John Lennon: The Life (90 page)

It is part of the unending paradox of John that he could indulge in such puerile yah-boo stuff at one moment and at the next create the song regarded ever afterward as his solo masterpiece. Thanks to the album’s film diary, we can follow the development of this, from rough talked-through version around the kitchen table (“Imagine
no possessions…da-da-de-dah…”) to first demo for the band and, finally, performance on film in Tittenhurst’s long, white drawing room—an effortless, because unconscious, transition from the ridiculous to the sublime.

“Imagine” is, in many respects, one of his least inventive songs. As he would admit, it sprang from the “instructional poems” Yoko had been writing since the early Sixties—often a one-word command or exhortation like the “Breathe” that had transfixed him at her Indica show. He was also out to write something avowedly “spiritual” in response to George’s “My Sweet Lord” and, for that matter, Paul’s “Let It Be.”

The vision he came up with is easily dismissible as hackneyed and can hardly be called alluring. We are called on to imagine a world set free from its ancient belief in both heaven and hell and cleansed of organized religion, war, and famine, with all national boundaries abolished to create “a brotherhood of Man”—a vista of purgatorial blandness, in fact, which would probably have sent John himself mad with boredom in five minutes. Nor are the lyrics anywhere near the standard he reached in, say, “Norwegian Wood.” With Paul still looking over his shoulder, one cannot picture him rhyming “isn’t hard to do” and “no religion, too,” or repeating the same word in the chorus (“not the only one…world will be as one”). The little falsetto “You-oo” he uses as a bridge to the chorus seems too poppy—too Beatly—for such elevated subject matter.

Yet none of this matters. “Imagine” would touch millions while he was alive, and billions after he had gone, with its wistful passion and optimism and utter lack of pretension, conceit, or preachiness. As, equally, would the film clip of John performing it at his white grand piano—the burbling chords, his star-spangled seventies jacket and yellow-tinted glasses, those thin lips carefully shaping “Imagine all the pee-pul” while Yoko draws back one after another set of floor-length curtains and the room slowly floods with daylight. As the song ends, she sits beside him, they exchange a quizzical smile and, at the last moment, a bashful little kiss. Rock has never been more powerful, simple, or sad.

Even when dealing with themes such as these, John still resisted all
attempts to treat him as a leader or visionary. The
Imagine
film also shows him talking to an American fan who has been caught sleeping rough on the grounds and marched before him like a poacher before the squire. The stalker—this time—is quite harmless—a leftover Sixties hippie with a strangely Christlike air that makes all the more pathetic his unshakable belief in John as his Messiah. “I’m just a guy, man, that writes songs,” John protests. “You take words and stick them together and see if they have any meaning…I’m saying ‘I had a good shit today and this is what I thought this morning and I love you, Yoko’” Finally, as exasperation turns to pity, we could almost be listening to stern, hospitable Aunt Mimi. “Are you hungry? Mm?” The boy beneath the man’s whiskers nods miserably. “OK, let’s give him something to eat.”

“I
magine”’s wish list just then seemed a more than usually vain hope, especially “no need for greed or hunger.” In the secessionist state of East Pakistan, renamed Bangladesh, a bloody war was raging between rebel forces and the avenging West Pakistan army. As refugees caught in the crossfire streamed toward the Indian border, torrential floods added to their plight. Though millions were starving, European governments declined to intervene in what they termed “an internal affair.” It was a cause John and Yoko might have been expected to take up with vigor, but on this occasion they found themselves preempted. Briefed on the disaster by his friend and tutor Ravi Shankar, George Harrison set about recruiting superstar friends like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell for a fund-raising Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, New York, on August 1, and a live album to follow. It was an impressive occasion, which raised $250,000 for Bangladesh’s refugees on ticket sales alone, gave the rock business a first injection of dignity, and paved the way for charitable spectaculars like Live Aid in the eighties and nineties. George later admitted he would never have thought of putting it together had not the trail of peace and humanitarianism, and using one’s superstardom to take a moral stand, already been blazed by John.

John had naturally headed George’s list of superstar sidemen and, conveniently, was in New York at the time. When George’s call
came, he and Yoko were having breakfast in their hotel suite and had just cowritten the song that would become “Happy Christmas (War Is Over).” Yoko was full of enthusiasm for the concert, not realizing George’s invitation was to John only. “I kept saying, ‘It’s a charity event, we should do it,’” she remembers. “John got very angry, saying, ‘Oh, you always want to sing at the drop of a hat,’ and he just got up and left. I didn’t realise at the time he was so angry and worried by the thought that my feelings would be hurt. Later he told me he hoped I would chase after him, saying, ‘Oh, please don’t go,’ but I’m not like that.”

