by Tim Riley
That first week in December, as Reagan assembled his new cabinet, pundits began taking stock of the season. It was the year Solidarity began organizing in Poland, the year America boycotted Moscow’s Summer Olympics with sixty-three other countries to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the year before MTV launched. The Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back topped the box-office receipts. Paul McCartney released McCartney II, a milquetoast commemoration of his first solo album’s ten-year anniversary, which included “Coming Up,” a track Lennon felt obliged to praise, and “Temporary Secretary.” It reached number one in the UK, but peaked at number three in America.
Lennon was busier than he had been in almost five years. He sat for three major interviews: Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone taped on December 5; the BBC’s Andy Peebles on Saturday, December 6; and RKO Radio on Monday afternoon, December 8. Peebles remembers Ono’s strict advance negotiations: how at least half of the questions needed to be pitched directly to her. Slotted for half an hour, before Peebles could blink two hours had gone by and Lennon had taken off, soaring high above his career, looking down, pointing out details nobody had noticed before, remembering names, dates, and songs people had long forgotten, ticking off hit records by other acts nobody knew he paid any attention to, and generally charming this young British radio crew.
“Are you kidding me?” Peebles said many years later. “I remember the very day I saw Please Please Me in the record shop, buying it and racing home to put it on. To be interviewing John Lennon that day, I was dead chuffed.”
When Peebles took a break with his producers, Doreen Davis and Paul Williams, he ran into Yoko after hitting the bathroom. He took her aside to reassure her: “I said I know what we negotiated, I have questions for you, I just need to get a word in, I promise we mean to get your side of the story here.” And Yoko, clearly astonished at what was happening, said, “It’s okay, it’s okay! I had no idea he was going to talk so much.”32 So much talk over so many weeks, and so little overlap. Lennon was just getting warmed up.
As Lennon talked to the BBC, a young man in his mid-twenties began hanging around the Dakota, on Saturday, December 6. Like so many before him, he talked with other autograph hounds and hoped to get a glimpse of his hero. This anonymous figure barely stood out. He had been born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1955, an air force kid who graduated from Columbia High School in Decatur, Georgia, in 1973. There, he played guitar in a rock band, took Christ as his “personal savior,” and carried around a “Jesus notebook.”
In October 1980, this young man, at twenty-five, applied for a pistol permit from his home in Honolulu, claiming an attempted burglary at his apartment necessitated self-protection. Later that month, he plunked down $169 in cash for a five-shot Charter Arm revolver with a two-inch barrel at J&S Enterprises-Gun in Honolulu. According to police records, he traveled to New York on Saturday, December 6, spent the night at the West Side YMCA on 63rd Street and Central Park West, and then went over to the Sheraton Center at 52nd Street and Seventh to book a room, number 2730, at $82 a night, for the week.
The afternoon of Monday, December 8 was sunny and promising. Lennon had a number-one hit single with “(Just Like) Starting Over,” and plans were progressing for Ono’s techno-pop “Walking on Thin Ice” to be its follow-up. The Playboy interview, with its detailed deconstruction of Lennon-McCartney authorship, proved newsstand bounty. If insecurities had found voice during the production of Double Fantasy, they evaporated in the public’s embrace of Lennon’s new music. Now that the couple sat atop certain success, they could be selective about his exposure, and finally book some British press.
Annie Leibovitz, who had taken Lennon’s handsome portrait for the Rolling Stone cover in 1970, returned to the Dakota apartment to follow through on a session from the previous week. She lived upstairs in the same building. Ono recalled the shoot later for Rolling Stone: “We were feeling comfortable because it was Annie, whom we respected and trusted, so John seemed not to have any problem taking off his clothes. John and I were hugging each other, feeling a bit giggly and up.”
“I was thinking that they had never been embarrassed to take their clothes off, that they could do a nude embrace,” says Leibovitz. John immediately assented and took off his clothes; Yoko was reluctant. She agreed to take her shirt off but not her pants; Liebovitz said, “Just leave everything on.” She took a Polaroid shot for a test, and all three of them knew they were on to something—that the pose alone would create a stir.
