by Bryce Zabel
Marshall, no fool, knew that if a joke killed on the stage but there was no audience to hear it, then it counted for nothing. He needed his series to get some notoriety, so shortly before the bus departed the Paramount lot in Hollywood for Anaheim, he called the Hollywood Reporter and KABC Eyewitness News and leaked word of the adventure.
By the time Paramount’s school bus arrived at the gates of Disneyland, there were already reporters staked out to watch them off-load and be greeted by park officials. Lennon immediately knew that Marshall had played him and confronted the producer. Marshall tried to shrug it off, but Lennon was having none of that.
At that moment, however, Robert McBride, Disney’s PR man, showed up with an honorary “key” to the park and presented it to a beaming Julian.
At that point, John was presented with his own choice: hold Marshall’s feet to the fire and ruin one of the greatest days in his son’s life, or be Julian’s hero. Within an hour, John Lennon had spoken to nearly every TV news crew in Los Angeles, flashing the peace sign in every interview and mugging with Garry Marshall, the man Lennon was now calling “Mr. Kite.”
• • •
It seemed so simple and pleasant, a harmless PR prank by an over-anxious Hollywood producer. But there was one problem. Among the many people watching Lennon hang out with the Happy Days cast and crew at the most recognizable icon of capitalistic excess were radicals from the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers. During the 2008 presidential campaign when the Republican party tried to link their names to Democratic candidate Barack Obama, they first told their story publicly.
[William Ayers] “John Lennon was still the political Beatle to us. Granted, some of the lyrics to his ‘Revolution’ had turned us off, but his behavior in 1970 and 1971 had placed him firmly left-of-center. When the Beatles tried to play their Nixon protest concert in Miami Beach, we thought that was cool, even though we had stopped believing in elections.”
[Bernardine Dohrn] “But then, one night in early 1974, there he was on the evening news, going to Disneyland with a bunch of comedians. Bill and I just looked at each other. What had happened to him? This left-wing radical now looked like any other capitalist tool, no longer committed to the revolution. We felt he could have become a symbol.”
The truth of the matter was that by 1974 the best (or the most destructive) years were behind the Weather Underground. Their brand of radicalism had stalled (or dimmed) and was not so active among the revolutionary elite, its rank and file, and even the public and the media. As Vietnam crawled toward its conclusion and even radicals started to get jobs and drop back into society, the organization was burning itself out.
Both Ayers and Dohrn knew that something had to be done that would re-focus the world’s energy back on them. They had just finished writing a book they hoped might do the trick: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. Within its pages, Ayers and Dohrn advocated the overthrow of the current capitalist system as the only solution to racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and imperialism.
Still, they all wondered, would it be enough? Like producer Garry Marshall, Dohrn and Ayers felt that the power of the Beatles could be harnessed to their own advantage. They certainly knew that the Weather Underground needed to adjust its tactics and goals to a post-Vietnam world. They needed to seize the world’s attention as they had done a few years earlier, and the sooner they could do it, the better.
The Weather Underground leaders had heard through the revolutionary grapevine that the Symbionese Liberation Army was planning something big, like the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, and they wanted to strike first.
They would kidnap John Lennon, subject him to “re-education” tactics, and force him to become their mouthpiece to the world. When a living, breathing Beatle laid out the case for radical change, the reasoning went, the world would pay attention. He could start the “prairie fire” of revolution that they so craved.
Dohrn, Ayers, and others began to stalk Lennon. They observed his comings and goings from his Malibu rental home. Among them was the departure of Julian Lennon to his life in England.
[Julian Lennon] “It’s no secret that my dad wasn’t much of a dad to me. But that vacation in LA was like it was supposed to be. Dads take their kids to Disneyland. So that was good. If I’d known what it was going to lead to, though, I guess I’d rather have missed out on it.”
Once Julian was safely back to the care of his mother, Cynthia, John returned to his party life in Malibu. The Weathermen followed him constantly. Ironically, even though Lennon spotted them several times, he dismissed them as junior FBI agents and ignored them.
