Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  At one point, Lennon tried to talk to his captors, to strike a deal. He received a hard physical beating for his attempt and was not fed again for two days. During this time, Lennon was locked in a coat closet, where he was in earshot of the news coverage.

  Even in the complete darkness, he could still hear Ringo say through the television: “We won’t give up until we find you.”

  It gave him hope.

  On the Road to Nainital

  A nineteen-year-old Steve Jobs was already in India when thirty-two-year-old George Harrison landed in New Delhi, seeking refuge from the rising hysteria over the Lennon kidnapping. Jobs had quit his job at the Atari game company and had also come to India searching for enlightenment and a guru. He arrived in New Delhi weeks before Harrison but had fallen sick with dysentery almost immediately. With a fever spiking for days at a time, he claimed to have dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in just three weeks. He knew he had to get out of the city.

  Fate decreed that Harrison would first meet Jobs near the Ganges River at Haridwar, a town in western India where a festival known as the Kumbh Mela was underway. It was a time of madness, as more than ten million spiritual seekers descended upon a town of one hundred thousand. The skinny, sickly white kid in the throng stuck out like a sore thumb. Harrison knew he was in trouble the minute he saw him and immediately bought Jobs a giant bottle of certified filtered water.

  “There’s a hole in me and I have to fill it,” Jobs told the Beatle as he drained the bottle. “That’s why I’m here. ‘Fixing a hole.’”

  George confessed later to being put off by Jobs’s quoting the Beatles back to him, but it was apparent to him that the last thing this malnourished and dehydrated American fan should do was to stay in Haridwar. Overlooking the minor annoyance, George bought himself and Jobs a couple of train tickets, and they began a journey to get anywhere but where they were.

  As the miles rolled by, Harrison realized that Jobs knew more about Apple Records than he did.

  [George] “I had to confess to him that I had very little to do with Apple originally because I was actually here in India when it started. It was John and Paul’s madness—their egos running away with themselves. There were a lot of ideas, but when it came down to it, the only thing we could do successfully was write songs, make records, and be Beatles. That’s what I thought, but this kid, barely out of high school, he had other ideas.”

  Jobs knew the players at Apple and the company’s history like he had lived the events himself. Even more astonishing than his knowledge was the fact that this nineteen-year-old nobody had opinions on Apple’s past—and future—that he was not afraid to share with the Beatle.

  [Steve Jobs] “I remember telling him that I thought he’d gotten screwed in the Grand Bargain, that if I were him, I’d have settled for nothing less than full parity with Lennon and McCartney. Everybody gets the same amount of songs on an album. No exceptions. But I also told him that ultimately it wouldn’t matter because music in the future was going to transcend albums, that Beatles fans were going to make their own even, and that his hits would rise to the top.”

  Harrison had never met anyone like the “enthusiastically detached” Jobs. The young man from California said he believed in destiny and karma (and he passionately loved Lennon’s “Instant Karma!”) and was convinced that he had been meant to meet Harrison, even if the reason was not yet apparent.

  “Do you still take acid?” he asked. Jobs had brought two tabs of LSD into India, smuggled inside a Band-Aid travel kit. He had been saving them, he told George, for a moment that would reveal itself. He felt that moment had been revealed.

  After one particularly bad trip in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, Harrison had avoided LSD altogether, with the single exception of the night of the California primary debate where all the Beatles tripped with Hunter Thompson. From what he could remember, that had worked out.

  Still, he told Jobs that he would pass but would be happy to guide the young man on his own trip as his travel companion. Jobs took his hit of blotter acid, and once again the two got on a train together with no destination in mind.

  They found themselves having an animated conversation mid-journey about what it meant that the Beatles had picked a green apple as the icon they wanted the world to know them by. Jobs was fascinated by the apple, and the way he talked about it made Harrison marvel and laugh at the same time. “It’s naughty like the Garden of Eden, but it’s got crunch and taste, and everybody has eaten one and feels good about that association. It’s almost primal…”

  Apple signaled friendliness to the young genius. He said it didn’t sound like any company that had come before it, but still it felt as American as apple pie.

  After a few minutes of this, Harrison stuck out his hand: “If this is going to work, I guess I’m going to have to take that other tab.” George always insisted that he knew, as he placed the blot on his tongue, that he was making the right choice to drop acid that day and that he also knew he’d never do it again, which turned out to be true. On that train with Steve Jobs was the last time George Harrison would ever dose.

  Now that Harrison was with Jobs on the same psychedelic astral plain, the two continued to talk about religion, music, the potential of the human mind, and the future.

  [George] “He started talking about this vision he had, that the way we were hanging out, that people in the future could do that with friends who weren’t even there with them or even people they’d never even met. We were all going to have little machines in our homes, little computers, and they would wake us up, talk to us, sing to us, and make our lives wonderful and wire us all up together somehow. I never used this phrase much, but I was quite high when he laid this on me, and all I could say was, ‘far out, man.’”

