After the show, Yoko and her companion came backstage for what was only supposed to be a friendly word with John and his own date that evening. “John and I started talking at once, each of us totally forgetting the person we were supposed to be with,” Yoko remembers. “After that, he invited me to an art exhibition. We started dating all over again.”
They settled down, as they thought, to grow old together in their rambling apartment on the Dakota’s seventh floor. In October 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals finally overturned the deportation order against John, ruling that the British law under which he had been convicted of drug possession in 1968 had been unfair by American standards, and paving the way for the green card that would allow him to stay in the country without further harassment. At the age of forty-one, despite the traumatic memory of three miscarriages, Yoko became pregnant again. On John’s thirty-fifth birthday, she gave birth to a son whom they named Sean Ono Lennon.
The year had seen John release two further albums—Shaved Fish, a compilation of existing tracks, including “Instant Karma,” “Cold Turkey” and “Mind Games,” and Rock ’n’ Roll, a nostalgic collection of four-chord classics from his boyhood in the Merseyside dance halls. He had also briefly found another songwriting partner in Elton John’s main glam-rock rival, David Bowie. The result was “Fame,” Bowie’s first number-one single in America.
After Sean’s arrival, quite spontaneously, John decided to opt out of the music business altogether and devote himself to parenthood. With Yoko’s help, he said, he finally felt secure enough to function without the golden armor of fame. “My whole security and identity [had been] wrapped up in being a pop star. But Yoko told me, the same way she told me with the Beatles. That was one liberation for me. The other was that I didn’t have to go on making records.” He delighted in the symmetry of including Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula” on the Rock ’n’ Roll album. For he’d sung that same song for the first time onstage at Woolton village in 1957, the day he’d first met Paul McCartney. He was leaving the business at exactly the same place he had come in.
From there on, he organized his whole life around Sean, feeding him, putting him to bed, establishing a routine for the little boy as settled and healthy as Aunt Mimi once had for him. He learned to cook and even bake bread—his triumph in his first successful loaf mingled with slight annoyance that it did not receive the kind of accolades he was used to. (“I thought, ‘Well, Jesus, don’t I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?’”) Having given him the child he had so much wanted, Yoko was content to play a secondary role with Sean. While John took on the role of “househusband,” Yoko became their business brain, a role in which she proved highly, though perhaps not unsurprisingly, effective.
They began to buy up other apartments in the Dakota, including a ground-floor suite that they turned into their office, Studio One, and another merely to serve as storage space for their vast accumulation of files and videos. They also bought a harborside mansion on Long Island, a Florida mansion that once had belonged to the Vanderbilt family, and a farm with a collection of prize Holstein cattle in upstate New York. Even if they had elected to sit still and do nothing, there was no danger of John’s bank account ever being down to its last fifty thousand pounds. Despite the feverishly changing fashions of seventies pop, Beatles albums and compilations still sold incessantly the world over. A vast annual royalty income was channeled to John from London via the Apple office—now merely a nest of busy accounting machines, supervised by the ever faithful and honest Neil Aspinall.
John’s involvement with Sean also awoke guilty memories of Julian, the son by his first wife, Cynthia, whose childhood he had almost missed in the whirlwind of being a Beatle. Now in his early teens, Julian lived in the Welsh hill town of Ruthin with his mother and her new husband, an electrical engineer named John Twist. He was already showing an interest in music, singing and playing guitar. But, so far as he knew, he had left no mark on his faraway father other than as the alleged inspiration for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Soon after Sean’s birth John invited Julian to New York and, over the next few years, made concerted efforts to rebuild a relationship with him. One of the many presents that Julian brought home to Ruthin was a portable typewriter, given to him by Yoko. Cynthia took a certain grim pleasure in using it to write her autobiography, A Twist of Lennon, published in 1978. But the book itself was characteristically free of rancor, ending with words from the I Ching: No blame.
John’s only other regular contact in Britain was Aunt Mimi, the resoundingly normal and conventional woman whose virtues he unconsciously carried within him, and who still could read him better than anyone else.
