John Lennon’s emergence from retirement turned Chapman’s former near worship of him into contempt first, then hatred. He felt personally betrayed that the man who had sung “Imagine no possessions” now had accumulated costly real estate and herds of prize cattle. His parallel obsession was with Holden Caulfield, the anarchic sixteen-year-old narrator-hero of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The fantasy grew in his mind that once he had made an end to John, he would step into the pages of Salinger’s novel, transfigured into Caulfield.
So, on the first weekend of December 1980, he said goodbye to his wife, Gloria, and flew out of the Hawaiian sun, bound for New York with a .38-caliber handgun in his baggage. He would later tell his interrogators he had intended to shoot John during their first encounter early on the evening of December 8. But John’s niceness about signing his Double Fantasy album temporarily disarmed him.
John that night was in particularly good spirits, feeling that Yoko had at last begun to receive proper respect as a musician in her own right. When they left the Hit Factory and headed back to the Dakota, shortly before 11:00 P.M., he carried a tape of her new song, “Walking on Thin Ice.” As he climbed out of the limo and walked under the Gothic arch, a voice softly called, “Mr. Lennon?” Mark David Chapman stepped forward with the leveled .38 and pumped five shots into his back.
Inside the Dakota’s entrance hall, the night doorman, Jay Hastings, heard the fusillade of shots. A moment later John staggered in with “a horrible confused expression on his face,” followed by Yoko, screaming, “John’s been shot! John’s been shot!” Hastings thought it was some kind of macabre joke until John collapsed onto the floor, scattering cassette tapes around him. Hastings tore off his own tie to try to use it as a tourniquet to stem the bleeding, but did not know where to begin. He dialled 911, then knelt beside John to give what comfort he could. Within minutes, three police squad cars were at the scene. Chapman still stood on the sidewalk, calmly rereading The Catcher in the Rye for the umpteenth time.
When no ambulance arrived, a police car was used to take John to Roosevelt Hospital at West 59th Street and Ninth Avenue. A few minutes after his arrival, he was pronounced dead.
Away across the time zones in Poole, Dorset, his aunt Mimi awoke, switched on the radio, and heard someone talking about him. Mimi’s first thought, as so often down the decades, was, “Oh, Lord! What’s he done now?”
Five months later, I walked into the lobby of the Drake Hotel, having just been interviewed about the Beatles on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America show. Awaiting me at the front desk was a message to call a number I did not recognize. “Studio One,” said the voice that answered. A moment later, another, so familiar, voice came on the line. “Hi, this is Yoko. What you said about John was very nice. Maybe you’d like to come over and see where we were living.”
I remember how glorious was that spring afternoon of what now must be termed New York’s good old days. Balmy sunshine lightened even the Dakota’s drab stonework and the heavy iron vases along its Central Park facade, cheerily planted with red geraniums. Outside the Gothic arch on West 72nd Street tourists with cameras lingered around America’s most famous assassination site after Dealey Plaza. Another Liverpool-Victorian touch is a kind of small sentry-box with a coppery metal finish, from which a security guard keeps twenty-four-hour watch. Its occupant was bundled firmly inside it, as though too squeamish to look at the killing place, barely ten feet away.
Everything possible had been done to mitigate the pain and shame of this seemingly ultimate Manhattan tragedy. Despite psychiatric opinion that he might be schizophrenic, Mark David Chapman—arrayed in two bulletproof vests to protect him from tit-for-tat reprisals by Lennon fans—had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was now serving twenty years to life in New York State’s Attica Penitentiary where, seven years earlier, forty-three inmates had died during the worst riot in U.S. prison history. Ironically, one of John’s first stage appearances after settling in America had been a charity concert for the Attica riot’s bereaved wives and children.
