John Lennon: The Life (96 page)

On trips back to New York, he would often call at the Dakota but, she recalls, was always “too proud” to ask if he could stay. (Aunt Mimi could have cited a similar situation fifteen years earlier, after he had tired of his student flat and wanted her steak-and-kidney pie and his old bedroom at Mendips.) Forgetting his wish that Yoko remain sexually active, both to share the guilt and as a medical safeguard, he became more possessive than ever. Once when she was in Philadelphia, he returned to their apartment, found a new vase in her bedroom, and, assuming it was a gift from another man, smashed it to pieces, then disappeared again. Yoko’s first act on returning home was to change all the locks.

Meanwhile, crisis had hit
Oldies and Mouldies
, the rock-’n’-roll covers album that John expected to be so relaxing. Having shown up at the studio in the varied guises of karate champion, surgeon, and trigger-happy cowboy, Phil Spector suddenly ceased showing up at all. He gave no explanation for his absence nor indication of when or if he intended to reappear. Telephone calls by the dozen were made to his office and his barbed-wire-encircled mansion near Sunset—many of them by John personally—but none was ever returned. On the musicians’ grapevine, it was rumored that Spector had left the city, possibly even the country, or had suffered a horrendous acci
dent and was lying somewhere in intensive care or maybe even dead. After two or three weeks of fruitless inquiry, John decided to take over producing the album himself, as he had done successfully with
Mind Games
, and called for the tapes of the sessions, which had been chaotically going on since the previous October. It then emerged that Spector had been in the habit of taking them home with him every night, and still had them. Short of starting again from scratch, nothing could be done until he chose to resume work or could be persuaded to hand the tapes over.

One dangerous accomplice had no sooner thus stepped out of John’s life than another stepped in. He and May were currently staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in a duplex apartment that Ringo maintained there. Three fellow musicians were sharing the accommodation: Klaus Voormann, Keith Moon, and Harry Nilsson.

Nilsson—known professionally by surname only—was one of the more oddball characters in early-seventies pop. A New York–born singer-songwriter, he combined outstanding melodic and verbal talent with a voice whose operatic high register was matched only by Art Garfunkel’s. Yet ironically, his two most successful singles, “Ev’rybody’s Talkin’” (theme-song of the film
Midnight Cowboy
) and “Without You,” had been written by other people, and the singer-songwriter wave seemed to have left him high, although not dry. Once beautiful and sylphlike, he was now paunchy, bearded, and apparently resigned to being (in Elliot Mintz’s phrase) “the Orson Welles of rock ’n’ roll.”

He was already a crony of Ringo’s and (like all three other ex-Beatles) had contributed to the hugely successful
Ringo
solo album. In the frat-house atmosphere of the Beverly Wilshire apartment, he and John now became inseparable. He was not only wildly funny but a brilliant mimic who could “do” John to the life—a novelty that John adored. And no one was better equipped to help lose a weekend, if not a lifetime. “The difference between the two was that Harry loved to drink and was good at it,” Mintz remembers. “He could down triple Courvoisiers all night without any problem. John also loved to drink, but was no good at it. At the beginning of an evening with the two of them, the conversation would be brilliant, like being
at Dorothy Parker’s Round Table. Then suddenly it would flip, and the insanity would start.”

On the evening of March 12, the two went to watch the Smothers Brothers begin a “comeback” engagement at the Troubadour. It was a glitzy occasion, attended by Hollywood royalty like Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Peter Lawford. John that night had discovered Brandy Alexander—Cognac shaken with milk, ice cubes, crème de cacao, and nutmeg to taste as harmlessly refreshing as a milk shake. During the after-midnight wait for the curtain to rise, he began singing “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” the theme song of his recent Kotex fashion statement, in which Nilsson raucously joined. It so happened that, of the two Smothers Brothers, John liked Tommy but had never been able to stand Dickie—and in any case, understandably, was violently opposed to comebacks of any kind. When the brothers appeared, Dickie Smothers received a torrent of heckling from John. Their manager came over and began to remonstrate angrily; security people were called, John overturned a table, and he, Nilsson—and the blameless May—were ejected.

