John Lennon' Entertaining Drunk Stories

That could be a true story.

Lennon could be both clingy and unpredictable.

""Annie Peebles was closing at the Troubadour that night. She had a hit record, I Can't Stand the Rain,' that John really liked. So we drove over there, and John walks in with this Kotex still stickin' on his head. When the waitress came over to take our order in the big round booth by the door, she saw we were drunk. She refused to serve us. 'Whaddya mean, you won't serve us?' says John. 'Do you know who I am?' The waitress gives him a disgusted look and says, 'You're some asshole with a Kotex on your head.' Well, we had to order our drinks through the other people. We got more drunk. We would have been in the prone position if it hadn't been for this little bit of toot I brought along. That was the only thing that was keepin' us alive.

"When Annie Peebles came out on the stage,- John was sittin' up on top of the back of the booth. Annie was sort of foxy-lookin', so John starts hollerin', 'Annie! Annie!' He figured she'd recognize him, but with the stage lights in her eyes, he must have sounded like any drunk. So when she doesn't answer him, he starts hollerin', 'Annie! I wanna suck your pussy!' Next thing I remember is these two big arms grabbed me around the shoulders from behind. Picked me up and carried me out. I ended up on the curb, and there was John! Some other big guy had carried him out. They left May and Patti in there to pay the bill. They came out pissed and said that when we got thrown out, the audience stood up and cheered. So John says: 'Let's go to the house and have a nightcap.'

"On the way there May said, 'I think we should take Patti and Jesse back to their car.'

"'No!' John growled. 'I wan' 'em to come over for a drink!' She got pretty insistent about it. He went for her. He grabbed her around the throat and started choking her. Then he stopped choking her, and he tried to get out of the car. Jim Cataldo, who was driving, grabbed John and pulled him back in. Then John went for May again! Jim pulled John's hand off her neck and saved the day.

" "When we got back to Harold Seider's apartment, we came up from the street into the kitchen. There's a light hanging from the ceiling. John said, 'I don't want this light on!' He picks up a skillet and smashed the globe. Glass flew everywhere

"May started screaming, 'Oh, no! Oh, no! Don't do that! '.We laughed. We thought it was funny. So we decided to play Keith Moon on Harold Seider's apartment. [Moon was the greatest house-wrecker in the history of show business.] We demolished the whole place. Just turned it into smoking rubble.

"We even went upstairs to the bedroom. John thought the mattress was Roman Polanksi. He ripped the mattress up and pulled all the stuffing out. Just demolished the place. Finally, we came back downstairs, and there was nothing left to break but this big marble ashtray. We threw it and couldn't break it. All this time we continued to drink and snort a little coke. When we realized there was nothing left to break, we said, 'Let's wrestle!'

"We started rolling around on the floor. When you're that drunk, things turn serious quickly. It turned into a full-on fight. 'John was incredibly strong! He got me in some kind of a hold behind my back that I could not get out of, like a full nelson. And he started to kiss me on the mouth! He was laughin' and kissin' me on the mouth. I was strugglin' to git away and I couldn't git away. Then he stuck his tongue in my mouth. God! So I bit him. Bit him on the tongue. That pissed him off. So he grabbed the marble ashtray that we couldn't break and banged me on the head. Knocked me cold

"Patti was screaming - I've been told - 'You killed him! Oh, my God! He's dead!' That's about all the neighbors needed to hear in that apartment building because they had heard all the smashing and crashing. Now to hear some chick scream, 'He's dead!' They called the cops. "John said, 'He's not dead! We'll just throw water in his face.' "So he went in the kitchen to find something to put water in, but we'd smashed everything.

"In the refrigerator there was a big carton of orange juice. He comes back in and throws that in my face. That woke me right up. Orange juice in the eyes and nose and mouth. I came up coughing and spluttering. 'We need to bandage his head,' says John. He goes over to May's purse and pulls out this Nikon camera that she kept and pulls out the film. He wraps my head with the big long roll of film, with the little yellow plastic film can hangin' off one ear. And the damn cops come in! "

"They've got shotguns out. They're lookin' for Charles Manson. We sobered up real quick. I'm laying there with orange juice dripping off my head. Film around my damned head. One of the cops is an Indian guy. He comes over to me and says, 'Aren't you Jesse Ed Davis?' Never mind that I look ridiculous sitting there. He's proud to see another Indian in such distinguished company. He's givin' me the fan treatment!"

May Pang recalled that when the sheriffs men announced themselves, John fled upstairs to hide in the bedroom. When a cop asked, "What about upstairs?" May darted up the steps and confronted John.

"You've got to come down," she insisted. "If they come up and get you, it will be worse."

May had been followed by a cop with his gun drawn. When he saw John Lennon, he froze. When John appeared downstairs, the whole posse turned their flashlights and guns upon him. Then they, too, turned to stone. Finally, the youngest and most naive cop spoke. He said humbly, "Do you think the Beatles will ever get together again?"

"You never know," John answered nervously. "You never know." Finding nobody dead, the cops left,

"cops left, followed by Jesse Ed and his people. May was seeing them off from the driveway when she heard John shouting up in the bedroom, "it's Roman Polanski's fault!" Dashing back into the house, she arrived in time to see John prize one of the legs off the four-poster bed. Then he seized the television and threw it against the wall. Grabbing a lamp, he used it to smash a mirror. Yanking out a dresser drawer, he dumped its contents on the floor. Then he fell to ripping and rending the clothes, like an enraged animal. When May sought to calm him, he seized a jade necklace that he knew she wore at her mother's behest and tore it off her neck, trampling it underfoot

May began to panic. She called Yoko for help. While she sketched in the situation, Yoko could plainly hear the sounds of demolition. "Call Elliot Mintz," she snapped and hung up.

When May echoed, "Elliot?" the name clicked like a trigger in John's sodden brain.

"I don't want that Jew bastard in my house!" shouted Lennon. "I'll kill him if he comes through the door!"

Next morning, when John awoke amid the rubble of Harold Seider's apartment, he claimed to remember nothing. Nor was he contrite about the havoc he had wrought. The only thing that affected him was the sight of his Martin guitar, which had been broken. "This is the first time in all these years," he exclaimed, "I ever destroyed anything that belonged to me.

"Jack Douglas, an engineer who had developed a good relationship with Yoko, recalled that she offered him money at this time to spy on John in L.A. Jack declined, but when John invited him, Douglas flew out to the Coast with his wife. He soon witnessed a scene that reminded him of the terrifying conclusion of The Day of the Locust.

Lennon was drinking one night at the new "in" place. On the Rox, a club atop the Rainbow disco. A crowd of fans was shouting up at the club from the parking lot, demanding that Lennon appear. Incensed by their demands, John got so hot that he kicked out the window overlooking the lot. Then he started screaming at the fans, "You want me, y a fucks! You want me!" Just about to hurl himself down upon the crowd, he was seized from behind by Jack Douglas and Jim Keltner. Breaking free, Lennon dashed downstairs and burst out into the lot, where he started throwing punches right and left. The fans hit back. By the time Jack and Jim came running out of the building, Lennon had been swallowed up by the mob

Plunging into the melee, they grabbed John, still hitting and cursing, and dragged him into the back seat of a big black Caddy. As Jack floored the car, Lennon went for the door. Checked in his attempt to escape, he suddenly jack knifed and kicked out the back window with his boots, sending shards of glass showering down over everybody.

" Lil, one of Harry's two steady girlfriends, broomed into town and joined the Roaring Boys. A sophisticated, good-looking, highly ambitious writer and filmmaker, Lil had gotten involved with Harry in the course of cutting a record album that she hoped would lead on to a career as a pop star. The first thing she observed now was that Harry was so busy scamming that even while he slept, his "coke foot" never stopped tapping. Next, she sized up the relationship between John and May, pinning it as a pimp turning out a new whore. John encouraged May to dress like a tart, with her blouse unbuttoned to the midriff and gold chains hanging all over her breasts. "He was very titillated by her," Lil recalled. "He had his fingers in her, hand on the ass, hand in the blouse. She was a fox. He liked having that squirmy, puppyish, sexy little koochie dancer. I could tell that this was not how she usually dressed or behaved, but he was turning her into a sex kitten.

John and Harry were wearing matching slouchy patchwork denim porkpie hats and dark glasses. John was always afraid of being recognized, but he and Harry would be unhappy if they weren't recognized. So John went over to the jukebox and found some Beatles' records, which he played over and over again. Sure enough, we were recognized and people started coming over to us. Finally, we had to leave the bar, but the tram was not ready to go down. May and I were wearing short shorts that are cut to show your cheeks in the back. John and Harry were playing games with us, passing us back and forth. The other people saw that, which explains what happened when we got on the tram.

"Everyone from the bar crowded into the last tram. We were surrounded and couldn't move. Harry and John were still playing their little games with our buttocks. Except that after a while, it became obvious that there were-many more than four hands on us. At that point we realized things were getting out of hand. I remember some fifty-year-old grandmother shouting at Harry, 'Bite my tit! Bite my tit!' The whole tram was going wild. Everyone was getting very aggressive about touching us. But nobody could get any closer. They were just pressing their bodies against us as hard as they could.

"When we got to the bottom, Mal had the limousine waiting there with the door open, as if he knew this was going to happen. So the moment the tram door opened, we were off and running at full speed - with the entire tram after us!

"John and I got into the little Jacuzzi on the front lawn of the hotel. I don't know what happened then because I blacked out. Harry was very upset with me when he came back. Harry and May were both very angry, but they got in the Jacuzzi with us. I don't know what May said to John, but she was being whiny and spoiling his fun. Suddenly he had both his hands around her throat. He was squeezing as hard as he could. I couldn't believe it! We didn't do anything for a few crucial seconds. Then Harry decided that May had had enough and dragged John off. The guard came out at that point and made us get out of the Jacuzzi

"Up in the room John picked up May and threw her across the room into a wall! It wasn't May he was angry about. It was something about women. He used to turn on women like that. I don't doubt he pulled some of it on Yoko in the early days. Cynthia and May are infuriating in a way because they don't have any character.