Since the late sixties, Mimi had lived alone in a waterside bungalow in Poole Harbour, Dorset. She had never wanted to leave Liverpool or, indeed, her old home on Menlove Avenue, but in the end the pressure of Beatles fans had made it uninhabitable. One night John arrived at Mendips to find the house under siege and Mimi, uncharacteristically, crumpled up in tears on the front stairs. Next day, he told her to choose a new house anywhere else in the country that she fancied.
Mimi being Mimi, the bungalow was several sizes short of the place he would have bought her without a thought. Inside, all was as neat and spotless as ever. On the television set stood a photograph of John in his Quarry Bank High School cap, the happy, sunny little boy Mimi preferred to remember. In a bureau drawer lay bundles of his childhood drawings and poems, not yet the stuff of sky-high Sotheby auctions. Beside the patio window stood an anomalously expensive and tacky object, a cocktail cabinet shaped like an antique globe from Asprey’s, the Bond Street jewelers. Each Beatle rushed to possess such a globe in the first, free-spending days when, as Ringo said, Asprey’s used to feel “just like Woolworth’s.” Mimi was keeping John’s in case he should ever want it again.
Even this secluded reach of Poole Habour was not completely safe from lingering Beatlemania. Sometimes, to Mimi’s annoyance, passing pleasure boats would announce “There’s John Lennon’s aunt’s house” over the loudspeaker to their passengers. At regular intervals, groups of pilgrims would turn up on her doorstep from as far away as Japan and Australia. Mimi would give them a scolding, then invite them in, just as she once had Paul McCartney and George Harrison. A few even got to stay the night in the little spare-room bed whose history they did not dream. “This used to be John’s bed, you know,” Mimi would say casually when she brought their morning cup of tea.
As John moved into his late thirties, his regular telephone calls to Mimi began to show increasing signs of nostalgia about his childhood—even aspects of it that he’d detested at the time. He asked her to send him various family mementoes, including the Royal Worcester dinner service that used to be displayed in the front hall at Mendips, and a photograph of Mimi’s late husband, his much loved Uncle George. Once, to her amazement, the one-time incorrigible school truant and outlaw asked for his old Quarry Bank cap with its Latin motto, Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem.
Despite the five thousand miles between them, aunt and nephew could have furious rows. One of their worst—on the subject of repainting the bungalow—ended with Mimi hooting, “Damn you, Lennon!” and slamming the phone down. A little later, John rang back, anxious and contrite. “You’re not still cross with me, Mimi, are you?” he asked.
New York has always allowed its large celebrity population a surprising measure of privacy and anonymity. John and Yoko became just another famous uptown couple in semidisguise, walking through Central Park, standing in line for pizza, or having birthday parties at Tavern on the Green. In a city then among the world’s most violent, John said he never felt a moment’s insecurity—though in late 1979, with chilling prescience, he and Yoko donated a thousand dollars to a fund to equip the city’s police with bulletproof vests.
Where he had once seemed thoroughly Ono-ized, Yoko now grew increasingly Lennon-ized. After Sean’s birth, John took to calling her Mother with a frisson of old-time norther
n comedians like Al Read. Yoko looked forward as much as he did to settling down before the television on Sunday evenings to watch public television’s imported English classic serials like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
In the daytime, when Sean was asleep and the latest batch of loaves were safely in the oven, he would put on a Japanese happi coat and lie before his ever flickering giant TV screen, reading or watching the Central Park trees outside his window change from the heathery palette of spring through summer’s deep green to the russet and radicchio blaze of autumn. On the wall above his bed hung a state-of-the-art electric guitar that he’d bought just after getting back with Yoko but had hardly ever played. Next to it was the number 9 and a dagger made out of a bread knife dating from the American Civil War, as he said, “to cut away the bad vibes—to cut away the past symbolically.” From time to time he would glance at the guitar and wonder if he’d ever hold it again.
