John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  This was just as well, since Tittenhurst Park and its motley collection of servitors and passing guests ate up money on an epic scale. Lavish open house was kept for John and Yoko’s musical and artistic cronies, and anyone they considered a victim of establishment persecution or repression found generous sanctuary with them. In late 1970, for example, Michael X had been charged with robbery and extortion and, rather than face trial, had fled back to his native Trinidad. Despite the damning evidence, John remained his stalwart supporter and offered his wife, Desiree, indefinite rent-free use of Tittenhurst’s Tudor cottage while she tried to sort out the legal and financial chaos he had left behind.

  John’s son Julian, by now a moon-faced seven-year-old, was a frequent weekend visitor, delivered by chauffeured Rolls from his mother’s less-than-mansionlike home in West London. Tittenhurst was a seven-year-old’s paradise (a “house of fun,” grown-up Julian would call it), and father and son found their first sense of real togetherness racing over the hilly greensward on an Amphicat or rowing on the lake. Though an endearing little boy in many ways, Julian had none of John’s precocious creativity and charm at the same age, and his relations with his new stepmother were—and would remain—uncomfortable. Yoko says she did her best to be nice to him, but admits she knew little about small boys or how to connect with them. Inevitably, Julian’s visits reminded her of the problems she and John were experiencing in having a baby together. She also felt it keenly that, while his son had free run of their home, her daughter did not.

  Until now, the shared custody arrangement whereby Kyoko lived with Tony Cox had seemed to work more or less to everyone’s satisfaction. Cox had also somehow become part of John and Yoko’s creative retinue—to the point where John even suggested they should form another breakaway band, with Cox’s Texan girlfriend, Melinda, as its fourth member. Early in 1970, Cox had filmed John and Yoko for an intended documentary on Michael X’s Black House, and shot further domestic sequences at Tittenhurst with John cuddling and petting Kyoko. As time passed, however, John began to suspect Cox of using his day-to-day control of Kyoko as a pressure point on Yoko and, more subtly, himself. When Cox invited them to Kyoko’s seventh birthday party, John thought he was being set up, refused to go, and forbade her mother to do so either. “Can you imagine how I felt?” Yoko says. “I heard that Kyoko had been watching the door all afternoon, waiting for me to arrive.”

  In fairness to Cox, he was a devoted father who had always done the lion’s share of parenting Kyoko, and felt deeply uneasy about her immersions in John and Yoko’s unstable, unpredictable lifestyle. The constant media floodlight on them made it impossible for the girl to lead any kind of normal existence—sabotaging, for instance, her long-held wish to learn ballet. Often, too, when Cox tried to contact Yoko or John on some matter connected with Kyoko, he would be blocked by one or other of their assistants. Their car accident with Kyoko and Julian in the Scottish Highlands made Cox “freak out,” according to his former neighbor, Dan Richter. From then on, he ruled that whenever Kyoko spent time with them, he must be there, too.

  The various mystical manias of the Sixties had a profound influence on Cox. During their stay together in Denmark, he introduced John and Yoko to an American named Don Hamrick, a leading light in a cult known as the Harbingers. Both underwent hypnosis by Hamrick in attempt to cure their heavy smoking habit and, secondarily, to relive their former existences on earth. He also claimed to be in communication with other worlds and, with a fellow cult member, had proposed bringing the real UFOs to the Toronto Peace Festival. Though Cox remained friendly with Hamrick, he had since moved on spiritually, becoming a convert to, of all things, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation movement. Along the way, his view of John radically changed from “great fellow” and potential backer to drug fiend and threat to the moral welfare of his daughter. He became progressively more difficult about access and finally, in mid-April, without any warning, left his London flat with Melinda and Kyoko.

  Initially there was no clue whatsoever either to his whereabouts or his intentions. Then his Harbinger friend Don Hamrick let slip that he was attending a TM course on the Spanish holiday island of Majorca, where the Maharishi now owned a house. With Dan Richter and a Spanish lawyer named Cesar Lozano, John and Yoko flew by private jet to Majorca and removed Kyoko from the kindergarten at Cala Ratjada where Cox had enrolled her. Before they could make their escape, Cox discovered what had happened and called the police. John and Yoko were arrested in their suite at the Hotel Melia Mallorca in Palma, parted from Kyoko again, and taken to police headquarters.