"The next thing I remember is that John, Harry, and I were in bed together. May had run off crying because she had been beaten to a bloody pulp. I don't remember any of that, until the next morning. Then I remember something John said: 'I don't want to be in love. It hurts too much."'

"When he arrived at the Troubadour with May and Harry 'round about midnight on 13 March, well before the second show, he was already half loaded and seething with anger. When somebody yelled, "Where's Ono?" John shot back: "Suckin' Ringo's cock!" Ushered into the VIP section, where they found a celebrity claque, including Peter Lawford, Pam Grier, Jack Haley, Jr., and Alan Sacks, producer of Welcome Back, Kotter, the threesome booked their orders for triple Milk Shakes. When the drinks arrived, John downed his in a single gulp. "Let's have another round," he proposed expansively. Then he began to hum "I Can't Stand the Rain," an ominous sign. Harry joined his voice with John's and soon both singers were performing happily, while accompanying themselves by banging spoons and knives against the glasses and salt cellars.

"That's really wonderful," gibed Peter Lawford. "You'd be a great opening act for the Smothers Brothers." John responded to this crack by seizing Peter Lawford's Milk Shake and downing it.

The Smothers Brothers were an object of liberal sympathy in Hollywood because of the way they had been booted off TV. This night was supposed to mark the beginning of their great comeback. The moment they stepped onstage, they received an ovation. But when the cheering and applause subsided, John and Harry could still be heard singing - louder than ever and without any sign of stopping. Harry was egging John on, shouting at him, "They love you!"

Lennon was determined to have his fun. A lifelong heckler, he shouted: "Hey! Smothers Brothers! Fuck a cow! "

Soon Lennon was alternating between loud singing and shouted obscenities. Occasionally he'd vaunt: "I'm John Lennon!" Peter Lawford told John to shut up. Alan Sacks told John to shut up. No matter what anybody told John, his answer was: "Fuck you!"

Now people all over the packed club were shouting back at John, "They were fucked over, and now you're fucking them over!... How will you sleep at night?"

Finally, Ken Fritz, a mild little guy who managed the Smothers Brothers, came over to the table. He was hopping mad. "Look," he shouted, "we've worked hard for this, and I'm not going to let you fuck it up!" With that, he grabbed John's shoulder.

John reared up instantly, overturning the table with a crash of shattering glass. Spinning around, he caught Fritz with a hook to the chin. Fritz swung at Lennon, as the crowd roared. Before either could throw another punch. Peter Lawford came charging in with a group of bartenders and waiters. Forming a flying wedge, they gave John and Harry the bum's rush. The hecklers were hustled through a furious crowd, whose members threw punch after punch at John Lennon.

When John and Harry came flying out of the club, they ran head-on into a knot of people in the parking lot. There was a lot of pushing and shoving. John wrestled a parking attendant to the ground and fell atop him. A woman photographer began screaming, "He hit me! He hit me!" (She claimed later in a lawsuit that Lennon had belted her in the right eye.)

When John and May got back to Harold Seider's house (to which they had returned after wrecking Lou Adler's place), John gave his mistress the freeze until it was time to leave for the studio; then he left without her. When he got back that night, he was half drunk. May implored him to tell her what was wrong, impulsively throwing her arms about him. Angrily he broke out of her embrace. When she persisted, he grabbed her long hair and snapped back her head like a rag doll. "Do you know what you did?" he demanded. "I don't! I don't!" she wailed.

Gulping down a big slug of vodka, John coughed up the choke pear that had been gagging him since lunch. "You flirted with David Cassidy."

As May denied this ridiculous accusation, John started circling her like a menacing animal. While he paced, he rapped out the carefully compiled evidence of her betrayal: (1) She had met Cassidy outside the house when he arrived; (2) she had ordered the same dish as Cassidy at the restaurant; (3) she had stood at the window with Cassidy, talking to him intimately. "I always knew you would cheat on me, and now I have the proof!" screamed John as he worked himself up for the kill. "Don't you know who I am?" he demanded. "I'm John Lennon!"

Seizing May's eyeglasses, John tore them off her face and stomped them on the floor. Then he grabbed a camera he had bought her and smashed it. Finally, he started running around the house, destroying everything that lay in his path. As he buried vases into walls and toppled pieces of furniture, there could be heard above the sounds of smashing crockery and cracking wood the persistent ringing of the doorbell. "Are you all right?" shouted Arlene from outside.

Distracted by this unexpected interruption, Lennon ordered that Arlene be sent away. When May replied that Arlene was living in the house, Lennon seized May's handbag and dumped its contents on the floor. Snatching up the keys to the car, he said, "Tell Arlene to drive the car away or I'll smash it!" Arlene drove off.

"I'm callin' Yoko!" John yelled when May returned. "I'm gonna tell her everything," he warned, like an outraged child. When his call came through, Yoko was in her dressing room at Kenny's. She was just about to go on. "You were right!" John shouted the moment she answered. Then, signaling May to pick up the extension phone, John started telling Mother everything that naughty May had done that day

Mother was too busy to listen. "I have to give my show," she snapped. "I'll call you later." Lennon heard the receiver clatter in its cradle.

Blocked by Yoko, John swung his guns around on May. For the next half hour he denounced her as a fortune hunter and a gold digger. While he was abusing her for exploiting him, he revealed inadvertently how much he and Yoko were exploiting May. She learned now that her salary had been stopped the day they left for Los Angeles. What's more, Yoko had told John to spend no more than a thousand dollars on May. May saw at once that Yoko had been poisoning John's mind against his mistress. Her insight was soon confirmed when Yoko called back and May, ordered again to pick up the phone and listen, heard John say, "You were right, Yoko. She doesn't treat me like a star. Tell her that you told me she was a fortune hunter."

Yoko was caught in a trap. She giggled nervously. "May," she said in a tone that meant "Aren't we being silly?" "You know how people say things when they're drunk!"

When John realized that Yoko was not going to help him, he suddenly turned against her, too, denouncing her bitterly, then he slammed down the phone. When Yoko called back, he refused to answer. After kicking the instrument across the floor, he collapsed across the bed. May sat up all night, crying

""The violence that had been building inside John Lennon all night came bursting out the moment he left the studio. It struck so fast and unexpectedly that it stunned May Pang. She recalled that John was walking unsteadily toward the parking lot when suddenly he cast a drunken look over his shoulder at Jesse Ed Davis. Running over to him, Lennon gave Jesse Ed a passionate kiss on the mouth. Not to be outdone, Jesse Ed grabbed John and kissed him back. Lennon screamed, "Faggot!" - and knocked Jesse flat on his ass.

At that moment Phil Spector roared up in his old Rolls-Royce with George at the wheel. Roy Cicala was following in his car. Phil leaped out and threw May Pang into the Rolls. Then he pushed John into the back seat of Cicala's car, ordering Keltner and Davis to sit next to John and Arlene Reckson to get into the front seat beside Cicala's assistant, Jimmy Iovine. Both cars took off at once for Lou Adler's house. As they sped along the hushed streets of Bel Air, May could hear John screaming in the car behind her: "May! Yoko! May! Yoko!"

The moment John had realized that he had been separated from May, he had gone berserk. He had yanked Arlene's hair like a child. He had tried to kick out the windows of the car. Davis and Keltner sought to restrain him, but he had displayed extraordinary strength, pulling out Keltner's hair by the handful. When the cars screeched to a stop before the house, Arlene jumped out and ran toward May, shouting, "John's gone mad!"

May wanted to put John to bed at once. Spector ordered her to sober him up first with coffee. He warned that John was still highly dangerous. No sooner were the words out of Phil's mouth than John lunged for the little producer's throat. Instantly Spector was on his feet issuing orders.

George seized Lennon from behind and frog-marched him upstairs to the bedroom. Bang! went the door. May heard John screaming, "Gimme back my glasses, you Jew bastard!" Inside the bedroom George was tying Lennon's hands to the bedposts with neckties from the closet. The bodyguard showed his professional skill by tying Lennon face-down.

When Lennon found himself being tied down, with his ass up in the air, he flashed back on his sex scenes with Brian Epstein. "I thought, Phil is gonna fuck me up the ass!" he told Jesse Ed the next day. Instead of fighting and screaming, John suddenly changed his tune. Now he whined: "Please let me go, Phil. Be my baby! I'll sing your song great, Phil!" Then John started singing "Be My Baby."

No sooner was Spector out the door than John began screaming, "Untie me, May! You had better untie me or else!" May and Arlene were panic-stricken. They didn't know what to do. May was afraid to release John because he might turn on her. Suddenly they heard sounds of rending and tearing upstairs. Then there was the crash of broken glass. John had gotten loose and buried something through the window.

The next moment he appeared at the top of the staircase. Without his glasses, he looked blind and weird. The neckties that had bound him were trailing from his wrists. Squinting down the stairs, he screamed: "Yoko, you slant-eyed bitch! I 'm gonna get you!" With that he came stumbling down the stairs and lunged for May.

Screaming with terror, she ran out the door barefoot and took off down Stone Canyon Road toward the Bel Air Hotel. Arlene was running after May, when suddenly, a jeep driven by two boys came roaring around a curve and nearly struck May. Screeching to a halt, the boys shouted at Arlene: "What's going on?" Arlene replied: "She took some acid!"

Meantime, May had reached the hotel, where she ducked into a phone booth. Even at this desperate moment she did not violate the code of her service to the Lennons by calling the cops. Instead, she rang the engineers for help. Then she went out front in the parking lot, where she and Arlene could hear John howling and moaning in the darkness. "Why doesn't anyone love me?" he cried out in anguish. "Why doesn't anyone love me?"

Finally, help appeared in the form of Tony King, whom May had called while Spector was haying John pinioned. Pointed in the right direction, he approached Lennon, calling out, "What's the matter, John?" The sound of a sympathetic English voice must have relieved John's fears because he broke down immediately and started sobbing. Tony took John into his arms, as one would a frightened child. Rocking and soothing him, he quieted John's spastic motions.

Finally John's fit ended in a flood of tears.

Wow, what a mess.

