The Elephants were not expected to be McCartney-caliber collaborators, but Lennon sought input from the musicians. Gabriel was amazed when Lennon requested feedback while writing songs for Some Time in New York City.
“He really wanted an opinion,” Gabriel says. “Here he was, this rhythmic genius, but he didn’t stick that in your face. His ego was really in check. If anything, I think he was more insecure than a lot of celebrities.”
Lennon wanted to work with, not necessarily guide, the musicians, and treated the Elephants with professional respect. What surprised Gabriel most was how relaxed Lennon made the bandsmen feel, and how the barely twenty-one-year-old Gabriel felt in Lennon’s company.
“I can really look back and see how far out it was to have that natural comfort with someone of that magnitude,” Gabriel says. “I mean, there I was learning a tune, and he’s asking: ‘Do you like it?’ I never felt like, ‘This is John Lennon the Beatle, what am I doing here?’ You felt you belonged there. He made you feel that way.”
Lennon relaxed during such times with the group, ending work sessions with late dinners or at Bank Street; quiet, low-key times that allowed—at least in Lennon’s mind—the illusion of anonymity.
“It was cool not to be too in awe of him,” says Prewitt. “It was cooler to just walk the street, ‘Oh, hey John, how ya doing?’ Occasionally there would be people outside the studio, but never big crowds. He felt really comfortable there.”
Sometimes that same innocent attitude clouded Lennon’s vision. After a recording session ended in the predawn hours, Van Scyoc was driving uptown when he spotted John and Yoko by themselves on an Eighth Avenue corner trying to hail a taxi.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. “Get the hell in the car!” He couldn’t believe they hadn’t arranged a driver, or weren’t aware of the boundaries they crossed—regardless of their celebrity—in a neighborhood populated mostly by “derelicts and prostitutes” at that hour.
“But they loved New York so much they thought nothing about walking down Eighth to catch a cab,” Van Scyoc says. “They thought they were totally incognito and nobody would notice, but that’s just not the way it was.”
• • •
Suspicions about John Lennon had been aired in the Oval Office prior to Strom Thurmond’s early February memo suggesting deportation. A year earlier Nixon had been warned about those troublesome Beatles by the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley.
The landscape of America had changed since Elvis joined the Army in 1958; at the time Presley was clearly the top name in the pop universe, and some cynically considered the induction a patriotic career move. If so, the strategy was misguided as Presley never again reached the chart-topping dominance of his early, Sun Records era. After his days in uniform, Presley spent the “Beatlemania” years making formulaic movies that produced a few hit records, but the British invasion, explosion of rock talent, psychedelia, and the passing of time seemed to leave the King and other ’50s pioneers behind. Like Nixon, Presley staged a brief comeback in 1968, a leather-clad glimpse of his rock and roll roots before a final career stage of cabaret spectacle, with Vegas neon reflected off his sequined jumpsuit.
Among other hobbies, Presley developed a fondness for law enforcement and collected guns, badges, and honorary titles from police agencies. Presley was sincere in his concern for his country, and in December 1970 reached out to the president of the United States to offer his assistance.40
While sharing first-class airline space with Senator George Murphy (a California Republican and show business veteran of movie musicals including For Me and My Gal), Presley wrote a letter that was delivered to Nixon. The nation faced enemies from within, according to Elvis, dissident elements that trusted him in ways that conventional investigators couldn’t achieve. Presley offered to be the highest-profile spy since Marlene Dietrich vamped for the Allies: “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc., do not consider me their enemy or as they call it the establishment. I call it America and I love it. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help my country.”
Presley asked to be named a “Federal Agent at Large.” He wanted a badge, of course, but not a formal “title or an appointed position.” With unintended, tragic irony, Presley said he spoke with authority on the matter: “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good.”
A White House meeting was scheduled. Presley was taken to the Oval Office on the morning of December 21; in preparation for the visit deputy assistant to the president Dwight Chapin advised White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that Presley’s credibility included a recent award from the Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees): “Presley was voted one of the ten outstanding young men for next year and this was based upon his work in the field of drugs.”
The historic meeting began with photographs that, decades later, are described as among the most requested from the National Security Archive’s considerable collection: Presley, wearing a velvet cape of sorts under a wingspan collar, enormous belt buckle shimmering amidst the glare, eyes more glassy than seductively sleepy, shook hands with a visibly uncomfortable Richard Nixon.
The Nixon-Presley meeting was summarized in a memorandum, “For the President’s File,” written by attorney Egil “Bud” Krogh, who had served as Nixon’s liaison to the FBI and Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The first paragraph described introductory small talk. Presley said he was currently headlining in Nevada.
“The President indicated that he was aware of how difficult it is to perform in Las Vegas,” Krogh noted. An understanding man, Nixon.
In the second paragraph, Nixon explained his hopes that Presley could help reach young people; Elvis said he did that while singing. They both agreed that Elvis should maintain his credibility with America’s youth.