  Searching for a real apple, they exited the train at the next stop to find a local market where they could score a couple of pieces of fruit to eat now and a few others they could take with them to eat at the foot of the Himalayas.

  While absorbed in the Zen of Apple, they missed the train they’d intended to take and instead were forced to travel by bus to Nainital, a small village surrounded by the great snowy range that forms the spine of the Himalayas. George explained that the lake was one of the Shakti Peeths, or religious sites where parts of the charred body of Sati fell to Earth.

  While that might have been hard for the average Westerner to relate to, Steve Jobs understood immediately. Jobs loved the mythology of the place and even argued with Harrison that a thousand years from now, people would still be talking about the Beatles as legendary artists in much the same language of respect. He also said that he himself might someday be in that same historical class of legends, and he wasn’t kidding.

  They rented a small room with a couple of mattresses on the floor from a family who promised to help Jobs recuperate from his illness by feeding him a strict vegetarian diet. Harrison went to town to look for any news he could find from America on the fate of John Lennon.

  He returned the next day with a week-old newspaper and a young Hindu holy man. When Jobs asked who the man was, Harrison said he was “karma.” The man produced a bar of soap and a straight razor, which he proposed to use to shave Steve Jobs’s head, a process that would, he asserted, “save his health” from his bout with dysentery. As the man went about his work, Harrison read the front-page article from the New York Times about the search for John Lennon.

  Much had happened while Harrison was abroad. For starters, the Weather Underground had gone public in a big way, and there was definitive proof that John Lennon was alive. A photo had been released of Lennon in captivity, sitting in a kitchen chair with a white sheet hanging in the background to prevent the gathering of any clues regarding the location. Robert W. Morgan, the disc jockey in Los Angeles, had received a second “Declaration” from the radicals who had taken Lennon. The statement demanded that the Beatles donate $50 million worth of food to create and sustain “The People’s Food Bank” in Chica
go. Deeper into the article, the FBI was quoted as saying that the Lennon investigation was “ongoing” and “subject to resolution” at any moment. George closed the paper, folding it carefully. “They haven’t a clue,” he said.

  All in all, it was a depressing state of events. Both Harrison and Jobs decided that the only thing they could do at that time was to meditate on the situation. If the Universe was trying to tell them something, perhaps they might be able to hear it.

  [Steve Jobs] “I started to think obsessively about John Lennon. I thought, here’s this famous person, only he’s disappeared and nobody can find him. But there’s got to be plenty of data about what’s happened to him, and it’s just that we’re not asking the right people the right questions. And I started to wonder if there was something that I could do to put these people together.”

  By the next morning, George Harrison’s meditation had convinced him—or, he had convinced himself—that he needed to accept whatever version of reality was revealing itself to him. John Lennon would either live or he would die. That outcome could not be controlled. The only thing Harrison could control was his own response to whatever came to pass.

  Steve Jobs, however, had come to another conclusion. He was going to create a self-sustaining network of like-minded individuals who wanted to find John Lennon. Jobs reasoned that if Lennon had gone off the grid, voluntarily or involuntarily, with radicals like the ones from the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army, they would have to rely on a network of other radicals to hide them from law enforcement authorities. Those other radicals were already living in communes across America. Members of one commune often knew members of others.

  Jobs had experience with a commune he had spent time at while attending Reed College up in Portland, a place called All One Farm, run by a man named Robert Friedland, who’d been arrested in Oregon and served time for possession of twenty-four thousand tablets of LSD valued at more than $125,000 before meeting Jobs.

  The connections were too obvious, Jobs claimed, to ignore. All One Farm was a 220-acre apple farm. Jobs had even worked at the commune pruning Gravenstein apple trees. In fact, for a period of time, he had run the orchard the commune operated to support an organic cider business. Jobs had literally brought the neglected orchard back to life by getting a crew of monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple to do backbreaking work for days on end.

  By then, Harrison was well versed in Jobs’s fascination with apples and acid but wondered what this might have to do with finding Lennon alive before the FBI could find him and shoot him as collateral damage.

  Steve Jobs explained that everything was cosmically linked. Lennon and Ono had just finished primal scream therapy with Doctor Arthur Janov, right? So had Robert Friedland, the guru behind All One Farm, and Jobs knew this because he, too, had done the therapy. He listened to “Mother,” Lennon’s painful song the Beatles had included on the And the Band Plays On album. Jobs had his own father issues, given that his Syrian father had given him up for adoption, but he maintained no interest in reconnecting with him.

  Jobs would contact Friedland and through him reach out to his contacts from primal scream and All One Farm. He would ask the people he contacted to contact their own circle of friends (Jobs kept calling it a “network”), and then they would contact their circle of friends.

  They would state they were looking for anonymous information only, and anyone who knew anything could call in to a phone number Apple would set up and monitor closely to make sure it was not bugged by any branch of the United States government.

  Eventually, someone who knew where John Lennon was would want to help him. Anyone in Lennon’s network would likely feel uncomfortable passing on information to Nixon’s venal FBI. But Apple Records and the Beatles? That was something entirely different.