He was certainly no recluse, as would later be claimed: each day he saw dozens of people and spoke to dozens more on the telephone. He made regular trips with Yoko to their other properties and took extended overseas vacations with her and Sean (sometimes traveling under the alias “Fred and Ada Gherkin”). But for most of his former friends in the music business, he had disappeared from the radar screen. When Mick Jagger moved into a Central Park apartment within sight of the Dakota, he dropped John a note, asking him to telephone. But no reply ever came. The only exception was Elton John, who continued to bask in the Lennons’ gratitude for bringing them back together and whom they asked to be Sean’s godfather.
Elton returned from his first visit to the Dakota complex acknowledging that the world now held an even bigger shopaholic than himself. “I couldn’t believe it. Yoko has a refrigerated room, just for keeping her fur coats. She’s got rooms full of those clothes racks like you see at Marks and Spencer. She makes me look ridiculous. I buy things in threes and fours, but she buys things in fifties. The funny thing is, you never see her wearing them. She’s always got up in some tatty old blouse.” Yoko bore no resentment for such observations, nor did she even when Elton poked gentle fun at her in a birthday card to John:
Imagine six apartments
It isn’t hard to do.
One is full of fur coats
The other’s full of shoes.
John was equally cut off from the Beatles’ old circle, though the fate of Mal Evans, their former roadie, caused him a certain macabre amusement. In 1976, Mal died a bizarre death in Los Angeles, shot through a motel-room door by police who feared he was about to harm a young girl he had with him. His wife, Lil, who still lived in England, afterward received a bill from the motel for dry cleaning the carpet on which he’d died. Without reference to Lil, Mal’s body was cremated and the ashes were mailed to her—but en route the package got lost. It was a sickly appropriate footnote, since Mal had been working for the post office in Liverpool when he first joined the Beatles’ entourage.
The general mellowing of John’s character finally encompassed even Paul McCartney. Though still nothing like a fan of Paul’s solo output, he could not help but admire his old estranged fiancé’s steely determination in creating a new band, Wings, in controversial partnership with his wife, Linda, and winning it a worldwide fame almost comparable with the Beatles’ own in their heyday. Paul, too, had been mellowed, by matrimonial stability as much as by solo success and, around 1978, decided it was time to make up with John. The way John later told it, Paul took to showing up on his doorstep unannounced with a guitar, as if hoping to re-create their schoolboy songwriting sessions in Allerton twenty years earlier. John, however, had more pressing grown-up concerns, like putting Sean to bed at his scheduled time. “I’d let [Paul] in, but finally I said to him, ‘Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same any more.’”
In fact, John and Yoko and Paul and Linda spent several evenings together, in a friendliness one would never have predicted for that uneasy foursome of the late Apple era. The McCartneys happened to be visiting one evening when Saturday Night Live, America’s seminal TV satire show, turned its mocking gaze on the continuing multimillion-dollar offers for a Beatles reunion. Producer Lorne Michaels jokingly put up a fee of $3,200 if the four would reconvene before his cameras. John and Paul happened to be watching, and for a moment considered jumping in a cab and turning up at the SNL studios; then they decided they were too tired to bother.
John’s retirement ended as impulsively as it began. He had been intrigued to see how the British punk rock movement of the late seventies had filled the charts with noises wilder than any he and Yoko ever had created on their private tapes. Postpunk female vocalists like Lene Lovich, Chrissie Hynde, and, especially, the keening and warbling Kate Bush, seemed to John to be “doing Yoko’s act from ten years ago.” The clincher, he said, came one night in a Bermudan dance club when he heard the B52s” “Rock Lobster.” “I said to meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old axe and wake up the wife.’”