The nightclubs they followed him into included the famed Troubadour in Hollywood. Wearing disguises, the Weathermen observed Lennon and Nilsson throwing back Brandy Alexanders like mess possessed. One night, an inebriated Lennon came from the restrooms wearing a sanitary napkin attached to his forehead. Dohrn and Ayers watched as a waitress questioned him as to whether he was leaving a tip on the way out.
“Do you know who I am?” Lennon asked.
“Yes,” the waitress shot back. “You’re the asshole with a Kotex on your head.”
The plan had been for Dohrn and Ayers to pick up Lennon after he left the Troubadour, but now there were too many people around, from bouncers to club owners to fans gathered to watch the stumbling Lennon. If anything, the scene convinced Dohrn and Ayers that Lennon was a worthy target who would benefit from some re-education—they’d just have to wait a little longer to implement their plans.
As it turned out, they didn’t have to wait as long as they thought. The evening of March 12, 1974, had been a dark one for John Lennon, now almost a year into his banishment by Yoko Ono. Lennon and Nilsson began throwing down more cocktails and decided to heckle the Smothers Brothers, the controversial political satirists.
“The comments got so ugly and personal that we were about to get pulled off the stage,” Tommy Smothers said. “We loved the Beatles and it blew our minds that one of them would try to ruin our show.”
As the situation escalated, club security attempted to remove the drunken and enraged rock stars in the audience. The struggle turned physical, and Lennon lost his memorable glasses in the scuffle.
All of this, of course, attracted just as much attention as the Kotex incident, but this time, the Weather Underground was prepared—they had a spotter in the crowd who used a nearby payphone to call Bernardine Dohrn, stationed at another payphone near Lennon’s rental house on the beach.
As a taxi dropped off Lennon, Nilsson, and Pang at Lennon’s, a coordinated team of five members of the Weather Underground made their move to grab Lennon. Nilsson tried to hold on to his friend but was punched out cold for his bravery, suffering a concussion when his head hit the stone driveway. A car appeared, driven by Ayers, with Dohrn in the passenger seat.
Pang screamed, terrified she might be raped, and was gagged, blindfolded, and thrown into the back seat. The Weather Underground radicals overpowered Lennon as well, tied his hands with duct tape, and threw him in the trunk of the vehicle. Within less than a minute of exiting the taxi, John Lennon, inebriated and vomiting, found himself locked in a dark car trunk without his eyeglasses.
The car sped off, going north on Pacific Coast Highway. Twenty miles away, on a dark, deserted stretch of beach highway outside of Trancas, a member of the rebel group threw May Pang from the car.
It took her over two hours to find her way to an all-night liquor store with a phone. The manager, a volunteer member of the Malibu Sheriff’s Department, took care of the frantic Pang and helped her remember the physical descriptions of the assailants as best as possible.
With Pang’s assistance, deputies found Harry Nilsson shortly before daylight, still unconscious, in the driveway of the beach house. Within another hour, AP had broken the story.
• • •
Breaking News
APB107
-BULLETIN- (AP)
(LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA)—THE RADICAL WEATHER UNDERGROUND TERRORIST ORGANIZATION SAYS THAT MUSICIAN JOHN LENNON IS IN ITS CUSTODY. LENNON, A MEMBER OF THE POPULAR MUSICAL GROUP THE BEATLES, HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE TUESDAY.
05:18gAPD 03-15-74
APB108
LENNON-BULLETIN-TAKE 2
FBI DIRECTOR CLARENCE M. KELLEY CONFIRMS THAT BUREAU AGENTS BELIEVE THE COMMUNICATION FROM WEATHER UNDERGROUND LEADER BERNARDINE DOHRN IS AUTHENTIC.
• • •
After a three-day search that involved coordinated investigations by police from Los Angeles to San Francisco and all points in between, the car into whose trunk John Lennon had been thrown was discovered by officers in a Medford parking lot in southern Oregon.
