John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  John spent the next six hours working on a Yoko song, originally meant for Double Fantasy, called “Walking on Thin Ice.” During the early evening, David Geffen dropped by to say that, despite its apparent mixed reception, the album was about to go gold. John also found time to telephone Aunt Mimi and talk further about his imminent homecoming. He was pleased with the night’s work, and had cassettes of the track made to take away with him. When they stopped work, at around 10:30, Yoko suggested having dinner at the nearby Stage Deli, but John wanted to return to the Dakota first. “The last thing he had on his mind,” she remembers, “was getting back and seeing Sean before he went to sleep.” On his way out of the Record Plant, he paused to sign an autograph for the switchboard operator, Rabiah Vincent.

  There seemed no safer direction to be heading than home.

  The December night was exceptionally mild, and shadowy figures could be seen at the corner of West Seventy-second as usual. Instead of driving through the arch to the safety of the inner courtyard, the limo drew up at the curb. As John got out, Chapman came forward, still clutching his autographed copy of Double Fantasy. He softly called “Mr. Lennon,” then produced a .38 handgun, dropped into the two-handed combat stance familiar from innumerable cop movies, and fired five shots. John kept walking, went up the stairs into the porters’ vestibule, then collapsed on the floor, scattering the cassettes he had been carrying. A few seconds later, Yoko burst in, screaming, “John’s been shot!” The young duty porter, Jay Hastings, rang the alarm that connected to the police, then knelt beside John with thoughts of trying to administer a tourniquet. This being clearly futile, Hastings gently removed John’s glasses and covered him with his porter’s jacket.

  Two cruising police cars were at the scene within minutes. Unlike later specimens of his kind, Chapman had not taken his own life, but was leaning against the Dakota’s brickwork, calmly reading The Catcher in the Rye, on whose flyleaf he had written “This is my statement.” His gun and copy of Double Fantasy lay nearby. John was put into one of the squad cars and taken to Roosevelt Hospital on West Fifty-ninth Street, with Yoko following in the second car. He was rushed into the emergency room, but, at 11:07, was pronounced dead.

  For days afterward, up in apartment 72, whenever the kitchen door opened, three cats came bounding forward to greet him.

  POSTSCRIPT

  SEAN REMEMBERS

  It’s a nice memory, just floating around in the ocean with my dad and this capsized boat.

  I meet Sean Lennon in a small, cluttered apartment in the quiet part of London’s Chelsea known as “World’s End.” Though he has become a songwriter-performer like his father—and a brilliant one, if in a totally different way—there is nothing grandiose about his gigs. A few weeks earlier, I had watched him play at a converted pub in downmarket Shepherds Bush before he moved on to Russia and Eastern Europe. Sean and his manager stayed at an anonymous tourist hotel in the suburbs while his three-piece backing band lived together in a tiny trailer parked outside the hall.

  Now aged thirty-two, he is like his father circa 1969—the same restless brown eyes behind circular glasses; the same nose; the same dark, curly beard; even the same wreaths of cigarette smoke. Only in his profile do you also see Yoko and the Japanese side of his ancestry. He has John’s vivid turn of phrase and chronic inability to resist a pun (“My parents were transparent…trans-parent…”). The mellifluous American-accented voice at times can sound almost British, at times almost Liverpudlian, as if some indestructible part of John still remains at his core And, just as John once did for Rolling Stone or Red Mole, he sits back, puts his stockinged feet up, and lets everything out.

  His time with his father lasted for only five years and ended at a point where, for most children, memory is barely functioning. He admits that, before my arrival, he has been trying to retrieve as much as possible from that unconnected, inevitably self-centered toddler’s-eye-view. “I remember my Dad teaching me how to make a paper airplane, which I still know how to do in the way that he taught me—and flying paper airplanes. I remember we used to watch The Muppets together, and Jekyll and Hyde, but I wasn’t allowed to watch any other television. And when we did watch those shows which were, I think, back-to-back once a week, he would turn off the TV during the commercials which was really frustrating to me because often we’d have missed a bit of the show when he turned it back on.”

