CHAPTER 20
PS Dear John…You will see that I preferred not to join the ‘rat race’, and I’m sure that had you not reached your present influential position in life through your talents, you too would reject the conventional 9 to 5 job in defiance of the establishment.
Even in the Beatle-mad Sixties, Freddie’s life story had been of dubious commercial value; in the glam-rock mid-seventies, it did not even reach the first base of a literary agent. After a few crushing rejection letters, he gave up, put the manuscript in a drawer, and returned to being a prototype househusband. However, he made Pauline promise that if it had not been published when he died, she would make sure John received a copy.
Three months later, Freddie was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. By the time Pauline managed to get the news to John in New York, his father had already been admitted to Brighton General Hospital. John immediately put through a call to Freddie and also to the specialist who was treating him. Freddie by now was almost too weak to hold the receiver, but their brief conversation left him looking as if his “Little Pal” of that long-ago escape to Blackpool had miraculously returned. John gave him the telephone number at the Dakota, told him about his new grandson and promised a get-together once he was well again. Freddie mentioned his autobiography (as he also had to the surgeon treating him) and made John promise to read it; they chatted about music awhile, then signed off with a nonchalant Liverpudlian “See yer, la.” Later that day, an enormous bouquet arrived at Freddie’s bedside. “To Dad—Get well soon,” read the accompanying card. “With much love from John, Yoko and Sean.”
Freddie fell into a coma and died a few days afterward. As she had promised, Pauline sent a copy of the autobiography to New York, with the covering letter he had written months earlier:
Dear John
By the time you read this I will be dead, but I hope it will not be too late to fill the gaps in your knowledge of your old man which have caused you distress throughout your life.
…Since we last met on the occasion of your 30th birthday, I have been haunted by the image of you screaming for your Daddy and it is my sincere hope that when you have read this book you will no longer bear me any malice. Perhaps the revelations in my life story may bring you a clearer picture of how fate and circumstance control so much of our lives and therefore must be considered in our judgement of one another.
Until we meet again, some time, some place
Your Father
Freddie Lennon
But no reply came back from the Dakota. Pauline did not know whether the manuscript had reached John or been lost in the mail along with Big Mal’s ashes.
On July 27, 1976, almost a year after his federal court victory, John applied formally for the green card that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been left no grounds to deny him. Leon Wildes turned this pro forma immigration court hearing before Judge Ira Fieldsteel into a headline-grabbing parade of VIP character witnesses. A letter read to the court from Episcopalian Bishop Paul Moore called John “a gentleman of integrity”; Norman Mailer, America’s most celebrated writer, called him “a great artist.” There were tributes from the silent screen goddess Gloria Swanson, the TV host Geraldo Rivera, and the musician John Cage, and others from earlier hearings were recapped. Perhaps the pithiest came from Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum, who as New York Parks Commissioner had overseen the Beatles Shea Stadium concert in 1965. “If he were a painting,” Hoving said, “I’d hang him in the Metropolitan Museum.” Afterward, John faced the cameras in the suit and tie he had become inured to, holding up the precious permit, which actually was not green but blue. “It’s been a long and slow road, but I am not bitter,” he said. Now I’m going home to crack open a tea-bag and start looking at some travel catalogues.”
Six months later, a statement from Apple announced that the tangled legal dispute between the former Beatles and Allen Klein had finally been settled. Klein was to relinquish all managerial rights for a one-time payment of just over $5 million, plus undisputed retention of all previous commissions and expenses. Yoko had played a crucial part in the two-year courtroom and boardroom marathon, and at its conclusion even Klein was moved to praise her “tireless efforts and Kissinger-like negotiating brilliance.” John signed his portion of the agreement at the Plaza Hotel, a fitting place for this final chapter in Beatles history to end. Then, to show there were no hard feelings, he and Yoko met Klein for dinner.
