On March 20, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married at the British consulate on the Rock of Gibraltar in a ten-minute ceremony. In deference to Yoko, the adoring husband legally changed his name to John Winston Ono Lennon. The couple decided to use their notoriety to promote the issues they believed in. The Lennons’ unconventional honeymoon became an integral part of the Beatles mythology. Though it is not unusual for newlyweds to spend an inordinate amount of time in bed, the Lennons spent seven days in theirs. They booked room 902, the presidential suite in the Amsterdam Hilton, in what they termed a “bed-in.” The press excitedly pursued them, assuming that the famous nudists would provide a provocative peep show. Instead, the pajama-clad newlyweds spoke out for international peace. It was the honeymoon as performance art: its theme a protest against the Vietnam War.
In May they staged a second weeklong bed-in in Montreal, at the stately Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where they recorded their famous pacifist anthem. John and Yoko, along with Dr. Timothy Leary, Montreal Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, Petula Clark, and members of the Canadian Radha Krishna Temple sang the chorus for “Give Peace a Chance.” While the hippies embraced the song, Lennon did the same with his dearly beloved: “When I fell in love with Yoko, I knew, my GOD, this is different from anything I’ve ever known ... This is more than a hit record, more than gold, more than anything.”
Unfortunately, even a honeymoon that consisted of a bed-in has an expiration date. The fabric of their relationship began to tear when John was threatened with deportation from the States because of his earlier drug arrest, and Yoko could not move to Britain because she was sharing parenting of Kyoko in New York City. Then, in 1971, Cox kidnapped their eight-year-old daughter and disappeared into a cult: the Church of the Living Word. He changed his daughter’s name to Rosemary.
As a refuge from their troubles, John began to find solace in alcohol, and by 1973 the couple’s relationship went the way of the Beatles. John moved to Los Angeles, where he started living with Yoko’s former assistant, May Pang. It soon became apparent that he was miserable without Yoko. He later told Playboy that without Yoko, “I was on a raft alone in the middle of the universe ... It was the lost weekend that lasted 18 months. I’ve never drunk so much in my life. I tried to drown myself in the bottle.”
He begged his wife for another chance; she relented and he moved back to their New York City home in the Dakota. Realizing that Yoko was central to his life, he penned “God,” in which he wrote he didn’t believe in any “ism.” All he believed in was “Yoko and me.”
In 1975, after several miscarriages, at age forty-two, Yoko became pregnant. John, who had not been very involved in his son Julian’s life, and Yoko, who had lost Kyoko, decided that their baby would be the focus of their lives. Yoko offered John a deal that he readily accepted: “I am carrying the baby nine months, and that is enough. You take care of it afterward.” Sean Taro Ono Lennon was born on his father’s thirty-fifth birthday; John was only too happy to be a stay-at-home dad. He retired from performing and Yoko managed their $200 million portfolio as if it were her new art form. John was able to make the transition because it was only his music he had taken seriously, never himself. An oft-repeated comment was, “I’m just a rocker.”
After years in seclusion, John decided to make a musical come-back. In December 1980, he and Yoko spent an evening recording “Walking on Thin Ice”; they were elated that John’s latest album had gone gold that day. To celebrate, Yoko suggested they go out for dinner ; John refused with what were to be his last words: “No. Let’s go home because I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep.” When their limo pulled up to the curb, deranged fan Mark David Chapman, who a few hours earlier had received Lennon’s autograph, was waiting in the shadows. Within seconds of John’s arrival, Chapman fired five shots; one shattered a window in the Dakota, and the other four inflicted fatal injuries. Ono, in utter shock, kept sobbing, “Oh no, no, no, no ... tell me it’s not true.”
The following day, before Yoko went into an extended period of seclusion, she issued the following message: “There is no funeral for John. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him.” The love story that had begun on an imaginative note had ended on a tragic one.
