John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  “A recluse? Well, yes and no,” Bob Gruen says. “The kind of recluse that can go to Bermuda or Long Island when he feels like it. Some people who stay at home are kinda pack-rats among their magazines. But John had a nice big expanse live in. He could take a half-a-block walk inside his home. There’s a lot of places where the corner news stand is a shorter walk away than his kitchen was from his bedroom. It’s true he sometimes didn’t go out for days at a time, but that didn’t mean he was cloistered like a hermit. If ever I called him up, he always asked me to stop by.”

  Elliot Mintz, his confidant and minder during the Lost Weekend, remained close to him and Yoko, and spent long hours with them at the Dakota. “There certainly were moments in those years when John wasn’t exactly the life of the party,” Mintz says. “He had his mood swings, as he always did, but for most of the time he was in good spirits. One certainly could never have called him a depressive. In general he seemed happy with the more modest, moderate way of life he’d chosen.”

  Much of the time he devoted to child care, determined to be there for Sean as his own father had not been for him—and as he had similarly neglected to be for his firstborn. Anyone who has looked after a child knows how totally it revolutionizes one’s life and changes ones ideas of what is and is not important. Where once John had demanded novelty and diversion every other moment, his existence now became an unchanging cycle of mealtimes, bath-times, and bedtimes—much like the routine his Aunt Mimi had once built around him—the days crowded, demanding, often joyful and triumphant, but with little or nothing to differentiate them once they had gone.

  In other ways, he took care to make his regime the opposite of Mimi’s. Remembering—still bitterly—how she used to raid his bedroom and throw away his drawings and writings, he treated every creative effort by Sean with the reverence due a Rembrandt. “Even if he makes a paint mark on a napkin, I keep it, I save it,” visitors like Gruen and Mintz were told. “It’s Sean. It’s part of him.” As the little boy learned to talk, he was initiated into John’s world of comic voices and names, and recollections from the country named England they were going to visit together someday, though a certain epoch was never mentioned. One day while visiting a friend, Sean happened to see Yellow Submarine on TV. Afterward, he came running back into the apartment and shouted, “Daddy…were you a Beatle?”

  At that time, the great fear on both John’s and Yoko’s minds was that Sean might be kidnapped. Despite the Dakota’s stout defenses, it was not impregnable; now and then, an intruder managed to evade the copper-boxed sentry at the front gate, slip past the well-staffed internal reception desk, get into the right wood-paneled elevator, and reach the hallway outside apartment 72. However, late-seventies paparazzi were nowhere near as ruthless in hounding celebrities, and celebrities’ children, as they would later become. No press pictures of Sean appeared until he was well into toddlerhood.

  When it came time for the nanny to take over, John would retire into his and Yoko’s bedroom overlooking the park and put on a bathrobe or Japanese kimono, content for “Mother” to wear the pants. In contrast with adjoining rooms, the décor here was simple, even spartan. The bed was a plain king-size mattress rigged between a pair of old wooden church pews. On the wall above the headboard pew hung a state-of-the-art “bodyless” electric guitar, a large number 9, and a dagger made from a Civil War–era kitchen knife intended, so he said, “to cut away the bad vibes…to cut away the past symbolically.” Visitors were not allowed to come around to his side of the bed, a sacred area where he kept his writing and drawing materials, his Gitane packs and ashtray.

  At the foot of the bed was a Sony giant-screen TV set that he’d seen in Japan and had specially imported long before they were available in New York. As always, this was left permanently on at low volume, the murmur of newscasts scarcely distinguishable from that of weather forecasts, game shows, movies, and soaps. With it was one of the new videotape players and a stock of tapes, mostly classic movies and comedy shows from England like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. (He often said he’d rather have been one of the Monty Python team than a Beatle.) The room was equipped with a five-button telephone console that never rang, only winked with soundless red lights as calls were directed elsewhere in the apartment. Half-watching, half-listening, reading, writing, doodling, he might have lost track of time altogether but for the changing treetops outside, from winter skeletons to frothy springtime pink and white, from summer’s green to the blazing reds and russets of autumn.

