John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Their telephone was bugged, as was their lawyer’s. “We were told about a special number you could dial,” Leon Wildes remembers. “If you got a busy signal your line was okay, but if there was a screeching noise, it was bugged. We both got the screech.” Wildes’s only guarantee of confidentiality was, where possible, to conduct his phone conversations in Yiddish. A tail was even put on John’s personal photographer, Bob Gruen—“two guys in fedoras who looked like TV versions of G-Men.” John tried to laugh off the situation, but no one around him, particularly not his American employees, found it at all amusing. “I was expecting him to be put in a bag at any moment and hauled off to the airport—or even to be assassinated,” Dan Richter says. “It was scary.”

  Help was also enlisted from what, four decades later, could still be identified only as “a foreign intelligence service” but can have been none other than Britain’s MI5. Well before John’s departure for New York, MI5 had him listed as a supporter of Republican terrorism in Northern Ireland; he had allegedly been seen carrying a banner against “British Imperialism” and had contributed to a civil-rights organization that was a front for the Provisionals. This dossier had been fattened by his and Yoko’s participation in a demo by republican sympathizers outside the New York headquarters of Britain’s national airline, BOAC. Coded teletypes from London to Washington chattered with further detail of his subversive activities in the United Kingdom, such as sending money to Scottish shipyard strikers and giving interviews to tiny-circulation radical magazines like Red Mole.

  In Britain, John had written nothing about the worsening Ulster Troubles. But moving to New York had sharpened both his view of the conflict and his sense of his own Irish ancestry. American opinion on the Troubles ran largely against the British, even anglophile elements feeling a certain satisfaction that, after years of refusing outright support of the Vietnam War, Britain now had an analogously unwinnable conflict on its very doorstep. In New York, there were organizations openly dedicated to financing and purchasing weapons for the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who, against all evidence to the contrary, were seen as heroic young freedom fighters.

  On January 30, 1972, a date known ever afterward as Bloody Sunday, British soldiers shot thirteen people dead during a civil-rights march in Londonderry. John’s immediate response was a song called “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” couched in a brogue that seemed more of the seventeenth than twentieth century: “Keep Ireland for the Irish / Put the English back to sea….” Still more extreme sentiments permeated a companion ballad, “The Luck of the Irish,” this time expressed with the same bitter sarcasm as “Working Class Hero.” The British were depicted as “brigands” who had “raped” a “land full of beauty and wonder” and did wholesale murder “with God [i.e., Protestantism] on their side.” Of the innocent Protestants daily bombed or shot in their own homes in front of their children, there was no mention: “Blame it all on the kids in the I.R.A. as the bastards [i.e., his compatriots] commit genocide.”

  The “kids in the I.R.A.” were understandably delighted by this view of themselves, and for a time hoped to make John an even more useful advocate of their cause. In 2006, the writer Johnny Rogan revealed that a Provisional IRA activist named Gerry O’Hare visited John and Yoko at Bank Street, and that John talked seriously about doing a concert in Dublin for the Northern Aid Committee, a presumed IRA front, to raise funds for bereaved Catholic families. By this time, he had seemingly acquired a more balanced view of the conflict, making clear that he also wanted to give a similar show for Protestant victims in Belfast. The idea came to nothing, mainly because by now he feared that if he left America, he would not be readmitted.

  As Jon Weiner would eventually discover, the anti-Lennon campaign was approved and closely monitored at the very highest level. On April 23, a few days after John’s latest appearance before the INS, an FBI memo repeated the assertion from “a confidential source” that he had contributed $75,000 to a “New Left Group” that planned to disrupt the Republican Convention. It passed on John’s statement to the INS hearing that he was being deported “for his outspoken views on United States policy in Southeast Asia” and listed two apparent ruses on his part to stall the process even further. According to other confidential sources, he had accepted a teaching post at New York University that summer, and was to join the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. A footnote read: “This information is also being furnished to the Hon. H.R. Haldeman, assistant to the President at the White House.”