If one of the Beatles’ former roadies had gone, the other was still very much around in the capacity that had always been far more than mere employee. Having weathered Klein’s regime, Neil Aspinall now worked mainly with George Harrison, but his loyalty to the other three, and their trust in him, remained as rock-solid as ever. When the rift with Klein first became known, John called Neil to the Dakota and, on George’s and Ringo’s behalf, asked him to take over running Apple. The prospect was hardly alluring, with Paul still suing the others, two different receivers now standing guard over the company’s finances, and the legal fight with Klein gathering momentum. Neil was hung-over that day and, midway through the conversation, had to excuse himself to go to “Albert,” the guest bathroom, and throw up. “If I’d been asked to run Apple, I’d have thrown up as well,” John remarked. Neil agreed, on condition that Paul, too, was happy with the idea; this assurance instantly given, he began work on the—to him—appropriate date of April Fools’ Day, 1974.
He also received one of the apologies John was always scrupulous about giving, however long after the event. In 1969, when valuable executives as well as spongers at Apple seemed to be falling under the Klein axe, he had appealed to John to intervene, but been answered only by a telegram saying, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” “After I took over Apple, John suddenly said one day, ‘I’m sorry about the telegram,’” Neil remembered. “At first I had no idea what he was on about.”
Apple might no longer trade from a Georgian house in London’s Mayfair. But as time passed, and the Beatles’ magic refused to dissipate, the company would grow far beyond anything they had ever imagined. So great was the volume of brilliant work they had left, and so ineradicable their effect on the pop psyche, they could be said never to have broken up at all—simply changed from a band into a brand.
John’s used his new freedom to travel outside America by making a trip to Japan with Yoko and Sean that lasted almost the whole summer of 1977. In preparation, he took a six-week course of Japanese lessons at the Berlitz language school in Manhattan, clocking in conscientiously for eight hours each day and practicing vocabulary on Yoko every evening.
In Tokyo, she took him to see the Kudan house, ancestral home of her mother’s Yasuda family, where she used to play in her little Western-style kilts and tam o’shanters. John insisted on throwing a party for her Ono relatives, which more than fifty people attended—all but a senior uncle who felt it more correct that they should come and visit him. A group photograph was taken with John in the center, rather like the ones at Quarry Bank High School he used to delight in subverting. But there now were no grimaces or horseplay. “He took a lot of trouble to look very dapper,” Yoko says. He wore a dark suit, a tie, and a pink carnation. He wanted to show to my relatives that I married someone who was proper.”
Sean was now an adorable two-year-old with enormous almond-shaped eyes and what could only be called a Beatle bob. Though he attended nursery school for some of the time, and a nanny was always on hand, John did many hours of footslogging with him around parks and Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, dealing with all the unpredictable mood swings and emergencies of the active toddler. Their reception was not unreservedly cordial, for many Japanese still regarded Yoko as a traitor both to her class and her sex. One taxi driver called her “a whore” and ordered them out of his vehicle.
After they had been away two months, their L.A. friend Elliot Mintz received a messenger-delivered first-class air ticket and an invitation—that is, a summons—to join them. The day
before Mintz’s departure, Elvis Presley was found dead of heart failure in the bathroom at Graceland, his Memphis mansion, aged only forty-two. Bloated by binge-eating and prescription drugs, handing out his sweat-soaked scarves to blue-rinsed matrons in Las Vegas, he had long been unrecognizable as the sublime young punk who had changed John’s life twenty years earlier. John’s reaction when Mintz telephoned with the news was, “Elvis died the day they put him in the Army.” He asked Mintz to send two white gardenias to Graceland with a card saying, “love from John and Yoko.” But already, every florist in the Memphis area had sold out.
Mintz joined the family party in Karuizawa, the small resort town seventy-five miles northwest of Tokyo where Yoko and her two siblings used to spend summer holidays, and where her mother, Isoko, still had a home. When Mintz arrived at their hotel, the Mampei, a note in his room informed him that John had taken a vow of silence. “When we met the next day, he spent about fifteen minutes explaining why he’d decided to take the vow of silence. Then he started asking me more questions about Elvis’s death, so fortunately that was the end of it.”
