The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  John threw himself into the world of radical causes with all the enthusiasm he had poured into previous Next Big Things. The mayor of the East Village, David Peel, who sang “The Pope Smokes Dope,” threw a Welcome-to-New York parade for John and Yoko through the streets, singing “You also met an underground, welcome to a freaky town.” They began hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, a once superhip club patronized by Andy Warhol that had turned into the home of underground rock, where John began practicing with an unknown band called Elephants Memory. They set up command headquarters in the bedroom of their Bank Street apartment and turned it into a salon for the leaders of every potentially unpleasant political and social cause in America. No matter how far-out you were, John and Yoko would embrace you. They did all their business from bed, and they quite literally invited the diminutive Jerry Rubin into bed with them, right in front of a delighted reporter. “You should be a member of the band,” John told Rubin. “If you’re gonna work with us, you should play music with us.”

  Under Hoffman and Rubin’s tutelage, John “came out” politically. In October he appeared at a protest on behalf of the American Indian’s civil rights; in November he appeared at the Attica Relatives Benefit at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for the relatives of the men in the bloody prison riots. He wrote guest columns for an underground magazine called Sundance and made the trip all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to appear at a John Sinclair rally. Sinclair, founder of the White Panthers, had been given ten years in jail for selling two joints to an undercover cop. John also wrote for the Gay Liberation Book and spoke out to the press loudly in support of Angela Davis, the accused murderer and Black Panther leader.

  Then John made a near-fatal mistake; he took on the paranoid Nixon White House directly. Rubin and Hoffman were working on a master plan for a demonstration at the Republican National Convention, which was going to be held in San Diego in the summer of 1972. Rubin and Hoffman intended to sponsor a rock concert, which they hoped would draw upwards of 300,000 antiwar demonstrators, bringing the convention to a standstill. Of course, gathering a few hundred thousand war demonstrators together, convention or not, wasn’t going to be easy without a big-name drawing card for the rock concert.

  Enter superstar John Lennon.

  In the autumn of 1971 John and Yoko attended a meeting about such a concert to be held in San Diego. Present at the meeting were Rubin, Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and John Sinclair. Says John, “When they described their plans, we [he and Yoko] just kept looking at each other. It was the poets and the straight politicals divided. Ginsberg was with us. He kept saying, ‘What are we trying to do, create another Chicago?’ That’s what they wanted. We said, ‘We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence—so you can overthrow what?—and replace it with what?”

  But if John and Yoko refused at the time to go along with the plan, that wasn’t the way it was reported to the press. According to John, it was Jerry Rubin’s fault for blabbing about the concert to Rolling Stone, which published a small piece about it. John was angry with Rubin for announcing his presence at the concert, but he never denied his participation, and thus he gave the plot his tacit consent.

  The Nixon administration immediately labeled John a threat and set about to remove him from the country. In January of 1972 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee researched and wrote a classified memo on John Ono Lennon and his wife. It was six paragraphs long and delivered to Senator Strom Thurmond. It listed all of John’s activist causes and his alliances with Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, Leslie Bacon, Jay Craven, and “others.” The memo stated that “This group has been strong advocates of the program to ‘dump Nixon.’ They have devised a plan to hold rock concerts in various primary election states for the following purposes: to obtain access to college campuses; to stimulate eighteen-year-old registration; to press legislation to legalize marijuana; to finance their activities; and to recruit persons to come to San Diego during the Republican National Convention in August 1972 ... Davis and his cohorts intend to use John Lennon as a drawing card to promote the success of the rock festivals and rallies. The source feels that this will pour tremendous amounts of money into the coffers of the New Left and can only inevitably lead to a clash between a controlled mob organized by this group and law enforcement officials in San Diego. The source felt that if Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategy counter-measure.”

  On February 29, John’s immigration attorney filed for a routine extension to his six-month nonimmigration visa, which was granted. In the interim, Senator Thurmond forwarded the Judiciary Committee memo to Attorney General John Mitchell, along with a note: “This appears to me to be an important matter and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level as I can see many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action be taken in time.” Across the bottom, in his own hand, Thurmond wrote: “I also sent Bill Timmons a copy of the memorandum.” Timmons was on the White House staff; John Lennon’s trouble-making had found its way directly to the top.