“When I was with John and Yoko, they seemed like gods to me,” Leibovitz remembers now. “It’s hard to think about that time, but I remember being impressed with the simple kiss they did on the cover of Double Fantasy. The eighties were not a romantic era, and the kiss was just so beautiful.”33
After putting his clothes back on, Lennon sat down with the UK’s syndicated RKO Radio that afternoon and talked his head off. “When I was writing this [album],” he said, “I was visualizing all the people of my own age group . . . being in their thirties and forties now, just like me, and having wives and children and having gone through everything together. I’m singing for them. I’m saying, ‘Here I am now. How are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t the seventies a drag, you know? . . . Well, let’s try to make the eighties good, because it’s still up to us to make what we can of it.’ ” As the interview ends and the crew breaks up the equipment, you can hear everyone’s elation on the tape. Especially Lennon’s.
That evening, John and Yoko came out of the front gate to take their limo to the Hit Factory on West 44th Street, to work on Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice,” which they were both convinced would break Ono through to the pop charts. Lennon had raved to her about her obvious influence on the B-52’s single “Rock Lobster.” He seemed certain that once she found the right material, Ono could take her place as the rightful influence on the cutting sounds coming from punk and new wave. On his way to the car, Lennon signed some autographs on the cover of Double Fantasy. Somebody flashed a picture. The person holding the album had unkempt hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and wore a dark raincoat and scarf.
David Geffen, now the doting, friendly record executive, visited the couple at the Record Plant that evening, to listen to the final mix. He remembers Lennon smiling and dancing around, filled with anticipation about Yoko’s single. “Wait’ll you hear Yoko’s record. It’s a smash! This is better than anything we did on Double Fantasy,” Lennon said. Yoko remained skeptical, although she seemed to be enjoying John’s enthusiasm. “Oh, John, it’s not that great,” she said. “Oh yes it is,” Lennon insisted. “It’s better than anything the B-52’s ever did. And we want you to put it out before Christmas.” Geffen said, “Well, let’s put it out after Christmas and really do the thing right. Take out an ad.” Lennon said, “An ad! Listen to this, Mother, you’re gonna get an ad!”
Then Geffen gave Lennon some news: Double Fantasy would be the number one album the next week in England. “Yoko gave me this real funny look,” Geffen remembers, “like it better be number one in England. That was the thing she was interested in, not for herself but because John wanted it so badly.”34
John and Yoko spent the evening at the studio, mixing Ono’s track, and decided to pop back home instead of heading out somewhere for dinner. At around 10:50 P.M. that evening, their limo pulled up to the Dakota and the couple hopped out at the curb. As they walked up to the gate, a young autograph hound called, “Mr. Lennon,” pulled out his handgun, dropped to a “combat stance,” and pulled the trigger five times into the singer’s back before he could turn around. Four of the shots ripped through Lennon’s flesh—two on the left side of his back and two in his left shoulder.
Two witnesses saw the shooting: the Dakota elevator operator at the door and a cabdriver who had just dropped off another passenger. Somebody called 911. From their nearby patrol car at 72nd and Broadway, about three blocks away, Officers Steve Spiro and Peter Cullen heard a report of sh
ots fired. When they arrived, they found the killer standing “very calmly,” reading his book, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Bleeding profusely, Lennon had somehow stumbled all the way through the courtyard of the Dakota into the lobby, where he lay bleeding in front of Jay Hastings, the doorman. A second patrol car arrived with Officers Bill Gamble and James Moran, and they loaded Lennon into the backseat of their squad car rather than wait for an ambulance. Moran reported Lennon “moaning” from the back. Officer Moran asked him, “Are you John Lennon?” and Lennon moaned, “Yeah.”