The fracas continued outside, with cameras unfortunately present. John grappled with a parking-lot attendant and wrestled him to the ground, then received such a look of hero worship from his supine victim that all his anger evaporated. Two other bystanders afterward claimed he had assaulted them—a club waitress and a photographer named Brenda Parkins. When Parkins brought charges, John settled out of court to avoid jeopardizing his immigration case, but maintained he’d never touched her—and anyway she hadn’t been a bona fide press representative, just a pushy fan with “an Instamatic.”

“OK, so I was drunk,” he admitted later. “When it’s Errol Flynn, all those showbiz writers say, ‘Those were the days when we had Sinatra and Errol Flynn, socking it to the people.’ I do it, I’m a bum…I was drunk in Liverpool and I smashed up phone boxes, but it didn’t get in the papers….” Next day, he and Nilsson sent flowers and a note of apology to the Smothers Brothers, who issued a diplomatic statement that “it was partly our fault.” That night, a sober and penitent John was seen with May at an American Film Institute tribute dinner to James Cagney, prompting the first press reports of a “new girl in his life.”

The ménage using Ringo’s apartment at the Beverly Wilshire had by now worn out its welcome. Keith Moon was a past master in the seventies rock-star art of trashing hotels, and John (who seldom damaged so much as an ashtray in Beatle-touring days) was quick to emulate “Baron von Moon” as he admiringly dubbed him. Coincidentally, the next-door suite was occupied by an old Swinging London crony, Jonathan King. One day when King used the elevator to the penthouse floor, he saw FUCK YOU scratched on its wood paneling in unmistakable Lennon capitals.

After several run-ins with the hotel management, the party moved to a large and well-secluded beach house in Santa Monica, where they were joined by Ringo, his new manager, Hilary Gerrard, and Klaus Voormann’s girlfriend, Cynthia Webb. The house had once been used for Bobby Kennedy’s assignations with Marilyn Monroe, and John and May were quartered in the very bedroom they were reputed to have shared. Here, mainly at the instigation of Baron von Moon, domestic life took on the semblance of a modern, multimillionaires’
Goon Show
. Every morning, for instance, Moon would live up to his name by appearing naked but for an ankle-length leather coat, split up the rear to show his bare bottom, a trailing white scarf, and ankle boots.

There still was no sign of Phil Spector and the
Oldies and Mouldies
tapes, so, rather than just sit around and wait, John decided to produce an album for Harry Nilsson. This was to be entitled
Pussycats
and feature an eclectic song mix, from Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Work began at Burbank Studios on March 28; John brought in session men like Jim Keltner from his own album lineup and even wrote Nilsson a track entitled “Mucho Mungo.” “He was determined he was going to give Harry the breakthrough that no one else ever really had,” Elliot Mintz says. “When he spoke about him it was almost in the vernacular of a manager.”

During the first week of recording, Paul and Linda McCartney happened to be in L.A., and dropped by the studio to say what they expected would be only a brief hello. Paul by this time was finally enjoying solo success at the same level as John’s; his wife-augmented band, Wings, had won credibility with the album
Band on the Run
,
and he had written the theme song to a James Bond film,
Live and Let Die
, which was nominated for both an Oscar and a Grammy. Despite the thousands of miles between them, both geographically and spiritually, the old Lennon-McCartney symbiosis still occasionally revived. Paul, too, had been in hot water over a song about the Ulster Troubles, entitled “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” had been busted (twice) for cannabis possession, and was now having problems over U.S. visas.

The business disputes that had driven such a wedge between John and him were all now as good as settled. The Beatles partnership was on course for final dissolution in London’s High Court in December. Both had ended their yoked-together contract with ATV/Northern Songs in 1973, and were free to market their work through their own publishing companies. Most important, John admitted that if he’d followed Paul’s advice in 1969, he, George, and Ringo would not now be battling Allen Klein in the U.S. civil courts with something like $19 million at stake. Consequently, when Paul visited one of John’s sessions for
Pussycats
, the old partners greeted each other as if they’d never had a cross word. Within minutes, they had picked up guitars—left-handed and right-handed—and were jamming together on “Midnight Special,” an old blues favorite from earliest Quarrymen days.

