John and Yoko initially went to ground at Tittenhurst Park, their Georgian mansion in Sunningdale, Berkshire. The house was equipped with its own private studio where John could set to work on a second solo album without fear of anyone objecting to his wife’s presence or creative input. To work with him he summoned Phil Spector, who had put the chaotic Let It Be album into releaseable shape, albeit to Paul’s unforgiving disgust. These Tittenhurst sessions included a simple voice-and-piano track that was to become John’s post-Beatles masterpiece. “Imagine no possessions,” he sang wistfully, forgetful of his rambling stately home and seventy-two-acre estate. It was also at Tittenhurst that the famous “Imagine” video was shot, with John seated at a white grand piano in a long, white room, and a white-gowned Yoko drawing back curtains as if on the vista of their new life together.
In March 1971, the British high court granted Paul’s suit to remove the Beatles’ partnership from Klein’s control and place it in the hands of a receiver, meaning that the break between the four was now legal and irrevocable. The following September John and Yoko closed the white drapes at Tittenhurst Park for the last time and moved to America.
Their ostensible reason was to win custody of Yoko’s seven-year-old daughter, Kyoko, from her former husband, the American filmmaker Tony Cox. Though originally well-disposed toward John, the eccentric Cox had undergone the first of a series of religious transfigurations, and now furiously execrated his ex-wife and her ex-Beatle spouse as ungodly dope fiends. When ordinary diplomatic methods failed John and Yoko resolved to snatch Kyoko from her father who, by a bizarre twist, had lately become a disciple of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While Cox attended a course with the Maharishi on the island of Majorca, the Lennons abducted Kyoko from the children’s nursery, but were forced to return her after spending some hours in police custody.
Their lawyers’ advice was to seek legal guardianship of Kyoko in the American Virgin Islands, where Yoko had obtained her divorce from Cox. The order was granted, but could only be put into effect within the United States, where Cox, his second wife, Melinda, and Kyoko were now thought to be living. The Lennons therefore would have to take up residence in America.
It was meant to be only a temporary, pragmatic arrangement, but John had already made up his mind not to return to Britain. He had had enough of its intrusive media, its racist attacks on Yoko, and the business meetings he described as “rooms full of old men, smoking and fighting.” America not only promised refuge and relative anonymity, but still had magic as the heartland of his musical first love, rock ’n’ roll. He never forgot how, as a no-hope teenager, he would stand on the Liverpool Pier Head and gaze out over the gray waves of the Atlantic Ocean, excited to think that “the next place was America.”
Going to the opposite extreme of Tittenhurst Park, he and Yoko moved into what was little more than a glorified studio apartment in New York’s West Village. More than ever like twins in their matching convict crops and sunglasses, both were soon immersed in the harsh radical politics that had elbowed aside sixties-style love and peace. For John, it was as if the Statue of Liberty had reached down and touched him personally with her beacon. The image-fettered pop star who had once been scared to voice even mild criticism of the Vietnam War now publicly allied himself to Black Power revolutionaries like Malcolm X and Angela Davis, and icons of the yippie movement Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. The one-time male chauvinist who’d kept his first wife in child-rearing purdah became a vociferous convert to the feminist movement, writing a song based on Yoko’s axiom “Woman is the nigger of the world” that would appear on his 1972 album, Sometime in New York City.
His songwriting style had changed absolutely, from the allusiveness of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life” to graffiti-simple political tracts like “Give Peace a Chance,” “Power to the People,” and “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” which was to top radio Christmas play-lists forever afterward. He was determined to put his Beatle past, and all its monstrous highs and lows, totally behind him; to prove that, unlike Elvis Presley, he could break out of the palace. The message was hammered home by his new, acrid solo voice on an album with the Plastic Ono Band: “I don’t believe in Beatles … I just believe in me… Yoko and me… and that’s reality.”