Then they discussed the Beatles. The third paragraph begs the question of Elvis’s own paranoid tendencies: “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. He said the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme. The President nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise.”
The heavy-drinking president and prescription-loaded singer then spoke of America’s enemies within. “The President indicated that those who use drugs are also those in the vanguard of anti-American protest,” Krogh wrote, echoing the White House philosophy that opposition to the war was unpatriotic. “Violence, drug usage, dissent, protests all seem to merge in generally the same group of young people.”
Some people wondered, based on the report and photo, if Elvis was under the influence of various pills at the time. Krogh made several references to Presley’s emotional state: passionately telling the president he was “on your side”; humbly saying he was “just a poor boy from Tennessee” who’d been blessed by America and wanted to return the favor. At meeting’s end Presley repeated his support for Nixon, “and then, in a surprising, spontaneous gesture, put his left arm around the president and hugged him.”
Presley’s embrace of the president—symbolically and literally—ranks among the most awkward moments in Oval Office history. The legendary meeting ended inconclusively. Gifts were exchanged: a faux Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge for Presley; a commemorative World War II–era Colt .45 pistol joined the Nixon arsenal (“encased in a handsome wooden chest,” according to the thank-you note). Elvis continued sweating it out on Vegas stages, and little or no evidence exists that he made any headway in infiltrating the hippies, SDS, or Black Panther Party.
Many insiders maintain that Nixon was sincere in his attempts to communicate with the young, to find common ground with those who so actively loathed him. Efforts to reach across the generational divide included a 1968 campai
gn-year cameo on Laugh-In, when Nixon delivered the “sock it to me” catchphrase as a question rather than invitation. It was no secret that Nixon wasn’t always comfortable in social settings.
“He was clumsy with people,” says Joseph Blatchford, Nixon’s 1969 appointee as director of the Peace Corps. Blatchford recalls the president sometimes trying odd methods of connecting with young people, including an early morning Lincoln Memorial visit with protestors who had flocked to DC after Kent State. Accompanied by just a single aide, Nixon climbed the steps of the memorial and truly freaked out the hippies who awoke to a private audience with the president of the United States.
“It was a bizarre thing to do,” Blatchford says, especially at a time when the White House was prepared to go on lockdown status if post–Kent State demonstrations took a turn for the worse. “He was troubled and he tried to talk to them.” Nixon stopped short of asking the kids about their favorite subjects in school as he struggled to make conversation, bringing up football and surfing, among other topics. Travel, the president advised the young, was a good way to broaden one’s mind.
From Blatchford’s perspective, international trips were a delicate topic. He’d been warned that Peace Corps volunteers should not be wandering the globe and bad-mouthing the president or the nation’s defense policy. “The Vietnam War really split up the country badly,” Blatchford says. The Peace Corps mostly attracted idealistic youth fresh from college. “They were torn: they desired to take Kennedy’s call and go overseas and serve and, at the same time, were coming out of college where all the campuses were saying no, stay here and fight Nixon and the war.”
In spite of the seeming divide, with Nixon seen as top antagonist, Blatchford says the president had a soft spot for the young generation, however ill-expressed, that was sometimes revealed. “I was surprised when he told me he was all for the eighteen-year-old vote,” Blatchford says. “I was trying to encourage him to move forward with it. Others in the administration said it would cost him the ’72 election. He said, ‘I don’t care, I think they should have the vote.’”
Blatchford says Nixon himself supported the Peace Corps and its mission; others would have preferred ending the program after the Kennedy administration. One notable problem involved Peace Corps volunteers who took part in antiwar protests. Blatchford stood his ground admirably in the face of considerable pressure.
“I had some dealings with the White House, some unpleasant ones,” Blatchford recalls. “Strangely enough, I got most of my support from Nixon himself. Vice President Agnew got all upset and wanted me to fire these people.”
Blatchford struggled to keep the corps neutral and met resistance from both sides of the aisle. After Kennedy the agency became part of the government, which made it vulnerable to politics.
“Nixon was very positive, but not so much some of his aides. They wanted to go after the young guys with long hair. It was tense.”
However superficial, hair length was very much a barometer of the decade’s conflicts, fashion attributed to rock and roll and certain bands in particular. In the early 1960s, Blatchford was a Berkeley law student and founder of global-action group Accion. He visited London just as the times began-a-changing.
“I’d never seen young men with long hair before, [or heard of them] except in Shakespeare’s time,” Blatchford says. “And here were these guys on the street with long hair and funny suits imitating the Beatles. That was the first time I saw the youth antiestablishment message, before I saw it in this country and before the Vietnam War became a big issue.”
By 1972 the war in Southeast Asia was the most telling symptom of the national condition. The confusion in Washington was matched by uncertainty throughout the land, which Blatchford said included journalists and activists.
“There was an attempt in society, fanned by the media, where people were trying to get a fight going,” Blatchford says. “It was hard to figure out who were the dangerous guys, who were the criminals, who were the saints and spiritual leaders. It was a very confusing time.”