I had not seen Yoko since the Apple era’s final days—and, indeed, at first hardly recognized her. Grief had played the cruel trick it does on so many widows of making her look better than her years. The former cloud of black hair was now tied back as neatly as any lady lawyer’s or Wall Street banker’s. In place of miniskirts and hot pants were sleek black trousers, high-heeled boots, a black shirt, and a loosened tie. The face which once seemed so implacably humorless frequently softened into smiles, even when discussing the most painful things. The once flat little voice was full of John’s sayings and phraseology, and cozy north-of-England usages like “cuppa” for “a cup of tea.”
She admitted feeling that with John’s death, his whole character had somehow been subsumed into her. Having enjoyed twenty-twenty vision all her life, she suddenly found herself as myopic as he used to be. She also developed his raging sweet tooth. “John was the one who loved chocolate; I hardly ever used to touch it. But on the day after he was killed, all I wanted to do was eat chocolate. Elton [John] was so sweet; he sent me an enormous chocolate cake. My diet went crazy for about a month—nothing but chocolate and mushrooms.”
We talked for almost two hours in Yoko’s office at Studio One, a long, high-ceilinged room decorated with small trees, white sofas, and pastel-shaded Art Deco lamps. She sat behind a huge inlaid desk, in a chair modeled on the throne of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The ceiling was a trompe l’oeil panorama of lazily drifting clouds. “Above us only sky,” I couldn’t help thinking.
She still had not come to terms with no longer being hated—with having changed overnight from a figure of poisonous ridicule to one of monumental tragedy. As she told me, hundreds of messages continued to pour into the Dakota each day, a goodly number from women who as teenage Beatles fans had once screamed “Chink” and offered her yellow roses with the thorns uppermost, but who now wished to thank her for making John happy according to his wishes, and to sympathize in her inexpressible loss.
She could even smile bleakly at the horrible irony of John’s being taken just as he was feeling so fit and rejuvenated, and new doors seemed to be opening on every side. “After all those years of not smoking and losing weight and trying to keep healthy by eating the right foods…. Since December, I’ve been telling Sean, ‘Eat whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.’
“And he was so happy. Both of us were. A few days before it happened, I remember thinking, ‘This is all so good. I wonder how long it can go on being as good as this.’”
She referred to the other former Beatles wryly as “the in-laws,” something else she must have picked up from John. There was no disguising her bitterness against Paul McCartney, though she said no more than repeating John’s cryptic remark about how much Paul had hurt him. It had also deeply offended her that, after John’s death, Ringo was the only ex-Beatle to fly to New York and offer her his condolences personally.
After our talk, Yoko sent me on a tour of the seventh-floor apartment where she and Sean still lived together. My guide was Fred Seaman, the same assistant who signed the polite turndown I had received when I first asked the Lennons for an interview. I remember thinking that he seemed the ideal factotum for someone like Yoko in her present circumstances: soft-footed, soft-mannered, infinitely attentive, caring, and trustworthy.
And so, five months later than I could have wished, I finally got to see where they were living. I saw the vista of high-ceilinged white rooms with their stunning view of skyscrapers set down as though at random among the Central Park treetops. From the Strawberry Fields memorial garden directly below came a succession of small glints and flashes as visitors used pocket mirrors and other shiny objects to heliograph messages of sympathy to Yoko.
I saw the kitchen where John had learned to bake bread, a cozy domestic nucleus no different from any other wealthy New Yorker’s apart from the wall painting of himself, Yoko, and toddler Sean in Superman costumes, soaring upward hand
in hand. I saw the room devoted to Egyptian relics, including a full-size gold mummy in a case, and the bentwood hatstand on which John had hung his old school cap, and the Yoko artworks and sculpture dating back to their first cautious, awkward encounters in London. A thin Plexiglas column supporting four silver spoons bore the inscription “Three spoons, Y.O. 1967.” I remembered how John always used to say that what attracted him first had been the humor in her work.
I saw the little side room where he used to lie and “watch the trees change color,” now empty but for some cardboard cartons and the giant-screen TV set he’d had specially shipped from Japan. Along the hall was a triangular-shaped room, full of circular clothes racks, and resembling some ghostly boutique. Here with the care of a museum curator—the last quality one would have suspected in him—John had preserved everything he’d ever worn since the sixties, from Swinging London military tunics and cloaks to agitprop fatigues, with their attendant floppy-brimmed fedoras, denim caps, boots, and shoes. I even saw, or fancied I did, the knitted scarf that Stu Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle, had given him circa 1961. The same thought kept recurring as I followed Fred Seaman around: This is the only time I’ll ever see all of this.