"Japanese ladies are notoriously susceptible to the lure of soothsayers. Yet, it wasn't an Oriental who introduced Yoko to New York's leading clairvoyant - it was Harry Nilsson's woman, the intelligent and sophisticated Lil. When she told Yoko how this man could look into the future, she jumped up from the restaurant table and darted into a phone booth. Next afternoon, huddled into the corner of a stretch limo, she was on her way down to Little Italy

Frank Andrews lives in a modest house on Mulberry Street facing the churchyard over whose wall Robert De Niro vaulted in Mean Streets

he comported herself like an attentive little schoolgirl, copying everything Andrews said into a mottled black-and-white notebook. Just as she was rising to leave, he checked her. Murmuring in a semi-trance, he said: "Your husband sleeps in blood."

"What do you mean?" she gasped.

"I don't feel he has a happy ending," explained the visionary lamely. Then, struggling to sharpen his psychic gaze, he added: "I see him covered in blood."

After that warning Yoko insisted that John consult with Andrews. He was opposed to the idea but relented, on condition the psychic come to him. Andrews held a two-hour session with Lennon in the kitchen at the Dakota. It was an unpleasant experience. Every time Andrews spoke the truth, Lennon would sneer: "You read that somewhere!" Despite his hostility and distrustfulness, Lennon plied Andrews with difficult questions. "Will the Beatles get together again?" he demanded.

"No, but I see them on Broadway," Andrews replied. John snorted derisively, but Andrews points to Beatlemania as the fulfillment of his prophecy.

"Will I receive my green card?" asked John. When Andrews assured him that he would, Lennon retorted, "Of course, I will - after all the money I have paid to lawyers!"

Next John asked, "Will I make it to forty?" Andrews smiled and replied: "You've got at least till forty-four." When they got onto the theme of love, Andrews suggested that Lennon was troubled by his homosexuality. "Why do you dress Yoko up as a boy?" he challenged. John was enraged at the suggestion, rejecting it violently. "I see a baby being born," observed Andrews. John conceded that it was possible that May Pang might bear him a child.

The session ended with a palm reading. Andrews found Lennon's palm lined with signs of conflict and madness. He concluded that Lennon was a "Satumian" type, with a pronounced tendency to sadomasochism.

Thanks OP. Entertaining stories, indeed!

John's real family was the Beatles. Hence, it is not surprising that one day he should clap his hand across the receiver and say to May: "Can you stand having Paul over tonight?" May wanted nothing more than to see John reunited with Paul, even though the McCartneys had treated her in California with unconcealed condescension. What was worse, the moment May's back was turned, Paul told John that he had spoken recently with Yoko and was sure that John's marriage could be saved - if John would humble himself before Yoko, get down before her on bended knee. John gave Paul a withering glance and told him that he didn't know what he was talking about. So shaken was Paul by this rebuke that he spilled a glass of blood-red wine on the pure white rug. "It's good for the carpet," drawled John coolly, laying a firm, restraining hand on May's shoulder as she rose instinctively to protect her home.

John also got tight again with Mick Jagger. He always showed up with a pretty bird and a bottle of Beaujolais. His talk would be gossip, gossip, gossip, including the latest dirt on George Harrison, whom Ringo had caught in bed with Maureen, while Patti was living with George's best friend, Eric Clapton. "Where have I been!" John would cry out at each fresh - and delicious - dish.

John Lennon had always taken a condescending view of the Rolling Stones because for years the Stones had aped the Beatles. John had also been tight with Mick's hated rival Brian Jones until his mysterious swimming pool death in 1969 -a death of which John believed Mick innocent. Perhaps the most revealing moment in John's relationship with Jagger had come during their joint appearance on the Rock 'n Roll Circus, when a stoned John, playing a TV interviewer, had done a satiric turn with Mick as pop star, that concluded with John slipping his hand inside Mick's shirt and feeling him up. John always said that he liked the Stones' "real stuff," like "Satisfaction" and "Honky Tonk Woman," but he could not stomach their "fag stuff."

R13, Lennon was Saturnian, indeed. His mood swings were legendary.

By the time Yoko got back to the States in September, her determination to end her marriage had begun to weaken. "The Japan tour broke her bubble," remarked Harold Seider. "Once Yoko realized that John was beginning to stand on his own and she was becoming a nobody, she knew her only salvation would be getting back with John... She knew that on a divorce all she would get would be money and she would be off the scene." So Yoko resumed her mind games with John, but she was shocked to discover that instead of winning almost every hand, she began to lose. According to May, she would call John at the studio, and he wouldn't take her call. When she did get through and started threatening divorce, instead of breaking down and begging her to reconsider, he barked: "Hurry, up and get it over with!" Finally, John publicly insulted Yoko, inflicting on her a painful loss of face.

On the night of 14 November 1974, John and May attended the opening of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road. John had extended his invitation to include Yoko, but she had declined. Just before the curtain went up, Harold Seider came down the aisle and said that Yoko had come with Arlene and was unhappy with her seats at the back of the house. Instantly May offered to exchange seats with Yoko. John turned to Seider and snapped: "She'll have to sit in the back!" When the show ended, John grabbed May by the hand and rushed up the aisle and out of the theater so rapidly that Yoko could not intercept him. As the limousine pulled away from the curb, she was left standing on the pavement, shouting, "John! John!

The moment John arrived at the Hippopotamus, the disco where the opening-night party was being held, he started belting down drinks at the bar. Soon he was flirting openly with every girl who caught his eye. Eventually he was engulfed with women, cramming them in his face, as in the old days at the Speakeasy. May was furious and fearful of what would happen when the booze cooked up his brains. She went home and called Yoko. (John left with two black chicks.) "Was he on liquor?" asked Yoko. May replied, "Yes." "Was he on cocaine?" Again, the answer was yes.

There was a perceptible pause before Yoko spoke again. Then she said: "You know, May - I'm thinking of taking him back."

"December 1974 marked the moment of greatest alienation between John and Yoko. Knowing only too well that cutting Yoko's phone line is like cutting her lifeline, John began refusing to take her calls or slamming down the phone in the midst of the conversation. What must have alarmed her even more than these insults were the signs of mounting strength and stability in the enemy's camp, especially the news that John and May were preparing to buy a stone house in Montauk. If John Lennon was buying a home with May Pang, things were getting serious. The time had come for Yoko to make the supreme effort.

Like a skillful general, instead of stepping up her unpromising attack, she withdrew. She stopped calling John and went off to California, where she knew virtually no one. When she got back to New York, about 10 January 1975, she rang up John, according to May Pang, and made a surprising announcement: She had discovered a new and absolutely effective cure for smoking! It was the same claim that Tony Cox had made in Denmark when he had urged John to fly in Don Hamrick; what's more, the method was also the same - hypnosis. If Hamrick had failed, why should another hypnotist succeed?

Lennon didn't raise this question. He was ready to try anything because he was suffering from a hacking cough produced by smoking two packs of Gaulois a day. What made Yoko's offer even more beguiling was the way she now began to play mind games with John, calling him up and announcing that she had made an appointment for him with the smoking therapist, only to call back a few days later to cancel and reschedule his appointment with this mysterious wonder worker. After Yoko had played this game for two weeks, May Pang pointed out to Lennon that he was being teased. John didn't object. He liked being teased.

By the last day of the month, when John's next appointment fell due. May Pang had become very apprehensive about this eagerly anticipated cure. She had lived for so many years on such an intimate footing with John and Yoko that she had developed an uncanny sensitivity to the vibrations that passed back and forth between these strong personalities. What she was getting now from Yoko were very strong vibes, portending something really big. So when the appointed hour arrived on Friday afternoon, 31 January, and there was no call from Yoko canceling the session. May grew alarmed. She tried to dissuade John from going to the Dakota. She said that she had never yet asked for anything from him, but today she was asking, nay, begging him, not to go!

John made light of the whole business, assuring May that he would be home in time for supper. Then tomorrow, he told her, they would drive out to Montauk and take one last look at the house before they bought it. Two weeks later they were scheduled to go down to New Orleans, where Paul was cutting the album which became Venus and Mars. This was the moment for which May had worked so hard.

She was sure that once The first sign May received that something strange was .afoot was when she called the Dakota around ten o'clock in the evening and asked to speak to John. Yoko, obviously in the midst of some urgent activity, barked, "I can't talk to you right now! I'll call you later!" and threw down the phone. May sat up all night, waiting for John, but he never came home. At ten o'clock Saturday morning she called again. This time Yoko answered in a hushed and furtive tone. May could tell from long experience that Yoko was lying next to the sleeping John. When May asked to speak to John, Yoko whispered: "You can't. He's exhausted. The cure was very difficult." Then, assuring May that John was all right, Yoko promised to have him call later. May received no call that day or the next.

It was not until Monday afternoon that May finally came face-to-face again with John Lennon.

They had booked successive appointments with a dentist several blocks from their apartment. When May walked out of the dentist's office, she discovered John sitting in the waiting room. One glance, and she knew that something had happened to him. "His eyes were red rimmed and there were bags under them," she reported. "He looked at me vaguely and seemed dazed. His eyes were dilated and his manner [was]weird." (May's description of Lennon's exhausted appearance and befuddled manner was confirmed the very next day, when the veteran reporter Pete Hamill arrived at the Dakota to conduct an interview with John, pegged to the rock 'n' roll album. Lennon looked to Hamill like "a man recovering from a serious illness." When John opened his mouth, he talked like a patient coming out of an anesthetic. "It's '75 now, isn't it?" he groped, although the date was 4 February, not 4 January. "And on this day you've come here," he said vaguely, "I seem to have moved back in here. By the time this goes out - I don't know?" Hamill got the impression that John was saying: "What do I do now?" What he actually said was: "Could you come back in a few days?" For once the great master of the press interview could not rise to the challenge.)

May waited for John, and when he came back into the reception room, she asked him if he was coming home. He blinked and said, "Uh... right... OK." May scrutinized him carefully now, struggling to understand what had come over him. He reminded her of those zombie-like creatures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When they got inside the flat, John said: "I guess I should say this to you now. Yoko has allowed me to come home."