  The memo gives some flavor of the incompetence that underlay the whole operation. The bizarre belief that John was to be a member of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse—a body recently set up by Congress at Nixon’s behest—apparently derived from a statement to the INS tribunal that he and Yoko were planning a media antidrug campaign. Elsewhere, the mistakes and misinterpretations by Hoover’s agents often tipped over into farce. Another report, conflating John’s first two New York addresses and merging uptown with downtown, said he had resided at “the Saint Regis Hotel, Bank Street.” In the event that he might follow Tony Cox’s lead and go on the run inside America, a Wanted poster was drawn up—but using David Peel’s photograph in mistake for his. The précis of a televised press conference he gave with Jerry Rubin noted portentously that “Rubin appeared to have his hair cut much shorter than previously shown in other photographs.” Underneath, the nameless watcher printed in childlike letters “ALL EXTREMISTS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS.”

  All the time, a simple solution to the problem lay under the bureau’s nose. An early memo from the INS had admitted that only “a loose case” for deporting John existed on present evidence, and the best way to make it watertight would be to bust him for drugs, thus placing a second conviction on his record, which would guarantee his permanent exclusion from the country. FBI sources habitually mentioned his “excessive” use of substances stronger even than those favored by the Antichrist Rubin, and the New York Police Department had orders to swoop at the slightest suspicion of this or any other offense.

  Yet it never happened, even though, in his daily and nightly rounds with Yoko and their musical, artistic, and political retinue, John disdained to exercise even the slightest caution. Rehearsal and studio bouts with Elephant’s Memory always featured prodigal quantities of alcohol and drugs. “We called them the Tequila Sessions,” Bob Gruen remembers. “There’d be maybe ten bottles of tequila between eight people—and that was every night. Then after working in the studio, we’d go out drinking; we’d have more shots of tequila, then a big steak dinner, then we’d have a lot of Cognacs—and beers throughout. And in most circles a lot of pot and other chemicals to keep you going. The cops could have come along and busted John any time they wanted. It wasn’t like we were sneaking around. We were drinking and driving and smoking.”

  The government’s crowning mistake was not appreciating what massive public support John could command. Jon Hendricks organized petitions calling for an end to his harassment, which soon collected tens of thousands of signatures; the New York Times ran an editorial backing him; the head of the national auto-workers’ union sent a message of support. On April 27, New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, appealed to the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization in Washington for the deportation to be rescinded, calling it “a grave injustice” motivated not by John’s drug conviction but the fact that “[John and Yoko] speak out with strong and critical voices on the major issues of the day.” There was a similar appeal from Lord Harlech, Britain’s former ambassador in Washington, making belated amends for the mistreatment the Beatles had suffered at his embassy in 1964.

  Every TV talk-show host who interviewed John did so as an unequivocal sympathizer. “He had only to say ‘Yes’ and he could go on primetime and talk to a million people,” Dan Richter says. “We didn’t feel like we were underground people or outsiders. We represented reality—it was the politicians, the military and the people trying to deport John who live
d in the world of fantasy.”

  His main ally in this arena was Dick Cavett, whose late-night show on ABC combined intelligence and literacy with overt sympathy for the counterculture. To Cavett on May 11, he revealed that the FBI had not been engaged in a covert operation so much as overt intimidation. “I felt followed everywhere by government agents. Every time I picked up any phone, there was a lot of noise…I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in the car and they’d be following me and not hiding…. They wanted me to see I was being followed. Anyway, after I said it out on the air, on TV, the next day there was nobody there.”

  He also used the Cavett show to appeal to Tony Cox to come out of hiding with Kyoko. It was obviously better for a child to know both parents, he said, and Cox would be allowed fair access once a civilized dialogue had been restored. According to John, Yoko had been traumatized by Kyoko’s disappearance; she could not bear to see children of the same age, even on television, and was having constant nightmares, which always came at the same time, five a.m.