For the most part, Yoko played her new role as rock’s most tragic widow with a restraint of which few had ever suspected her capable. Her replies to the grieving millions were limited to brief, dignified communiqués asking them to keep alive John’s ideals of peace and brotherhood, and entreating some space to mourn him in private. She became a familiar, forlorn figure in Central Park, walking the paths she and John once had arm-in-arm, wrapped in a white fur coat and dark glasses to hide the tears none yet had seen, nor ever would.
Yet under the widow’s weeds, the old performance artist had lost none of her compulsion to shock. Two years after John’s death, she released a solo album called Seasons of Glass whose cover showed the bullet-shattered and bloodstained glasses he had still been wearing in his dying moments. Many were offended, though some were willing to interpret it as an extreme form of therapy.
Yoko had made it clear she was not willing to settle for merely being the guardian of the Lennon shrine, but that she intended to continue the careers in which John had so encouraged her. She put her artworks on display at leading galleries, few of which could now refuse her, and went on releasing albums. Without John to give them melody and accessibility—much as Paul McCartney had once done for him—their sales were never spectacular. In 1990, John’s solo music was collected in a memorial four-CD set. When Yoko’s collected work appeared soon afterward, the set ran to six CDs.
She made efforts to reinforce the new, favorable view of her, taking Sean on a trip to Liverpool in 1983 to visit Beatles landmarks like Strawberry Field, and returning in 1990 for a concert to mark the fiftieth anniversary of John’s birth. More positive vibes were created that same year when, helped by Sean, she rerecorded “Give Peace a Chance” as a protest against the Gulf War. At other times, she seemed to show her old total disregard for public and media opinion, as when she allowed John’s name to appear on a range of mugs, plates, and jigsaw puzzles. Uncomfortable echoes of Seasons of Glass were stirred at a Yoko exhibition in Los Angeles when a replica of John’s broken and bloody glasses went on display.
But Yoko, too, was to learn something about being exploited. In the years immediately following John’s death, a succession of one-time Lennon employees—aides, gofers, tarot-readers, and the like—produced trashy books on their lives with the Lennons, usually portraying Yoko as a scheming, manipulative virago. The worst betrayal came from Fred Seaman, the soft-footed young man who had been one of her two most trusted personal assistants. It later emerged that, just a day after John’s death, Seaman had begun walking out of the Dakota with bags full of his diaries, drawings, and correspondence, and feeding them to an accomplice to be processed into a book. He was charged with theft, received five years’ probation, and was prevented from quoting from any of the letters or diaries in the book he persuaded a New York publisher to bring out in 1991.
In 1988, Albert Goldman published The Lives of John Lennon, branding John as an epileptic, schizophrenic, autistic killer, thug, wife-beater, and recluse whose entire musical oeuvre had been founded on the tunes of nursery rhymes. A few weeks after the book appeared, despite all my expectations I found myself back in Yoko’s Studio One office with the trees, the white sofas, and the chair like Tutankhamun’s throne. Seated beside her was a teenage boy with oriental almond eyes but an unmistakable twist of Britishness around the mouth. I realized I was to be the first writer to meet Sean Lennon, now aged thirteen.
Yoko had made no attempt to sue Goldman for his many extreme references to her, nor to bring an injunction that would have removed the book from sale. Her nonreaction was seen as further evidence of her toughness and imperviousness to criticism. But to me she confessed the book had so devastated her that she’d seriously thought of committing suicide and had been held back only by the thought of Sean. Wasn’t it a mistake, I asked, for her not to have uttered a single word of denial? “I am in the position of someone who’s been punched five hundred times,” she answered. “There are so many allegations against John, I could never deal with them all in one interview. If I answer just a few, people might say, ‘What about the others? Maybe they are true.’”