Another kind of exorcism was giving a marathon interview to Jann Wenner, whose Rolling Stone magazine had set new standards in thoughtful and analytical rock journalism. John’s testament ran to thirty thousand words and was later published as a book, Lennon Remembers. In it, he declared he had outgrown George Martin (“he’s more Paul’s sort of music than mine”) and alleged that some of the worst “shit” thrown at Yoko had come from Apple’s managing director, Peter Brown, and—surprisingly—from George Harrison. Indeed, he largely blamed his and Yoko’s recent resort to heroin on “what the Beatles and their pals were doing to us.”
But Wenner’s tentative question, “You were really angry with Paul?” brought a strangely muted response. “No, I wasn’t angry,” John replied. “I was just… shit! He’s a good PR man, Paul. I mean, he’s about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job.”
Even so, his bitterness against Paul continued to fester, for reasons that even now are difficult to fathom. True, Paul had displaced him as head Beatle, but only at the very end, when he himself could no longer be bothered. As he half-told Rolling Stone, he was furious about Paul’s public resignation from the band on the McCartney album when he himself had effectively quit six months earlier. Yet even this does not explain his later remark to Yoko that no one had ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him. He might have longed to get away from Paul, but he could never quite get over him.
Paul, too, had been far more wounded than he ever showed, and no longer cared about preserving diplomatic niceties. On the second McCartney solo album, Ram, was a veiled reference to John’s having thrown away his talent by going off with Yoko (“You had your lucky break and you broke it in two”). John’s Imagine album—despite the plea for universal peace and brotherhood in the title track—launched a thermonuclear strike back at Paul with “How Do You Sleep?” a title suggesting crimes almost in the realm of first-degree murder. The McCartney references were unmistakable and often cruelly unjust: “The freaks was right when they said you was dead…. The only thing you done was Yesterday.” There was even a two-fingered gesture of contempt for Paul’s new outdoor life with Linda on their Scottish farm. The Ram album’s cover had shown him in rural outdoor mode, holding down a ram by its curly horns. Inside the Imagine album jacket was a postcard picture of John, playfully wrestling with a pig.
To his credit, John realized that his life in the Beatles, and before, had left him in serious need of psychiatric help. Before leaving Britain, he and Yoko had signed up for extensive sessions with the therapist Arthur Janov, whose primal scream technique encouraged patients to vent emotion with the same directness as babies and animals. Consultations with Janov in Los Angeles had plumbed the deepest sources of John’s anger and anguish—the abandonment by his parents when he was a toddler; his relationship with his mother, Julia, when he was a teenager, only to lose her at the hands of a speeding motorist just a few yards from his aunt Mimi’s house.
Primal scream therapy also finally overcame the stage fright that had built up in him throughout the late sixties—and had ultimately prevented the Beatles from making peace onstage together again. In August 1972, he gave a show at Madison Square Garden, dressed in military fatigues and letting loose all the emotions released by Arthur Janov in a song about Julia very different from the earlier ballad of that name. “Mother you had me… but I never had you.” Half a lifetime later the filmed version is still almost too painful to watch.
America under the early seventies presidency of Richard Nixon was a very different country from the one that had welcomed and adored the Beatles in 1964. John’s public support for the Black Panthers and the yippies soon engaged the attention of an FBI still under the control of the parano
iac J. Edgar Hoover (whose penchant for wearing women’s dresses none then suspected). Following the earlier lead of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, extensive and often farcical FBI dossiers were compiled on the Lennons as potential subversives; they were covertly followed and their telephones were bugged. In March 1972, the U.S. Immigration Service declared John an undesirable alien on the grounds of his conviction for cannabis possession in 1968 and ordered him to leave the country within sixty days. His ensuing four-year battle, first against deportation, then for resident-alien green card status, confirmed his exile from Britain. For he knew that, were he to leave the United States with these matters unresolved, he would never be allowed back in again.
He also continued to devote himself to Yoko’s pursuit of Kyoko, though now careful to give the immigration service no further ammunition against him. In 1972, Tony and Melinda Cox were found to be living in Houston, Texas, where Cox had applied for legal guardianship of eight-year-old Kyoko—now renamed Rosemary. When the Lennons flew to Houston and presented their Virgin Islands custody order, the court ruled Cox to be a more suitable guardian, though it did grant Yoko visitation rights. Cox, however, refused to give up Kyoko-Rosemary for even those prescribed ten days, and received an overnight prison sentence for contempt of court. On his release, he, Melinda, and Kyoko-Rosemary once more disappeared without a trace.