  On February 14 Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst, who didn’t even realize the Lennons were already in America, sent the memo to Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner Raymond Farrell with the note, “Ray, please call me about the attached. When is he coming? Do we—if we so elect—have any basis to deny his admittance?” If Kleindienst had turned on the television set in his den in Georgetown, he would have been able to see the enemy of the government beamed into tens of millions of American homes all week as co-host of the “Mike Douglas Show.”

  On March 2, Farrell’s associate commissioner, James Greene, told the New York INS district director to “immediately revoke the voluntary departure granted to John Lennon and his wife.” A few days later, on March 6, John’s visa extension was summarily canceled. The official reason given was John’s 1968 pot bust in London. John and Yoko didn’t believe that was the real reason, but they still didn’t seem to connect it with their political activities. They guessed they were being asked to leave because in January they had given a concert at Alice Tully Hall without INS permission. They had no American work permits and were forced to perform from their seats, where Yoko conducted the band with an apple instead of baton. John’s lawyers appealed the case and applied for a temporary extension on his deportation date. The case against Yoko, who had no criminal record, was dropped, and John became the solitary target.

  Ironically, getting a permanent visa was supposed to be John and Yoko’s primary concern. In order to get final custody of Kyoko, Yoko had to live in America. Through all their political activities, John and Yoko hadn’t abandoned their search for Kyoko. Again through a series of private detectives, they learned that Cox had moved to Houston, Texas, where his second wife, Melinda, had been brought up. Now the story had taken yet another bizarre turn; Cox had given up the Maharishi and become a born again Christian, as fervent an apostle of Christ as he had been of the guru. He had legally changed Kyoko’s name to Rosemary and had applied to Houston Domestic Relations Court for legal custody.

  Upon learning of this, John and Yoko flew to Houston in December of 1971 and presented their custody order from the Virgin Islands to Justice Peter Solito. Judge Solito, faced with the choice of giving the child to her Bible-spouting father or to John and Yoko in bed with Jerry Rubin in New York, quickly overrode the Virgin Islands order and gave custody of the child to her God-fearing father. However, the judge added that Yoko could see Kyoko-Rosemary frequently—as long as she posted a S20,000 bond in case she “kidnapped” the child again.

  John and Yoko would have quickly forfeited the $20,000 bond to have Kyoko back—$20,000 didn’t mean that much to them—but there was no amount worth the legal problems if they broke the law in the United States. They agreed to a ten-day visitation period over Christmas, during which they wanted to take Kyoko-Rosemary back to New York and the Bank Street apartment with them. It was suggested that before they
hustled Kyoko-Rosemary away from her father, they first spend the weekend with her in Houston so she could get used to being with them again. But when it came down to the moment for Cox to hand the child over to them, he just couldn’t do it and refused to let Kyoko-Rosemary come out of the house.

  With this clear-cut defiance of Yoko’s custody rights as ordered by Judge Solito, John and Yoko summoned up a team of high-priced lawyers who got a court order for contempt of court against Cox. On December 22 he was arrested and put in a Houston jail, shouting, “Pray for me all good Christians!” The following day Cox was released on his own recognizance on $5,000 bail. On Christmas Eve, he and Kyoko-Rosemary and his wife, Melinda, vanished into the night, never to be seen again.

  In the ensuing years John and Yoko dropped their search for the girl, now in her early twenties. Since 1972 Yoko has heard from Kyoko-Rosemary only twice, in two spontaneous phone calls. As of this writing. Yoko has never seen her daughter again.