  Kyoko still vividly recalls the cycle of her emotions that day amid the sunshine and flowers: from shock at being snatched from her classroom to pleasure at seeing Yoko and John again, to fear of what her father would say and dread that the grown-ups would have another of their screaming fights. A summary hearing of the case was convened at Palma courthouse, beginning at midnight and lasting almost until dawn. The judge ordered that Kyoko be taken into the room where John and Yoko were being held, then into the one where her outraged father waited with Melinda. In a chilling echo of what had happened to John at around the same age, she was then told to choose between them. Accustomed to Cox’s care as she was, Kyoko picked him. Cox ran out of the courthouse with her on his back and was driven away at top speed. A few days later, the adversaries gave a press conference and announced that the whole episode had been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Kyoko was even allowed to return with her mother to Tittenhurst Park.

  John and Yoko had been released only on condition that they return to Majorca later in the month to face further questioning about the “abduction.” The date of the hearing, however, clashed with that of the Cannes Film Festival, where their films Apotheosis and Fly were both premiered (the first to boos, the second to a standing ovation). Afterward, they had to honor a promise given months before to visit Michael X in his Trinidadian exile. So while Richter went to sort out matters in Palma, they spent a week loyally hanging out with the fallen demagogue and his family in the compound near Port of Spain, where he now planned—with John’s patronage—to found an “alternative university.”

  On May 24 came the UK release of Paul McCartney’s second solo album. Entitled Ram, it was credited to “Paul and Linda McCartney” in apparent imitation of John and Yoko; its cover showed Paul in Scottish sheepshearer mode, gripping the curled horns of a woolly coated ram. Although critically panned, it reached number one in America and two in Britain and spun off a hit single, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” Also included was a track called “Too Many People,” clearly alluding to John’s rejection of the Beatles for Yoko. “That was your first mistake,” ran the refrain. “You took your lucky break and broke it in two.”

  As mild and oblique as the comment was, it seemed to cut John to the heart. On top of the questionnaire inside the McCartney album and the lawsuit, it was like the tipping point between a divorcing couple that turns love into savage, no-holds-barred hostility. Indeed, John’s wounded anger was more that of an ex-spouse than ex-colleague, reinforcing a suspicion already in Yoko’s mind that his feelings for Paul had been far more intense than the world at large ever guessed. From chance remarks he had made, she gathered there had even been a moment when—on the principle that bohemians should try everything—he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality. Nor, apparently, was Yoko the only one to have picked up on this. Around Apple, in her hearing, Paul would sometimes be called John’s Princess. She had also once heard a rehearsal tape with John’s voice calling out “Paul…Paul…” in a strangely subservient, pleading way. “I knew there was something going on there,” she remembers. “From his point of view, not from Paul’s. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn’t help wondering what it was really about.”

  Just now, getting even with Paul had to take second place to the continuing saga of Tony Cox and Kyoko. After a short truce following the Majo
rca episode, Cox had once again vanished into thin air with his daughter and Melinda. In June, John’s lawyers received information that the trio were now in America. He and Yoko returned to New York, hoping to pick up Cox’s trail there, but the mission proved fruitless. Ironically, that week found Kyoko’s distraught mother and John onstage with the Mothers of Invention, who were making a live album at the city’s Fillmore East auditorium.

  Back home, too, there was another urgent call on the John and Yoko agitprop helpline. In May 1970, the underground magazine Oz had published a “schoolkids issue,” put together by schoolchildren, whose most striking feature was a pornographic cartoon strip with Rupert Bear heads superimposed on the characters. As a result, Oz’s three editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson, and Felix Dennis, were charged with “conspiracy to corrupt public morals,” ushering in the longest, most hilarious obscenity trial in British legal history. John issued a statement backing Oz, and he and Yoko joined a march protesting the absurd heavy-handedness of the prosecution.

  By July, as the “Oz Three” stood in the dock at the Old Bailey, John was itching to make another album. To goad him, there was now even more than George’s All Things Must Pass and Paul’s Ram amidships. In April, Ringo had had a massive hit single, “It Don’t Come Easy,” cowritten, produced, and lead-guitared by George, with Klaus Voormann on bass and Stephen Stills on piano. No one was happier than John to see Ringo start having solo hits, but he still could not repress a twinge of competitiveness. He had done his therapy; now it was time to try going commercial.

  The studio at Tittenhurst Park was finished at long last, allowing him to work as he’d always wanted, free from the bureaucratic annoyances of Abbey Road and Apple, with home comforts close at hand and his beloved gardens all around him. Once again, the album was to be jointly credited to the Plastic Ono Band and himself, and coproduced by Yoko, himself, and Phil Spector. But this time, the former spartan lineup of Klaus Voormann and a drummer was augmented by star session men, including George Harrison, pianist Nicky Hopkins, and legendary saxophonist King Curtis, who had once played with Buddy Holly. To give the “chocolate coating” John desired, there was even a string section, billed as the Flux Fiddlers.