John and Yoko had by now exchanged their New York studio for an apartment in the Dakota, at the corner of West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. With its Gothic towers and mildew-green roof, the place bore a strange resemblance to some grimly grand Victorian bank or orphanage back home in Liverpool. It was so named because at the time of its construction in the mid-nineteenth century, this corner of Central Park seemed to Manhattanites as wild and unfrequented as faraway North and South Dakota. Lately, with its forbidding exterior and relatively low rents, it had become an abode of Upper West Side bohemians, actors, and film directors. Before the Lennons’ arrival it was best known as the location for the filming of Roman Polanski’s urban horror classic Rosemary’s Baby.
Despite their public inseparability, the Lennons’ marriage was running into trouble. Though still obsessively jealous if he thought Yoko even noticed another man, John felt himself under no similar obligation to be monogamous. Women had always thrown themselves at him, and still did so now, undeterred by Yoko’s constant proximity. His infidelities grew ever more blatant. One night, he and Yoko went out to a party at the home of a mutual friend. Within a few minutes of their arrival John was having sex with another woman in an adjoining room within earshot of everyone at the party, including Yoko.
At the end of 1973, she ejected him from their Dakota apartment, though in a way that only Yoko could have devised. Both of them, she suggested, needed a breathing space after having been together virtually nonstop for more than five years. It was arranged that John should go to the West Coast for an indefinite period, accompanied by a pretty young Chinese-American woman named May Pang who had recently begun working jointly for him and Yoko. John himself seems to have remained blissfully unaware of how his life was being regulated. “I’d been married since I was a kid. Now I was a single guy. All I thought was ‘whoopee!’”
He was to spend something like a year in Los Angeles on what he would later call his “Lost Weekend” (after the 1940s film noir classic), living in Bel Air and hanging out with music cronies like Phil Spector, Harry Nilsson, Elton John, and Elton’s lyricist Bernie Taupin. His favorite tipple was brandy Alexander, a mixture of cognac and milk that found its way to the real Lennon as surely, and rather more rapidly, than any primal scream therapy. “After two brandy Alexanders, John was wonderful,” his TV reporter friend Elliot Mintz remembered. “You got all the old stories… he was hilarious…delightful. But after his third, he was just a plain ugly drunk.” One night, he was thrown out of L.A.’s famous folk club, the Troubadour, for heckling the Smothers Brothers as they performed onstage. Another evening, mildly stoned, he provoked the kind of put-down he himself might once have delivered, by emerging from the Troubadour men’s room with a Kotex sanitary napkin clamped to his forehead. “Do you know who I am?” he slurred at a passing waitress. “Yeah,” she snapped back. “You’re an asshole with a Kotex on his head.”
Periodically he would get in touch with Yoko and plead for another chance, a campaign that intensified when he tired of L.A. and returned to New York, bringing the Lost Weekend to almost a year and a half. But thus far, Yoko had remained impervious. “I’d been married twice before and divorced,” she remembered. “For me, that was what happened to marriages. They ended.” She, too, returned to the life of a single, dating a man considerably younger than herself.
For Bernie Taupin, however, the stories of Lennon debauchery and desperation on the Lost Weekend have been much exaggerated. “All I know is that every time I went around with him, he was perfectly normal. I remember going with him to see Bob Marley at the Roxy, and we had a great night.…John was always very sweet and encouraging about the things Elton and I did, especially ‘Your Song.’ And he was incredibly modest about the fantastic things he’d done. He’d say things like, ‘Er, I wrote this song called “Across the Universe.” I dunno if you know it.’”