  Yet even at that tender age, he glimpsed “the little child inside the man,” to quote one of John’s last pieces of self-analysis: “I remember that Alice, our black cat, had jumped out the window after a pigeon and died, and I remember that was the only time, I think, I ever saw my dad cry.”

  So many of the memories involve water: the warm, blue ocean of Bermuda; the chill, gray waves of Long Island Sound; or the chlorinated shallows at the YMCA. “I remember swimming, a lot, in Bermuda, in the ocean especially. That was on the famous trip when he did the whole boat thing and also wrote a bunch of songs for what turned into Double Fantasy. I remember some strange kind of house that he was writing songs in. I remember swimming a lot in the pool at Cold Spring Harbor and I remember that he really enjoyed watching me swim. He was proud of the fact that I was a good swimmer.

  “I remember that at Cold Spring Harbor there was a green sailboat and I think in my mind that I named it Flower…I remember Fred Seaman accidentally flipping the boat over and us all being in the water, my dad swimming next to me, and I remember seeing my flip-flops that I’d got in Japan floating away. I was very upset because I loved those flip-flops, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you another pair…’ I said, ‘Are there any fish in the water?’ and he was like, ‘Yes,’ which really scared me. So I remember my dad protecting me in the water. It’s actually a nice memory, just floating around in the ocean with my dad and this capsized boat.”

  As a rule, the only memorable childhoods are unhappy ones. Sean was idyllically happy with John, yet their hours, days, and months together linger in a thousand vivid impressions, often of simply doing nothing in particular together in the Dakota apartment’s wide, white rooms, with Central Park’s treetops like a variegated salad basket outside. “I remember that around the house he always wore a blue-and-white floral patterned yukata, which is like a casual kimono, and he always had a ponytail. He burned incense a lot as well, and I remember his glasses. I remember him playing guitar and hitting the strings myself and us singing together. He used to sing this song about ‘Popeye the sailor man, lives on the Isle of Man’…

  “I remember that he was always barefoot, he rarely wore shoes and if he did it was mostly flip-flops. And for some reason he was very interested in teaching me now to pick up pens and other things between my toes. He would do that all the time because he was double-jointed and a very, very flexible man. I remember him putting his leg over his head in the passenger seat of our Mercedes station wagon. I remember jumping on the bed a lot. Oh…I remember one time he accidentally let one of the heavy wooden doors at the Dakota slam on my finger. And he was very upset about that. My fingernail eventually fell off about two weeks later.”

  At times, John’s presence is so close, one feels almost an intruder for listening. “He was a very thin man at that point, and I remember the look of his ankles and his legs, they were very sharply defined in my mind—his knees and his ankles and his legs. I don’t remember his hands but I remember his face, his neck, his hair, his calves, and that bump on the right side of your ankle. I remember the feel of the stubble on his chin very clearly, and wondering about the scar I could see underneath it. I remember him telling me that he got that scar through a car accident with Kyoko, my sister. I don’t think he told me the whole kidnapping story at that point, only that she was with her father, Tony. I found out about all that after my dad passed away. And I think he told me that he never drove again after the accident.”

  There were also rather strict lessons in table manners, an area where John had never previously distinguished himself. “I remembe
r him teaching me how to cut and eat steak, which was a mystery to me at age four; how to stick the fork in and cut behind it, and that was how you got a piece in your mouth. I think it was that night when he got very upset with me, I think because of something I did very cheekily with the steak. He did wind up yelling at me very, very loudly to the point where he damaged my ear, and I had to go to the doctor. I remember when I was lying on the floor and hurting, and him holding me and saying, ‘I’m so sorry…’ He did have a temper, though; I don’t think that’s a secret.”

  Not surprisingly, the dearest memory is the sound of John’s voice. “Every night when I was going to sleep, he’d come in the room and say, ‘Good-night, Sean,’ and he’d flick the light switch in the rhythm of his words, so that they’d wink in time. There was always something very comforting about that. I had a bunkbed even though I was the only child in the house, and a mobile of silver airplanes above my head. And I very much remember the shadows that were cast on the wall by the cars going along Central Park West, seven flights down. I remember watching those shadows move by, from left to right, and I remember thinking of the words ‘watching shadows on the wall’ from ‘Watching the Wheels.’ When he wrote and recorded that song, I remember thinking somehow that he’d been watching the same shadows I had.”

