John Lennon: The Life (97 page)

John’s lawyer, Leon Wildes, had naturally been concerned about the bad publicity emanating from the West Coast (little dreaming how much more had been avoided). As a first step back to regaining his former moral high ground, Wildes counseled further involvement in charity events like the One to One Concert to benefit Willowbrook. So on April 28, John did a walk-on with Nilsson at a March of Dimes benefit concert in Central Park; for two days in mid-May, he broadcast as a disc jockey for station WFIL in Philadelphia during its “Helping Hand” marathon. All in vain, seemingly. On July 17, he heard from the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals that his appeal against the previous October’s deportation order had been rejected, and he had sixty days to leave the country.

But Wildes was proving a formidable adversary to powers that had always hitherto seemed faceless and invincible. His first major breakthrough was successfully taking the Immigration and Naturalization Service to New York’s District Court over its calculated
refusal to deal with John and Yoko’s application for third-preference visa status. Diligent sifting of Yoko’s personal papers revealed that she had actually been issued a green card, allowing her full U.S. residency, while married to Tony Cox. Though this had lapsed some years earlier, Wildes speedily established her status as a person of special creative merit, supported by testimonials from leading figures in the art world—and the fact that she had no drug conviction. The lawyer then used her case to strengthen John’s, pleading that she needed his support in the continuing America-wide search for Kyoko and that kicking him out of the country would force her to make an unconscionable choice between her daughter and her husband.

Having proved the INS not invulnerable, Wildes launched two further actions against it in the district court. The first invoked the Freedom of Information Act to unearth files revealing that aliens with far worse drug records than John’s were being allowed to live in the United States and that, in effect, a “secret law” discriminated between individuals the government did and did not like. The second action sued everyone in the anti-Lennon campaign’s chain of command for “abuse of process” and violating John’s constitutional rights, and demanded their personal appearance in court to explain themselves. Wildes began by subpoenaing New York’s district director of immigration and his superior, the immigration commissioner in Washington, D.C., but he intended to move up the ladder to the attorney general in the relevant period, John Mitchell. Though he did not really believe it could happen, Wildes talked of bringing President Richard Nixon himself into court.

Before this extraordinary event could be mooted, however, the president simplified matters by committing hara-kiri. On the night of June 17, 1972, at the start of the presidential campaign—when the surveillance and wiretapping of John were at their height—five Republican party workers had been caught in the National Democratic Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate Hotel complex, attempting to service bugging devices that had been planted there earlier. The burglars proved to work directly for CREEP, then headed by Attorney General Mitchell. Nixon could have escaped serious consequences by taking full responsibility and apologizing, but in
stead he and his senior officials consistently denied any involvement despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Two years later, the affair known simply as Watergate had turned into the political scandal of the century, with the president increasingly beleaguered and a special Senate committee conducting daily public investigations.

One of John and Yoko’s last pre-separation outings together was to attend the Watergate hearings, accompanied by Jon Hendricks. Under interrogation that day, as it happened, was John Dean, the former White House counsel whose revelation of a secret taping system in the Oval Office destroyed all Nixon’s claims that he knew nothing of his minions’ grubby doings. “The metaphor was not lost on John and Yoko,” Hendricks says. “Their accusers were now the accused.”

One by one, all Nixon’s top aides were discredited and disgraced, including John Mitchell, before Leon Wildes could subpoena him, and H. R. Haldeman, who had directly overseen the FBI’s investigation of John. Finally on August 9, 1974, Nixon himself resigned in the nick of time to avoid impeachment. This was also the month when John’s immigration case moved from INS jurisdiction to its last resort, the U.S. Court of Appeals. He testified that he had been marked for deportation because the Nixon government considered him a political threat, not because of a minor UK drug offense, and that he and Yoko had been almost a test bed for the dirty White House tricks exposed by Watergate. For the first time in their three-year uphill struggle, Wildes was conscious of sympathetic ears.