A few minutes later, Dan Richter answered a knock at his door to find an agitated John there. “He couldn’t swallow the idea that Yoko wouldn’t be allowed to appear with him,” Richter says. “And anyway, he was terrified the other Beatles were out to trap him. He thought he’d be onstage with George and Ringo, and then Paul McCartney would walk on, and headlines all over the world would say ‘Beatles Reunion.’” Spurred by that hideous thought as much as the tiff with Yoko, he made Richter drive him to JFK Airport and caught a flight to Paris.

Yoko, still at their New York hotel, had no idea where he’d gone. “The next day, Allen Klein told me ‘You gotta go home to Ascot. John’s gonna be there, he’s waiting.’ Suddenly my brain, which had always tried to make myself so small in this relationship, opened up. I said ‘Listen, I’m getting a rest from it, okay? He was the one who left me…and, anyway, this is
my
town.’ He thought I would be lost on my own, but this was where I’d grown up as an artist. Then Allen said that John was calling him so many times during the night that Allen couldn’t go to sleep; it was ‘Please get Yoko to come, please get Yoko to come…’ Allen told me that was the first time he realised I was not the one grabbing the relationship. Finally, I said ‘Okay, I’ll go back.’”

After all that, she expected John to meet her off the plane in London, but only their chauffeur, Les Anthony, showed up at Heathrow with the Rolls. “When I got back to Ascot, I thought John would be waiting at the front door—but still no John. And I went upstairs to our bedroom, I opened the door, the bag from my Bag Piece was on the floor and John was inside it. ‘I’m sorry, Yoko’ was all he said. And
in Paris he had got me a heart-shaped diamond necklace. I thought it was so touching and sweet, because the heart was so small. He knew I didn’t like anything too big and ostentatious. And so we got cosy in bed, and that was that.”

But the pull of America was becoming ever more powerful. Though Yoko had never been granted U.S. citizenship, Tony Cox was an American national, which meant that their daughter was, too. Following the Majorcan debacle, John’s lawyers advised Yoko to seek full custody of Kyoko in the American Virgin Islands, where her divorce from Cox had been granted. John applied for a twenty-four-hour U.S. visa to accompany her to the court hearing in St. Thomas, but was kept waiting for it in the nearby British Virgin Islands—then, to his amazement, issued with a visa for three months. The Virgin Islands court had no hesitation in granting Yoko custody of Kyoko, but stipulated that the child must be brought up in America. And clearly it was advisable for Yoko to base herself there for the present, in order to exercise her legal rights whenever and wherever Cox might resurface.

John, in any case, was growing tired of Britain. The racial slurs against Yoko, though not as virulent as formerly, had by no means gone away. And, for all its supposed social upheavals, the country seemed as stuffy and repressive as ever. A new Conservative government under Edward Heath was busy drawing battle lines with the trade unions. The Irish part of John was appalled that, in Ulster’s worsening sectarian conflict, terrorist suspects could now be interned without trial. He was also upset that, after years of procrastination, decimal currency on the European model had finally arrived, sweeping away the familiar, clunky half crowns, florins, ten-bob notes, and threepenny bits that had been known as “LSD” long before mind-expanding drugs.

Further lengthy negotiations began with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (which paradoxically seemed rather miffed that John had not used his three-month entitlement after entering through the Virgin Islands). On August 13, he and Yoko were each granted new visas in the B2, or visitors’ category, good until the following February. At the end of the month, they returned to New York without setting a firm date for their departure.

The only person John found it hard to leave behind was a brisk, self-sufficient woman, now in her late sixties, still living beside Poole Harbour with her books, her Royal Worcester china, and pedigreed cats. Aunt Mimi, of course, had no idea that he’d gone to America indefinitely—still less that she would never see him again. She expected him to turn up sooner or later, “like a bad penny” as she always said, maybe throwing pebbles at her bedroom window as on the night when he returned, broke, from Hamburg. Even after all these years, there was no doubt in Mimi’s mind where he really called home. “He used to tell me that [the bungalow] was his haven,” she would recall. “He could always come here, and have his own little room, and be waited on hand and foot. One summer, he came down for a week and sunbathed while I ran backwards and forwards for him, making cups of tea and cooking…just like the old days.”

