set the tone of the summer for millions. But the
Get Back
project was in no state to meet either demand. When the sessions in Apple’s basement studio had finally ground to a halt, none of the band—not even Paul—could face sifting through the thirty-odd
hours of tape with George Martin to find twelve serviceable tracks. Instead, the whole lot were turned over to Glyn Johns, their engineer at Twickenham Studios, to put into the best shape he could.

The Beatles single released on April 11 offered two of the songs they had played in that reluctant alfresco concert on Apple’s roof. Neither gave any hint of a band reaching for a simpler, more “honest” style. The one actually called “Get Back” was a catchy but unmeaningful McCartney A-side about characters in a pastiche American West—Jojo and Sweet Loretta Martin. On the B-side, John’s “Don’t Let Me Down” spoke directly to Yoko with heart-whole commitment of an extra marriage vow: “I’m in love for the first time…It’s a love that lasts forever / it’s a love that has no past.”

On April 22, the Apple roof was pressed into service again for a ceremony reaffirming his commitment to Yoko. Up there among the Mayfair chimneys and burbling pigeons, in front of a Commissioner for Oaths, he discarded his war-baby middle name of Winston and became John Ono Lennon to her Yoko Ono Lennon. Afterward, he noted with pleasure that between them they now mustered nine letter
o
’s—his lifelong lucky number. “The simplest way of saying what Yoko is to me and what I am to her is that before we met we were half a person. You know, there’s no myth about people being half and the other half being in the sky or in Heaven or something or the other side of the universe or the mirror-image bit…We were two halves and together we are a whole.”

Another Lennon song was on the drawing board that had even less to do with getting back to where he once belonged. His lyrics always been a kind of journalism, drawn as much from passing headlines as from the heart and soul. Now he decided to file his own version of the story that had been eating up newsprint this past month. The result was “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a piece of reportage laced with satire and double entendre, structured like a short story and with dialogue like a play. It retraced the couple’s European odyssey, from “standing in the dock at Southampton” to flying into Paris and Peter Brown’s discovery that they could “get married in Gibraltar, near Spain”; from the Amsterdam Hilton and “talking in our bed for a week” to Vienna and eating chocolate cake (the Hotel Sacher’s famous, decidedly nonmacrobiotic
Sacher torte
) “in a bag.” A chorus
of pursuers and persecutors played walk-on parts: immigration officers, hostile questioners at the bed-in, newspaper commentators muttering snidely that “She’s gone to his head” and “They look just like two gurus in drag.”

The middle eight featured a metaphysical quotation from Yoko, here cozily depicted as “the wife,” while the chorus of “Christ! You know it ain’t easy!” and the prediction that “They’re gonna crucify me” overtly dared the religious zealots of three years earlier to rise up again.

None of it had anything to do with the other Beatles, yet John still looked for no other collaborators to bring his combined travelogue, PR job, and cry of protest to fruition in the studio. At that point in mid-April, however, George had gone abroad; Ringo was making a film,
The Magic Christian
; and only Paul was in London. Despite the rift between them over business, John asked him to help finish and record “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” And, despite Paul’s lack of engagement in the subject matter, it was an appeal he could not refuse. John came to his house in St. John’s Wood; they discussed the song while walking in the garden, then went around the corner to Abbey Road Studios to cut it. They settled on a laid-back, almost Latin beat, dividing the roles of the two absentee Beatles between them—John on lead guitar as well as lead vocal, Paul on drums as well as bass, piano, and maracas. The track was finished in a single session amid much good-humored mutual joshing about their surrogate roles. “Go a bit faster, Ringo,” John called out at one point. “Okay, George,” Paul replied.