Kuruizawa was an almost foreigner-free resort where Yoko was occasionally recognized but John not at all, despite sometimes going around in a T-shirt lettered WORKING CLASS HERO. They spent several weeks there, following a healthy regimen of yoga, massage, meditation, and mineral baths, living mainly on fresh fish and homegrown vegetables, cleansing their systems of every impurity except the strong black coffee John could not do without. They did not use a limo but went around on bicycles, always led by Yoko with her long hair streaming behind her. In September, the party moved on to Kyoto, Japan’s old imperial capital, to visit the most famous of its two thousand Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines and the palaces and gardens that mercifully had escaped wartime immolation. John was particularly impressed by a Japanese convent that, Yoko told him, had been one of the world’s first shelters for battered women. “He took to Japanese culture quite naturally,” Mintz remembers, “and seemed to derive a great deal of peace and reassurance from it.”
Returning to Tokyo en route for home, they moved into the top-floor Presidential Suite at the grand luxe Hotel Okura. The suite had its own private elevator, opening into a lounge area so vast that John and Sean could play soccer in it. One evening when Mintz and John were there by themselves, the elevator doors opened and an elderly Japanese couple emerged, believing it to be some rooftop cocktail lounge. Not recognizing or even seeming to notice John, they settled themselves in chairs and waited to be offered drinks or food or for a cabaret to begin. With a wink at Mintz, John picked up a guitar and sang “Jealous Guy” softly to them. But they clearly had never heard the song, could not understand the English words, and expected better entertainment than this; in a few minutes, without acknowledging their serenader, they got up rather ill-temperedly and left.
During the time apart from John, Yoko had taken up Chinese astrology and numerology (initially, she admits, in hopes of finding a new sexual partner). Along with the subjects’ astrological signs and the configuration of the planets, great importance is placed in the direction they are facing or moving at critical times. So powerful was this belief in Japan that travel agencies employ “direction masters” to work out their clients’ most propitious routes. It now transpired that, although the signs were auspicious for Yoko to fly directly back from Tokyo to New York, the same did not apply to John and Mintz, and a more roundabout journey would have to be plotted for them. “We hung on at the Hotel Okura until John was starting to get stir-crazy while our direction master worked out our way back to the States,” Mintz remembers. “At one point it even seemed like we’d have to go via South America.”
Eventually their route was fixed as Tokyo–Hong Kong–Dubai–Frankfurt–New York. The twenty-six-hour flight was an arduous one, even in first-class, with four reserved seats between the two of them. On the journey, Mintz remembers, John was “melancholy, though not drunk,” and talked at length about his childhood, his early sexual fantasies—and, of course, his mother—to the companion whose discretion was as absolute as a priest’s in a confessional. The only stopover was in Frankfurt, where John, to his chagrin, was given a hotel room like a broom closet, while Mintz was allotted a comfortable suite—as he quipped, because the desk clerk mistook him for Paul McCartney. John did not see the humor, and insisted on trading places. All travel blues disappeared, however, when he arrived at JFK Airport and produced his green card, and the immigration officer said, “Welcome home, Mr. Lennon.”
For Yoko, the joy of having Sean, and seeing John with him, was tempered by an ache that the family reunions in Japan aggravated afresh. She had not seen her daughter Kyoko since her ex-husband, Tony Cox, had disappeared with the girl after losing their last custody battle in Houston, Texas, four years earlier. The former adorable tot—facially a little like her new half brother—was now a teenager of fourteen. A crucial segment of her childhood had been taken from her mother, and legal guardian, yet notwithstanding John’s wealth and instinted support, there seemed to be nothing that could be done. All appeals to Cox through the media to get back in touch had failed; all efforts by police and investigators to pick up his tracks after he left Houston had drawn a blank.
