by Peter Brown
This third pot bust was enough to mark Paul as a habitual drug offender by most authorities, and he began to experience difficulties getting work visas in foreign countries. In fact, an elaborate tour of Japan had to be canceled because the authorities would not grant Paul a visa. It took three years before the Japanese would relent and allow Paul into Japan, in January of 1980, for what was to be the first Wings tour there. You would think that Paul would have learned his lesson, but upon arriving at the Narita Airport, nearly a half a pound of marijuana was found in their luggage. Allegedly, this was marijuana that Linda had picked up at a stop in New York on their way to Japan, and Paul knew nothing about it. He was handcuffed and led away by the police, begging the photographers not to take his picture as he was escorted into jail. Paul was in for one of the worst nightmares of his life. At first it was reported that he would be treated like any drug smuggler, and he might face a long prison sentence. His clothes and belongings were taken from him, and he spent his days sitting on a mat in a prison cell, writing a diary to keep him calm. Linda and the kids checked into a hotel and frantically tried to obtain his release through both lawyers and political diplomacy. Paul spent a total of ten days in jail, after which he was deported from the country on January 26. He intended to publish his diary, which he titled Japanese Jailbird, but thought better of it. It was reported that Paul was at the end of his rope with Linda and that their marriage was going to split up, but if anything their relationship seemed stronger than ever.
Curiously, while so many drug arrests would smear the public reputation of most artists, Paul’s image as a kind of goody-two-shoes family man remains intact. He is the most commercially successful of any musician in history, a certified Guinness Book of Records entry. His personal worth is estimated at close to $500 million and climbing. Among his other profitable investments, he has purchased many valuable music catalogs, including all of Buddy Holly’s music, Paul’s special favorite.
In the beginning, after their breakup, Paul tried to keep in touch with John, but there was never a renewal of their friendship. Once, early on, Paul was in New York and he called John at the Dakota to say hello. Not more than three sentences were exchanged before the conversation disintegrated into a screaming match about lawsuits and tax liabilities. “But what about the fuckin’ tax!?” John screamed at him. Paul slammed down the phone and then quickly looked through his phone book for the number of John Eastman, but in his haste he mistakenly called John Lennon’s number again. John picked up the phone on the first ring.
“John?” Paul said. “This is Paul. You wouldn’t believe what that fuckin’ asshole John Lennon just said—”
“Fuckin’ who?” John demanded. “I’m fuckin’ John Lennon!”
Paul, realizing his mistake, slammed down the phone again.
As time passed and the lawsuits were settled, things cooled down and the two of them visited from time to time in Los Angeles and New York, but never more than an hour or two and never to effect any great reconciliation. The last time I saw Paul was at his country home, Waterfall, some 90 miles south of London. The house is circular, like a large gazebo, with the rooms cut up like pieces of pie. This odd architecture leaves little privacy, as you can hear every sound from room to room. There are few trappings of a rock star or even of a rich man. The gold records and expensive stereo equipment are in his offices in London. The furniture in the house is simple and well-worn, the floors littered with newspapers, magazines, and children’s toys. There are so many books and plants and knickknacks everywhere that it’s easy to miss the black baby grand piano in the corner.
Paul spends most of his time in this house with Linda and his three young children. He is a caring and attentive father and is particularly attached to his young son, James. It was amusing to watch him trying to discipline the children while remaining Beatle Paul. While I was there, Heather, who is now a young woman and living in her own apartment in a nearby town, brought her boyfriend home to meet her dad. I suppose it’s hard enough to meet your girlfriend’s father without him being a Beatle. To top it off, the young man was an aspiring musician himself, just starting out with his own band. As he was introduced to Paul he stared down at the floor and shuffled his boots nervously. Paul was charming. “What’s yer band called, son?” he asked. It was a long way from the cherub-faced skirtchaser I knew at the Cavern Club.
That same visit John’s last album, Double Fantasy, was about to be released. It was his first record in over five years, and Paul was curious to hear it. I could see he was still threatened by John. John and Yoko had recently given an interview to Newsweek magazine and for no reason had lashed out at Linda and Paul. In the interview John mentioned turning Paul away from his door. Linda said to me, “Is this new album all of John’s music or does it have her on it too?” When I said it was half Yoko’s music, Linda sneered at the thought.
I asked Paul if John had really turned him away, and he told me the story. He was in New York on business, and he had his guitar with him. He felt a few pangs of nostalgia and decided to take his guitar and just drop in on John at the Dakota. Paul went past the guarded gate, through the arched entranceway, and into a small, mahogany-paneled office where another guard sat behind a switchboard. John didn’t believe it was really Paul McCartney at first, but when Paul got on the phone to confirm it was really him, he was greeted with a cold silence on the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry,” John finally said, “but you can’t come up now. You just can’t drop in on people in New York like you did in Liverpool. The old times are over.”
chapter Twenty
I am convinced of the fact that Lennon perhaps had a career
whose balance is somewhat more delicate than the career of other artists.