This fact of geography caused Lieutenant Samuel R. Forster, the lead LAPD detective assigned to the case, to designate that John Lennon was in the wind. The investigation was officially handed off to the FBI, as the evidence had already crossed state lines.
From the perspective of today’s scandal and celebrity-saturated culture, it is hard to comprehend the impact the news of Lennon’s kidnapping had on the general public when the story first broke on March 15, 1974. One of the world’s greatest celebrities had just been taken hostage by a revolutionary group most Americans knew sought to destroy the world as they knew it. Against the backdrop of the daily implosions of the Nixon Administration, the Lennon kidnapping mesmerized the country.
“The news just went nuclear,” shouted New York journalist Geraldo Rivera when he arrived in Los Angeles, determined, he told his viewers, to “find John Ono Lennon and bring him home.”
The Weather Underground’s kidnapping of John Lennon became, after Watergate, the greatest media event of the 1970s. Before it was over, Lennon’s face would appear four times on the cover of Time alone.
News coverage grew more hysterical by the day. There seemed to be no limits around who John Lennon was and what he represented, what the crime meant, and what it symbolized for Americans battered by war and scandal.
Less than a day after Lennon had been abducted, Robert W. Morgan at radio station KMPC received a call. A woman’s voice informed him that John Lennon had become a “prisoner of war.” She made no ransom demand but directed Morgan to broadcast the news immediately. More news would be forthcoming, the woman said, and then she hung up. Morgan told the FBI his belief that it was Bernardine Dohrn who’d been on the other end of the line.
After taking credit for the Lennon kidnapping, the Weather Underground went silent. As Apple’s first order of business, security details were hired for Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Richard Starkey, and Yoko Ono. Never again would a Beatle or a family member be without protection.
PR man Derek Taylor was called back from vacation in France. He locked all the marijuana and alcohol in his safe, and then he got to work. The first thing he did was craft a statement that had none of the tongue-in-cheek nuance he was known for.
[Apple] “Apple joins with Beatles fans worldwide in condemning the illegal kidnapping of John Lennon in Los Angeles. We urge law enforcement officials in the United States to treat this as a serious crime and act immediately to find and free our John. We also urge any individual who has information that could free John and bring the perpetrators to justice to call police immediately.”
Each of the individual Beatles found reporters on their doorsteps even before the security details could arrive. All of them were, to say the least, freaked out, not only for their comrade but for themselves, not knowing if this was part of a larger plan.
McCartney, whom the press tracked down in a London studio where he was producing a Badfinger song, was so guarded in his first remarks that he was forced to amend his statement that same day. “John is our great friend,” he said with the proper sense of gravity. “We’ll do anything to bring him home safely.”
Harrison viewed the event in his stereotypical cosmic perspective. “The universe has many dark forces,” he told BBC, “but John is a being of light. The light always finds a way.”
Starkey’s response was, perhaps, the most compelling. He stared into the camera’s lens and spoke directly to his friend: “John, we all love you, and we will find you. If you see this, just remember that. We won’t give up until we find you.” Starkey then went silent and went back into his home, knowing that if the short sound bite was all reporters had on film, the news stations would play it over and over, increasing Lennon’s chance of actually seeing it.
Yoko went into hiding in the Dakota, distraught as one might expect, especially given that nearly two months earlier she’d turned down John’s plea to return to New York, and to her. Instead, she’d sent him back to Los Angeles, and now he was missing altogether. She blamed herself.
Yoko’s new personal assistant rang Paul with her new number, and Paul called her back immediately. “John’s thinking of you right now, and he’s okay,” Paul said, trying to sound reassuring. “You did nothing to cause this. He’ll be coming home soon, and he’s going to want to be with you.” Their conversation was cut short when the FBI arrived to interview Ono for their investigation.
This, of course, created a terrible problem. Yoko knew, more than almost anyone, how deeply the FBI, an instrument of the Nixon government, had been involved in surveillance and harassment of her husband. All of the Beatles, in fact, had come to see the FBI as the enemy. Now they were being told to work with them to find John Lennon.