When they arrived at Roosevelt Hospital, Dr. Stephan Lynn could tell Lennon was beyond hope as the gurney whooshed past, but a team set about trying to revive him anyway. He had lost too much blood, and all attempts to get his heart beating again failed. Dr. Lynn pronounced Lennon dead at 11:15 P.M. The autopsy by Dr. Elliott M. Gross, chief medical examiner, said Lennon had died of “shock and loss of blood” and that “no one could have lived more than a few minutes with such injuries.” The lack of gunpowder burns on Lennon’s skin indicated the shots must have been fired from farther than eighteen inches.
David Geffen had gone straight from the Record Plant to his apartment and turned his phone off. After a few minutes, he noticed the light flashing, so he picked up and heard a strange woman’s voice tell him, “I’m a friend of Yoko’s, John’s just been shot. They’re at Roosevelt Hospital. Run right over.” Geffen thought it was a crank call. Just to make sure, he called the Record Plant, “and they said, no, it’s impossible, he just left here ten minutes ago.” Then Geffen’s phone rang again, and the same woman asked him, “Why haven’t you left? He’s shot!” Geffen called her back to verify, and then took a call from his partner, Eddi Rosenblatt, who’d seen the news bulletin on television. They met to grab a cab downtown.
Security was tight at the hospital, and Geffen had to yell his way past guards to find Ono:
It was such a scene. There were cops everywhere, big cops, you know. You feel so intimidated, and all I could think was that I had to get to Yoko. . . . Finally, someone opened the door and I ran in. Yoko was in this little room, hysterical, and I just picked her up in my arms. She said, “Someone’s shot John. Can you believe it? Someone shot him.” I was in shock.
Then a policeman called me outside and said, “He’s dead. He died on arrival at the hospital.” It was like an explosion in my mind.35
Ono was led away when doctors told her of her husband’s death. “Tell me it’s not true!” she was quoted as crying. Later, Geffen issued this statement on her behalf: “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him.”36
As mayhem rapidly descended on the Upper West Side, the most common feeling was one of disbelief, the stillness of a December evening violently sundered, as if the sixties had finally and irrevocably ended, only ten years too late. Many heard about Lennon’s death from ABC-TV, when Howard Cosell came back from a commercial break with an inexplicably sobering tone that shrank the Dolphins-Patriots Monday Night Football game to a pinpoint. Cosell had hosted a rare appearance by Lennon in his booth as a guest celebrity six years earlier, in December 1974, when Lennon raved about hearing “Yesterday” come over the PA system.
On this night, Cosell’s supernatural egotism went limp: “This, we have to say it, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to the Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
In New York City that night, spectacle engulfed the Dakota. News cameras and policemen swarmed the scene; flowers and photographs began piling up against the great Victorian façade. Pedestrians, caught unaware, stopped dead in their tracks as word spread. They turned direction, as if in mid-step, and began striding toward Central Park West, pulled by an invisible force, eventually the pull of the music. Beatle songs and spontaneous sing-alongs started up, faded away, and returned. Candles illuminating tearful faces contested the city’s great darkness. Extinguished either by wind or use, they were quietly relit.
Jay Hastings sat at his post in the Dakota lobby, his shirt still flecked with Lennon’s blood, and talked to reporters in a daze. He recognized the gunman. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Hastings told Rolling Stone. “Some bum came up and asked him for money, and the guy gave him a ten-dollar bill. The bum was ecstatic and kissed him and everything. He didn’t bother anyone here; I hardly noticed him.”37
The crowd seemed to speak in a hush, as if participating in somebody else’s bad dream, mortified to be part of the scene yet unable to turn away. “I keep thinking about all those years when the government tried to deport him,” said Joe Pecorino, who played the John Lennon character in Beatlemania, then running at the Winter Garden Theater. “Now it’s too damn bad they didn’t.”38 Sentiments like this echoed throughout much of the British press.
In shock, and increasing futility, American fans watched TV late into the night; still others awoke to Beatle tracks blanketing morning radio, and shock jocks quietly humbled. Five hours ahead of New York time, Britons awoke to the grim news, which disturbed the patter of their morning chat shows.