Lennon has attempted a variety of ventures both in popular music and
avant-garde music. Lennon’s product tends to be somewhat more intellectual
than the product of other artists. What this means in my view is that
Lennon’s reputation and his standing are a delicate matter...
—Justice Thomas P. Greisa
New York Federal Court
July 13, 1976
1
Between recording albums and singles, bed-ins, concerts and various other international shenanigans, John and Yoko managed to turn out a prodigious number of 16 mm films. These films were sometimes aired on European TV or shown at minor film festivals. One of their early attempts was entited Rape, a metaphor for the media’s treatment of them. In Rape a camera relentlessly pursues a young girl, finally reducing her to tears. Erection was only a movie of a building being constructed in stop-action time, but Self Portrait turned out to be the real thing. This is a short film of John’s flaccid penis, in close-up, almost imperceptibly growing tumescent in slow motion. The special slow-motion effect was achieved with a Milliken high-speed camera. This noisy camera sends film through the gate so fast that there’s no way to shut the camera off once it’s been turned on until the film runs out. This meant that John had to become erect on cue. John stood poised in front of the camera and lights, thinking erotic thoughts, and said, “Hit it!” But every time the camera went on he panicked. Thousands of feet were wasted without any results. Finally, the crew was asked to leave the room, while Yoko posed erotically for him. Still no erection. Finally, John was given a copy of Playboy magazine, and that did the trick. When Yoko and John were interviewed about the film in their office at Apple, Yoko innocently told a reporter, “The critics wouldn’t touch it,” and she was right.
There was another film that John and Yoko made that disturbed one person in particular: Tony Cox. This was a short film made to commemorate Kyoko’s seventh birthday, which she celebrated at Tittenhurst Park. Only instead of a birthday party and cake with candles, it was a film of Kyoko and John bathing nude together in the same tub. Cox was reportedly furious over this film, and he vowed not to let John and Yoko get near his daughter again.
Things had been deteriorating
anyway over the past year. Intermittently, Cox would call to say he needed money to pay his bills. In exchange for whatever sum of money was needed at the time, Cox would allow Yoko a few days with her daughter but always under his careful supervision. Then he would vanish for a time, only to resurface a few months later when he needed more money. By mid-1971 Cox and Kyoko had disappeared altogether, and John and Yoko were determined to find them.
They hired an elite team of private detectives to track Cox down, but he kept hopping from continent to continent in an effort to evade them. In April they were tipped off that he was living on the island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, attending a course given by none other than John’s old friend, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. John and Yoko rented a plane, and along with Dan Richter, Yoko’s American friend, they slipped onto the island of Majorca. Without attracting any attention, they managed to check into a suite at the Melia-Mallorca Hotel and started to search the island for Kyoko. They learned that during the day, while Cox studied with the Maharishi, Kyoko stayed in a communal children’s camp just outside of town, guarded by the Maharishi’s disciples.
John and Yoko arrived at the camp later that day to find Kyoko frolicking in a playground with the other children. According to Yoko, all she did was extend her arms to the child, who ran toward her. They then spirited her to their rented car, and with Dan Richter at the wheel they sped off through the countryside with the Maharishi’s disciples chasing after them on foot. Fearful of road blocks by police, John and Yoko lay down in the rear of the car with Kyoko between them so it looked as if Richter were driving alone. They made it back to the hotel with no trouble and rushed the little girl up to their suite. It was only then that they realized that Kyoko wasn’t wearing any shoes, and they sent Richter out to buy some. By the time the elevator brought him down to the lobby, the hotel was crawling with police.
The following day the London tabloids carried a front-page picture of John carrying the frightened nine-year-old Kyoko over the threshold of the police station, with Yoko, Cox, and a phalanx of police close behind. John and Yoko were kept fourteen hours on suspicion of kidnapping “I’m not exactly being detained,” John told reporters who assembled outside the courthouse. “I’m trying to sort this matter out.”
Cox was furious at the alleged kidnapping. “I’ve got John by the balls this time,” he said at the station house. “This will cost him millions.” When the Lennons were finally permitted to leave the station, it was without Kyoko. The judge pulled the same rotten test on them that Freddie and Julia Lennon had pulled on John when he was a little boy; he asked Kyoko whom she wanted to stay with. Kyoko said, “My daddy.”
“We will be back for her, wherever she is,” Yoko told the reporters, her voice quavering emotionally. “But now we must get a legal ruling. How can you kidnap your own baby?” she demanded. “I did what any mother would have done.”
“We’ve done everything we can to come to an amicable agreement with the father,” John said. “In all it’s cost us a lot of money and a shaft of broken promises. Yoko loves her daughter, and I can’t let her suffer like this any longer. What effect can all this be having on Kyoko? I remember it was happening to me ... I was shattered.”
