Shout! (78 page)

Elton John had by now become as massive a world attraction as the Beatles had been ten years earlier. But, for all his stature as a performer, he remained at heart an inveterate record fan whose greatest thrill was meeting the musicians who had colored his lonely boyhood in Pinner, Middlesex. The Beatles, above all, had inspired his earliest songwriting efforts with Taupin, often in outright
Sgt. Pepper
knockoffs with names like “Regimental Sergeant-Major Zippo.” And, by a weird coincidence, the duo had been discovered by the Beatles’ former music publisher, Dick James, proving that once-in-a-lifetime luck can strike the same person twice.

As Elton got to know John better, he was dismayed to see how his greatest idol’s solo career seemed to be slipping into the doldrums. And, with the generosity and altruism that was to be a feature of his career, he decided to do something about it. The next Elton single was both an homage to John and a ruse to drag him back into the limelight. At Caribou studios, nine thousand feet up in the Colorado mountains, the ultimate seventies glam-rock star recorded the ultimate sixties spine-tingler, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” set to a modish reggae beat but otherwise almost eerily reminiscent of John’s 1967 version. The composer himself joined the backup rhythm section under a complex but easily crackable code name, “the Reggae Guitars of Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” That December, it became Elton’s third U.S. number one.

John so enjoyed working and playing with his superstar fan that when he returned to the studio to make the album that would become
Walls and Bridges
, he asked Elton in to sing backup vocals. The result of their collaboration was “Whatever Gets You Thru’ the Night,” a scatter-gun rocker equally infused with John’s acidity and Elton’s pub-pianist good humor. As they listened to the playback, John said jokingly that if it was a hit, he’d sing it with Elton live onstage. By November, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” was at the top of the U.S. chart—and, it would prove, John’s only number one outside the Beatles in his lifetime.

Elton’s current sellout American tour was scheduled to end with a gala concert at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night, November 28. It was the perfect moment for John to honor his promise, though the very idea scared him almost witless. He had not performed
in public since a charity appearance two years earlier; in the meantime, his old enemy, stage fright, had come back worse than ever. A brief rehearsal with Elton and his band in New York did not do much to help calm his fears. He showed up at the Garden wearing dark glasses and a black suit more appropriate to a funeral parlor than dueting with glamrock’s answer to Liberace. Waiting backstage, he was so nervous that he went into the men’s room and vomited. He even temporarily forgot the order of strings on his guitar and had to ask Davey Johnstone, from Elton’s band, to tune it for him.

Just before showtime, a messenger delivered two identical gift boxes, one for him and one for Elton. Inside each was a white gardenia and a note: “Best of luck and all my love, Yoko.” “Thank goodness Yoko’s not here tonight,” Lennon said. “Otherwise I know I’d never be able to go out there.” He had no idea that, playing Cupid as well as Svengali, Elton had also invited Yoko to the concert, and that she was seated in the front row with her current date.

Midway through the concert Elton paused at the piano in his top hat decorated with outsize pheasant feathers. “Seeing as it’s Thanksgiving,” he said, “we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us onto the stage.” In the wings, still hesitating, John turned to Bernie Taupin. “He said, ‘I’m not going out there unless you go with me,’” Taupin remembers. “So I went forward a little way with him, then he sort of hugged me, and I said, ‘You’re on your own.’”

Also in the audience was Margo Stevens, the former Apple Scruff (George’s name for the female fans who haunted the individual Beatle’s front gates, EMI’s studios, and the steps at 3 Savile Row) who had progressed from camping outside Paul McCartney’s house to working as Elton’s housekeeper. Margo has never forgotten the moment when John walked—or, rather, was propelled—onstage. The house lights went up and all sixteen thousand people present rose to their feet in a spontaneous cheer. Only Yoko felt the moment to be one of less than pure euphoria. “When John bowed, it was too quickly, and one too many times,” she remembers. “And I suddenly thought, ‘He looks so lonely up there.’”