  3

  Through the spring and summer of 1972, John felt the unmistakable heat of Big Brother breathing down his neck. It began with a certain hollowness on the phone; the soft clicking noises and the vacuum of a third person listening. He began to think people were following him, serious-looking men in suits and ties. When he talked about politics or drugs in hotel rooms, he sometimes went into the bathroom and ran the water in the sink in case the room was bugged. He told everyone who would listen to him that something weird was happening to him, that he wasn’t imagining it, that he was the victim of some baroque plot brewed up in the Oval Office of the White House. “...It was really gettin’ to me,” John said. “There was a period where I just couldn’t function, you know. I was so paranoid from them tappin’ the phone and followin’ me...” John even appeared on the “Dick Cavett Show” to publicly confess his paranoia, saying that his phone was tapped, much to Cavett’s quiet bemusement. For most people who watched this broadcast, it sounded like more of John’s provocative ramblings. John had cried wolf too many times.

  Paranoia had long been a constant in John’s life. Drugs and paranoia went hand in hand, and John was taking drugs again. Yoko claims that whatever this drug was, it was not heroin. However, it was a drug (possibly methadone) they found it necessary to “kick.” By June of 1972 it was perilously dangerous for John, under constant government surveillance, to be fooling around with drugs again. Afraid of checking into a hospital or staying in their apartment, which was bugged, they came up with the extraordinary, if ingenuous, plan to kick in the back of a limousine during a cross-country trip. Since George and Ringo were due in New York that month and expecting to see them, John and Yoko seized on this as the time to escape. John later told Tony King, who worked for him, that he and Yoko were ashamed to see George and Ringo in their condition. They spent over a week in the backseat of the limousine, traveling across the country, withdrawing. The identity of the limousine driver remains a mystery, but he was either a friend or very well paid. When they reached the Coast they stayed several weeks in a rented house with a pool in Ojai, outside of Santa Barbara, and then spent a month at the Miyako, a traditional Japanese hotel in San Francisco, where they saw a Chinese acupuncturist. By mid-summer they returned to New York, ready to face the foe again.

  In the interim, John’s lawyers fought for various continuances and appeals to extend his visa. John lived constantly on the edge, facing deportation orders every sixty days. It didn’t help his cause any when on June 12 he released his new album, Sometime in New York City, a shrill and abrasive catalog of protest songs. This two-record set contained titles like “Attica State,” “Born in a Prison,” “John Sinclair,” and one for Angela Davis, called “Angela.” For good measure there was a version of “Cold Turkey” and a seventeen-minute live cut of Yoko doing “Don’t Worry Kyoko, Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow” Needless to say, even superstar John Lennon couldn’t make this kind of music sell at the record stores. Sometime in Nem York City sold only 164,000 copies, compared to John’s Imagine album which sold 1,553,000.

  The Republican National Convention came and went that summer without John’s appearing at any provocative concerts. The only place he did appear was, by contrast, quite admirable, and that was at the One to One Concert at Madison Square Garden, where he and Yoko helped raise S1.5 million for retarded children. Also, to their great pleasure, a host of credible character witnesses came forward on John’s behalf, including New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, Dick Cavett, artists Larry Rivers and Roy Lichtenstein, United Auto Workers president Leonard Woodcock, Congressman Ed Koch, and columnist Pete Hamill, who wrote in the old New York Post, “John Lennon has improved this town just by showing up.”

  But John had already lost the fight. He was a nervous wreck, pale and puffy with that unhealthy white complexion that comes from rising at dusk. He chain-smoked unfiltered Gitane cigarettes from the moment he woke up, drank his fair share, and remained almost perpetually stoned. To add to his troubles, he began to have violent disagreements with the way Allen Klein was handling his business matters. Foreseeing a protracted legal fight, John and Yoko arrived at Klein’s office unannounced one day and raided the files for their personal records while he wasn’t there. In June of 1973 Klein and John let fly with major lawsuits, claiming assorted mismanagement practices and breaches of contract, not unlike the previous accusations made against Klein. Nobody got much of a chance to tell John “I told you so.” In November Paul, George, and Ringo joined in the suit against Klein, alleging that he took excessive commissions and practiced fraud. This was in addition to George’s claim that Klein had mismanaged the Bangladesh concert. Klein responded with another lawsuit against John, George, Ringo, Yoko, and Apple for a total of $63,461,372.87 in claims. In a separate suit against Paul, in which he accused him of conspiring against him in business, Klein claimed damages of $34 million. The lawsuits were just another stone around John’s neck.