The following Sunday, March 31, John invited Paul and Linda to an all-day party at the Santa Monica beach house. Many other notable musicians were present, including Stevie Wonder, and another jam session soon started, with John on guitar and Paul on the absent Ringo’s drums. In a medley of old favorites, from Little Richard’s “Lucille” to Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a matchless sour-sweet harmony took its final bow. “There were about 50 people playing,” John would remember, “and they were just watching me and Paul.”

E
lliot Mintz believes he witnessed the end of the Lost Weekend, or at least the beginning of the end. One morning when he and John were having breakfast after an all-night studio session, a beautiful woman wearing an array of expensive bracelets stopped at their table and handed John a napkin with a telephone number written on it. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she murmured. “I just want you to
have this. Use it when you’re ready.” Next day when Mintz arrived to collect John—it was during one of various breakups with May—he glimpsed the woman in the background, still with her conspicuous bracelets but otherwise wearing only a robe. John took him aside and asked him to get rid of her as quickly and discreetly as possible.

“Some people have bachelor parties; John had the Lost Weekend,” Mintz says. “For him, it was the end of innocence and the start of growing up and being serious. And I think on that particular morning, he recognised the obvious…. He could spend a lifetime collecting phone numbers scribbled on pieces of paper. At age thirty-four, he knew that’s how it might be forever. There would be a thousand amorous women in terry-cloth robes waiting around in the morning while he assigned someone or other the task of getting rid of her.”

For John himself, the turning point was producing
Pussycats
for Nilsson, which by now had grown almost as much of a shambles as
Oldies and Mouldies
, with three different drummers (Ringo, Keith Moon, and Jim Keltner), a huge brass section, and a children’s choir. The sessions had no sooner gotten under way than Nilsson’s extraordinary, keening voice began to fail. “Harry told me he’d woken up on a beach somewhere after a night out with John,” Keltner remembers. “They’d both been doing a lot of screaming the night before, which John was really good at, and the next morning Harry found his voice was completely shot.” Afraid the album might be canceled, he tried to hide the problem from John, hoping that medication would cure it. “I [didn’t] know whether it was psychological or what,” John recalled. “He was going to the doctors and having injections and he didn’t tell me till later he was bleeding in the throat or I would have stopped the session…. I’m saying, ‘Well, where is all that yooo-deee-dooo-daaah stuff?’ and he’s going ‘croak’…That’s when I realised…I was suddenly the straight one amid all these mad, mad people. I suddenly was not one of them.”

Those stricken vocal cords provided just the out that John was seeking. In mid-April, he brought Nilsson back to New York and checked into the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, ostensibly to finish
Pussycats
away from the distractions of their L.A. chums. It also happened that Nilsson’s record company, RCA, had tired of waiting for another hit like “Without You” and was threatening to drop him.
John went to see RCA’s bosses, talked up the brilliance of
Pussycats
, and hinted at a preparedness to sign with the label—bringing Ringo along, too—if Nilsson’s contract were extended. Mesmerized by the prospect of owning two ex-Beatles (which, of course, would never happen) the RCA men fell over themselves to agree.

There was another, more pressing reason to be back East. For months past, the hundred or so total strangers per day who felt entitled to greet John like an old friend had invariably asked one of two questions. The foremost—which even a young L.A. cop, called to investigate yet another fracas in Bel Air, could not help blurting out—was “Will the Beatles be getting back together?” But a close second, especially beloved of cabdrivers, was “How’s your immigration going?” By now, his virtual criminalization in the land the Beatles had once entranced was causing anger and puzzlement all over the world. In Britain, the outrage on his behalf posed the biggest threat to Anglo-American relations since Vietnam. Radio Luxembourg (as British an institution as warm beer or rainy summers) demanded a Royal pardon for the drug conviction that had started all his visa troubles, and delivered a petition with sixty thousand listeners’ signatures to the prime minister, James Callaghan.