I reflected, but did not say, that it seemed less than wise strategy from the many high-priced advisers at her disposal. Sean corroborated that, in his very clear memory, John had not been the volcanic domestic tyrant and recluse portrayed by Goldman, but a conscientious, loving, and laughing dad.
Yoko’s main biographical service to John was authorizing the respected film director David Wolpert to make a documentary, Imagine: John Lennon, which had a worldwide cinema release also in 1988. Firmly suppressing all her own ideas about avant-garde filmmaking, she gave Wolpert a free hand to produce a clear and comprehensive portrait that unwittingly rebutted several of Albert Goldman’s crazier allegations in The Lives of John Lennon. Goldman had asserted, for example, that John suffered from a total lack of motor coordination that amounted to autism. One of the film’s early scenes shows him at work in the studio at Tittenhurst Park and, with lightning reflexes, catching a sheath of song sheets as it slips off his music stand. Yoko had told me that, in fact, he was double-jointed and could fold his limbs into the most demanding yoga positions without effort.
Wolpert’s film also includes the touching scene when John confronts a young American hippie who has been found living rough in the Tittenhurst grounds. For about ten minutes he talks to the boy, trying to persuade him that there’s nothing godlike about John Lennon nor mystical truth to be disinterred from his song lyrics. The encounter has an almost New Testament quality—Jesus this time preaching unbelief. Finally, he realizes that it’s hopeless and asks whether the vagrant is hungry. The answer is a shamefaced nod. “OK,” John says to the watching musicians and security people. “Let’s give him something to eat.”
Perhaps the saddest casualty was John’s elder son, Julian, for whom all of this cruelly echoed what had happened to his father at the same age, seventeen. Having been given away by his mother as a toddler, John had just been getting to know her again when she was knocked down and killed a few yards from Aunt Mimi’s front gate. In the same way, Julian had virtually lost his father in infancy and found him again as a teenager, only to be robbed of him a second time.
The Dakota apartment, when I first saw it, had photographs of Julian and Sean displayed in equal prominence. But with John no longer around, Julian could hardly expect the same treatment from his stepmother that she gave to her own son. Although Yoko made him an allowance and still invited him on visits, their relationship was clearly not an easy one.
A young man named Lennon who could sing and play guitar was something the recording industry could hardly pass up. Julian’s debut album, released in 1984, revealed some songwriting talent and enough of the familiar Lennon vocal rasp to compel attention.
His first single, poignantly entitled “Too Late for Goodbyes,” reached number six in Britain, though, surprisingly, it failed to make the American Top Forty. He appeared in Chuck Berry’s film autobiography, dueting with Berry on John’s old favorite, “Johnny B. Goode,” and in 1991 had a second U.K. number-six single with the proenvironment song “Saltwater.”
After that, his career seemed to lose momentum. He knocked about the social scene with eligible young women in London, New York, and Monte Carlo, where he acquired a share in a harborside restaurant, La Rascasse. With increasing bitterness, he accused Yoko of withholding his rightful share in his father’s estate, and at one point even threatened legal action against her. Though their financial differences seemed to have been settled quietly, Julian remained resentful that personal keep-sakes like John’s guitars had not been passed on to him. His next album, Photograph Smile, came out in 1998—ironically on the same day as Into the Sun, the debut album of his half-brother, Sean. The critics’ view was that Sean’s effort had the edge.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of John’s death in December 2000, Julian put a message on his website, revealing undiminished pain and anger toward the father he almost never had. John’s dedication to love and peace, he said, “never came home to me.”
When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame gave John a lifetime achievement award in 1994, Paul was chosen to read the citation. His speech was an open love letter to his old partner; at its conclusion, he embraced Yoko and Sean, symbolizing an end to all the old bitterness between their two houses. A significantly short time afterward came the Beatles’ reunion on record, with Paul, George, and Ringo playing backup firmly to some John solo vocal tapes provided by Yoko, and the multipart TV documentary.
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