John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The fracas continued outside, with cameras unfortunately present. John grappled with a parking-lot attendant and wrestled him to the ground, then received such a look of hero worship from his supine victim that all his anger evaporated. Two other bystanders afterward claimed he had assaulted them—a club waitress and a photographer named Brenda Parkins. When Parkins brought charges, John settled out of court to avoid jeopardizing his immigration case, but maintained he’d never touched her—and anyway she hadn’t been a bona fide press representative, just a pushy fan with “an Instamatic.”

  “OK, so I was drunk,” he admitted later. “When it’s Errol Flynn, all those showbiz writers say, ‘Those were the days when we had Sinatra and Errol Flynn, socking it to the people.’ I do it, I’m a bum…I was drunk in Liverpool and I smashed up phone boxes, but it didn’t get in the papers….” Next day, he and Nilsson sent flowers and a note of apology to the Smothers Brothers, who issued a diplomatic statement that “it was partly our fault.” That night, a sober and penitent John was seen with May at an American Film Institute tribute dinner to James Cagney, prompting the first press reports of a “new girl in his life.”

  The ménage using Ringo’s apartment at the Beverly Wilshire had by now worn out its welcome. Keith Moon was a past master in the seventies rock-star art of trashing hotels, and John (who seldom damaged so much as an ashtray in Beatle-touring days) was quick to emulate “Baron von Moon” as he admiringly dubbed him. Coincidentally, the next-door suite was occupied by an old Swinging London crony, Jonathan King. One day when King used the elevator to the penthouse floor, he saw FUCK YOU scratched on its wood paneling in unmistakable Lennon capitals.

  After several run-ins with the hotel management, the party moved to a large and well-secluded beach house in Santa Monica, where they were joined by Ringo, his new manager, Hilary Gerrard, and Klaus Voormann’s girlfriend, Cynthia Webb. The house had once been used for Bobby Kennedy’s assignations with Marilyn Monroe, and John and May were quartered in the very bedroom they were reputed to have shared. Here, mainly at the instigation of Baron von Moon, domestic life took on the semblance of a modern, multimillionaires’ Goon Show. Every morning, for instance, Moon would live up to his name by appearing naked but for an ankle-length leather coat, split up the rear to show his bare bottom, a trailing white scarf, and ankle boots.

  There still was no sign of Phil Spector and the Oldies and Mouldies tapes, so, rather than just sit around and wait, John decided to produce an album for Harry Nilsson. This was to be entitled Pussycats and feature an eclectic song mix, from Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Work began at Burbank Studios on March 28; John brought in session men like Jim Keltner from his own album lineup and even wrote Nilsson a track entitled “Mucho Mungo.” “He was determined he was going to give Harry the breakthrough that no one else ever really had,” Elliot Mintz says. “When he spoke about him it was almost in the vernacular of a manager.”

  During the first week of recording, Paul and Linda McCartney happened to be in L.A., and dropped by the studio to say what they expected would be only a brief hello. Paul by this time was finally enjoying solo success at the same level as John’s; his wife-augmented band, Wings, had won credibility with the album Band on the Run, and he had written the theme song to a James Bond film, Live and Let Die, which was nominated for both an Oscar and a Grammy. Despite the thousands of miles between them, both geographically and spiritually, the old Lennon-McCartney symbiosis still occasionally revived. Paul, too, had been in hot water over a song about the Ulster Troubles, entitled “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” had been busted (twice) for cannabis possession, and was now having problems over U.S. visas.

  The business disputes that had driven such a wedge between John and him were all now as good as settled. The Beatles partnership was on course for final dissolution in London’s High Court in December. Both had ended their yoked-together contract with ATV/Northern Songs in 1973, and were free to market their work through their own publishing companies. Most important, John admitted that if he’d followed Paul’s advice in 1969, he, George, and Ringo would not now be battling Allen Klein in the U.S. civil courts with something like $19 million at stake. Consequently, when Paul visited one of John’s sessions for Pussycats, the old partners greeted each other as if they’d never had a cross word. Within minutes, they had picked up guitars—left-handed and right-handed—and were jamming together on “Midnight Special,” an old blues favorite from earliest Quarrymen days.