  Despite his pact with Yoko, and his duty to Sean, he had not cut himself off completely from music making, as he would one day claim. The apartment was full of expensive sound equipment, much of it not working properly, some not even unpacked from its cartons. “John was always buying the latest high-tech stuff, but he never had the patience to follow the assembly manuals, and always had to call in a studio engineer to put it together for him,” Elliott Mintz remembers. “Basically he didn’t really like listening to stuff in stereo or quadraphonic, because they weren’t what he’d grown up with. He used to wear a badge—as did Phil Spector—saying I PREFER IT IN MONO.”

  On the table beside his bed was a cheap cassette tape recorder on which he was always roughing out new songs, or revisiting old ones, with guitar or piano accompaniment, as well as extemporizing comedy routines or simply talking to himself in the thick northern accent of his childhood music-hall favorite Al Read. Dozens of Lennon compositions and performances were put on tape, some mere fragments, others fully formed, with all the power and charm of his greatest past. One told how he had been “saved by a TV preacher” after a black mood of depression that made him seriously contemplate jumping from his seventh-floor window. Another, entitled “Free As a Bird,” might have been prompted by Central Park’s grimy sparrows, possibly by memories of Liverpool’s Liver Birds. Yet another was a loving recreation of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”

  In his retreat, he was not at all averse to being compared with Howard Hughes, particularly since the title of world’s richest, most enigmatic recluse was currently up for grabs. Hughes had died in 1976, the cause of his resignation from the human race still unexplained, his fabulous wealth unable to save him from an end of awesome loneliness, squalor, and neglect. Elliot Mintz, who had studied his life extensively, lent John several books about him, and they often discussed the myriad Hughes phobias and obsessions—the terror of germs that made him wear Kleenex tissue boxes on his feet; his refusal to cut his hair or nails or to take any nourishment but sips of soup or ice cream; his fixation on a single film, Ice Station Zebra, which he would watch in his darkened, disinfected hotel suite on an endless loop.

  But the analogy never really stood up. Whereas Hughes was terrified of human contact, John saw people and interacted with them every day. Whereas Hughes’s mental processes were a mystery, John maintained a constant flow of correspondence with Aunt Mimi and his British family, and notes and memoranda to his staff. He also began to keep a journal again, in a series of leather-bound New Yorker desk diaries, recording his new quiet domestic life as scrupulously as he previously had his West Coast bachelor spree. Whereas Hughes lurked in eternal twilight, John was constantly out and about, both the city and the world. Though he failed to keep a promise to his cousin Liela to return to Britain in 1976, the green card continued to get plenty of exercise. In July 1978, he flew Yoko and Sean by private jet for a holiday on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman. He made a second trip with them to Japan that August, and a third and—and final—one in the same month the following year.

  Through his son, indeed, he was more connected to ordinary people and things than at any time since before the Beatles became famous. Several times a week, he took Sean swimming at the Y—the YMCA on West Sixty-sixth Street—preferring the cheery clamor of its pool to the many luxury hotel spas within easy reach. Rather than pay an instructor, he taught Sean to swim himself, making him totally confident in the water by the age of four. “John us
ed to tell me, ‘That’s the one thing he’ll always remember,’” Yoko says. “His Dad taught him to swim like a fish.”

  He was also often to be seen pushing Sean’s buggy or arm in arm with Yoko in the meadows and dells of the great garden outside his door. After decades as a virtual no-go area, Central Park had been opened up by the new crazes for jogging, cycling, and skating, and John made full use of it. His thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth birthdays, and Sean’s third and fourth, were celebrated by lavish parties at the parkside restaurant, Tavern on the Green, whose owner, Warner LeRoy, was his downstairs neighbor at the Dakota.

  He became a familiar figure on nearby Columbus Avenue, where he would take Sean for pizza or breakfast at a coffee shop named La Fortuna. A favorite afternoon outing was to go down to Columbus Circle and along Central Park South to the Plaza Hotel, where shrieking crowds had besieged the newly arrived Beatles back in 1964, and have afternoon tea in its venerable Palm Court. Whenever he arrived, the string quartet would strike up “Yesterday,” blissfully unaware that it was a Lennon-McCartney song in which he’d had no hand whatsoever. Occasionally someone would stop him and say, “Aren’t you John Lennon?” “I get told that a lot,” John would reply, or sometimes, “I wish I had his money.”