Elton John had by now become as massive a world attraction as the Beatles had been ten years earlier. But, for all his stature as a performer, he remained at heart an inveterate record fan whose greatest thrill was meeting the musicians who had colored his lonely boyhood in Pinner, Middlesex. The Beatles, above all, had inspired his earliest songwriting efforts with Taupin, often in outright Sgt. Pepper knockoffs with names like “Regimental Sergeant-Major Zippo.” And, by a weird coincidence, the duo had been discovered by the Beatles’ former music publisher, Dick James, proving that once-in-a-lifetime luck can strike the same person twice.
As Elton got to know John better, he was dismayed to see how his greatest idol’s solo career seemed to be slipping into the doldrums. And, with the generosity and altruism that was to be a feature of his career, he decided to do something about it. The next Elton single was both an homage to John and a ruse to drag him back into the limelight. At Caribou studios, nine thousand feet up in the Colorado mountains, the ultimate seventies glam-rock star recorded the ultimate sixties spine-tingler, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” set to a modish reggae beat but otherwise almost eerily reminiscent of John’s 1967 version. The composer himself joined the backup rhythm section under a complex but easily crackable code name, “the Reggae Guitars of Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” That December, it became Elton’s third U.S. number one.
John so enjoyed working and playing with his superstar fan that when he returned to the studio to make the album that would become Walls and Bridges, he asked Elton in to sing backup vocals. The result of their collaboration was “Whatever Gets You Thru’ the Night,” a scatter-gun rocker equally infused with John’s acidity and Elton’s pub-pianist good humor. As they listened to the playback, John said jokingly that if it was a hit, he’d sing it with Elton live onstage. By November, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” was at the top of the U.S. chart—and, it would prove, John’s only number one outside the Beatles in his lifetime.
Elton’s current sellout American tour was scheduled to end with a gala concert at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night, November 28. It was the perfect moment for John to honor his promise, though the very idea scared him almost witless. He had not performed in public since a charity appearance two years earlier; in the meantime, his old enemy, stage fright, had come back worse than ever. A brief rehearsal with Elton and his band in New York did not do much to help calm his fears. He showed up at the Garden wearing dark glasses and a black suit more appropriate to a funeral parlor than dueting with glamrock’s answer to Liberace. Waiting backstage, he was so nervous that he went into the men’s room and vomited. He even temporarily forgot the order of strings on his guitar and had to ask Davey Johnstone, from Elton’s band, to tune it for him.
Midway through the concert Elton paused at the piano in his top hat decorated with outsize pheasant feathers. “Seeing as it’s Thanksgiving,” he said, “we thought we’d make tonight a little bit of a joyous occasion by inviting someone up with us onto the stage.” In the wings, still hesitating, John turned to Bernie Taupin. “He said, ‘I’m not going out there unless you go with me,’” Taupin remembers. “So I went forward a little way with him, then he sort of hugged me, and I said, ‘You’re on your own.’”
Also in the audience was Margo Stevens, the former Apple Scruff (George’s name for the female fans who haunted the individual Beatle’s front gates, EMI’s studios, and the steps at 3 Savile Row) who had progressed from camping outside Paul McCartney’s house to working as Elton’s housekeeper. Margo has never forgotten the moment when John walked—or, rather, was propelled—onstage. The house lights went up and all sixteen thousand people present rose to their feet in a spontaneous cheer. Only Yoko felt the moment to be one of less than pure euphoria. “When John bowed, it was too quickly, and one too many times,” she remembers. “And I suddenly thought, ‘He looks so lonely up there.’”
The John-Elton set was brief and, progressively, brilliant. John sang “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” as promised, with Elton’s backup vocals like a friendly instructor keeping him on track. Then Elton sang his revisited “Lucy,” backed by John. Within a few minutes, his confidence was sufficiently restored to take a sly dig at Paul McCartney: “We thought we’d do a number of an old, estranged fiancé of mine, called Paul.” The number was “I Saw Her Standing There,” Paul’s kick-off track on the Beatles’ first-ever album, from the days when Lennon and McCartney songs were interchangeable and as perfect, in their way, as early Picassos. “Everyone around me was crying,” Margo Stevens remembers. “John was hugging Elton, and Elton seemed to be crying, too.”
Shout! Page 59