  On June 12 came the U.S. release of Some Time in New York City—which they had completed to coincide with their third wedding anniversary in March—coproduced by Phil Spector and with Elephant’s Memory incorporated into the Plastic Ono Band. To underline Yoko’s full creative partnership, the preceding single was a song built around her pioneering feminist slogan, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” with the vocal delivered by John. Even used thus, to symbolize latter-day enslavement, the word nigger led to radio bans across America (though Britain still had no problem with it). John and Yoko appeared on television with representatives of two leading black magazines, Jet and Ebony, who said that in such an allegorical context the usage was justified. Dick Cavett defied his ABC bosses and sponsors and allowed them to perform it on his show, first giving his audience a detailed explanation of why he was doing so.

  In contrast to Beatles albums that seemed to endure forever, John wanted this one to be as quickly assembled—and disposable—as a newspaper. Its cover was like a front page of the New York Times, each track-title appearing as a headline to a story and illustrated with gritty black-and-white news photographs. The contents might have been a checklist for the FBI of all the causes and individuals he had backed in the past ten months: “John Sinclair,” “Attica State,” “Angela” (about the Angela Davis case), “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “The Luck of the Irish.” In lighter vein, “New York City” added a fresh chapter to the “Ballad of John and Yoko,” recounting their adventures since arriving stateside, with mentions of David Peel, Elephant’s Memory, Max’s Kansas City restaurant, their bicycles—and “the Man” who was trying to kick them out. As a live-performance bonus, the album included clips from their UNICEF gig at the London Lyceum and their Fillmore East guest spot with Frank Zappa.

  Some Time in New York City was generally pronounced a failure, reaching only number forty-eight on the American chart and eleven in Britain (where its release was delayed until September). Even loyal Rolling Stone dismissed it as “incipient artistic suicide” and called the words “sloppy nursery rhymes.” “We weren’t setting out to make the Brandenburg Concerto…,” John retorted. “It was just a question of getting it done, putting it out and the next one’s coming up soon. We needn’t have done it. We could have sat on ‘Imagine’ for a year and a half, but the things…were coming out of our minds and we just wanted to share our thoughts with anybody who wanted to listen. The songs we wrote and sang are subjects we and most people talk about.” Unconsciously he invoked the namesake grandfather who had crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool on an uncannily similar journey eighty years earlier: “It was done in a tradition of minstrels—singing reporters—who sang about their times and what was happening.”

  Today, the album is recognized to be much more than a soapbox rant. The mood of almost every track may be angry, but an artful range of commercial pop effects sweetens the harangue, including generous sprays of rock-’n’-roll chicken sax. To critics in 1972, it seemed the most unwarrantable intrusion yet that Yoko had equal time both as a songwriter and performer, that John sang her lyrics as well as his, and that in two songs, “Angela” and “Born in a Prison,” he provided harmony for her just as Paul McCartney once had for him. Both duets, in fact, have an unexpected sweetness and delicacy—grim newsprint suddenly turning into Willow Pattern china. Yoko’s words, more blank verse than lyrics, seem to stretch John’s voice as even the most impassioned of his own never have. “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” gets a bravura performance rivaled only by “Twist and Shout.”

  This public affirmation that Lennon had found a successor to McCartney brought trouble in its wake. Since John began writing with Yoko, there had been problems in getting his British publishers, Northern Songs, to accept her name as a bona fide substitute for Paul’s. So uncomfortable was Northern’s new ATV management about billing “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” as a John-Yoko collaboration that the single would not appear in Britain until the Christmas after its U.S. release. On Some Time in New York City, Yoko’s publishing company, Ono Music, claimed half the copyright to four tracks she and John had cowritten: “Angela,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “The Luck of the Irish,” and “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” Northern and its associated Maclen company promptly filed a $1 million lawsuit against John in New York, claiming he had broken the 1965 agreement giving them exclusive rights to his work, whether solo or collaborative. John responded by countersuing for $9 million in allegedly unpaid foreign royalties.

  Such an album was clearly not the most diplomatic thing to have released just as John and Yoko’s lawyer, Leon Wildes, was trying to convince the immigration courts that they presented no threat to America’s internal security. While Wildes could not influence what John put on record, he urged him soften his persona by public charitable works in the mold of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. An opportunity arose through a friendly TV reporter named Geraldo Rivera, who was helping to organize a fund-raiser for Willowbrook State School, a children’s psychiatric hospital on Staten Island. John and Yoko volunteered to perform at the event at Madison Square Garden on August 30, alongside Steve Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Sha Na Na. Even for such an obviously respectable occasion, the FBI surveillance team turned out in force, ostentatiously photographing an audience that included Mayor John Lindsay, Princess Lee Radziwill, and the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern.