In times to come, Mimi would often look at his favorite spot on the back patio, where a flight of stone steps led down to the water, and yachts and excursion launches passed a few yards away. “He’d just sit there, dangling his feet in the water and watching the boats go by. The days always seemed sunny when John was here.”

J
ohn unpacked his bags in a country where the generation gap had turned into a blazing abyss. By 1971, the Vietnam issue divided America more bitterly than any since its traumatic Civil War a century earlier. Older people by and large still believed in the irreproachability of the U.S. Cavalry, while younger ones upheld the hippie ethos of love and peace, though sometimes with methods no longer loving or peaceable. Despite government noises about “de-escalation,” the conflict had entered a horrific new phase in April 1970, when American forces first bombed, then invaded Cambodia, allegedly to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines. The resultant explosion of youthful protest at home was met with a brutality more suited to Communist Eastern Europe. On May 4, at Kent State University, Ohio, four student antiwar demonstrators, two of them female, were shot dead by National Guardsmen, and nine were wounded.

For President Richard M. Nixon, it had become almost common
place to look out from the White House onto horizonless seas of banner-waving protesters, invariably chorusing “Give Peace a Chance.” Nixon was in many respects a visionary leader whose groundbreaking journeys to Moscow and Beijing signaled an eventual end to the Cold War. But long years of waiting for office had aggravated the secretiveness and paranoia that would be his eventual undoing. In mid-1971, a former Pentagon official named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a top-secret official dossier on the Vietnam War to the press, revealing among other things that it had long been regarded as unwinnable. When a federal court refused to ban publication of these Pentagon Papers, the government launched a covert plan to destroy Ellsberg, burgling his psychiatrist’s office, even considering an assassination attempt. John, that insatiable newsprint addict, had followed every twist and turn in the saga, little imagining what similar treatment was in store for him.

He and Yoko started off at the plush end of New York, moving into the St. Regis Hotel, four blocks from that hallowed Beatle landmark the Plaza. Two adjoining seventeenth-floor suites were needed to house all their baggage and also serve as improvised offices, recording studios, and staff quarters so that they could pursue their numerous audio and visual projects without breaking step. The just-released
Imagine
album was climbing the American charts to its eventual high of number three (number one in Britain). At the St. Regis, they continued to accumulate footage for the documentary of the same name, recruiting fellow VIP guests in the hotel for cameo roles. One was the great Hollywood song-and-dance man Fred Astaire, who—despite being late for a plane—agreed to be filmed walking into a room with Yoko. Ever the perfectionist, Astaire asked to do a second take.

To interviewers John extolled the superiority of New York over London—the cheeseburgers, the malted milks, the freedom to go to a cinema or restaurant, buy a newspaper, or even visit a bookstore at whatever hour of the day or night he chose. “If I’d lived in ancient times, I’d have lived in Rome…. Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.” The raucous, impatient rhythm of Manhattan daily life also awoke memories of Liverpool. “There’s
the same quality of energy, of vitality, in both cities. New York is at my speed…I like New Yorkers because they have no time for the niceties of life. They’re like me in this. They’re naturally aggressive, they don’t believe in wasting time.”

The pair’s first public engagement in the U.S. was a major retrospective of Yoko’s work, mounted by the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse, New York. Entitled
This Is Not Here
(after the framed motto above Tittenhurst Park’s front door), the exhibit opened on October 9, John’s thirty-first birthday. John featured as “guest artist” and catalog designer, and there were pieces by such luminaries as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning as well as friends like Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. John and Yoko chartered a plane to fly a large party up from New York City, including the Starrs, Klaus Voormann, Phil Spector, and Neil Aspinall. It was an expensively staged “water show,” with even the invitations sent out in water-filled containers; when its costs overflowed the museum’s budget, Apple had to make up the difference, which meant the other ex-Beatles subsidizing it, to their very mixed emotions. After the opening, there was a birthday party for John in his hotel room, with a jam session of rock-’n’-roll classics and Beatles oldies, including “Yesterday.”