[Yoko] “I became sick to my stomach when I thought about this. I could not trust these people to keep my husband alive. I pretended that I did not know what evil things they had done to us because I did not want them to know what I knew. It was a very terrible thing that happened.”
The arrival of the FBI team, however, sent Yoko into action. She checked into a room at the Plaza Hotel under another name and had her new security detail make certain she was not followed. In the Plaza suite, she began to collect call everyone at Apple, dispensing the insight that John was in terrible danger, but not just from the Weather Underground.
Allen Klein, with his aggressive New York instincts, also understood that in a takedown of the Weather Underground, the FBI could “accidentally” see that John Lennon was killed as collateral damage. Klein had heard from his own sources of the FBI’s nefarious Squad 47, formed specifically to break up the Weather Underground by any means necessary. They were said to regularly violate civil rights by tapping phones and opening mail without warrants, but they were also conducting black-bag break-ins that were not sanctioned by the Bureau.
Klein told Yoko that he would put together a private team of ex-agents and military to find Lennon before the FBI did. He had made key contacts during the short period the year before, when blackmailer Winston Fourney had held the tapes from the Nigerian Band on the Run sessions. The most important was former Marine Corps special operative Connor McNary, a man Klein had grown to trust.
“Listen up, Connor,” Klein told him on the phone. “John Lennon’s gone missing and I need you to drop what you’re doing and come help us find him.” To his unending credit, McNary packed his bags and got a flight to New York that same day.
Klein’s next call was to Lord Beeching. “I’ve found help, but it won’t be cheap,” he said. “I need a line of credit now, a big one, no strings, and if it doesn’t happen within an hour of this call, you’re going down in history as the man who let John Lennon die.”
Beeching took a long moment to consider this demand. Then he did as instructed, with no complaint or evasion.
To the world at large, it was starting to seem as though John Lennon had simply disappeared. The longer the Weather Underground Organization stayed silent, the more hysterical the press coverage became. Newscasters openly discussed that Lennon might already be dead. A mutilated body found on the side of the road in Dearborn, Michigan, earned twenty-four hours in the news cycle, despite being three inches shorter than Lennon, before the local coroner ruled that the body was not his.
&nb
sp; Although no one knew it, Lennon was alive, if not well. Physically, the manhandling of the kidnapping and the transit in the car trunk had covered his body with cuts and bruises. His right shoulder was dislocated in the struggle and had to be popped into place by an inexperienced Weatherman who claimed medical experience only so he could meet the rock star but ended up causing Lennon excruciating pain.
Dohrn, Ayers, and the rest of their fellow revolutionaries had acted before they had a real plan. No one considered how complicated it might be to have one of the world’s most famous faces in their care and to keep a lid on the situation so nobody found them out.
Seeing the ad hoc nature of what was happening, John Lennon tried to bargain for his freedom. Ironically, only Lord Beeching and Yoko Ono knew exactly what his total net worth was, but he promised it all to the Weather Underground. “You’ll be the scariest kind of revolutionaries,” he reasoned, “the kind with money.”
The kidnappers briefly debated asking for ransom money but firmly rejected the idea. Even though the Weather Underground routinely laundered money from supporters to members, something of this scale, with the eyes of the world on alert, seemed foolish and likely to end up with the group broken and in prison. No, the reasoning went, Lennon was theirs and they were going to keep him.
As Lennon was shuttled about the West Coast, Dohrn and Ayers found that even fellow Weather Underground members were hesitant to help them. The entire nation seemed to be following the case with intense interest. Every local police department that had suspicions about undercover revolutionaries in their midst used the case as an excuse to check them out. Soon the FBI had over two thousand alleged sightings.
As a result, in the first two weeks, John Lennon was transported in three different vehicles to five different locations. He was placed in handcuffs, and his body was chained to everything from heating furnaces to steel beams. Because of his celebrity, all of the Weather Underground co-conspirators along the road seemed to want to talk to him, causing Bernardine Dohrn to decree that he was not allowed to speak at all, and that, if he did, they would crush one of his fingers with a hammer for each instance of disobedience.