  Even during his longest homebound periods, the Dakota apartment never resembled any habitat of Howard Hughes. “There were always people around—assistants, psychics, tarot card readers, masseurs, maids, acupuncturists, odd-job people,” Mintz says. “I believe there was one man whose sole job was keeping the brass doorknobs bright. Going from his bedroom to the kitchen for John was often like going through a subway station.”

  The kitchen was his other main comfort zone, a cavernous white inner space almost immune to noise from the street. His personal whims and fancies were everywhere, from the long, country-style table—like the one at Tittenhurst Park—to refrigerators with glass doors, so he could see what was inside without the trouble of opening them. On one wall was a painting of him, Yoko, and Sean, dressed in Superman costumes and soaring upward, hand in hand. Though he took no illegal drugs beyond the occasional “smoke” or magic mushroom, he remained as addicted to acrid French tobacco as ever. The kitchen was the haunt of three cats, Sasha, Misha, and Charo, respectively white, black, and brindled, who would all bound forward to greet John, rub themselves around his legs, and compete to curl on his knees. Calf’s liver, bought for them from chic uptown butchers at $8 per pound, would often be cooking on the stove, its odor a Proustian memory of Aunt Mimi and Mendips.

  Another surprising new pastime developed after both John and Yoko suffered a severe bout of gastric flu, then went on a liquids-only diet for forty days. “John’s way of keeping on the diet was reading cookbooks and fantasizing about the recipes,” Bob Gruen remembers. “He channeled all his craving for food into these amazing fantasies of dishes he’d never heard of, learning how to prepare them and what’s good for you and what’s not. Up to then, he’d always thought getting a bowl of cornflakes was cooking, and, being English, he could make a cup of tea. Yoko was a good cook but suddenly, after reading all these books, John got into it, too. I was at the apartment one night with my son, Chris, and he did a baked fish with steamed rice and vegetables that was really delicious.”

  Tormented by scents of warm bread during his diet, he even tried his hand at baking. When the first loaf came out of the oven, perfectly shaped, with an authentic golden-brown crust, he took a Polaroid snapshot of it, feeling he deserved as much applause as for any record (“I thought, ‘Well, Jesus…don’t I get a gold watch or knighted or nothing?’”) For a time he prepared lunch every day, not only for Sean and Yoko but for their whole staff, feeding as many as ten or twelve around the long kitchen table. “The novelty of that wore off rather quickly,” Mintz remembers. “He realized he was just turning himself into a galley-slave.”

  Finding himself such a good father to his second son inevitably made John want to be a better one to his first. The uncomfortable hiatus that had lasted since the final months of the Lost Weekend was broken in 1977, when Julian came from England to spend Christmas at the Dakota. A gangling fourteen-year-old in outsize glasses, he had gained little in resilience or self-confidence meanwhile, and arrived full of understandable forebodings. There continued to be little natural warmth between him and Yoko, for whom he was not only a potential rival for Sean but a reminder of her lost daughter. However, John was determined to establish a relationship that would not be broken again, and he seemed well on the way to succeeding. Central Park, that holiday season, lay under a thick fall of snow. Plunging downhill with him on a toboggan, Julian, too, seemed to have the perfect dad at last.

  There was to be no corresponding thaw between John and Julian’s mother. In June 1978, Cynthia Lennon published her autobiography, A Twist of Lennon (so titled because her third husband’s surname was Twist). Written on a typewriter that Yoko had given Julian, the book was not recriminatory, ending with a quotation from the I Ching: “No blame.” Even so, when John read an advance extract in the News of the World, he began legal moves to suppress it for “breach of marital confidence.” The case reached the Appeal Court in London before being thrown out by Britain’s most senior judge, Lord Denning. “It is as plain as it can be,” said Denning, “that the relationship of these parties has ceased to be a private affair.”