Pulling down the barely used guitar from above his bed, he began to write new songs at frenetic speed. But this was no longer the angry, insecure John of the early seventies, obsessed with making propaganda points and settling scores. It was a man approaching forty with most of his old demons apparently exorcised, celebrating the joys of parenthood, home, and monogamy as he had once so despised Paul McCartney for doing. “Beautiful Boy” was a song about Sean and all the bedtimes and bath times they had shared. “Watching the Wheels” was a view from his Dakota retreat, thankful he was “no longer in the game.” “Woman” was both an apology and a tribute to Yoko (“after all, I’m forever in your debt”) while “Starting Over” affirmed that for him their love was “still special.”
They planned a double album of his-and-her songs, naming it Double Fantasy after the freesia John had seen in Hong Kong’s botanical gardens. To symbolize the new beginning, he chose not to release it on the Apple label, as all his previous solo albums had been. Instead, he went to David Geffen, creator of the Asylum label and, later, the inspirational driving force behind the hugely successful Warner-Elektra-Asylum conglomerate. Geffen won John to his new, eponymous label, not with huge cash advances but with a guarantee of personal care and sensitivity.
With Double Fantasy set for release, the doors of the Dakota, shut and padlocked for so long, were thrown open wide. The journalists who stampeded there from every corner of the world were equally astonished and charmed by the new John. Yoko had got his weight down and—for Sean’s sake—even persuaded him to give up his incessant Gauloises cigarettes. Posing for Rolling Stones star photographer Annie Leibovitz, he looked more youthful than at any time since Brian Epstein first buttoned him into a round-collared suit. Even Yoko, not one for idle flattery, was moved to exclaim, “Hey—you’re even better looking now than when you were a Beatle.”
To every interviewer, from Newsweek magazine to BBC Radio One, he sounded the same top note of reenergized optimism. “I am going to be forty and life begins at forty, so they promise. And I believe it, too. Because I feel fine. I’m, like, excited. It’s like twenty-one—you know, hitting twenty-one. It’s like, ‘Wow! What’s going to happen next?’”
The only middling sales of Double Fantasy did not dampen John’s spirits. His fortieth birthday behind him, he and Yoko started work on a follow-up album at New York’s Hit Factory studios—a home-away-from-home for the Lennons now that Yoko had decorated one of its rooms like an Egyptian temple. The backing musicians were expected to share John’s new healthy regimen, exchanging their normal drugs, cigarettes, and booze for sushi, green tea, and shiatsu massages.
The evening of December 8, 1980, John had set aside to work on one of Yoko’s new tracks at the Hit Factory. Ordinarily, he preferred to hop in a yellow cab to the studio, but tonight Yoko had called up one of the limousines she kept on permanent twenty-four-hour standby. Outside their building’s Gothic front arch stood a little knot of the fans that John called “Dakot
a groupies.” As he walked out to the car a pudgy young man in a Russian-style fur hat proffered a copy of Double Fantasy and asked him to autograph it. A bystander photographed John scribbling a signature while the pudgy young man looked on.
His name—henceforward destined always to be spoken in full like those of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald—was Mark David Chapman. And his twenty-five-year life history, when it came to be written, would show he was almost as perfect an example as Charles Manson of the way the sunny, smiling sixties could turn bad.
Born in 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of an air force sergeant, he had spent a rootless childhood and adolescence living variously in Texas, Indiana, and Virginia. A lonely, introverted boy, mocked and bullied by his schoolfellows, he sought refuge in his imagination, inventing a world populated by “Little People” where he could enjoy both status and control. As a teenager, he got into drugs, experimented with LSD, and became a devout Christian. But what colored his mind above all was the music of the Beatles.
He was no graceless, hopeless nerd, as he would often later be portrayed. Despite meager academic qualifications, he became for a period a valued worker for the YMCA organization, helping to resettle Vietnamese refugees, or boat people, and spending a hazardous time in Beirut during the first stages of Lebanon’s mid-seventies civil war. He received commendations for his work, and on one occasion had his hand shaken by President Gerald Ford. Settling in Honolulu, he was hospitalized for depression after a suicide attempt, but seemed to make a full recovery. In 1979—in an eerie unconscious emulation of his still-unchosen victim—he married a Japanese-American woman several years his senior.