Earlier, John had turned up at Sutton Place with one of Yoko's assistants, Jon Hendricks, to remove everything but the bed (tainted by May), the sofa (on which Julian had slept), and the wall mirrors, which John couldn't pry loose. He had even gone so far as to claim any of May's clothes that happened to fit him, compromising only on the T-shirts, which they divided evenly. Meantime, he had continued working every day with May at the studio and the office of Lennon Music in the Capitol Building, where they rounded off their labors on the official version of the rock 'n' roll album (which differs slightly from the Levy version) as well as did the publicity on the album.

"Yoko had allowed John to come home only on certain conditions - which he couldn't disclose to the public. Instead of slipping back inside the marriage bed, he was obliged to spend a probationary period sequestered in the Black Room. Here he dossed down on a mattress laid upon the black carpet and spent his time in solitary pursuits: reading books on magic, composing Skywriting by Word of Mouth, ogling the mirror-sided TV, playing records on his jukebox, and struggling, with diminishing success, to write songs at his ebony-finished upright piano. Though he relished the longed-for peace and comfort that came with his return to his monastic existence as a mature man he could not long tolerate the sexual deprivation that was the lot of a monk.

With May Pang, John had enjoyed sex every day in every way that his horny imagination could suggest. John had a "raging hard-on," according to Jesse Ed Davis, who not only had plenty of opportunities to feel the vibes between this pair but was the recipient of John's ribald confidences. Now Lennon was back with the woman whom he had denounced years before as a "prude." No Druid ceremony alone was going to restore to the Lennons' marriage its lost sexual glamour.

It is an open question what had happened to the sexual passion that had once consumed John and Yoko. She told Marnie Hair that before her marriage she and John had sparks coming off their bodies when they made love, and John celebrated their honeymoon by drawing an extensive series of erotic lithographs that leave nothing to the imagination when it comes to asking what the Lennons did in the sack. When he was asked why so many of the pictures represented him going down on Yoko, he replied: "Because I like it." As soon as the Lennons started living together, however, they became stone junkies, which must have given the quietus to their passion. Subsequently John apparently suffered from impotence. Just two years after the marriage, when John denounced Yoko to Klein, the Lennons' sex life was clearly on the wane. It may not be surprising to learn that in the month of May, only three months after he came home, he responded to an invitation to spend a weekend in Philadelphia, broadcasting on behalf of a local charity, with the words "Great! Yoko and I need some time apart." For by then Yoko had reneged on her promise that John could continue to enjoy May as mistress. Actually, no sooner did Yoko announce her pregnancy than May found herself being given the bum's rush

Can't wait to read this thread once I get home. The best celebrity drunk story I"ve read is of Gary Oldman and Sean Penn after a night on the town. Oldman serenaded/taunted Penn with a rendition of "like a Virgin"

"When their work was done, they would go back to their stripped-down apartment to make love. No sooner was the fun over, however, than John would be smitten by fear that Yoko would find him out. Leaping out of bed, he would take a quick shower to remove the telltale odor of the "other Woman" and then would anoint himself with the sweet-smelling, come-hither-love-to-me oil that Yoko had ordered him to apply to his body. May talks of the "two Johns" in her life at this time. Actually, there was but one man oscillating between two states of being: horny and guilty.

Once John had lost May, his attitude toward Yoko began to change. Instead of feeling the love that is inspired by the sense of being saved, John began to experience the hatred that children evince when they are thwarted of their dearest desires. Indeed, his whole situation at the Dakota was becoming reminiscent of how he had lived as a child with Mimi at Mendips. As the months rolled on and his free contacts with the outer world drastically diminished, John could see that the old techniques of psychological control - isolation, observation, regimentation, even low feeding - were coming into play again. Inevitably they fomented all his old rebelliousness and cruelty.

John would invite Yoko to dine at a restaurant, a gracious gesture that any wife would appreciate. But when they were seated at table, he would order a brandy Alexander. Drinking was forbidden at home, but in a public place Yoko was powerless to stop John from imbibing. As one Milk Shake after another slid down the famous throat, the Lennon tongue would turn sharp and nasty. Pinioned by social convention, Yoko was obliged to submit mutely as John cut her up like cat food. Perhaps he would josh her about her nobly melancholy features, making her samurai dignity the butt of his Liverpool-shogun vulgarity. Or perhaps he would complain of sexual deprivation, demanding that if she didn't want to fuck him, she should at least provide suitable substitutes, like some nice young girls - or boys! When Yoko could no longer tolerate this outrageous behavior, she would jump up from the table and flee the restaurant. That was John's cue to go out on the town"

Hailing a cab, he would roll down Fifth Avenue to 12th Street, where stood Ashley's, the hottest disco in town and the favorite hangout of the music biz crowd. A ground-floor bar-restaurant with a dance hall upstairs, Ashley Pandel's joint was experiencing in the year 1975 its fifteen minutes of fame. When John Lennon walked in, the red carpet would roll out. John could drink without paying, score drugs off virtually every dude in the house, jive with the celebs and DJ, and, when the hour grew late and his courage grew great, walk in the cloakroom and thrust his hand up the hat-check girl's skirt. One morning he called Yoko at seven and confided: "I'm watching three lesbians make it. I hope they make it with me next!'" Another night he went home with two waitresses, expecting to make it a threesome. When the girls refused, he whipped out his cock and began masturbating, growling: "Fuck it! I'll do it meself!"

Actor Robert Ryan owned the apt in the Dakota before Lennon did.

"Yoko wasn't slow to recognize the dangers posed by this sort of behavior. Just as she had once sought to sate John's lust by procuring him a discreet and trustworthy mistress, so now she arranged with reliable people, like Elliot Mintz or Tony King, to have her husband taken to a whorehouse. (John was too insecure to go by himself, and Yoko wanted a full report on how he behaved.) One of these establishments, a Korean brothel on 23rd Street, still proudly displays Lennon's signed photograph. Here John could indulge his yearning to see women get it on with women, either by going down on each other or by using dildos. He could also have his fill of rubber-firm bodies and nimble-fingered jerk-off artists. Nor was there any danger that these illiterate foreign prostitutes would create a scandal by, as Yoko put it, "writing a book."

For years afterward the Lennons sought in vain to have a child. The cause of their failure was identified in 1972, when a test revealed that John had such a low level of active sperm that he could not impregnate her. Now, without John receiving any kind of treatment or assistance through artificial insemination, Yoko had become pregnant. What made the pregnancy even more miraculous was the fact that it was produced by only a single act of intercourse.

John informed his cousin Dr. Leila Harvey, in a letter written in the summer of 1975, that the baby had been conceived on the night of 7 February. Yoko told John Green that conception occurred on 1 February - the night that John returned to the Dakota for his cure. The reason both husband and wife could point to a single date is that, as Yoko explained, she had had vaginal intercourse with John only once during the first months of their reconciliation.

Another remarkable feature of the pregnancy was the widespread confusion over its anticipated term. John told many people that the baby would be born in November, which, in view of the date of conception, is natural. He cited that month in his letter to Leila and gave May Pang the same date, remarking, "It will be a Scorpio, and I know how to deal with Scorpios" (May's sign). He must have told the same thing to Ringo, who presented the baby on its birth with a ring engraved "November." On the other hand, in a couple of letters of roughly the same date as that to Leila, he announced that the baby would be born in October, presumably at the end of the month, which is the date that was published in the press on 8 October, the day before Sean's birth.

In one of the letters that cite October as the month of birth, John exclaims after the date, "What else!" His aside must have been inspired by the recognition that, as he told Fred Seaman years later, "She's always trying to have babies on my birthday." Yoko's motive was an occult belief that if a child is born upon its father's birthday, it will receive his soul when he dies. Hence, Yoko's goal was to bestow her husband's genius upon her child.

God, what a mess he was. I find all this depressing.

what's the source of this stuff?

"What was disquieting about the interview was not the movie footage backstage at the Garden but the way John flogged himself with almost masochistic intensity for his wicked behavior during the Lost Weekend. Instead of explaining his behavior as the product of a failed marriage, he made it appear that he had simply gone crazy.

Asked to account for this travesty of the truth, Harold Seider remarked: "He [John] was under an obligation to perpetuate the myth. Given the fact of Yoko's domination, there was no way he could have said: 'Hey, she wanted to get laid, I wanted to get laid, she wanted to get a divorce.'... He had spent his whole marriage making her the martyred person... Unless he was prepared to break with Yoko, he could not tell the truth... He understood diplomacy. He had to say: I was the bad boy. She sent me away.'"

Pressed to explain the total contradiction between the reality of Lennon's life and the way he presented himself to the public, Seider observed: "The real Lennon was not the public statements that he made. They were made [that way] because they were public statements, and he was looking to make a point. Not that he really believed it, but he wanted to make the point." Didn't Lennon experience guilt about lying? Seider retorted: "He couldn't give a shit because to a certain extent he had contempt for the media because they bought all the crap... He was there to manipulate the media. He enjoyed doing that... He understood how to use the media, you got to give him credit for that, and you got to give her credit... they would use the media... but it was not that they believed it, but that was the image they wanted to present."

Once John had finished making propaganda, however, he offered a final glimpse of himself that cut to the core of his being. Explaining that the root of his problem was his refusal to grow up, John confessed: "I don't want to grow up but I'm sick of not growing up - that way. I'll find a different way of not growing up. There's a better way of doing it... [but] I have this great fear of the normal thing... the ones that settled for the deal! That's what I'm trying to avoid. But I'm sick of avoiding it with violence."

"The month after John Lennon told the rock public how happy he was to be back with Yoko Ono, he resumed his affair with May Pang. Now, however, their relationship became a clandestine affair. With their penthouse long gone and May living with a girl who worked all day at home, the lovers' greatest problem was finding some place to be alone. If they went to a hotel or motel, John, who never carried money, would be obliged to pay with his American Express card, which would mean a bill that Yoko was certain to see because she opened all the mail, just as she monitored all the calls that went in and out of the apartment. The only solution John could hit upon was to schedule an appointment with his$200-an-hour lawyer, Michael Graham, and then tell the astonished attorney to drive his client and his client's former assistant to Connecticut to examine some property. When they had parked in a secluded place, John told Graham: "OK, Michael, take a walk!"