By the end of October, he and Yoko had left the St. Regis and moved downtown to 105 Bank Street in the West Village, renting a small two-room apartment from Joe Butler of the Lovin’ Spoonful, with the great musical iconoclast John Cage as a next-door neighbor. They also acquired a building on Broome Street, mainly to serve as a headquarters for their film projects. “It was Yoko who sold me on New York,” John would remember. “She’d been poor here and she knew every inch. She made me walk around the streets and parks and squares and examine every nook and cranny. In fact you could say I fell in love with New York on a street corner.” They even bought bicycles—an English model, as close as possible to his old Raleigh Lenton for John, a high-tech Japanese one for Yoko.

If the city’s toughness and scabrous wit reminded him of Liverpudlians, the district south of Houston Street—as yet barely gentrified into “SoHo”—almost reincarnated his home city in the years
when he had loved it best. Often on his wanderings or bike rides with Yoko, he would stop and stare down a cobbled street of nineteenth-century warehouses, almost as if expecting to find the Cavern or the Iron Door around the next corner.

Under Yoko’s guidance, he soon became acclimated, and addicted, to downtown life—the teeming markets of Chinatown, the trattorias and aromatic groceries of Little Italy, the oddball galleries, bars, and boutiques, the infinite tolerance of eccentricity, and respect for personal space that allowed them to stroll or cycle about largely undisturbed, as they never could in London. John’s favorite comparison went over the heads of journalists except those who, like him, had read Dylan Thomas’s
Under Milk Wood
: “It’s like a little Welsh village with Jones the Fish and Jones the Milk, and everybody seems to know everybody.”

His first real downtown buddy was David Peel, a songwriter and street entertainer whom he met one day at a St. Mark’s Place clothes boutique called the Limbo Shop. Fronting a ragtag band, the Lower East Side, Peel mixed antigovernment, promarijuana polemics with wry satires on New York life among “the cockeroaches…living in a garbage can.” John became a keen follower of the Lower East Side’s street-corner happenings, which to him recalled skiffle gigs around Woolton in the late Fifties. Using expertise largely acquired from Phil Spector, he and Yoko produced Peel’s third, almost universally banned, album,
The Pope Smokes Dope
.

The Bank Street apartment became a salon, conducted in a now familiar manner. “It was a very small place, two steps down from the street,” Dan Richter remembers. “The back room had a skylight on the ceiling and a bed in the middle, and that’s where John and Yoko would be when people came to visit. You’d have David Peel and the musicians, journalists and media crews and a lot of people who’d just walked in off the street to say ‘Hello.’ John would have his guitar and a bit of grass, and the TV going all the time.”

This daily bedside throng produced two more friends of lasting loyalty and value. One was Bob Gruen, a curly-haired young photographer whose camera would record most of the crucial moments in John’s life over the next eight years. The other was an aesthete
and political activist named Jon Hendricks, who had known Yoko since her Fluxus group days, and who worked for John and her as an unpaid volunteer before joining their ever-fluid roster of personal assistants.

As composer of the protest anthem that had superseded “We Shall Overcome,” John had already made the connection destined to cause him so much aggravation in the future. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were joint leaders of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, the faction behind many of the headline-grabbing marches and rallies then convulsing America. Both had stood trial with the so-called Chicago Seven after the infamous 1968 Democratic Party Convention, and had since amassed a following comparable to that of Lenin and Trotsky in pre-1917 Russia. Campaigning for civil rights as much as disengagement from Vietnam and Cambodia, the Yippies worked in alliance with black radical groups, notably the ultra-militant Black Panthers through their cofounder, Bobby Seale. This coalition’s objective was overthrow of the established order by any possible means; Rubin described their activities as “military” while Hoffman frequently declared, “We are at war.”

John had initially been nervous about meeting such hell-bent extremists. But Rubin and Hoffman were young men of formidable charm who leavened their crusade with theatricality and absurdist humor after his own heart. The Yippies’ most famous anticapitalist stunt—almost a piece of Yokoesque performance art—had been to scatter dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, then film and photograph the resultant grabbing frenzy. Rubin was the author of a hilarious as well as inflammatory book entitled
Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution
, while his Black Panther cohort Bobby Seale harangued audiences in quasi verse, like a prototype rap star. “When I met [Hoffman and Rubin] I said ‘You’re like artists, man,’ John later remembered. “And they said [to Yoko and me] ‘You two artists are like revolutionaries.’”