  The following Sunday, March 31, John invited Paul and Linda to an all-day party at the Santa Monica beach house. Many other notable musicians were present, including Stevie Wonder, and another jam session soon started, with John on guitar and Paul on the absent Ringo’s drums. In a medley of old favorites, from Little Richard’s “Lucille” to Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a matchless sour-sweet harmony took its final bow. “There were about 50 people playing,” John would remember, “and they were just watching me and Paul.”

  Elliot Mintz believes he witnessed the end of the Lost Weekend, or at least the beginning of the end. One morning when he and John were having breakfast after an all-night studio session, a beautiful woman wearing an array of expensive bracelets stopped at their table and handed John a napkin with a telephone number written on it. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she murmured. “I just want you to have this. Use it when you’re ready.” Next day when Mintz arrived to collect John—it was during one of various breakups with May—he glimpsed the woman in the background, still with her conspicuous bracelets but otherwise wearing only a robe. John took him aside and asked him to get rid of her as quickly and discreetly as possible.

  “Some people have bachelor parties; John had the Lost Weekend,” Mintz says. “For him, it was the end of innocence and the start of growing up and being serious. And I think on that particular morning, he recognised the obvious…. He could spend a lifetime collecting phone numbers scribbled on pieces of paper. At age thirty-four, he knew that’s how it might be forever. There would be a thousand amorous women in terry-cloth robes waiting around in the morning while he assigned someone or other the task of getting rid of her.”

  For John himself, the turning point was producing Pussycats for Nilsson, which by now had grown almost as much of a shambles as Oldies and Mouldies, with three different drummers (Ringo, Keith Moon, and Jim Keltner), a huge brass section, and a children’s choir. The sessions had no sooner gotten under way than Nilsson’s extraordinary, keening voice began to fail. “Harry told me he’d woken up on a beach somewhere after a night out with John,” Keltner remembers. “They’d both been doing a lot of screaming the night before, which John was really good at, and the next morning Harry found his voice was completely shot.” Afraid the album might be canceled, he tried to hide the problem from John, hoping that medication would cure it. “I [didn’t] know whether it was psychological or what,” John recalled. “He was going to the doctors and having injections and he didn’t tell me till later he was bleeding in the throat or I would have stopped the session…. I’m saying, ‘Well, where is all that yooo-deee-dooo-daaah stuff?’ and he’s going ‘croak’…That’s when I realised…I was suddenly the straight one amid all these mad, mad people. I suddenly was not one of them.”

  Those stricken vocal cords provided just the out that John was seeking. In mid-April, he brought Nilsson back to New York and checked into the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, ostensibly to finish Pussycats away from the distractions of their L.A. chums. It also happened that Nilsson’s record company, RCA, had tired of waiting for another hit like “Without You” and was threatening to drop him. John went to see RCA’s bosses, talked up the brilliance of Pussycats, and hinted at a preparedness to sign with the label—bringing Ringo along, too—if Nilsson’s contract were extended. Mesmerized by the prospect of owning two ex-Beatles (which, of course, would never happen) the RCA men fell over themselves to agree.

  The
re was another, more pressing reason to be back East. For months past, the hundred or so total strangers per day who felt entitled to greet John like an old friend had invariably asked one of two questions. The foremost—which even a young L.A. cop, called to investigate yet another fracas in Bel Air, could not help blurting out—was “Will the Beatles be getting back together?” But a close second, especially beloved of cabdrivers, was “How’s your immigration going?” By now, his virtual criminalization in the land the Beatles had once entranced was causing anger and puzzlement all over the world. In Britain, the outrage on his behalf posed the biggest threat to Anglo-American relations since Vietnam. Radio Luxembourg (as British an institution as warm beer or rainy summers) demanded a Royal pardon for the drug conviction that had started all his visa troubles, and delivered a petition with sixty thousand listeners’ signatures to the prime minister, James Callaghan.

  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 instead 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, wherev
er 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.”