Postscript
Lennon’s ashes were kept by his grieving widow. Yoko’s ex-husband, Anthony Cox, as well as seventeen-year-old Kyoto sent a message of condolence, though they remained in hiding.
Thousands gathered in Central Park; his songs were played. One grieving fan held up a sign with John’s photograph, the peace sign, and the single word WHY?
On December 14, millions of people around the world responded to Yoko’s request to pause for ten minutes of silence to remember John. Thirty thousand gathered in Liverpool; a hundred thousand converged in Central Park, close to the scene of the shooting.
31
Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman
1967
The troubadour of romance, Paul McCartney, ironically trod a long and winding road until he met the one he would immortalize in his song “Lovely Linda.” He met her at a club called the Bag O’Nails. There, the man who could have any woman he wanted found the one he needed; she was to become his soul mate. His term of endearment for her: lovely.
Linda Louise Eastman was born and raised in Scarsdale, New York. Her father, the son of Jewish-Russian immigrants, changed his name from Leopold Vail Epstein to Lee Eastman; he became a Harvard-educated entertainment lawyer. Her mother, Louise Linder, was the status-conscious heiress of a department store fortune. Their multimillion-dollar home was lined with works by de Kooning and other eminent painters. Linda, however, did not relish the role of Scarsdale society; her favorite fashion statement was to wear one red argyle sock and one green one. While her peers rode in sports cars, she was happiest on horseback and her room was lined with blue ribbons.
Linda was devastated when her mother died in a plane crash, and she sought solace with fellow classmate from the University of Arizona, Joseph Melvin See Jr. They married in 1962 and six months later their daughter, Heather, was born. When he asked Linda to move with him to Africa, she refused, realizing that her marriage had just been undertaken in the wake of grief. They divorced in 1965; he committed suicide in 2000. After graduation Linda and Heather moved to New York City, where she became a receptionist at Town & Country magazine, written for the rich and those intrigued by the rich (Linda did not fall into either category, as she was self-supporting). Yet through this job, she was to receive an invitation which would lead her down a road as fascinating as Dorothy’s yellow brick one.
Linda’s destiny, James Paul McCartney, was born into a working-class family in Liverpool, England, where he enjoyed a happy, uneventful childhood, along with younger brother Michael. Paul’s life was shattered when his mother, Mary, died suddenly from breast cancer when he was fourteen years old. To help him cope with his devastating loss, he turned to music and songwriting; at age sixteen he composed “When I’m Sixty-Four.” A short time later he was performing at a local church party when, in the music industry’s greatest instance of serendipity, he met John Lennon, who invited him to join his band, the Quarrymen. Later, in a nod to Buddy Holly’s band the Crickets, they changed the group’s name to the Beatles. The rest, as the saying goes, was history.
After their release of “Please Please Me,” Beatlemania exploded. There were any number of girls who wanted to hold the hand of the “cute” Beatle, Paul, whose face was emblazoned on reams of posters. A string of one-night stands led Lennon to dub McCartney a “sex gladiator.” However, soon he was to meet the one who made him wish “to dance with no other.”
Through her magazine, Linda received an invitation to attend a Rolling Stones party on the yacht, the SS Sea Panther, which was docked in the Hudson River. During the event, photographers snapped the Rolling Stones’ portraits, but the results were stilted; however, photos taken by Linda captured the boys in all their youthful vitality. Her work became so in de
mand that she became the visual chronicler of the sixties. In the process she also bedded some of her portraits’ subjects: Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Neil Young, and Jimi Hendrix. Linda was elated when she left her job at Town & Country to become Rolling Stone’s magazine photographer, and in that capacity she was sent to swinging London to capture the images that were making it swing.