A little later in the summer Richard Ross, proprietor of Home, a rock musicians' hangout on Second Avenue at 91st Street, went into Mount Sinai Hospital to be treated for Hodgkin's disease. Richard, who adored John and was an old friend of May (who had steered a lot of rockers, including John, to Home), provided another opportunity for the unhoused lovers. After chatting with his visitors, he said: "You two look like you need some time alone." Then he hauled himself out of his sickbed and went to the lounge, while John and May hopped in the sack. After he was discharged, Richard continued to play the role of Pandarus. He would ring up May and tell her that a "friend" wanted to see her. That was May's cue to hustle over to Ross's apartment on 92nd Street near Madison Avenue, where she would rendezvous with John. Two or three times a week John and May met in this fashion until the birth of the baby produced a temporary break in their relations.

Dreary.

Drunk Story : One day Jesse, John, and May went to Westwood, where they spent the afternoon eating, drinking, and going to the movies. At this time there was a commercial on TV that amused John. Three swishy boys would appear and introduce themselves: "Hi, I'm Charlie... I'm Scott... I'm Dennis - we're the Wilson Brothers from the House of Suede!" As luck would have it, on this day Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys spotted Lennon sitting in a beanery. Coming up to John, who was drunk and not wearing his glasses, Wilson said, "Hi, John! I'm Dennis Wilson."

John looked up and drawled, "Yeah, from the House of Suede - right?" Dennis just hung his head and shook it. Then he walked away, crushed. Another night John grabbed Jesse and his woman, Patti, demanding, "Have you ever seen Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee?" When it turned out they hadn't, John carried them down to the Los Angeles Theater on Main Street, in the heart of Los Angeles's skid row. A heavy rain had driven all the winos inside the movie house, where they were sitting around, swigging out of their bottles. John upped with his jug of vodka and a carton of orange juice. But just as they were getting into the good part of the picture, with Bruce Lee knocking men over like tenpins, the roof caved in!

"A torrent of water came cascading into the theater. Jesse Ed had stood up to leave when suddenly the manager appeared. He gazed up at the ceiling, shook his head, and went out again. Meantime, the picture never stopped. Jesse sat down with his friends, and they watched the last three reels through a waterfall."

John Lennon and Phil Spector :

Lennon had done very little drinking during the first session, though he had armed himself with a flask of vodka. Now he started passing a gallon of Smirnoff back and forth with Jesse Ed Davis, thus giving the signal for all-the players to pull out their jugs and drink openly. As May Pang and Arlene Reckson looked on in dismay, the musicians got loaded and John began to get rowdy. He swaggered over to May and kissed her macho style, running his hand up inside her blouse. Then he went into the booth and y el led at Spector, who was driving everybody crazy with his time-consuming procedures. When Spector ignored John's complaint, John picked up a headset and smashed it on the console. Soon a fight broke out between the producer and a musician who was shouting: "I've been here five hours, and I've only done twenty minutes' work!"

" John and Phil were trying to outdo each other in their drinking. They were into vodka and champagne, drinking under the table, shooting jets from the bottles into each other's mouth. When the food came, they were so blasted that all they could do was play with the stuff, throwing it at each other or sticking it in their ears. As Jesse Ed looked about the restaurant, he could see that the people witnessing this incredible scene were struggling to persuade themselves that the man making such a fool of himself was not John Lennon.

Finally, John and Phil got really nuts. They mounted the table and rolled around on the food. Then they started a game of "I bet you can't do this!" One flipped a fork in the air and caught it. The other raised the ante by making the fork turn twice or three times before catching it. At last Phil screamed, "I bet you can't do this!" With that he flipped over backward in his chair and struck his head violently on the floor. John said: "You win."

John Lennon was clearly an idiot.

Yuck! Please give us more.

"The whole group gathered for supper a couple of days later at the home of Mal Evans's girlfriend, Frances Hughes. John and Cynthia were enjoying reminiscing together when she remarked that she had always wanted another child by John. Instantly John got defensive, volunteering some surprising news: "I can't have another child... I have a low sperm count because of the drugs I've taken." The party broke up shortly afterward, but all the way home John brooded on Cynthia's remark, which he interpreted as a confirmation of Yoko's warnings. Yoko, for her part, was greatly relieved by word of this contretemps. She told Arlene Reckson, who was now in Yoko's employ, that she lived with the fear that John would divorce her and treat her just as shabbily as he had Cynthia. "Imagine!" exclaimed Yoko. "She was the mother of his child!"

The day after the dinner party John ran amok. Jesse Ed Davis preserved a vivid recollection of what happened. "I lived over on the beach at Venice with Patti and her little boy, Billy. He and Julian are the same age," he recalled. "John and May were going to pick up Julian from Cynthia and come down to our house so the kid could play in the ocean. John and May showed up two hours late without Julian. They had had a hassle with Cynthia, who wouldn't let them have the kid. So John was in a bad mood. He just wanted to take anything! I had some little mini-whites, like Bennies. He swallowed a bunch of those and got all wired up. Then he went down to the liquor store and bought a big bottle of vodka. We got back to our house and just got shit-faced.

"Jim Keltner called up and said, 'Why don't you come join me and Bobby Keyes [a horn player on the Spector sessions] for dinner at this restaurant, Lost on Larrabee?' So we drove over in May's car. By the time we got there, we were so blasted! Everybody else was straight, and they ordered dinner. John and I just looked at the food. There was a friend of mine, Jim Cataldo, who came along to dinner. He was an artist and a racquetball player kind of athlete. He stayed straight because he knew we were all fucked up. Meanwhile, we kept gettin' more and more drunk, orderin' drinks. Then we went down in the basement, which had a co-ed bathroom.

"There was a sanitary napkin machine on the wall. John pulled one out. It had a little tape on the end. So he stuck it on his forehead. When we got back upstairs, everybody said, 'God, John! Take that shit off your head!' "John said, 'Naw, it's mine. I want it!'

"On election night, 7 November 1972, Jerry Rubin assembled his friends at his pad to watch the returns. John and Yoko had promised they would come after they finished work at the Record Plant, where Yoko was cutting a two-record solo album, Approximately Infinite Universe.

As news of Nixon's victory came pouring into the booth, John got loaded on tequila. He was enraged at the prospect of Nixon's re-election because Lennon assumed it meant he would be kicked out of the country. His fury was also fueled by his growing antagonism toward Yoko, whose singing had inspired John to dub her the "Japanese Mrs. Miller." By election night, relations between the pair had become so bad that all the musicians were convinced that John and Yoko were heading for a breakup.

When the session wound up at four in the morning, John was dangerously drunk. He was "cursing with a vocabulary that would have been the envy of a Liverpool sailor," reported Bob Gruen, the Lennons' house photographer and gofer, adding, "It's the only time I ever heard so many curse-words in such a torrential flow." As the group headed down to Rubin's apartment on Prince Street, Gruen observed that Lennon "was outrageously angry at everything

Those guests who remained at 4:00 A.M. were gathered about the TV, watching the Nixon totals pile up, when suddenly they were horrified by a terrible scream, obviously the sound of a man in agony. At that moment John Lennon burst into the flat, wild-eyed and unshaven, alternately crying out in pain and hollering like a Beatle, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!"

As an actress Malina was impressed by the depth of Lennon's passion and his remarkable ability to utter cries that came from the core of his being. As a woman she observed that Yoko was wearing a floppy hat and a brown leather coat with a gold sheriffs badge on the breast over a loose, linen jumpsuit of the latest design. Though Lennon never stopped cursing in his raspy voice and leveling accusations at these people, whom he now regarded as false prophets who had misled him, even going so far as to denounce them all as middle-class Jews, Yoko never lost her cool. She unwrapped a package of cocaine, from which those partook who were not swigging down vodka and tequila from the bottle.

One after another the guests sought to calm Lennon, Rubin trying to steer him into a room with a water bed, but John reacted violently to being treated as a nut case. Instead of cooling out, he kept spitting out his pain and disillusionment over the failure of the revolution, over the very idea that there could be such a thing as a revolution. When Julian Beck sought to reason with John, he could not be made to listen, denouncing everything Julian said as bullshit

Finally, Lennon found himself sitting face-to-face with Judith Malina, a tiny woman. Gazing into her eyes like a lunatic, he snarled: "I want to cut you with a knife!" When she didn't flinch, he repeated the threat even more menacingly, declaring that he wanted to see blood flow. When he still got no satisfaction from his victim, he rose unsteadily to his feet and lurched toward the door, where he bellowed: "I'm going to join the Weathermen! I'm going to shoot a policeman!

"Though John was willing to lend himself to a gag, he wasn't up to working any longer as one-half of the duo of John and Yoko. He had spent most of the last six months laid out in his bed at Bank Street, stoned on heroin and drunk from drinking crate after crate of Colt 45. When Harold Seider had gone to the flat to talk business with Lennon, the lawyer found his client sunken-eyed, emaciated, unshaven, looking as if he had just gotten out of a "concentration camp." Seider had interpreted Lennon's condition as a burnout produced by Yoko's relentless blitzing of first the art world and then the radical scene. He recognized that John had a need to "hibernate." Lennon had used this long layoff to review his position

both as an entertainer and as a husband. His conclusion, as regards the first issue, was, as he confided to May Pang: "I've tried to push Yoko for the past few years, and it doesn't seem to work. I'm a little tired now. The best person for Yoko now is Tony." Those words signaled the end, at least for the next seven years, of the team of John and Yoko. They also signaled the revival of John Lennon. In July John gave another signal by shaving his head.

Once Yoko recognized that John had withdrawn his support, she had to cast about for another male helper because Yoko needed a man the way a ballerina needs a partner: to lift her, spin her, and show her off to best advantage while she camps it up before the public. Now that her old partner was off sulking in the wings, she had to find some strong new hands to go around her waist.