  The recording sessions were filmed as part of a cinematic diary he and Yoko had been keeping for some months past. This color footage, shot in the studio and around the house and grounds, shows a very different Mr. and Mrs. Lennon from the hirsute near-look-alikes of six months earlier. John has gone for seventies fashion at full tilt, shaving off his beard (though keeping long sideburns to hide the scar from his road accident), adopting a wheatsheaf haircut, exchanging his denim battle fatigues for skimpy Fair Isle sweaters, billowing bell-bottoms, and wedge-heeled shoes. Yoko has pulled her hair back from her face and taken to figure-hugging jackets, hot pants, jaunty French berets, and kinky boots. Both, in fact, look about ten years younger. The only unchanged detail is the miasma of cigarette smoke around them.

  While providing a temporary home for session musicians and technical staff, Tittenhurst was once again giving sanctuary to the politically oppressed. The three Oz defendants had by now been convicted and sentenced to vicious prison terms. Pending their appeals (which would be successful), two of them, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, had fled abroad, leaving their less affluent colleague, Felix Dennis, to face the media fallout alone. Hearing of his plight, John and Yoko offered him accommodation with Les Anthony and family in the gatekeeper’s lodge.

  As the new songs took shape, Klaus Voormann saw little resemblance to the “out-of-whack” John who had howled out his boyhood anguish and fury a year earlier. He seemed happy and relaxed and, like everyone emerging from therapy, anxious to make public what a mess he used to be. “Jealous Guy” ruefully owned up to the malady he had suffered since his first courtship of Cynthia and the low self-esteem that underlay it: “I was feeling insecure…You might not love me any more…I was shivering inside…I was swallowing my pain…” His whistled solo halfway through, almost lost in the backing, was somehow even more poignant than his words. “Oh My Love” was a new hymn of gratitude to Yoko in his Julia voice, because “for the first time in my life…my mind can feel.” “Oh, Yoko!” admitted his need to be constantly reassured of her nearness (“in the middle of a bath,” even “in the middle of a shave”) with a country-and-western song of infectious jollity and an ebullient harmonica solo. “Yoko had an incredibly positive influence on the whole album” Dan Richter remembers. “She wasn’t just sitting in the background and yowling occasionally. She could read and even write musical notation. If there was ever a problem, say over harmonies, Yoko as likely as not would come up with the solution.”

  Here and there, one bit through the chocolate coating to a rancid center. A perky little yee-haw hillbilly number, for instance, was called “Crippled Inside.” The tolling, accusatory “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier” came on as rock ’n’ roll, with Link Wray–style bass guitar and an echoey “We-ell” that could have been Gene Vincent on “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” “Gimme Some Truth” chose an almost Broadway show–tune style to pour scorn on “neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians” and actually identify America’s president Richard Nixon by his long-standing nickname of Tricky Dicky.

  One track, however, made no attempt to candy-coat the message. “How Do You Sleep?” was a reply to Paul McCartney for that disparaging comment on the Ram album. Its title gave warning of the overreaction to come, for although Paul may have been self-serving and disloyal by John’s lights, he had done nothing to lose sleep over. Where his attack had been mild and sidelong, John’s was violent and full-on, a nuclear missile answering a pinprick. It accused Paul of surrounding himself with sycophantic “straights” and being pussy-whipped by Linda (“Jump when your Mama tell you anything”). It called him “a pretty face” without staying power and trashed his songs as “Muzak to my ears.” It worked in references to Sgt. Pepper, the “Paul is dead” rumor (“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead”), and, most unfairly of all, taunted, “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday.’”

  Felix Dennis, who was around as the lyric took shape, remembers John’s fellow musicians, including Ringo, telling him in vain that he was going way too far. In its original version, the line after the “Yesterday” reference was “You probably stole that bitch, anyway.” Only when the album was being mastered in New York did Allen Klein persuade John to cut it on the grounds that Paul would probably sue. Instead, Klein suggested “And since you’re gone you’re just Another Day,” a reference to Paul’s recent solo single. Even the arrangement of “How Do You Sleep?” was subtly insulting, a melodramatic soul-funk suggesting that some risible Demon King might appear through a trapdoor at any moment. George Harrison played slide guitar, thereby endorsing every word.

  The final insult was to Paul’s new rustic life with Linda. In parody of the Ram cover’s Highland sheepshearer, John had himself photographed in an identical pose straddling a pig. This was turned into a picture postcard, to be slipped inside every copy of the album. “I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time,” he would claim. “It was not a terrible, vicious, horrible vendetta…I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and the Beatles and the relationship with Paul to write a song. I don’t really go around with those thoughts in my head all the time…I’m really attacking myself. But I regret the association—well, what’s to regret? He lived through it.”

  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 respect
s, 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.