The John-Elton set was brief and, progressively, brilliant. John sang “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” as promised, with Elton’s backup vocals like a friendly instructor keeping him on track. Then Elton sang his revisited “Lucy,” backed by John. Within a few minutes, his confidence was sufficiently restored to take a sly dig at Paul McCartney: “We
thought we’d do a number of an old, estranged fiancé of mine, called Paul.” The number was “I Saw Her Standing There,” Paul’s kick-off track on the Beatles’ first-ever album, from the days when Lennon and McCartney songs were interchangeable and as perfect, in their way, as early Picassos. “Everyone around me was crying,” Margo Stevens remembers. “John was hugging Elton, and Elton seemed to be crying, too.”

After the show, Yoko and her companion came backstage for what was only supposed to be a friendly word with John and his own date that evening. “John and I started talking at once, each of us totally forgetting the person we were supposed to be with,” Yoko remembers. “After that, he invited me to an art exhibition. We started dating all over again.”

They settled down, as they thought, to grow old together in their rambling apartment on the Dakota’s seventh floor. In October 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals finally overturned the deportation order against John, ruling that the British law under which he had been convicted of drug possession in 1968 had been unfair by American standards, and paving the way for the green card that would allow him to stay in the country without further harassment. At the age of forty-one, despite the traumatic memory of three miscarriages, Yoko became pregnant again. On John’s thirty-fifth birthday, she gave birth to a son whom they named Sean Ono Lennon.

The year had seen John release two further albums—
Shaved Fish
, a compilation of existing tracks, including “Instant Karma,” “Cold Turkey” and “Mind Games,” and
Rock ’n’ Roll
, a nostalgic collection of four-chord classics from his boyhood in the Merseyside dance halls. He had also briefly found another songwriting partner in Elton John’s main glam-rock rival, David Bowie. The result was “Fame,” Bowie’s first number-one single in America.

After Sean’s arrival, quite spontaneously, John decided to opt out of the music business altogether and devote himself to parenthood. With Yoko’s help, he said, he finally felt secure enough to function without the golden armor of fame. “My whole security and identity [had been] wrapped up in being a pop star. But Yoko told me, the same way she told me with the Beatles. That was one liberation for me. The other was that I didn’t have to go on making records.” He delighted in the symmetry of including Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula” on the
Rock ’n’
Roll
album. For he’d sung that same song for the first time onstage at Woolton village in 1957, the day he’d first met Paul McCartney. He was leaving the business at exactly the same place he had come in.

From there on, he organized his whole life around Sean, feeding him, putting him to bed, establishing a routine for the little boy as settled and healthy as Aunt Mimi once had for him. He learned to cook and even bake bread—his triumph in his first successful loaf mingled with slight annoyance that it did not receive the kind of accolades he was used to. (“I thought, ‘Well, Jesus, don’t I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?’”) Having given him the child he had so much wanted, Yoko was content to play a secondary role with Sean. While John took on the role of “househusband,” Yoko became their business brain, a role in which she proved highly, though perhaps not unsurprisingly, effective.

They began to buy up other apartments in the Dakota, including a ground-floor suite that they turned into their office, Studio One, and another merely to serve as storage space for their vast accumulation of files and videos. They also bought a harborside mansion on Long Island, a Florida mansion that once had belonged to the Vanderbilt family, and a farm with a collection of prize Holstein cattle in upstate New York. Even if they had elected to sit still and do nothing, there was no danger of John’s bank account ever being down to its last fifty thousand pounds. Despite the feverishly changing fashions of seventies pop, Beatles albums and compilations still sold incessantly the world over. A vast annual royalty income was channeled to John from London via the Apple office—now merely a nest of busy accounting machines, supervised by the ever faithful and honest Neil Aspinall.

John’s involvement with Sean also awoke guilty memories of Julian, the son by his first wife, Cynthia, whose childhood he had almost missed in the whirlwind of being a Beatle. Now in his early teens, Julian lived in the Welsh hill town of Ruthin with his mother and her new husband, an electrical engineer named John Twist. He was already showing an interest in music, singing and playing guitar. But, so far as he knew, he had left no mark on his faraway father other than as the alleged inspiration for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Soon after Sean’s birth John invited Julian to New York and, over the next few years, made concerted efforts to rebuild a relationship with him. One of the many presents that Julian brought home to Ruthin was a portable typewriter, given to him by Yoko. Cynthia took a certain grim
pleasure in using it to write her autobiography,
A Twist of Lennon
, published in 1978. But the book itself was characteristically free of rancor, ending with words from the
I Ching:
No blame.