  He tried to distract himself by working on a new album in the studio, but the album he produced for Christmas of 1973, called Mind Games, was one of his weakest, most submissive works. “Yes is the answer,” John sings on the title cut, tired of fighting. Mind Games’ twelve selections are so offhand and low-key that critic Nicholas Schaffner called them “a collection of out-takes ranging over the past six years ...” Mind Games also had hopelessly banal liner notes, left over from the days of flower-power, that proclaimed a “Nutopian nation” governed by cosmic law. “The Nutopian International Anthem” was one of the more readily forgettable cuts on the album.

  In early 1973 John and Yoko visited me in my apartment and fell in love with the view of Central Park. A few weeks later Yoko called to say they had purchased their own apartment with a park view at the Dakota, a gothic fortress on the corner of Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. This forbidding-looking building, with its gargoyles and sinister dormer apartments at the top, was one of the most desirable on the Upper West Side and boasted a long tenant list of celebrities, including Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and Rex Reed.

  John wasn’t at the Dakota for long, however. He and Yoko had been feeding off each other with an exclusivity that would have long ago devoured any other couple, and they were due for a separation. They were bickering almost constantly, and when epic lovers fight, the fights are of epic proportions. In particular, Yoko was critical of John’s drinking and drugging. She thought that with the heat on it was time for him to really clean up his act. Yoko insists that there was never one big argument but that their parting was amicable, though unexpected. “One night John and I were lying in bed in the Dakota,” Yoko said, “and John kept saying how miserable he was, how he needed to get away. I said that we had been together twenty-four hours a day for five years and that I needed some time apart for myself. I told him, ‘Why don’t you go to Los Angeles?’ ”

  “What would I do there?” John asked.

  “Make an album. Call Phil [Spector] and make an album.”

  “But who would
I go with?” John said. “I can’t go by myself.”

  According to Yoko they discussed several possibilities, including Mal Evans, the Beatles’ loyal road manager and bodyguard who had moved to L.A., and Tony King, a close friend of John and Yoko’s who was then working for Apple Records. But John fancied May Pang, a shapely twenty-three-year-old secretary who worked for them for years out of Allen Klein’s New York office. Hard as it is to believe, Yoko says she gave this union her blessings. Whether the relationship was going to be physical or not did not faze or interest her.

  May Pang first met John and Yoko in December of 1970 when they had come to New York to meet filmmaker Jonas Mekas and help make an underground movie called Fly. One day John and Yoko walked off the elevator into Klein’s offices on Seventh Avenue, and May happened to be in the reception room. May Pang became their de facto assistant and was dispatched to a Chinese restaurant to collect hundreds of live flies for use in the film they were making. Pang also accompanied John and Yoko to England for the shooting of some footage to complement John’s Imagine album.

  “We decided on May,” Yoko says, “because she was the most efficient secretary available. It was not a love affair, although the relationship might have been physical. But then, John had a lot of girls.... May remained on salary the whole time she was with John, and she reported to me almost daily.”

  Needless to say, being the wet nurse-paramour of a rock star on the skids was a thankless job; for the next year May Pang would be the sole comfort to a man trying to exorcise his worst demons. John used to refer to this nightmarish period in L.A. as his “Lost Weekend.” “My goal was to obliterate the mind so that I wouldn’t be conscious,” John said later. “I think I was maybe suicidal on some kind of subconscious level.” Indeed, it was probably the closest John ever came to suicide in a real sense. The prodigious quantities of alcohol alone—there are stories of John’s polishing off fifths of Rémy Martin in one sitting—were enough to kill the average man, to say nothing of the increased danger of mixing the booze with his usual assortment of drugs, plus an L.A. specialty, coke. John fell in easily with a certain L.A. group, most notably Harry Nilsson, Who drummer Keith Moon, old buddy Ringo Starr, and sometimes Alice Cooper. “I was like an elephant in a zoo, aware it’s trapped but not able to get out.”