When she discovered that David Spinozza was breaking up with his wife, she began to write David some helpful letters, offering good advice. Then, toward the end of the session each day, there would be a few minutes when Yoko and David could chat and flirt without attracting notice. May Pang detected this dalliance immediately, but she could be relied upon to keep her mouth shut. Nobody else was allowed inside the studio.

Yoko's problem was what to do about John. Recently John had humiliated Yoko at Jerry Rubin's flat by taking Jerry's girl into an adjacent room and fucking her. It was probably this outrage that inspired Yoko to adopt a drastic but characteristic solution to her problem.

The Beatles' days:

"On 18 June Paul threw a big party to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The event drew every notable musician in Liverpool as well as Paul's "star guests," He had arrived with Cynthia, whom he introduced to everyone as his "date." No sooner did he begin to drink than he became abusive toward his wife, taunting her before the company and quickly reducing her to the verge of tears.

When Pete Shotton arrived, he found John slumped in a corner, a glass of Coke and scotch in his hand, looking very glum. "Fucking hell, Pete!" cried John, his face lighting up, "Fuck the rest of this party! Let's go get us a drink!"

when Bob Wooler came up to Lennon and said, "How was the honeymoon, John?" Taking Wooler's remark as an insulting reference to the recent trip to Spain with Epstien, John doubled up his fist and smashed the little disc jockey in the nose. Then, seizing a shovel that was lying in the yard, Lennon began to beat Wooler to death. Blow after blow came smashing down on the defenseless man lying on the ground. It would have ended in murder if John had not suddenly realized: "If I hit him one more time, I'll kill him!" Making an enormous effort of will, Lennon restrained himself. At that instant three men seized him and disarmed him. An ambulance was called for Wooler, who had suffered a broken nose, a cracked collarbone, and three broken ribs. Lennon had broken a finger.

John's rampage didn't stop with the fighting. Now it was time for the fucking. Grabbing a girl standing next to him, Lennon began to paw the alarmed young woman. Billy J. Kramer, Brian's new star, barked, "Lay off, John!" Lennon turned on the girl and said something very insulting. Then he sneered, "You're nothing, Kramer. We're the top!

When Shotton returned, he found John "sitting on the floor with his head cradled in his hands, shielding himself from the dagger like stares of his fellow partygoers and moaning, 'What have I done?"' He wasn't remorseful, simply fearful that he had fucked up his career. How little shame he felt was manifest when he turned to Pete and suggested that they swap wives for the night

"John Lennon committed another and even more ghastly outrage. This incident was witnessed by Alan Davidson, a NEMS clerk, who went to a flat in Leese Street one night to return a tape recorder he had repaired. A party was in progress. "There were lots of girls... booze and pills," recalled Davidson.

"I got there half eleven or quarter to twelve. I think Brian was there. A row [began] over something. There was an old-fashioned gas fire with fluted porcelain jets. He [John Lennon] grabbed hold of Beryl's hand and shoved it into the fire and tried to hold it there. She screamed. With the amount of booze and the amount of pills that were involved in the party, nobody really took any notice of it. But being cold sober, I took quite a bit of notice. He did hold her hand there. She was badly burned. He let go of her and just pushed her across the room." Commenting on this extraordinary scene, Davidson remarked matter-of-factly: "John Lennon in sober moments was quite a nice person. In drug moments or booze moments he was a thug.

Everyone in these interviews crabs about Ono monitoring Lennon too closely, when it's clear that he was emotionally unstable to the point of needing a 24/7 professional minder, not just someone who opened his mail and vetted his mistresses.

1976

"John resumed his relationship with May Pang in January 1976, but instead of their meeting at Richard Ross's apartment two or three times a week, the frequency of these assignations diminished to once every two or three months. One of the problems was the tightening of Yoko's surveillance of John now that she was free of the distractions of maternity. Another obstacle was Ross's growing reluctance to act as go-between. Yet another reason why Lennon wasn't as keen as before was the sexually dampening effect of heroin. Though May could never figure out what had come over her lover, she observed during the next few years an astonishing change in the man she knew so well.

The John I encountered in the[se] years seemed totally lacking in ambition," she remarked. "He seemed capable of concentrating for only short periods of time. Sometimes he would just sit there and look at me through glazed eyes. His spirit, his wit, his insight seemed to have disappeared, and he appeared to have no energy at all."

When John wasn't making love to May, he liked to reminisce about their good times together. He rarely said anything about his life with Yoko and Sean, but he always told May how much he missed her. That she was spending month after month looking for work in an industry that had blackballed her because of her relationship with Lennon didn't trouble John in the least. As always, he dismissed from his thoughts anything that might disturb his peace of mind.

There were some things that he could not so easily dismiss. During the first six months of 1976 he was hit by a dismaying sequence of surprising fatalities among his friends and family. The first shock was the news that Mal Evans had been shot to death by the police in Los Angeles. Like everyone who knew Mal, John could not comprehend how such a sweet, gentle, pacific man could come to such a violent end. The story is strange.

"When John Lennon proffered his gold American Express card to the reservations clerk at the Mandarin Hotel on Hong Kong island, he must have been dying to get up to his suite, where he could stretch out in bed and gaze peacefully at the telly, while listening to the radio and sipping a scotch and Coke. As one drink led to another, however, Lennon began to feel, lying drunk in this exotically decorated hotel suite on the other side of the world, rather like Alice when she stepped through the looking glass. Then he went to pieces.

"I played this game with myself in Hong Kong," Lennon told John Green when the trip was over. "I started taking off different layers of myself as if they were layers of clothing and setting them out about the room. I imagined my different subpersonalities as sort of ghostly forms. I would lie there listening to the radio and wait till one of my other selves came up and took control. Then I would project, see it sitting in a chair or standing by the door and talking to me. There were rules to this little game. Wherever I placed one of these ghosts, that's where he had to stay. Hanging on a hook in the closet, draped over the dresser, wherever. I kept them there for days. It was like creating my own haunted house.

"Every time I had successfully peeled off another layer I would go in and take a bath. After every bath I would take another drink. The baths were to help me relax, but they were also a test. If I found that I couldn't emotionally handle being in the water and had to jump right out of the tub again, then I knew that I hadn't managed to get that last layer off successfully.

"I don't mind telling you there were some very scary moments. Every little sound and shadow seemed twenty times louder and a hundred times larger. I was exposing myself, and I was afraid that someone, that invisible, unknown someone, maybe my long-absent [recently deceased!] father, would come storming into the room and catch me and I would die of fright.

"I played that game for three days before I left my rooms. I would wake up out of half sleeps and look around to see if all my mes were still draped around where they were supposed to be, and they were. My goal was to get them all off and leave them in the room and not come back. I thought I could escape them that way, but of course, it didn't work. They can walk through locked doors, you know. When I finally did go out, it was sunrise. I started down the street with just my passport and credit cards, thinking I had tricked those other mes and got away."

"When John walked out of the world-famous Oriental Hotel on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, he would have been accosted by steerers, who would have presented him with their comically garbled cards, reading, perhaps, "You haven't had your job blown until one of our girls does it."

Stepping into the first parlor that caught his fancy, he would have found a room stacked on one side with bleachers on which were lined up the girls, each one holding in her hands a placard with a big number. When he had picked the best numbers, the girls would check out the job with the mama-san and then lead him to a private room. Here they would disrobe, revealing themselves as tiny, undeveloped creatures with small breasts and virtually no pubic hair, very shy, very soft-spoken, talking almost in whispers, and utterly compliant. Having sex with these girls is the closest thing in the world to legally sanctioned child abuse, which is why Thai whores are the favorites of jaded men.

John's girls would be reluctant to do anything kinky but would be eager to whack him off, blow him, or have intercourse. The cost of the toss was about the price of a movie ticket. John might have also indulged himself with a Thai boy, who enjoys precisely the same reputation among sophisticated homosexuals as do the girls with straight men. Naturally there would be no problem about procuring his favorite marijuana, Thai stick, or in buying high-quality heroin at astonishingly low prices. As John was abroad for at least two weeks, spending only four days in Hong Kong, it is likely that he had a nice long layout in the cathouses of Bangkok: Some men wouldn't have come home.

to be continued

Do people still care about these old shenanigans by dead people?

R47 Yes, some i guess

I am really starting to think he was gay and feeling guilty and angry about it fuck ed any woman he could find to prove to himself he wasnt and showed his anger by being brutal with them. Men who get brutal with the women they have sex with have unresolved sex problems. Just my opinion, could be wrong. But just too much going on with the sex and drugs and violence. A very angry man who seemed to need to prove himself.

Why is the OP refusing to give us the source for this?

There might be several sources. Many books were written about Lennon and the Beatles and they all feature stories of his drunken, drug addled, frequently insane behavior and his tortured relationship with Yoko Ono. She really is as awful as she was always made out to be. If only John had left her for May Pang! But she had her hooks into him too deeply for that to happen.

"Seider had studied Yoko carefully during the three years he had been the Lennons' counselor. It was clear to him that Yoko felt that she should have enjoyed the success that John had attained. "How can that oaf be so successful," she would ask, "when I am so much more talented and educated?" Despite her low opinion of John, however, Yoko had no intention of divorcing him, because, in Seider's view, she saw him as the "bank," and Yoko was so concerned about money that the lawyer believed that if she ever went broke, she might kill herself. Now that she and John had agreed to make no more art, it was clear to Seider that. Yoko's primary goal was to gain total control over the "bank," which put her on a collision course with Seider, whose goal it was to prevent anybody from gaining control over his client. Hence, Seider was doomed because Yoko "couldn't allow a moderating influence upon John, with him having an alternate opinion."

On 16 January 1977 Yoko was on the phone to Sam Green: "You can do anything! Charlie Swan says you can do anything! You are our marvel man! Now you've got to drop everything and focus on this! It's the most important thing to John. Now that he's got his green card, i want to be at the inauguration!"

Sam Green was aghast. This was Sunday. The inaugural festivities would begin Wednesday. It was too late! "Yoko," he gasped, "I've only been to Washington twice in my whole life! I don't know a single politician! I wouldn't know where to begin!" The more Sam squirmed, the harder Yoko pressed him. After he had exhausted himself, he hung limp and silent for a moment.