  Sean had been oblivious to everything late on the night of December 8, 1980, when John returned from the Record Plant at that particular moment just to snatch a good-night kiss from him. Initially he could make no sense of what greeted him the next morning—the grim-faced strangers coming and going through those formerly safe white rooms; his father’s unexplained absence and the pandemonium below on West Seventy-second Street; the police barriers; the TV crews; the flowers; the moan of grief that would reverberate all around the world.

  “I remember being in [my] bedroom and someone telling me my mom wants to talk to me, and sensing the very strange atmosphere in the house and there are all these crowds of people outside. My mom is sitting in bed under the blanket, and I swear I remember seeing a newspaper, and almost understanding something about the headline. I remember standing there and her telling me, ‘Your dad’s been shot and killed,’ and I remember that the thing that felt most important to me was that I didn’t want her to see me cry. I remember saying to her, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, you’re still young. You’ll find somebody else,’ because at five years old I thought that sounded like a very mature thing to say.”

  The multitude in the street below, and in Central Park, chanting his father’s peace anthems between tears, only added to Sean’s fear and bewilderment. “In retrospect I find it very sweet that we were able to mourn with everybody, but at the time it was terrifying. So I remember walking away slowly out of the room, and it being so hard for me not to cry, and as soon as my mom couldn’t see me, running down the hall and bursting into tears and slamming the door, throwing myself on the floor and crying and crying. I think for days I cried.”

  In the terrible days that followed, there were times when the five-year-old felt completely alone. “Afterwards, my mom seemed very tired, I’ll put it that way. She stayed in bed a long time. I remember different people trying to comfort me. But my mom and dad didn’t really maintain family relationships, they’d ‘burned a lot of bridges,’ as my mom would put it. So it’s not like we had a lot of other people around who were like parental figures. My dad was gone: that was it. Everyone else was just an employee. And so I just remember not being able to be comforted by anyone.”

  Years were to pass before he pieced together who and what that ponytailed, flip-flopping tutor in table manners and singer of lullabyes had actually been. “Many of the impressions of my dad that I have are through the media. And I share those impressions with the rest of the world. I think that on some level when I was a kid I did feel jealous of the world for having known and spent more time with him than I got. But in a way the experience of someone that you can get through their work is really not comparable to the experience you can get from just sitting on someone’s lap. That is more than songs and words and stuff can really explain. And that’s reality—the way that the light hits someone’s hair, the sound of their voice, the sound of their footsteps in the hallway.”

  As Sean grew older, he found the best way of coming close to John was through playing music. “I remembered him playing the piano, so I started playing, too. And when I did I always felt like I was communing with him, like a sacred prayer or something. Like somehow I was with him. Every time I’d make progress musically, I felt I was making progress in my relationship with him. And that was the case when I was a teenager: the better I got at playing guitar, the more I understood music. And now the more I understand songwriting, the more I feel I understand him, because he was a songwriter above all things.”

  Despite all the blandishments of the music industry, Sean refused to be turned into a John Lennon clone, as his half brother Julian briefly was in the mid-1980s. His main talent is as a lead guitarist where John usually stuck to rhythm; in his songs, thoughts and chords alike constantly spring off in unpredictable directions, more like early David Bowie than anything. His music resembles his father only in humanitarian spirit; for instance, his latest album, Friendly Fire, echoing the pernicious military doublespeak of Afghanistan and Iraq. “People sometimes think I’m trying to separate myself from John Lennon as a musician, but I’m not at all. The only reason I make music is because my dad was a musician and a songwriter. It’s like I’ve inherited a craft, in the way an ironmonger’s son might also become an ironmonger.”

  His mature assessment of his father’s talent would delight John on many levels. “I think he had insecurities about everything: about grammar and writing, about knowing how to write and read music, about all the established ways of knowing things. And that was a handicap he turned to his advantage. He invented insecure songwriting—‘I’m a loser and I’m not what I appear to be’ or ‘Help!’