The first time Linda met Paul was on May 15 at the Bag O’Nails. Paul saw Linda across a crowded room and was mesmerized by her smile; he later recalled of that magic moment, “Across a crowded room, as they say, our eyes met and the violins started playing ... There was an immediate attraction between us. As she was leaving—she was with the group The Animals, whom she’d been photographing—I saw an obvious opportunity. I said: ‘My name’s Paul. What’s yours?’ I think she probably recognized me. It was so corny, but I told the kids later, had it not been for that moment, none of them would be here.”
He invited her and The Animals, as well as the British singer Lulu, to another club, the Speak Easy. There they heard, for the first time, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which was to become Linda and Paul’s personal song. The group ended up in McCartney’s home, where Linda was impressed with his Magritte paintings and Paul was impressed with her knowledge of them. Four days later, their paths crossed once more at the home of the Beatles’ producer, Brian Epstein, at a party thrown to celebrate the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The celebration was an A-list event, but Linda secured her entry by trading a portrait of Brian Jones for a coveted invitation. Linda was able to snap pictures of the Beatles, as well as to have a further conversation with Paul, and it was on that evening that their first picture together was taken. After the party, Linda returned to New York City, sans her heart. She was in love with the man with whom she had to compete with every other female on both sides of the Atlantic.
In June 1968, Paul flew to Los Angeles to promote his new Apple label, and two days later he phoned Linda in New York to ask her to join him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The sexual chemistry was such that before Paul could ask if she had a good flight, they were discovering that their physical connection matched their emotional one. Two months after this rendezvous, he called Linda to ask her to live with him. Shortly afterward, with Heather calling Paul “Daddy” and with Linda’s pregnancy, Paul proposed. He said her ring was symbolic of his bride-to-be: simple and gold.
The couple wanted a quiet wedding with Heather as the brides-maid. On March 12, 1969, they said their “I do’s” in a seven-minute civil ceremony in the Marylebone registry office; the bride was clad in yellow. When they emerged, they were greeted by hundreds of hysterical girls, and the news, which made headlines in the international press, resulted in females around the world donning black. Heather had to be rescued from the crush of the crowd by a policeman. Linda told the Daily Mail, “Just write that the bride wore a big smile.” The civil ceremony was followed by a religious one at St. John’s Wood church; the reception was held at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly. Their honeymoon, which included Heather, whom Paul adopted, was to the States to visit Linda’s family. Because the Beatles were in the midst of disbanding, his former bandmates were not in attendance.
Although the world harbored the view that contentment had come for the cute, promiscuous young rock star, the reality did not mirror that illusion. In 1971, the McCartneys were living on their Scottish farm, with Heather and their first child together, Mary, while the Beatles disintegrated. Paul was distraught and felt that without John he would not be able to write. However, Linda’s belief that he could led to his belief in himself. He credited her as the woman who gave him “the strength and courage to work again.” That same year Linda was in the hospital giving birth to their daughter Stella; complications set in and the lives of both mother and child were in jeopardy. Paul recounts that as he was in the hospital, feverishly praying, the vision of wings came into his mind. With their recovery, he decided to start his own group, and named it Wings after the image that had come to him in prayer.
Linda performed backup vocals in the band, as they wanted to spend as much time together as possible. The fans who had initially resented Linda for snagging the cute musical demigod soon came to embrace her as the good Beatle wife, the anti-Yoko who kept the home fires, and her man, stoked. McCartney wrote a number of love songs, all for his wife.
Paul and Linda, who had a fourth child, James, shared such a close bond that the only nights they spent apart were the ten when Paul was in a Japanese jail for marijuana possession. This event was overshadowed when Paul received a knighthood and they became Sir Paul and Lady Linda. Another bond they shared was their aversion to eating meat, and they became staunch supporters of PETA. Asked about the secret of their marriage’s success, Paul replied, “I guess it’s because we just adore each other.”
The long, winding, and joyous road came to its end when Linda was diagnosed with the same killer that had taken Paul’s mother. The hair that was once adorned with flowers was shorn when it began falling out in clumps from chemotherapy.