John had left the Pierre by now and was living with May in a small penthouse apartment on East Fifty-second Street, overlooking the East River. Among his neighbors in the block was Greta Garbo, the great screen siren of the prewar era, now the world’s most celebrated recluse, next to Howard Hughes. John’s apartment had a terrace from which, late one summer night, he swore he watched a UFO fly downriver and turn left over Brooklyn. He later described it in detail to a French journalist who interviewed him there, adding the corroborative testimony of his “girlfriend.” “I hadn’t been drinking—this is the God’s honest truth. I only do that at weekends or when I see Harry Nilsson.”

East Fifty-second Street was the nearest he would come to an alternative home in the whole Lost Weekend. Visitors included Paul and Linda McCartney and Mick Jagger, who was now living with his wife, Bianca, in Andy Warhol’s house in Montauk, Long Island. In July, Julian arrived for a visit, his mother feeling confident enough now to let him stay with his father. Their new rapport continued to grow, the more so as Julian was showing signs of musical talent and had recently started guitar lessons. John showed him chords (shades of Julia!), gave him a drum machine, and, spurred by May, took trouble to make his stay enjoyable. But having an eleven-year-old in the small apartment was sometimes jarring to a man so unused to children. One morning Julian received the full lash of his tongue and fled in confusion for accidentally waking him too early after a heavy night.

Two months before Richard Nixon quit the White House came the end of another long-running war of nerves. In a transaction as furtively melodramatic as any in the Watergate saga, Phil Spector finally handed over the tapes of John’s
Oldies and Mouldies
album sessions to a senior Capitol Records executive in exchange for $90,000. But John was in no mood to return to a project recalling the most lost of his months in L.A. The tapes as they stood, recorded amid drunken partying, celebrity intrusion, and gunfire, were nowhere near releasable standard. Besides, during his stay at the Pierre, he had begun writing material for a new album whose title,
Walls and Bridges
, suggested relief to be back in the river-girt citadel of Manhattan.

Made at the Record Plant Studios in July, it featured most of the same musicians he had worked with in L.A., but now under strict orders that there was to be no more drinking or carousing. Most of the tracks had an upbeat, brassy feel, strangely at odds with John’s recurrent, often desperate admissions of longing for Yoko: “You don’t know what you got until you lose it…Oh, baby give me one more chance”…“Bless you, wherever you are”…“I’m scared…I’m scarred.” Every chord sequence seemed to awaken echoes of their previous work together; at one trompe l’oreille moment at the start of the third track, “Old Dirt Road,” a distorted guitar produced an eerie
semblance of Yoko’s singing voice. She was there in spirit, almost deafeningly, in “Number 9 Dream,” a hymn to the mystic numeral in John’s life, suffused with the beatific happiness one can sometimes feel when asleep. He had, in fact, dreamed its falsetto chorus of “Ah bowakawa pousse pousse,” though the “heat-whispered trees” in its first verse sprang from poetic senses wide awake. The voice calling “John” that sounded so Yoko was May, being a dutiful stand-in yet again.

“Steel and Glass,” a track strongly reminiscent of “How Do You Sleep?” was taken to be a swipe at Allen Klein (“You leave your smell like an alley cat….”). The only reminder of
Oldies and Mouldies
—and John’s legal obligation to record a quota from Morris Levy’s catalog—was a brief rendition of Lee Dorsey’s “Ya-Ya,” with no backing other than Julian on drums. “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out” was a wry reflection on his recent West Coast bender, containing another horrible moment of prophecy: “Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.”

A sax-driven party song, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” had backup vocals by Elton John, proving he could “do” John just as well as Harry Nilsson. In the fade-out, John called “Can you ’ear me, Mother?” which no American and only about one in ten thousand Britons would recognize as the catchphrase of an old music-hall star, Sandy Powell. When the track was picked for release as a single, Elton asked John to break a two-year abstinence from live performance by appearing onstage with him if it reached number one. John shook on the deal, but only because he thought such a simplistic rocker, sung in the unorthodox form of a two-man duet, could not be a hit “in a million years.”