He was not long in declaring solidarity with these interchangeable revolutionaries and showmen. On December 2, Greenwich Village’s weekly paper, the
Village Voice
, published a letter protesting against a recent attack on Bob Dylan in its pages by a writer named A. J. We
berman. The signatories were Jerry Rubin, David Peel, and John and Yoko, calling themselves the Rock Liberation Front.

Two issues currently dominated the Yippie–Black Panther coalition’s agenda, one concerning a black woman, the other a white man, both exemplifying the Nixon regime’s onslaught on the political counterculture. In California a year earlier, a young academic named Angela Davis, whose boyfriend was a prominent Panther, had been jailed on patently trumped-up charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. In Michigan, John Sinclair, the founder of a radical offshoot called the White Panthers, was beginning year three of a ten-year sentence for offering two marijuana joints to an undercover policewoman.

Led by Rubin and Bobby Seale, Sinclair’s supporters staged a benefit rally and concert for him and Davis, in Ann Arbor on December 10, with appearances by Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, and Allen Ginsberg. At Rubin’s suggestion, John and Yoko also agreed to take part. John wrote a song about Sinclair, an Ozark Mountain–style country number (“It ain’t fair / John Sinclair / In the stir for breathin’ air…”), which he accompanied on a Dobro. The concert drew an audience of fifteen thousand and included a live telephone hookup with Sinclair in his cell. Three days later, he was freed on bail.

America’s larger stage revealed for the first time what extraordinary power John’s name possessed to transcend even the new spiky frontiers of race, gender, and political allegiance, and—more crucially here more than anywhere—to guarantee maximum media attention for any cause he supported. A week after Ten for Two in Michigan, New York witnessed a day of protest against the previous September’s horrific Attica state prison riot, when security forces had killed twenty-eight prisoners and nine hostages. A benefit concert in aid of bereaved relatives took place that evening at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater, featuring some of the great names in soul music—yet the show’s climactic moment was a surprise walk-on by John and Yoko.

To mark the event, and also publicize David Peel and the Lower East Side, they appeared on the open-forum television show that David Frost had been hosting in the United States since the late Six
ties. While Peel performed a song called “I’m Proud to Be a New York City Hippie”—a retort to Merle Haggard’s popular redneck taunt, “I’m Proud to Be an Okie from Muskogee”—John stood in the background, plunking a skiffler’s one-string bass. Later, he returned to sit on the edge of the stage and unveil another new-minted protest song, “Attica State.” When a middle-aged couple in the audience accused him of glorifying criminals (though the Apollo benefit was also for prison officers’ and hostages’ families) their neighbors angrily shouted them down.

As with Michael X in Britain, John seemed to feel it almost his mission to introduce figures like Rubin and Seale to a mainstream audience and show what intelligent and delightful people they really were. From January 14 to 18, he and Yoko acted as cohosts on daytime television’s hugely popular
Mike Douglas Show
, introducing a series of guests chosen by them, including Rubin, Seale, and a five-piece group named Elephant’s Memory, which Rubin had recommended to John as a new core for the Plastic Ono Band. When Rubin began to antagonize the conservative Mike Douglas, John’s good-humored interjections saved face for both of them. Among the other surreal spectacles offered to Douglas’s viewers was of rock-’n’-roll legend Chuck Berry sharing an apron with John in a macrobiotic cookery demonstration.

All these new causes and alliances, however, were incidental to his real reason for being in America—to help Yoko find Tony Cox and reclaim Kyoko in accordance with the Virgin Islands custody order. For two months, despite intensive inquiries, there had been no trace of Cox. Then, in mid-December, he reappeared in Houston, Texas, the hometown of his new wife, Melinda, and began legal action to restore his former equal access rights to Kyoko. The day after the Attica prison benefit, John and Yoko, accompanied by Jon Hendricks, flew to Houston for the court hearing.

Unlike in the Majorcan court battle, Kyoko was not asked to choose between her father and mother. Cox had hidden her away with Melinda’s family, and ignored repeated orders from the judge to produce her, until finally—on Christmas Eve—he was charged with contempt of court, imprisoned for five days, then released on bail.
Meanwhile, Yoko’s already airtight case was reinforced by a teacher who testified that in Cox’s care, Kyoko had fallen three years behind the normal educational standard of an eight-year-old. The judge ordered that she be turned over to Yoko pending a final ruling. Cox’s answer was to repeat his gambit of the previous summer: he, Kyoko, and Melinda once again disappeared without trace.