Knowing the inevitable was coming, Paul took Linda and the children to their ranch in Arizona; she rode her horse up to two days before her passing. In 1998, Paul said his last words to his first love: “You’re up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It’s a fine spring day. We’re riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear blue.” Lovely Linda was gone, though her memory never would be. Of his loss of the woman he called his best friend, Paul said, “People say time heals, but what it’s doing is not healing, it is making you forget. In some ways that’s a bad thing. I don’t want to forget her.” The greatest tribute to Linda’s memory—Paul’s “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
Postscript
Linda McCartney was cremated at her Tucson ranch; her ashes were scattered there as well as on the family farm in Scotland. A memorial service was held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, which was attended by the remaining Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Paul asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to cancer research and animal welfare charities. Then he added that if people really wanted to pay tribute to his wife, “Go veggie.”
32
Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi
1971
Patrick Swayze, seriously sexy in his prime, danced his way into American hearts in his role as Johnny Castle in the ultimate chick-flick romance Dirty Dancing. Audiences swooned along with “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) as she found the heat of first passion in his powerful arms. What was not apparent, however, was Patrick’s love affair with his noncelluloid leading lady, the woman he immortalized in his song “She’s Like the Wind.”
Patrick Wayne Swayze, born in Houston in 1952, was one of five children. His aspiration to a football scholarship ended with a high school knee injury. During his convalescence he heard his mother, Patsy, sobbing in the next room, “His life is over.” However, he traded his dream for another: to become an Olympic gymnast. He worked out at the Swayze Dance Studio (later merged with another), run by Patsy. Patrick said of his mother’s studio, “All these girls were studying with my mum and I used to go and check them out in their leotards. It was like being in a candy store.”
Patrick’s destiny, Lisa Anne Haapaniemi, was born in Houston, the only daughter of six children to parents of Finnish descent. At age fifteen she encountered the two passions that were to dominate her life: dance and her “till death do they part.”
The first time Patrick met Lisa was in the Houston Ballet Dance Company, when he was immediately drawn to the lithe fifteen-year-old with the long blond hair. However, unlike other girls, she stared at twenty-year-old Patrick with indifference. To get her attention, he pinched her on the rear and said, “Hey there, cutie!” The ploy did not earn the desired response. Lisa wasn’t interested because she was turned off by his Casanova reputation and ego the size of Texas. In addition, Lisa was focused not on romance, but on dance, which she wanted to parlay into an exit from a home p
unctuated by her parents’ contentious relationship.
Despite her apathy, Patrick continued to be captivated by the quiet girl who was so unlike other seventies Texan teens who sported big hair and were no strangers to makeup. However, the magic moment came when they rehearsed a dance: At one point Patrick had to ease Lisa onto the floor and lie on top of her. This had quite a heady effect on the twenty-year-old male. Patrick could not wait for the next rehearsal. He also asked her out.
On the date, the only part of the evening Patrick was not looking forward to was the scrutiny of her five tall, Nordic-looking brothers. During the evening, however, Lisa and Patrick’s mutual shyness made Patrick run his mouth, and the conversation mainly revolved around Patrick’s narcissism. The dinner was not the romantic encounter that Patrick had hoped it would be.
At age twenty, after completing two years of college, Swayze left Houston when he joined Disney on Parade Ice Follies in the role of Prince Charming. As most of the cast were women and few of the men were straight, Casanova held court once more. Despite new conquests, Swayze still carried the torch for his Texas Cinderella.
While Patrick was skating, Lisa was still in Houston, skating on thin ice. Because of her home-life she began to suffer from depression; desperate, she approached Patsy and asked if she could move into the Swayze home. When Patrick returned to Houston, he was thrilled to see the girl of his dreams living with his family, and the two began making out on every possible occasion. As it turned out, Lisa had actually been interested in Patrick all along, but had just camouflaged her feelings as a shield against getting hurt and to mask her shyness.
And the Rest Is History Page 17