As a further mark of homage, Elton decided to cover “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—a song till then regarded as unsingable by anyone but its author—and put it out as a British single, implicitly to keep John’s memory alive back home. John went with May to the recording session, which was at Caribou Studios, nine thousand feet up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He loved Elton’s reggae-influenced “Lucy” so much that he joined the studio band, credited as “the Reggae Guitars of Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” As a memento
of their partnership, Elton gave him an onyx pendant with a wall outlined in gold, a bridge in platinum, and
WINSTON O’BOOGIE
spelled out in diamonds. “I think he was a little fazed at being given jewellery by another man,” Sharon Lawrence says. “And he didn’t realise how extravagant Elton was. I remember him showing me the pendant and saying, ‘It’s diamante, isn’t it?’”

Despite his apparent domestication by May, he continued to see other women, by no means all nameless one-night stands. “That fall of ’74 there was one particular girl, who was an art director on a magazine,” Bob Gruen remembers. “I was with John one night when he was in a phone booth calling her up and asking if he could come over and she was rightly telling him he was too drunk. I was nervous because he was making a lot of noise and I didn’t want there to be any trouble with the police. He was ready not to be with May, he didn’t want to live with her basically, but she was the one who ran his life, made all his arrangements. As he told me, ‘I don’t know how to get rid of her ’cause she’s my phone-book.’”

He maintained constant contact with Yoko by telephone or surreptitious notes delivered via their mutual assistant, Jon Hendricks, and would regularly slip away to visit her at the Dakota, even though she continued to say he was “not ready” to come back permanently. “It used to be very nice,” she remembers. “John would say all sorts of funny things about the girl he met the night before and how it didn’t go well, I was telling him what happened to me because both of us had very bad times dating-wise, and we’d be laughing like crazy. I thought, ‘This is great. We’re just going to be great friends.’”

Now that they were on the same side of the continent once again, his jealousy and possessiveness receded; he had no objection to her seeing David Spinozza and even urged her to find several sexual partners as a precaution against cancer. “One day when he came here, he started that again, ‘Have sex, have sex…’” Yoko remembers. “I told him I didn’t know how to go about it. ‘Just say do you wanna fuck,’ John told me. He knew I could never do anything like that, but I realized he was saying he didn’t want me to come on to another person romantically. He kept saying that women didn’t know the difference between pure sex and romance, and that’s why they weren’t really
emancipated. He said I could even go to Italy or somewhere and find a young gigolo, because many ladies do that.

“So finally I made a call to one person—a musician, because John had said, ‘He’d be the type that you like.’ But he sounded so high that I just hung up. Other people John suggested I didn’t like because they were such heavy meat-eaters. John said, ‘Oh, Yoko—if you’re so particular, you’re never going to find anybody.’”

The final months of the Lost Weekend found him working harder than at any time since he was a Beatle. Predictably, Morris Levy was not satisfied by having just one brief, botched-up track on
Walls and Bridges
and demanded that John give him the full pound of royalty-generating flesh specified by their legal agreement. There was thus no alternative but to round up Jim Keltner, Klaus Voormann, Jesse Ed Davis, and the others and begin the
Oldies and Mouldies
album again from scratch. To help keep the band sober and on track, rehearsals took place at a farm owned by Levy in upstate New York. Each day, John and his musicians would eat lunch around a big kitchen table while the Octopus entertained them with stories of other bands he had exploited or intimidated over the decades. “He told it so amusingly,” Keltner says, “you just had to laugh.”

While making
Walls and Bridges
, John had somehow found time to write and demo what would be the title track of Ringo’s next album,
Goodnight Vienna
. In October, he returned to the Record Plant and began recording rock-’n’-roll standards like “Rip It Up,” “Stand by Me,” “Ready Teddy,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” and “Peggy Sue” in a new spirit of concentration and respect. He did radio promotion for Ringo and further brushed up his public profile with disc-jockeying stints for KHJ-AM, Los Angeles, and WNEW-FM, New York (where one commercial he had to read out was for a nightclub ambiguously named the Joint in the Woods). On November 18, to his utter amazement, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” his single with Elton John, reached number one in the United States, closely followed on the album chart by
Walls and Bridges
.