Epilogue
The days following Lennon’s death passed in a haze of public mourning. Elliot Mintz remembers being in the front office of the Dakota the morning of December 9 when Ringo Starr rang in. “He was calling from a pay phone, he told me. He said, ‘I’m here, I want to come over, do what I can to help. How do I get past all the stuff?’ ” Mintz told him to meet him on 73rd Street and sneak in a back door. Half an hour later, Starr’s car pulled up and Mintz walked him very slowly toward a Dakota service entrance. “We got about halfway there without anybody recognizing him, and then photographers started running after us,” Mintz says. Ringo just kept walking, and told Mintz, “Don’t run from them, it will just make it more difficult.” By the time they got to the entrance, photographers surrounded them.
Mintz took Ringo and his fiancée, Barbara Bach, up in the elevator to the Lennon suite. “The meeting was short but somehow got quoted accurately,” Mintz reports. “Ringo told Yoko, ‘I know exactly how you feel,’ and Yoko said, ‘No, you don’t.’ He was one of the few people who came in to see her and just talk with her. And then I remember taking him downstairs, but by then the building was completely surrounded, and we had to walk through the crowd to get back to his car.”1
An AP photographer caught Starr, Bach, and Mintz as they stepped back out from the rear entrance. After Ringo left, seventeen-year-old Julian Lennon arrived from North Wales. The surging crowd in front of the Dakota spilled over into Central Park West, with many people, men and women, openly weeping, holding signs, playing Beatle songs on boom boxes, and singing along with impromptu guitars. Many had stayed through the night; many more joined the throng in the morning hours. On television, the three networks regularly interrupted programming, in a scene that would be repeated with Princess Di’s funeral in 1997, with footage of the multimedia vigil unfolding around the world. Crowds gathered at Liverpool’s Cavern on Mathew Street, outside the former Apple offices on Savile Row in London, and beneath the rooftop concert location from Let It Be.
John Eastman called his sister’s house and woke his brother-in-law, Paul McCartney, with the news. McCartney hung up and called Yoko Ono. He went into the London studio later that day just to keep working as the enormity sank in. Reporters caught him on his way inside AIR Studios on Oxford Street, and badgered him for a quote. “Bit of a drag, isn’t it?” he blurted out, obviously reeling from the news (the video of this exchange shows a man in a barely suppressed rage). But the phrase looked so bad in print he had to come back and explain himself. In doing so, he let loose with some enticing candor on his partner’s persona:
If I had known John was going to die, I would not have been as stand-offish as I was. When John start
ed slagging me off, I was not prepared to say “you’re quite right,” I am human. Nobody would sit there and be called an Engelbert Humperdinck as I was and say, “Oh, fine, I think you’re right.” I just turned round and said, “piss off.” Had I known it was going to be that final—and quick—I wouldn’t have said it.
John was not the big working-class hero he liked to make out. He was the least working-class of the Beatles. He was the poshest, but he did have rather a tough upbringing.2
George Harrison issued a statement that read, “After all we went through together, I had—and still have—great love and respect for John. I’m stunned. To rob life is the ultimate robbery.”3
The day also brought a quote from Lennon’s aunt Mimi, from Dorset. Her first thought at hearing his name had simply been “What’s he done now?” Reflexively, she began by reiterating her primacy in his life: “John looked upon me as his mum. . . . There was never the possibility that he would be just an ordinary person. He’d have been successful in anything he did. He was as happy as the day was long.”4
Not since the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 had Americans gathered in such numbers to share this shock and dismay, but the event precipitated similar outpourings throughout the world. It was as if all the turmoil from Lennon’s era rushed back to fill the countercultural void created by November’s election of Ronald Reagan as president. By the evening of December 9, the network newscasts had gathered up reports from around the globe and channeled the grief on display at symbolic locations like Mendips in Woolton and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Radio stations played “Imagine” nonstop, and for the first time, the music rang nostalgic in preposterous ways—at once comforting, reassuring, and utterly absurd. Every familiar gesture seemed portentous, prophetic yet unimaginable, especially in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” when Lennon sang: “The way things are going they’re gonna crucify me!” It could never be true, and it was too true to take in all at once.