Confusion, as with politics, made for strange bedfellows, and Blatchford says that many well-meaning people may have stepped into situations ill prepared. No one, including Elvis Presley and John Lennon, knew quite what to make of the Black Panthers, often perceived as a militant threat.
“A lot of naïve people got involved with some very dangerous characters,” Blatchford says. “I remember Leonard Bernstein giving a fundraiser for the Black Panthers. It was a time of liberation for women, for blacks, and the whole racial thing going on, and at the same time there was the voice of Martin Luther King.”
In February 1972, Blatchford himself was on the same roster as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, among others, in a decidedly unexpected forum.
“Mike Douglas turned the show over to him for a week,” Blatchford says. “Lennon asked for me to come on the show; he wanted to hear about volunteerism and so forth.”
• • •
Mike Douglas found his days with Lennon to be memorable for many reasons, describing their time together as “one of the most interesting, most trying and, in the end, most rewarding week of shows we ever produced.”
Add “unprecedented” and “unusual” to that description. For Douglas, having John and Yoko as his cohosts for five one-hour installments of his talk and variety program was obviously a show business and ratings coup. In his memoir, I’ll Be Right Back, Douglas considered the Beatles “the most sought-after guests in the entertainment world,” an opportunity he was “determined not to waste.”41 If certain allowances had to be made to accommodate the whims of the guest hosts, Douglas knew it was a small price to pay.
It was customary for Douglas to offer his weekly cohosts a chance to bring on guests of their choosing, “but never to the extent that we did for John and Yoko.”
Lennon had a few visitors in mind, names more likely heard on the evening news than on an afternoon talk show. Viewers expected from these shows nothing more than family friendly comedians, middle-of-the-road ballads, and favorite recipes shared during cooking demonstrations. Douglas, a former big-band singer who provided Prince Charming’s vocals in Cinderella, called his easygoing ambitions “an enjoyable way to pass part of the afternoon watching television and sell some soap.” (The genial Douglas said that with false modesty: he was a quiet champion of civil rights and during the early 1960s featured more black leaders than any show on national television at the time. A network memo called Douglas out for having “an excess of Negro activists that may not be appropriate for our daytime audience,” and Douglas responded by inviting to the show Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidad-born “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party credited with popularizing the term “black power.”)
Of course, Carmichael hadn’t been recently convicted of starting a riot, as had two of John and Yoko’s wish list of invitees, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale. Lennon’s broad range of interests and recently made friends resulted in a wildly diverse cast from the worlds of entertainment and politics. Some of the ideas fell short—Lennon had hoped to bring Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Groucho Marx to the party—but the assembled cast guaranteed a week of television history: Washington-based names included Joseph Blatchford from the Peace Corps and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose 1965 auto industry exposé Unsafe at Any Speed ushered in a new era of safety watchdogging; comedy came courtesy of George Carlin, who had recently dropped the suit-and-tie approach in favor of long hair and social commentary. The eclectic atmosphere was complete with Yoko Ono art demonstrations, a civil rights attorney, and a macrobiotic cooking expert sharing space with conventional guests such as veteran TV comic Louis Nye.
Advance guest list negotiations gave the bandsmen of Elephant’s Memory their first up-close look at the level of clout held by Lennon.
“The fact that Mike Douglas would do anything to have John on his show is a testament to w
ho John was as a musical icon,” Adam Ippolito says. “There were a number of major debates over some of the guests before the show started taping; he even had Eldridge Cleaver on the list if I remember correctly.”
“Those people were a condition that John gave,” Tex Gabriel says. “I don’t see Mike Douglas calling for Bobby Seale on his own.”
In turn, John and Yoko felt that some of the conventional guests had been forced on them. Lennon vented in a letter to friend Pete Bennett, an American public relations man working at Apple Records: “I don’t know whether you heard of all the problems we’ve had with the people on Mike Douglas’s show? They keep trying to spring ‘surprise guests’ on us, and we can hardly control them. We don’t see much chance of getting you on the show—we can only just get the people we originally wanted on! They fight us every step of the way!”42
Musically, the show introduced Elephant’s Memory in their new role as Lennon’s backup band. The Daily News made note of the group’s recent promotion “after a long, crazy underground life making music without ever making it as an overground name.”43
Anticipation was high: the musicians prepared to share a national stage with a Beatle; Rubin delighted in turning a mainstream entertainment program into a Yippie forum; and Douglas recalled a frantic buildup as he and his Philadelphia staff and crew prepared for a week that “drew more interest from disparate groups of people than any other show in our history.” Executives from sponsor Westinghouse made appearances on a set they hadn’t seen in years; relatives of Douglas and the staff suddenly decided a visit to Philadelphia was long overdue.
Douglas was also aware of “at least a half dozen conservatively dressed men in attendance every day,” later confirmed to be FBI agents who were sent “to keep an eye on the suspiciously radical Beatle.”
The Walrus and the Elephants Page 7