John’s only other regular contact in Britain was Aunt Mimi, the resoundingly normal and conventional woman whose virtues he unconsciously carried within him, and who still could read him better than anyone else.

Since the late sixties, Mimi had lived alone in a waterside bungalow in Poole Harbour, Dorset. She had never wanted to leave Liverpool or, indeed, her old home on Menlove Avenue, but in the end the pressure of Beatles fans had made it uninhabitable. One night John arrived at Mendips to find the house under siege and Mimi, uncharacteristically, crumpled up in tears on the front stairs. Next day, he told her to choose a new house anywhere else in the country that she fancied.

Mimi being Mimi, the bungalow was several sizes short of the place he would have bought her without a thought. Inside, all was as neat and spotless as ever. On the television set stood a photograph of John in his Quarry Bank High School cap, the happy, sunny little boy Mimi preferred to remember. In a bureau drawer lay bundles of his childhood drawings and poems, not yet the stuff of sky-high Sotheby auctions. Beside the patio window stood an anomalously expensive and tacky object, a cocktail cabinet shaped like an antique globe from Asprey’s, the Bond Street jewelers. Each Beatle rushed to possess such a globe in the first, free-spending days when, as Ringo said, Asprey’s used to feel “just like Woolworth’s.” Mimi was keeping John’s in case he should ever want it again.

Even this secluded reach of Poole Habour was not completely safe from lingering Beatlemania. Sometimes, to Mimi’s annoyance, passing pleasure boats would announce “There’s John Lennon’s aunt’s house” over the loudspeaker to their passengers. At regular intervals, groups of pilgrims would turn up on her doorstep from as far away as Japan and Australia. Mimi would give them a scolding, then invite them in, just as she once had Paul McCartney and George Harrison. A few even got to stay the night in the little spare-room bed whose history they did not dream. “This used to be John’s bed, you know,” Mimi would say casually when she brought their morning cup of tea.

As John moved into his late thirties, his regular telephone calls to Mimi began to show increasing signs of nostalgia about his childhood—even
aspects of it that he’d detested at the time. He asked her to send him various family mementoes, including the Royal Worcester dinner service that used to be displayed in the front hall at Mendips, and a photograph of Mimi’s late husband, his much loved Uncle George. Once, to her amazement, the one-time incorrigible school truant and outlaw asked for his old Quarry Bank cap with its Latin motto,
Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem
.

Despite the five thousand miles between them, aunt and nephew could have furious rows. One of their worst—on the subject of repainting the bungalow—ended with Mimi hooting, “Damn you, Lennon!” and slamming the phone down. A little later, John rang back, anxious and contrite. “You’re not still cross with me, Mimi, are you?” he asked.

New York has always allowed its large celebrity population a surprising measure of privacy and anonymity. John and Yoko became just another famous uptown couple in semidisguise, walking through Central Park, standing in line for pizza, or having birthday parties at Tavern on the Green. In a city then among the world’s most violent, John said he never felt a moment’s insecurity—though in late 1979, with chilling prescience, he and Yoko donated a thousand dollars to a fund to equip the city’s police with bulletproof vests.

Where he had once seemed thoroughly Ono-ized, Yoko now grew increasingly Lennon-ized. After Sean’s birth, John took to calling her Mother with a frisson of old-time northern comedians like Al Read. Yoko looked forward as much as he did to settling down before the television on Sunday evenings to watch public television’s imported English classic serials like Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
.

In the daytime, when Sean was asleep and the latest batch of loaves were safely in the oven, he would put on a Japanese happi coat and lie before his ever flickering giant TV screen, reading or watching the Central Park trees outside his window change from the heathery palette of spring through summer’s deep green to the russet and radicchio blaze of autumn. On the wall above his bed hung a state-of-the-art electric guitar that he’d bought just after getting back with Yoko but had hardly ever played. Next to it was the number 9 and a dagger made out of a bread knife dating from the American Civil War, as he said, “to cut away the bad vibes—to cut away the past symbolically.” From time to time he would glance at the guitar and wonder if he’d ever hold it again.