Cox’s adventures during these years had once again been dictated by his involvement with alternative religions and gurus. Just before the 1973 custody hearing, he and his wife, Melinda, had undergone a religious conversion at a Dallas charismatic church. Kyoko also shared in the experience—mainly, she now says, because the church had generous facilities for children, and “I could be like a child for a change instead of always worrying about my parents. I loved going to Sunday School.” After Cox’s escape with her and Melinda, he approached members of other charismatic churches to hide them, but none would. Eventually, they found shelter with a cult named the Church of the Living Word, or the Walk, whose leader, John Robert Stevens, proclaimed himself “the returned Jesus.” The Walk provided accommodation, subsistence, work for Cox and Melinda, and education for Kyoko at settlements in Iowa and Los Angeles. In return, Stevens made his disciples swear absolute obedience to him and forbade them any contact with their families or friends in the outside world.
Cox, Melinda, and Kyoko left the Walk in the mid-seventies, just before the malignity of cults and the megalomania of their leaders were revealed through events like the Jonestown Massacre. In late 1977, now living in Oregon and chronically hard up, Cox decided to yield to John and Yoko’s pleas for contact. Fourteen-year-old Kyoko was not sure how she felt about the idea. Although she still missed her mother—and John—she had found a measure of security, thanks in large part to her stepmother, Melinda, and feared once again having to make “a Sophie’s choice” between her parents. “Everything with my Dad always ended being messed-up,” she remembers. “I couldn’t bear the thought of things being messed-up again.”
On November 10, Cox finally telephoned the Dakota from his Oregon hideaway as a prelude to a possible meeting. He kept a tape recorder running throughout the call, which was mostly taken up by John and himself, with interpolations from Kyoko in the background. Despite their long guerrilla war and John’s chronic insecurity about Cox’s influence over Yoko, the two men greet each other like blood brothers, agreeing how “fantastic” and “beautiful” it is to be in touch again, marveling that their old relationship could ever have broken down like this. At one point in their meandering chat, the subject of fathers comes up. Cox mentions that his has recently died of lung cancer, prompting John to talk about Freddie’s death in Brighton nineteen months earlier. It transpires that Freddie’s handwritten autobiography did reach him after all, and he has read and finally believed the explanation of why Daddy never came home. “It filled in a big hole in my life. I said, ‘Oh, that’s why he couldn’t make it,’ you know. Now I can understand a little bit.”
Despite the warmth of this conversation, no meeting with Cox followed, and he made no further contact, fulfilling Kyoko’s
premonition that things would be messed up. She was not to see her mother again in John’s lifetime.
A particular memory of the Japanese trip was to haunt Yoko in years to come. One day, leafing through a magazine, John happened on an old photograph of her maternal great-grandfather, Zenjiro Yasuda. Since the deal had always been that they talked only about his family, he knew nothing of the great Zenjiro, the Emperor’s de facto banker, who enjoyed national fame at a pop-star level half a century before such things were dreamed of. Nor had Yoko herself ever put together the several ways in which Zenjiro’s life paralleled John’s—coming from the north of the country, being a musician and poet as well as a moneymaking phenomenon, having his portrait hung in homes and workplaces as an inspiration to others, always insisting on full partnership with his tiny but dynamic wife. Though Yoko did not learn this until much later, Zenjiro even had the same birthday as John. The only thing which, seemingly, marked him as from a different culture and more dangerous times was his fate at the hands of a young man professing to be his admirer.
John was fascinated by Zenjiro’s photograph, which—especially since his conversion to Japanese clothes and manners—seemed to bear a more than passing likeness to himself. “That’s me in a former life,” he told Yoko.
“Don’t say that,” she replied. “He was assassinated.”
29
HOMEBODY
I prefer it in mono.
According to legend, John spent the next three years as a virtual recluse walled up in the Gothic heights of the Dakota building, increasingly bereft of self-confidence or self-reliance and prone to weird fancies and delusions calculatedly fed to him by his wife. Like most legends, it has grains of truth, or half-truth. But overall, this vision of rock ’n’ roll’s answer to Howard Hughes is flatly contradicted by his real friends, as opposed to former employees with axes to grind.