Yoko seized the opportunity to close the discussion. "You'll manage!" she pronounced emphatically - and hung up"

John Lennon was blissfully stoned when he arrived at JFK to catch National's 4:05 flight to Washington. As he sat in the first-class cabin chuckling at this last-minute triumph, he kept nodding out, his discourse sloping off on some strange inconsequent track as he lost consciousness. Sam Green must have shown his bewilderment because the next time John came out of his stupor, he fed Sam a typical Lennon put-on. "I suppose you're wonderin' why I'm so drowsy," drawled John. "It's because me adrenal glands are all fucked up. It's from drinkin' twenty or thirty cups of espresso a day. I've got to cut it down." Then, lips wreathed in a smile, he nodded out again.

That night Sam Green and the Lennons got dressed in formal evening attire and repaired to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Yoko wore a white strapless gown by Bill Blass with massive chains of gold and jewels about her neck and her hair done up at Sam's urging, in a chignon. John threw over his dress suit a black cape lined with white satin and combed his hair back from his forehead like a Romantic poet. After witnessing a very political variety show, they went backstage with the other VIPs to greet President-elect Carter. Sam was tickled by the fact that he was greeted warmly by so many celebrities, whereas virtually no one said hello to John and Yoko. Lauren Bacall, the Lennons' neighbor at the Dakota, hailed Sam effusively and embraced him affectionately, while tossing the Lennons a breezy "Hi, John and Yoko!" When Lennon was presented to Carter, the dialogue was on the coy side. "Maybe you remember me," said John - "I'm an ex-Beatle." The President remembered - and that was that."

1977

"Though John usually followed Yoko's lead without argument, he was very skeptical about this Japanese expedition. Basically he didn't want to go, and if he went, he didn't want to remain there nearly half a year. John's six-week course at Berlitz wouldn't enable him to speak Japanese, and the trip would deprive him of summer at the shore. What's more, even .though he was not a student of Japanese civilization he could see that a lot of Yoko's arguments were poppycock

Next, Lennon turned sullen and refused to participate in any outings. Day after day he sulked in his vast suite. Morosely he eyed Japanese TV, which offers one channel for tourists, showing travelogues. Then, one night, he allowed himself to be coaxed into going out to supper at one of Tokyo's most prestigious restaurants.

No sooner were John and Yoko seated than John cast an appraising look about the room, filled with wealthy and elegant patrons. "Ya know, what they say about the Japanese is right!" he exclaimed in a loud, strident tone, like the worst white-devil foreigner. "They all do look alike!"

Yoko was horrified. She knew that virtually everybody in the room was capable of understanding John. Whispering frantically, she begged him to lower his voice and hold his tongue. John's only response was to continue speaking in the same loud, provocative tone, inquiring, "Which is the preferred term for these people - 'nip' or 'gook'?" That did it! Yoko jumped to her feet and dragged John out of the restaurant

"When Yoko poured out her problems to the groggy John Green, he told her that John was suffering from imprisonment. Why not give him a little freedom? "Buy him a bike," counseled the oracle.

One night John Green was awakened by an S0S. "Charlie!" Yoko burst out. "I think John's gone crazy!" When Green objected that Yoko was always calling John crazy, Yoko gave him a description of John's behavior that would have given pause to the most skeptical observer of Lennon's moods and conditions.

"He doesn't talk to anyone," Yoko gasped. "He doesn't seem to hear anyone talking to him. Sometimes he just stands in the corner and moans. It's terrible. I knew he didn't like it here. I knew he wanted to get out, but I kept hoping that if we just waited a little longer, he would get used to things here. I think the pressure was too much for him. He doesn't have a very strong mind, you know. I think he's snapped!"

A few nights later, Green got a call from Lennon. When Green asked John what he had been up to, Lennon replied, "I've been dead, Charles." Then he went on to explain what had killed him: "Yoko killed me; this place killed me; the damned Japan-nieces killed me."

John said ""I'd lie in bed all day, not talk, not eat, just withdraw. And a funny thing happened. I began to see all these different parts of me. I felt like a hollow temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another. I realized then what the problem is that I have to solve. I have to be all of those people. But I can't be all those people all the time. And in the past, whenever I became one of them, I became that thing, that person so totally that I forgot the others. I don't know how to stop. I have no device, no magic, to keep an easy flow from one part of my personality to another. I need that because, Charles, the secret, the secret, is changing.

"On the night of 24 August, after putting a welcoming gift of flowers and walnut sweet rice in Mintz's room at the Mampei Hotel, John Lennon sat down to his typewriter and began to tap out a letter to himself in the style of a diary. Over the course of the next thirteen days, which covered the end of his stay at Karuizawa and his return to the Okura in Tokyo, he made a couple of other entries, so that the writing he mailed to New York amounted to three single-spaced pages, containing a finely cut histological slice of his mind.

The moment you start reading these entries, you sense yourself to be inside a private mental space that is oddly familiar in its quiet, intimate, self-absorbed atmosphere.

"The sound of Yoko vomiting in the bathroom sets John's mind running with thoughts about her being pregnant again. After a further stream of associations, he comes around to how he feels about being marooned in Japan. Reflecting that he's been alone all his life and likes to be alone, he remarks ironically on how he is always trying to "JOIN SOMETHING," even though "basically I don't like people." He feels "guilty and alienated,"

but he recognizes this tendency is just a neurotic symptom because "nothing worth knowing ever came out of a mob." So it's not so bad being in Japan because every place is the same to a solipsist and life is "DEJA VU," the same old thing every time, the only difference being that as you grow older, the pace slackens to "SLOW MOTION."

The other theme that exercises him intensely is the failure of his talent. Oddly he notes that he has plenty of tunes but no words worth singing. His consolation is that in the Eighties he will flourish again because, though he doesn't say so, the psychics have predicted that early in the decade his numbers will be right. The letter concludes with a few wry remarks on the death of Elvis, who John was wont to say had died when he went into the army: a sage observation. On this note he signs off, giving no sign of emotional disturbance, at most appearing a little blue, which is probably how he usually felt when he was not high on drugs or excitement"

"When Yoko gave John his travel orders, she told him that the directional man had decreed that he and his party must fly home in a westerly direction, which meant a twenty-five-hour journey via Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and Frankfurt, where they would be obliged to remain overnight. Appalled as John was by this prospect, he didn't have the courage to fly in the face of Mother's magic. He lived by faith, the faith he had expressed to Elliot Mintz when he arrived, exhorting him: "Trust her! Just trust her!"

"By 1978 John Lennon had ceased to resemble himself. Wasted by dieting, fasting and self-induced vomiting, he weighed only 130 pounds. Totally enervated by lack of purpose and exercise, he rarely left his bed. Drugged all day on Thai stick, magic mushrooms, or heroin, he slept much of the time and spent his waking hours in a kind of trance. Though he kept up the pretense of running the house and taking care of Sean, he was so zonked out that his presence in the apartment was hardly noticed. People who worked for the family would say, "Is there a real John Lennon?"

What had happened to John? The same thing that happened to Howard Hughes and many another wealthy, self-indulgent recluse. Lennon had simply refused to pay the price for staying alive, the toll levied in terms of involvement, responsibility, and effort. Finding in Yoko Ono someone who was willing, in fact eager, to lift off his shoulders all the burdens of existence, John had drifted far away from reality. He had taken up residence in the fantastic realm of "Imagine," where nothing that is matters at all and where everything one fancies can be achieved effortlessly through magic. The results of this irrational translation were profoundly ironic.

Instead of finding peace and comfort in his protective bubble, John was tormented constantly by scores of petty discomforts that came pouring out in his notes to his gofers. There was always something wrong with the TV, the morning paper had failed to arrive, or the soap in the kitchen was not organic.

John's health, which he thought he was guarding with his self-denying regimen, was actually being undermined. He complained of colds and fevers, chronic indigestion and constipation, headaches and toothaches, dizzy spells and tachycardia. Once he exposed his gums to Marnie and showed her an eruption that had him quite worried.

Though Lennon was a hypochondriac, alarmed by every ache and pain, he never sought professional help, doubtless because he knew that any legitimate doctor would demand that his patient give up illegal drugs.

"Perhaps the cruelest irony of Lennon's self-destructive life-style was the way it had reduced him to the hapless condition of Elvis during his final years. Though John wasn't fat, he had brought himself through starvation to the same state of befuddled torpor. There was one great difference, however. No matter how low Elvis sank, he had to rouse himself periodically to make a living, whereas John was free to sink to the very bottom."

Although John became in his last years a kind of invalid, pale, wasted, generally confined to his sickroom, his underlying character never altered. If Yoko left him alone or sent him off somewhere for a few days, he reverted to type. That's what happened in late September 1978, when she dispatched him to the Hawaiian Islands.

Odd journeys to distant and unlikely places became a feature of Lennon's life in his last years, as Yoko sought to make him (or herself!) feel better by posting him in promising directions. Why she chose Hawaii is as much a mystery as why she later picked Cape Town.

"Mother-fucker!" cried Jesse Ed when he recognized John. "What are you doing here?"

John gave Jesse and Tommy a quick squint through his shades. Then, in a raspy, drunken voice, he snapped, "Come in here!" They ducked into the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel. When Lennon felt he was safely out of sight and hearing, he confessed that he was "running away from Yoko." "What happened?" exclaimed Jesse Ed "I don't want to talk about it!" rasped John, "You know where we can get somethin'?"

Jesse Ed said he had the connection - did Lennon have the loot? John said he had $300. That was all it took to get the boys into a cab and over to Uwe Beach, where they found a dealer built like a refrigerator, named Timmy. The transaction was swiftly concluded, and the gang took off for home. When Jesse Ed asked John where he was staying, Lennon said he didn't know but he had the key to the room.