  Despite his continued abstinence from Billboard magazine, John still kept abreast of what was happening in pop music. He admired the professionalism of the Bee Gees, would-be Beatles in the Sixties now riding the disco wave with their sound track to Saturday Night Fever. Among the newer British bands, he liked the Electric Light Orchestra, even if their symphonic-electronic style felt like “son of I Am the Walrus.” He watched the continued transatlantic success of Bowie and Elton John without rancor, was amused by the way the Stones somehow still kept on rolling, surprised and scornful when Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian, and amazed that an apparently heterosexual band could have the nerve to call itself Queen. His main source of information was Bob Gruen, who photographed almost every major rock act that came through town and often urged him to come out and see some hot new attraction like Blondie or the New York Dolls. But putting Sean to bed always took precedence. “At one point I said, ‘Am I bothering you by telling you about all this?’” Gruen remembers. “John said, ‘No, I like to know what’s going on. And some night, you never know, I may want to change my mind.’”

  Still less inclined was he to socialize with any old cronies who might tempt him back to his former ways. Nor was it only overtly bad influences like Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson who found him permanently unavailable. In 1977, Mick Jagger moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side, within sight of the Dakota. Yet all his friendly overtures to John were ignored—an experience that even the hard-boiled head Stone found hurtful. “Does he ever call me?” Jagger complained. “Does he ever go out? No. Changes his number every 10 minutes. I’ve given up…just kowtowing to his bleedin’ wife, probably.”

  In fact, he was sometimes almost tempted to join Jagger at the new disco club on West Fifty-fourth Street where all New York’s haute bohème gathered. “He’d tell me he’d read in the papers about Mick and Bianca at Studio 54 and thought to himself, ‘Shouldn’t I be there, too?’” Elliot Mintz remembers. “It was the same when he read the bestseller lists in the New York Times Book Review, and was disappointed not to see his name. I’d say, ‘But you haven’t written a book.’ ‘That’s not the point,’ John would say.”

  Of all the books he read in this period, none had more effect than David Niven’s autobiography, Bring On the Empty Horses. “Niven had been friends with all the wild stars in Hollywood, and had been to all the crazy parties, but he’d come out sane at the end,” Bob Gruen says. “After John read that book was when he started taking Polaroids of everyone who came to visit. He once told me, ‘I’m gonna be David Niven. They’re all gonna go on getting drunk, but I’m gonna stay home and write the book.
’ His plan was to live beyond the wild days and be the one to reminisce. He was gonna be the one that survived.”

  With the other ex-Beatles—“the in-laws,” as Yoko drily called them—all issues were long since settled. He remained as fond as ever of Ringo, and felt intermittent concern that the simple, happy-go-lucky character who had so often kept him on the rails was now spectacularly plunging off them. After Rotogravure in 1976 (on which John broke retirement to play), Ringo had no more hit albums, lived mainly in a seafront condominium in Monte Carlo, and performed only on TV talk shows, frequently incoherent and always avoiding the subject of the Beatles, which did not leave very much else.

  George, too, had failed to sustain his early solo success, following All Things Must Pass with a succession of uninspired albums (uninspired, that is, by Lennon and McCartney), alienating concert audiences by his humorlessness and tendency to preach, eventually diversifying into movies as backer of Monty Python’s Life of Brian and cofounder of the HandMade Films production company. For some years, he felt resentment toward John for not supporting him on his 1974 American tour and for supposed dilatoriness in signing the Beatles severance contract. Even now that they were all right again, John felt George somehow regarded him as “the daddy who left home.”

  Between Paul and him, as he once told Elliot Mintz, “the wounds” had all healed. One might have expected a new mutual empathy now that John was leading the same domesticated existence he had once despised Paul for doing—a life of “pizza and fairy tales” no less. Instead, he put Paul and Linda in the same disruptive category as Jagger or Moon, resenting it hugely if they turned up at the Dakota while he was getting Sean off to sleep. Remote though the chance of Lennon and McCartney ever working together again, it once almost happened. In 1976, the producer of the Saturday Night Live TV show, Lorne Michaels, humorously offered $3,000 if the Beatles would reform and do three songs. John and Paul happened to be watching the show at the Dakota, and considered taking a cab to the SNL studio for a surprise walk-on. But in the end, they couldn’t be bothered.