  This “social network,” said Jobs, would find John Lennon faster than any wiretap the FBI could set up. Harrison called Yoko long-distance from the British Consulate in New Delhi and told her he had met a man who had a plan to locate her husband and was returning with him immediately. With the help of the British Embassy, he and Jobs then boarded a return plane to New York to put the young man’s bold plan into action.

  The Re-education of John Ono Lennon

  It was late spring, May 14, and John Lennon still had not been found. The days were getting longer and warmer, and he had now been missing sixty-two days, according to the sheet of paper tacked to the wall of a large suite in New York’s Plaza Hotel.

  The suite had been turned into the headquarters for the search to find John Lennon. Both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney had desks pushed into the middle of the room, one facing the other so they could talk without getting up from their phones. Both had stopped their own lives to devote maximum effort to an intensive search, living on coffee and cigarettes and working 24/7, united in a common purpose. They felt it was a race against the clock. Only if they found John before the FBI could his safety and his life be guaranteed.

  “I felt like I’d quit being a Beatle and gone to work for the coppers,” said Paul, not really exaggerating.

  This was a reasonable feeling, given the suite had become the hub where private investigators and former military intelligence operatives, financed by Apple and managed by Allen Klein, were at work. The leader of this group was former Marine operative Connor McNary. The entire operation—the team of retired military and police and all the Apple employees—quickly became known as “The Core,” a play on both Marine Corps and Apple Corps.

  “Me and my men don’t really agree with John Lennon’s politics, but we believe in America, and in America, we don’t let people take away the freedom of our citizens without a fight,” explained McNary in his job interview with Ono and McCartney. “Besides, I loved that song of his, ‘Let It Be.’” Yoko and Paul shared a smile; the song was Paul’s from start to finish, but neither corrected McNary, given the stakes of the moment.

  Based on leaks out of law enforcement, the Core began tentatively operating on the assumption that John Lennon was somewhere in the western United States, most likely San Francisco or Los Angeles. Yet there was only supposition and wishful thinking to back up that belief.

  The Washington Post, feeling confident and bold after their Watergate coverage looked as though it would drive Nixon from office, was about to write a major piece about the Lennon search. In it, Watergate icons Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would report that the FBI investigation and the Apple-sponsored search were no longer involved with one another, each ascribing the worst possible motives to the other.

  In the article, an FBI spokesman outrageously claimed that the organization had not ruled out the possibility that John Lennon had participated in his own kidnapping as a political stunt. In addition to being a leader in the revolutionary left-wing movement, the logic went, he was PR conscious, having staged “Bed-Ins” for Peace; he was known to be friendly with radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman; and he had performed at leftist charity concerts.

  With good reason, then, Apple deeply distrusted the FBI. Their team of investigators had concluded almost immediately that the FBI had a large surveillance file on John Lennon that had been years in the making (and selectively leaked to the press from the day of his kidnapping).

  Meanwhile, the FBI’s famous Squad 47 had been covertly tasked with making the Lennon case its highest priority, but there was never any public confirmation, given that only a very few insiders even knew the group existed. They broke the law routinely and none of it was being reported.

  This was the situation when George Harrison returned from India with Steve Jobs and showed up at the Plaza suite. He introduced the nineteen-year-old as a “living computer” who had an idea that just might work if they gave it a chance. Jobs spoke passionately about his vision.

  [Steve Jobs] “There is at least one person, and maybe a dozen, who know where John Lennon is right now, today. Your problem is you don’t know how to find any of them, but I do. We have
something the FBI will never have. You represent the Beatles. They represent Nixon. Who do you think people who know where John Lennon is want to talk to? We’re going to set up phones right here in the second bedroom. And we’re going to make sure that the entire counter-culture of this country knows that when they call us, they can be anonymous, and they’re helping John, not the Man. We’re going to build a social network from the ground up. We’re going to find the patterns, connect the dots. And, one day soon, the answer’s going to reveal itself to us. When that happens, you guys be ready to go get him.”

  Paul and Yoko were initially skeptical but allowed Jobs to test his theories. Once new phones were installed, Jobs recruited a half dozen friendly young people, known as the “Jobbers,” to begin to make the “cold” calls. That meant calling everyone anyone knew to be living at a commune or an alternative living arrangement, chatting them up, getting more names to call from each of them, calling the new people, and getting new names. With every call, the private, confidential call-in number for Apple’s effort would be given out, “just in case.”

  The information these Jobbers obtained was transferred to maps and boards, and day by day, what first appeared to be chaos began to very slowly take on shape and purpose.

  The kidnapping story itself kept moving and morphing in unexpected ways. There was no appetite to liquidate Apple to create a $50 million fund to comply with the Weather Underground’s earlier demand to create and fund a substantial food bank. Even Yoko agreed with the professionals that paying such a bribe would fail to obtain John’s release but would trigger new demands. They told the Weather Underground through a public statement that they would be willing to discuss a significant increase in charitable giving from Apple but only after Lennon was home safely.