  Backed by Elephant’s Memory, John and Yoko played a chaotic medley, ranging from “Come Together” and “Hound Dog” to “Mother,” which John introduced as “from one of those albums I made since I left the Rolling Stones.” A famous film sequence shows him alone at the piano, in tinted glasses and olive-green shirt, screaming into the Garden’s huge auditorium what most people would hesitate even to whisper secretly into their pillows: “Mother, you had me…but I never had you….” However long ago and far away, it is still almost too painful to watch.

  Back in Britain, what sent teenage girls crazy these days was glitter or glam rock. In reaction to the old decade’s washed-out hippie smocks and quest for higher meanings, early seventies bands dressed in shiny suits and tottery platform heels, used female jewelry, hair dye, and even makeup, and gave themselves up to flashiness, triviality, and self-mockery. The latest to be hailed as “new Beatles” were T-Rex, whose lead singer, Marc Bolan, wore eye shadow and face paint; instead of Beatlemania, the press now talked about TRextasy. Bolan’s run of self-penned hits like ‘Ride a White Swan,” “Telegram Sam,” “Jeepster,” and “Get It On,” the Melody Maker said, made him “as important as Lennon or Dylan.”

  The statement brought swift reaction from a transatlantic migrant who had supposedly left all such considerations far behind. “I ain’t heard ‘Jeepster,’ tho’ I heard and liked ‘Get It On’ and [Bolan’s] first hit,” John wrote to the paper, trying—not very successfully—to adopt a benign elder statesman air. “Anyw
ay, we all know where those ‘new licks’ come from—right, Marc?” Another correction came winging from New York after Melody Maker ran an interview with George Martin in which he said the Beatles’ first British hit, “Please Please Me,” had been cowritten by John and Paul and reordered a little by himself. “I wrote ‘Please Please Me’ alone. It was recorded in the exact sequence in which I wrote it. ‘Remember?’ love John & Yoko.” Like its predecessor, the letter was meant for publication, even coming tagged with the words “LP Winner”—Melody Maker’s traditional award to the week’s pithiest correspondent.

  John’s feud with his former other half staggered on for a little longer in this same arena. Late in 1971, Paul told an MM interviewer that the ex-Beatles’ financial disputes would soon be resolved if the four of them got together, without Allen Klein, Yoko, or Linda, and simply signed a piece of paper—“but John won’t do it…. Everyone thinks I’m the aggressor, but I’m not, you know. I just want out.” At the time, the Imagine album had just appeared, with its anti-Paul-and-Linda tirade, “How Do You Sleep?” Paul laughed it off as “silly,” though the jibe about “Yesterday” had obviously hurt him. “So what if I live with straights? I like straights. I have straight babies.”

  Claiming “equal time” on the letters page, John sent a lengthy reply (headed “Dear Linda, Paul and all the wee McCartneys…”) from which nine lines had to be cut for fear of legal repercussions. The remainder was still headline-making stuff with its suggestion the other ex-Beatles might buy Paul’s share of Apple, and brusque dismissal of the summit-conference idea.

  For someone reputedly so dedicated to self-advancement, Paul had not fared nearly as well as John these past two years. Though the public smile never left his face, he had suffered a dark period immediately after the Beatles’ breakup, starting to drink heavily and wonder if he really could go on without them. His decision to form a band named Wings with his wife in the lineup had been met with ridicule that even Yoko in the Plastic Ono Band never suffered. Unable to defeat the UK media’s prejudice, he was reduced to touring Wings in a small van, like pre-1962 Beatles, playing surprise gigs at provincial colleges. His post-Lennon-McCartney songs were increasingly criticized for being bland and cutesy, yet if he attempted to step out of character—as with his own comment on the Ulster Troubles, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”—people threw up their hands in horror. While the Plastic Ono Band had hit after hit, Wings were far slower to take flight.