Once back at the hotel, the action accelerated like the jerky frames of an old movie. Lennon was the buyer, so he had the first crack at the smack

"John knew just what to do," recalled Jesse. "He didn't even need a tourniquet." Lennon had "good ropes." After John got off, Jesse and Cowboy followed. Then they all kicked back to enjoy the high. Ordering up a quart of Smirnoff and a couple of containers of orange juice, they tuned the TV to Star Trek

When the alcohol had mingled nicely with the heroin, John asked if there was someplace they could go and play. Jesse Ed said that there was a real bust-out joint not far away that would welcome a little entertainment. Grabbing a couple of guitars that John was carrying, the boys made their way to the John Barleycorn in Pearl City

After twenty minutes of watching Dumbo, John murmured, "I can't stand this, Marnie. Let's go down to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee." When they had settled down in the Lennons' kitchen, Marnie observed that John was unusually nervous. "He was jumpy," she recalled. "I thought it was just jet lag. He was drinking coffee and scratching around the ear-pieces of his glasses, scratching the nosepieces of his glasses, scratching along his cheeks, scratching - he was making me very nervous doing that. I said, 'Why don't you scratch your teeth?' He said, 1 would if I could!' Finally, Yoko came down and sat in a chair and went to sleep... Yoko scratched plenty, too, but I thought this was due to her wool allergies and cat allergies."

One of the nice things about Marnie Hair was that she didn't know the first thing about drugs.

After Sean' birthday party John withdrew to his room and remained in seclusion. Every day, when Marnie would come to pick up or deliver the kids, she would find him incommunicado. After he had been hibernating for weeks, Marnie remarked: "If he doesn't come out of that room, he's going to turn to mold!"

"Listen," snapped Yoko, "we're gonna treat him like the fungus he is - keep him in the dark and feed him horse-shit!"

Obnoxious drunks are the worst.

"As a rich junkie John Lennon could obtain unlimited quantities of China White, the very pure heroin that comes into the States from Southeast Asia. Rarely did his connection fail. But nobody operates with 100 per cent efficiency in the drug game. There were days when the runner came back from Chinatown with a long story and an empty hand. When that happened, someone else had to take the responsibility for getting John his medicine.

One day Marnie was mildly puzzled when Yoko called her and said with a sense of urgency in her voice: "Meet me downstairs at the entrance to your building!" Expecting to be picked up, as always, by a stretch limo with a tiny woman in the back seat, Marnie was astonished to see Yoko scurrying down the block, trying to look inconspicuous. When the doorman of Marnie's building lunged forward to assist Yoko, who had stuck out her hand to flag a cab, she shrank back from the curb and whispered to her friend: "Do you think he recognized me?" Then Yoko dismissed the doorman and asked Marnie to go out on the street and hail the taxi.

Once the women were on their way downtown, Yoko began chattering nervously about everything under the sun. Marnie knew better than to ask any questions. After a long and circuitous drive they reached Alphabetsville, the most forbidding part of the Lower East Side, where the avenues bear letters as names, like A, B, C. Cruising past vacant lots, boarded-up stores, and dilapidated tenements, the driver came to a stop in front of a scabrous old wreck of a building that appeared completely abandoned. Sheets of galvanized iron had been nailed over the doors and windows

Yoko told the hackie to wait and then ducked out of the cab. Up the dirty steps, littered with broken bottles and discarded beer cans, she scampered until she got to the door. At that moment a hand reached out and pushed open a rent between the sheet metal and the doorjamb. Yoko ducked inside.

Marnie was alarmed. Entering a building like this was a very dangerous act for anyone, much less a little woman like Yoko, whose purse was always stuffed with $100 bills. As the meter ticked on, minute after minute, Marnie's anxiety mounted. She was just beginning to think how she might rescue her friend when the sheet metal over the door bowed out again and Yoko emerged, like a cat slipping out of the house. Jumping into the back of the cab, she shouted: "57th Street and Sixth Avenue!" - the address of the Zen Tea Room. Then, with a sigh, she leaned back and smiled at Marnie.."

Was Yoko a narcissist or psychopath?

I think John had a fucked up childhood then hit intense fame and fortune early in life. That is a recipe for disaster.

"Early in December 1978 Yoko flew to London to- attend an Apple board meeting. Though John was smacked out, he couldn't resist the temptation to go catting. No sooner was Yoko out the door, than he called up May Pang. The first time she answered, he was so anxious that he automatically hung up. The next time he began an embarrassed conversation that concluded with her agreeing to call in sick to her new employer. When John arrived an hour later at May's apartment in the East 60s, he looked half dead. It was raining and he'd had trouble getting a cab. He was so breathless that he was wheezing. When he sat down, he held May's hand against his heart, which was racing madly. May recognized what courage it had taken John to slip out of the house. Gradually she drew him out.

When she asked him if he still wanted to record, he replied: "Of course I do! I never stopped wanting to make music." At the same time he said he loved having Yoko act as his manager, pointing out that Billy Joel was managed by his wife, Elizabeth. When May countered that Billy Joel was very active both on the stage and in the studio, John changed the subject.

All that afternoon John and May spent in bed. Time and again they played "Reminiscing" by the Little River Band, a sentimental song that reminded John of his time with May. Finally, he began to get nervous, explaining that he had shut the door to his room to make it appear that he was still at home. May was saddened to see John fading away before her eyes, but she summoned a smile and told him how much she loved him. "I love you, too," he replied. Then he was out the door, down the hall, and into the elevator. May blew him a kiss good-bye. It was the last time she saw him"

"in March 1979 by renting an immense oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach. When Julian joined them during his spring holiday, John took the opportunity to make a fresh start with the boy. When Julian was twelve, John had offered him ajoint. Now he began to teach Julian the guitar, father and son playing together after dinner. John was sensible of how badly he had neglected Julian in the past and guilty about having substituted expensive gifts for real love. He proposed to reverse this pattern, but when he started explaining his intentions, he bungled the job so badly that he only succeeded in alarming the youngster.

Painfully, stammeringly, Julian struggled to explain how hard it was to be the son of a superstar. Though he and his mother had very little, his schoolmates insisted that Julian's house was papered with ten-pound notes. The only way he could placate these brutal boys was by sharing the goodies that his father provided. If John were not going to give Julian any more expensive presents, he would be in serious trouble. What's more, Julian had brought John a gift. Or was all this talk of gifts some game John was playing?

Reacting to Julian's timid little speech as if it were a slap in the face, John jumped back a yard. Instead of talking to his son and making their minds meet, Lennon threw up his hands and announced that he had made a terrible mistake. Everything was going back to where it had stood before. Henceforth Julian would get his gifts - and be damned!

"The Golden Lady was quite another story. This gold-leafed sarcophagus studded with semiprecious stones - a piece from the twenty-sixth dynasty (about 3,000 years ago) - contained under unbroken seal the mummy of a woman. The hieroglyphic inscription identified the woman only as being "from the East." The moment Yoko heard that mysterious phrase, she was convinced that this mysterious woman was actually herself in a previous incarnation.

She had John Green read on the mummy immediately. He found the cards favored the purchase of the piece....

On 29 January 1978, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the art movers tramped into the apartment, bearing their precious burden. But when the gold-gleaming sarcophagus was exposed, Yoko was horrified by the face carved on the lid of the burial box. The mysterious woman from the East was an ugly little creature who didn't bear the slightest resemblance to Yoko Ono!

A couple of days later, when John Green came up to the Dakota for his weekly consultation, he found Yoko in a highly agitated condition. She commanded him to look at the sarcophagus. "Is there something special I should be looking for?" he inquired blandly.

"Yes, the face! Look at that face! If that's what the woman inside looked like, then I don't think it could be me." "Why not?" asked Green, playing it dumb. "Because she's not Japanese."

"No one ever said that she was, Yoko," Green replied calmly. "She was 'from the East,' and from the look of it, she was Persian."

"If you don't like it we could always sell it," said Green helpfully. "No, that's no good," snapped Yoko. "I told John that I had to have it because it was me, and now I'm stuck with it!"

Well, r49, DL does have a theory about Western men with Asian women.

Egypt :

"On 19 January 1979, Sam flew first to London, where he stopped to party with some friends. No sooner did he start having fun with the society people than he got an emergency call from Yoko. She told him that Charlie Swan had discovered through reading the cards that the only solution to the Egyptian problem was for Yoko to go to the secret dig herself. (Most likely, Yoko decided to go herself and then shifted the responsibility to the cards.)

As if this startling declaration were not bad enough, Yoko announced next that she intended to bring along Lennon! After rattling off some nonsense about their numbers being in harmony for once, she ordered Sam to obtain suitable accommodations for the royal couple in Cairo and then make all necessary preparations for a journey into the desert.

Bursting with energy, she announced that she was going to accompany Sam to the dig. He warned that her presence would attract so much attention that the whole scheme would be exposed. He was planning to go in disguise, he explained, swathed in robes and bumoose like a Bedouin. "If you can go in disguise, so can I!" snapped Yoko, thrilled by the idea of masquerade. In a flash she conjured up a picture of herself costumed as a Middle Eastern princess, accompanied by John, who would be identified as her bodyguard

To kill time, Sam decided to take the Lennons on a sight-seeing expedition to the famous step pyramids at Saqqarah. Arriving at sunset, they bribed a guide to take them about after closing time. The experience was thrilling. "We were all tingling with excitement," recalled Sam. "John kept saying: 'This is a magical place, a magical time. I've been here before!"' In the photograph of the party taken inside the tombs, a weird aura emanates from every face. John, inspired to behave as he had in youth, broke off a tooth from a mummy's mouth and popped it in his pocket. By the time he got back to the hotel, he was so uneasy about having taken something that might be tainted with a curse that he discarded the tooth immediately.

At night Yoko would wait till John nodded off; then she would slip over to Sam's room to continue their plotting. The more Sam procrastinated, the more Yoko fought to overcome his resistance. Just as he was lying about the difficulties of the situation, she started lying about the ease of the solution. She claimed that she was receiving instructions from her distant psychics through mental telepathy and even by possession.

"Sam!" she cried. "This is not me talking; this is the supernatural! And the supernatural has always been right. This is the way we're going to do it!" Then she rattled off a scenario in which they bribed their way past a military checkpoint and went plunging into the wasteland guided by her voices

Meantime, