John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  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 Sixties. 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.

  There was thus an unhappy subtext to “Happy Christmas (War Is Over),” the single John and Yoko had just released as a follow-up to the previous year’s billboard campaign. In counterpoint to their alternating lead vocals, the “War is over / If you want it” chorus was provided by children from the Harlem Community Choir, many of them around Kyoko’s age. For John, it was just another instant, disposable Plastic Ono project: he could not know that “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” was to become as much a part of the Yuletide ritual as turkey or mistletoe. Equally ironic, as events would soon show, was his wish for the new year to be “a good one…without any fear.”

  He had inadvertently picked the worst possible moment to begin making waves in American public life. Nineteen seventy-two was a presidential election year, with Richard Nixon already assured of nomination for a second term by the Republican Party. Moreover, this election would see the franchise extended to eighteen-year-olds, thus creating some twelve million new voters. All his foreign policy triumphs in Russia and China had not lessened Nixon’s persecution complex, and he feared that this youthful surge at the polls would cheat him of victory. He and his inner coterie were prepared to repeat all the dirty tricks Daniel Ellsberg had suffered—and more—against anyone who threatened to encourage that result.

  A perfect hatchet man for Nixon was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover had run the FBI since the twenties, accumulating such a dossier of dirt on public officials that he could neither be fired or retired, however gross his own abuses of office. In secret a homosexual transvestite given to frilly frocks, he ruled the bureau as if still combating Al Capone and John Dillinger, and nurtured a ferocious hatred of “commies,” “lefties,” and their modern manifestation, rock stars.

  John’s ordeal at the hands of the U.S. government over the next three-and-a-half years might never have come to light but for a California academic named Jon Weiner, who was to dedicate himself to reconstructing it, armed with that most cleanly and enviable American law, the Freedom of Information Act. Even with this weapon, it would take Weiner three decades, spanning the regimes of four more presidents, to pry loose all the relevant official documents, the final ones not being released until 2006. It is a story of America at its worst and, ultimately, its best.

  Weiner’s investigation would show that the FBI’s interest in John, on paper at least, dated back to the American release of his and Yoko’s Two Virgins album. In March 1969, a congressman named Ancher Nelson sent J. Edgar Hoover an outraged letter from one of his constituents about the album’s nude cover photograph and asked whether anything could be done to suppress it. With this in view, Hoover consulted the Justice Department but was told the cover “did not meet the criteria of obscenity from a legal standpoint.” Before John’s April 1970 visit to Los Angeles with George and Pattie Harrison, the bureau’s West Coast agents were alerted to gather any evidence that the three were engaging in violent antiwar demonstrations or using narcotics. A dossier was even compiled on the Society for Krishna Consciousness, which he and George were said to support, lest it prove some kind of front for drug-taking or revolution.

  With John’s transplantation to New York and his open espousal of figures such as Abbie Hoffman, Angela Davis, and John Sinclair, the FBI finally had something substantial to chew on. The Sinclair freedom rally at Ann Arbor was heavily infiltrated by FBI informants, and detailed reports were compiled of the speeches made by Rubin, Seale, Allen Ginsberg, and others. One undercover FBI man who talked to John backstage claimed to have heard him speak in “anti-law enforcement tones” and pronounced him “a strong believer in the [Yippie] movement and in the overthrow of the present society in America today.”

  The attack, when it came, was not initiated by Hoover but by sixty-nine-year-old Strom Thurmond, Republican senior senator for South Carolina, an ardent segregationist and war enthusiast, and one of Nixon’s most influential supporters on the party’s far right. Early in February 1972, Thurmond wrote to John Mitchell, the attorney general and chairman of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (aptly known as CREEP). From his Se
nate Internal Security Subcommittee, Thurmond forwarded a staff memo warning that a group of anti-Nixon demonstrators planned to disrupt the Republican Party Convention that August, and that John was among its main supporters. The Thurmond letter implied that, with such a powerful agitator on hand, Nixon’s renomination ceremonial could disintegrate into the same chaos as had the Democrats’ catastrophic 1968 convention in Chicago. To head off this awful prospect, it proposed a “strategic counter-measure”: that John be deported forthwith.

  The warning was apparently based on a vague scheme of John’s to go “out on the road” with Yoko later that year. “All our shows we do will be for free,” he told a visiting crew from London Weekend Television. “All the money will go to prisoners or to poor people, so we’ll collect no money for the performances. We hope to start touring in America and then eventually go around the world…possibly to China, too.” He had also talked to Allen Ginsberg and others about using rock concerts to rally new young voters to the Democrats’ cause. But he had no connections with the group mentioned in Thurmond’s letter, the innocuously named Election Strategy Information Center, nor plans to go anywhere near the Republican Party Convention.

  The letter was passed to J. Edgar Hoover, who in turn passed it to Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as a matter potentially affecting national security. On February 12, 1972, Helms sent Hoover a coded teletype message, giving further sinister details of John’s alleged plot to disrupt the presidential election. According to CIA investigators, he was involved in a project “which will involve the use of videotapes, films and special articles” and participation “by a caravan of entertainers.” At this dire warning, the government’s “strategic counter-measure” swung into action.

  The B, or visitors’, visas issued to Yoko and him the previous August were due to expire simultaneously on February 29. Usual practice was to allow visitors another fifteen days in which to apply for a renewal. Five days into the extension period, they heard a pounding on their front door, like the prelude to a police raid, then saw a slip of paper pushed underneath. It was from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, informing them that both their visas had been “recalled” and they must leave the country by March 15.

  They needed a lawyer and, providentially, lit on the right one first time. Leon Wildes had fifteen years’ experience in the immigration and naturalization field, and was just ending his tenure as president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. An opera and classical music buff, he possessed none of John’s records and had barely even heard of him before being approached—by Yoko—to fight their case. He visited them at 105 Bank Street, where, acknowledging the gravity of the occasion, they did not interview him from their bed. “Yoko talked to me first in the front room, then John came in and served tea.”

  Wildes was at first doubtful of being able to help. Obvious though it might be that John was being punished for his political views and choice of friends, there seemed no earthly chance of proving it. Nixon might be considered “tricky,” but in early 1972 even his harshest mainstream critics would not have believed him this paranoid. Little was to be expected, either, from the INS system of review boards and courts that dealt with appeals against deportation—and rejected 95 percent of them. The only hope that Wildes could see was to fight the case through to the federal courts, whose judges were of higher caliber than the INS’s in-house ones, and less likely to toe the government line.

  With this in mind, Wildes turned up the 1968 drug-possession case that had gotten John banned from the United States for two years and had bedeviled all his visa applications since. John explained that he had pleaded guilty only to save Yoko from deportation from Britain, that the Montagu Square flat’s previous tenant had been Jimi Hendrix, and that he had carefully swept it for Hendrix’s drugs before taking up residence. Wildes at once spotted a gleam of hope. While marijuana was illegal in the United States, hashish, or purified cannabis resin, the substance found at Montagu Square, was not yet specifically named as prohibited under federal law.

  Further hope lay in the fact that since John’s case, UK law on drug possession had been amended. Unlike in 1968, the prosecution now had to prove a defendant had “knowingly” possessed an illegal substance rather than innocently occupying premises where it was hidden. Under American law, by contrast, John could never have been convicted without an opportunity to say whether he knew the cannabis was there. His suspicion that the police had planted the drug also looked more plausible now. The arresting officer, Sgt. Norman Pilcher, was now known to have consciously carved out a career in the headlines from busting pop stars, adding the scalps of Hendrix and Mick Jagger to his belt, often on equally dubious evidence. Before this year was out, Pilcher would be behind bars for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. A case full of such holes, Wildes intended to argue, should never have been a basis for John’s exclusion from America.

  Through the spring and early summer of 1972, John made repeated appearances with Yoko at INS hearings, each time securing a temporary postponement of the deportation order against them as fresh submissions were made by Leon Wildes and the final decision was deferred once again. John compared it with being summoned to the headmaster’s study at Quarry Bank School, except that he wasn’t caned. Talking to the eternal clusters of reporters and TV cameras outside, he managed to hide his resentment of the whole draggy, squalid, humiliating, inconclusive process, merely repeating that he loved New York and wanted to stay, that he was trying to get his UK drug conviction overturned (though actually that formed no part of Wildes’s strategy), that he needed to be in America with Yoko to recover Kyoko, and that they had no political agenda but the propagation of peace: “We’re revolutionary artists—not gunmen.”

  On March 3, the Houston court upheld Yoko’s solo custody of Kyoko and the Virgin Islands ruling that she should be brought up in America. The news was given to Yoko by Allen Klein as if it had been a personal deal-making coup on his part. But since there was still no trace of Tony Cox, Kyoko, and Melinda, the triumph fell rather flat.

  Cox’s strategy seemed to be to lie low until, as seemed inevitable, John lost his immigration battle and was thrown out of the country. Since Yoko had no drug conviction, she should never have been threatened with deportation, and Wildes expected to sort out her case relatively easily. She would then have to choose between going with John or staying behind to continue the search for Kyoko. One of John’s submissions to the INS was that, in all humanity, the two of them should not be torn apart like this: “I don’t know if there is any mercy to plead for, but if so I would like it for both us and our child.” He might as well have saved his breath. The latest allegation floating around in top-secret government documents was that he and Yoko were colluding with Tony Cox and that Kyoko’s abduction had been a put-up job to give emotional leverage to his antideportation case. Houston’s FBI office received orders to search for the hideout thought to have been agreed upon with Cox. If and when it were discovered, John would be charged with perjury.

  Before meeting Leon Wildes, John had had no thought of seeking permanent residence in America. He assumed that with a drug conviction on his record, the permit known as a green card, which granted foreigners freedom both to live and work there, was automatically beyond reach. Wildes did not agree, and suggested that he and Yoko should apply for classification as persons of special artistic merit whose presence enhanced American cultural life. Such “third-preference” status would not only solve their immediate visa problems but also enter their names on the register of those deemed eligible for green cards. The application was duly made but, despite repeated letters and calls, the INS failed to deliver a verdict.

  Preparing the case plunged Wildes into months of exhaustive research and investigation, in Britain as well as America. Meanwhile, it was essential that John cut a less controversial public figure than heretofore. “Rather than calling for Nixon’s overthrow, I said he should confine himself to gene
ral statements of principle,” the lawyer remembers. His commitment to the antiwar lobby remained as strong as ever. On April 22, he and Yoko attended a National Peace Rally in New York’s Duffy Square, leading the crowds in the sine qua non chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.” A month later, they added their names to supporters of a candlelight vigil in Washington, D.C., along with those of actor Eli Wallach, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, playwright Arthur Miller, and novelist William Styron. But there were no more overtly political appearances like the John Sinclair Freedom Rally. On Wildes’s advice, the film Yoko had made of that event, Ten for Two, was also shelved indefinitely.

  While the INS worked to get rid of John within the letter of the law, the FBI did so according to the personal doctrine of J. Edgar Hoover. The Bank Street apartment was put under surveillance, and tails were assigned to John and Yoko as they went about their daily business. Every lyric John had ever written was scrutinized for antigovernment sentiment, every television appearance he made was watched, analyzed, and committed to memoranda headed “Revolutionary activities.” There were plans for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether he had earned money while in the United States on a tourist visa, and for him and Yoko to be made to undergo psychiatric examinations. Contingency measures were even sketched out to meet his supposed threat to the Republican Convention, originally to be held in San Diego, California, but switched to Miami, Florida. These included the abduction of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the mugging of demonstrators by undercover government men outside the convention center, and the curtailment of John and Yoko’s freedom to travel inside America.