  “He said that Bob Dylan taught him to write in the first person about his real life, but Dylan never wrote a song that revealed his emotions like that. Dylan always observed other people’s emotions; it’s like he’s a journalist—he’s not saying it’s good or bad—just articulating something that’s in the air and jotting it down. That was an aspect of my dad’s work but, to me, not the best one. ‘Give Peace a Chance’ is great, but that’s not the one I want to go home and listen to; it’s not as good as ‘Hide Your Love Away’ or ‘Girl’ or ‘In My Life.’ To me, those songs are on a whole other level. For a man to feel insecure and question himself the way my dad did in songs is a post-modern phenomenon. Artists like Mozart or Picasso never did; it’s something that’s only happened since the Second World War. And that’s something he owns, that feeling of insecurity so many other songwriters since have tried to copy. He invented that.”

  The Beatles, Sean says, were an essential springboard for John, however irksome his life with them became. “I don’t think my dad would have been commercial at all without Paul and the management and George Martin. I mean in the sense of making himself palatable to the masses, I don’t think that was his area of expertise. I think he was very edgy and interesting, and ‘edgy’ and ‘interesting’ don’t always cut it for the populace. I think the sugar around the Beatles with my dad as this core of intensity made them the ultimate package.

  “When he turned his back on the Beatles and formed the Plastic Ono Band with my mom, that to me was like when Matisse turned his back on painting and decided that everything he wanted to say artistically from now on could be said by a few simple shapes cut out of paper. It was as if Elvis had left Vegas in the seventies and started to play with the punks. That Plastic Ono Band album, for me, is the greatest rock album any man ever made. That’s why he’s so much more for me than just a Sixties rock figure like a Jagger or a Clapton.”

  What are his favorite John Lennon songs? “[Those] have changed as I became more of a musician. The ones that I loved when I was a kid, loved, loved, LOVED, were �
�Watching the Wheels.’ And ‘Woman.’ Oh…‘Woman’! It just sort of shimmered, it felt like a dream. There’s something so sweet and sparkly about that major chord change. And I remember knowing that he wrote it about my mom, and feeling just love, almost like a golden light, the love he had for my mom.

  “That song broke my heart after he died; I couldn’t listen to it for about ten years without getting upset because I was there when he recorded that, and I remember it coming into the universe. And I remember how when he died, Double Fantasy was all over the radio, you couldn’t get away from it. Every time I heard his voice, it was like a knife in my heart, it hurt so much. And it took me a good ten years before hearing his voice wasn’t an incredibly difficult thing.”

  And, he admits, it still is. “If I’m at a party and someone casually puts on Sgt. Pepper, it’s hard for me. I can’t just hang out, drink wine, smoke cigarettes, and listen to those songs. I’m not saying it’s less intense for my mom. But she had him, she had a relationship with him. I think what hurts for me so much is that I didn’t. And it really hurts to hear his voice and hear him sing. I have to feel very strong to deal with it.

  “It’s so beautiful—and it’s my dad; it’s that resonance of voice that I remember from my childhood, the first voice I ever heard. It’s the first voice I ever heard speak English. It’s the voice from which I learned to speak English.”

  To many, Sean’s life might appear an enviable, effortless one, cushioned by the Lennon millions—the big houses and numerous servants; the private schools in New York and Switzerland; the doting love of a mother to whom he is everything; the reflected love of a whole planet. Yet there are signs that his chief inheritance from his father may be a horribly vulnerable heart. His romance with Elizabeth Jagger, daughter of Mick—which might have created the greatest dynastic union in pop—fizzled out when Elizabeth let it be known that she had yet to fall properly in love. Even more bruising was a relationship with the actress and model Bijou Phillips, whom he found to be cheating on him with his childhood friend and Dakota neighbor Max Leroy. Then Max was killed in a motorcycle accident before the two friends could reconcile. At one point in our conversation, Sean remarks that beautiful girls are doomed to a special kind of unhappiness, possibly his way of consoling himself for the unhappiness they cause him. One can almost hear an echo of John’s most wounded song on Rubber Soul: “Aaah—Gerl!”