The Lennons jetted back to London, where their lawyers advised them to get a legal writ of custody in the same court where the original divorce had been granted in the Virgin Islands, a U.S. possession. Late that August they flew to the Virgin Islands, where an attorney entered a plea for a custody order, which was summarily granted. Now all they had to do was collar Tony Cox. Cox had now reportedly moved to America. Cox’s move to the U.S. was to their great advantage, for the writ obtained in the Virgin Islands was good only on U.S. territory. This meant, of course, that in order to continue the search for Kyoko, the Lennons would have to move to America themselves.
John was delighted at the prospect of moving to New York. He wasn’t very much liked at home, and he had recently begun what would be a long-term love affair with Manhattan. Since his visit to Los Angeles for primal therapy, the United States Department of Immigration had let up on him and was allowing him into the country on a temporary basis. On these numerous trips to New York, John met with Jonas Mekas, the dean of underground filmmakers, and made several films. One, called Up Your Legs, consisted of a camera pan of bare legs up to a bare behind. Three hundred volunteers were assembled to be photographed, and John met a whole spectrum of New York society, including actor George Segal and artist Larry Rivers. He was suddenly exposed to a whole new cast of characters, more artists, poets, musicians, and assorted loonies in one single city than in all of Great Britain. In John’s two-part Rolling Stone “Working Class Hero” interview, he virtually spouts odes to New York. “America is where it’s at. I should have been born in New York. I should have been born in the Village, that’s where I belong. Why wasn’t I born there? Paris was ‘it’ in the eighteenth century. London—I don’t think had ever been ‘it’ except literary-wise when Wilde and Shaw and all of them were there. New York was ‘it.’ I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. That’s where I should have been... this is where it’s happening...”
At the end of August 1971, John’s immigration lawyers had arranged a six-month visitor’s visa for John, and in September he arrived in New York to settle. He checked into the St. Regis Hotel for a few weeks until he rented a brownstone apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. He was never to see England again.
2
By the time John and Yoko moved to Manhattan, I was already living in New York in my position as president of the Robert Stigwood Organization. RSO, as it was known, had become as diversified and sprawling as Apple had been, and in many ways it was much more successful. There was an RSO recording label, which featured many RSO-managed acts, including the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton; there was a TV division that produced “Movies of the Week” and licensed such American TV shows as “Sanford and Son” and “All in the Family”; a stage division produced Jesus Christ Superstar and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the theater; and a film company produced the movies of Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy while I was with the company. As the chief operating officer in America I traveled extensively between Los Angeles and London, but I considered New York my new home, and I took an apartment there overlooking the park on Central Park West. I remained a close friend to all of the Beatles, particularly John and Paul, and saw all of them frequently as they passed through the city.
Life in New York held great promise for John and Yoko. New people. A chance at starting over, a city where you could be anonymous if you wanted to be, even if you were John Lennon. A place where the press would leave him alone if he didn’t call attention to himself. John was also in a vulnerable position in America. He was an already controversial figure with many illegal vices and addictions. He was allowed into the United States only by the good graces of the Bureau of Immigration, even though he was a convicted pot felon. So what does John do? Sit back and keep his mouth shut so he can look for Yoko’s kid?
John took on the U.S. Government. He became, overnight, one of the most vocal political activists in the country, a powerful and feared rock and roll rabble-rouser. It wasn’t John’s fault, it was just the Next Big Thing.
The Next Big Thing happened “right off the boat,” as John put it. “I landed in New York,” John explained, “and the first people to get in touch with me were Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. It’s as simple as that. It’s those two famous guys from America callin’, ‘Hey, yeah, what’s happenin‘, what’s goin’ on?...’ And the next thing you know, I’m doin’ John Sinclair benefits and one thing and another. I’m pretty movable as an artist, you know. They almost greeted me off the plane and the next minute I’m involved.”
John forgot to mention that “those two famous guys from America” were also two of the most rabid political activists in the United States. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had gained international fame as two
of the convicted members of the “Chicago Seven,” the group that was blamed for disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Hoffman and Rubin were aggressive, unattractive, and intentionally aggravating at every turn. In retrospect they may seem absolutely benign, but at the time they were an alarming example of radicalism for the so-called “Silent Majority” and considered a direct threat to national security by the Nixon administration.
John was just ripe for this far left, publicity-conscious brand of politics. His personal failure in his peace endeavors with Yoko had hardened his line. His early vision of a pacifist revolution—“All You Need Is Love” or “Imagine”—was slipping into a more active mold. The public had already tasted this new, aggressive political stance in a single released that spring called “Power to the People,” a proletarian anthem that begins with a chorus of marching feet. Politics was also one of John’s ways of struggling with being rich. In a sense, being rich to John was selling out. He was by instinct part socialist, part right-wing Archie Bunker; to be an indolent, wealthy rock star would have made him feel guilty as sin. Yet the passionate politician he was to become was also a phoney pose, possessed with the guilty enthusiasm of a hypocrite. Years later John would disclaim the radicalism of this period, saying that an ideological breach between him and the other activists existed from the start, but if this was John’s attitude at the time, it was impossible to tell by his actions.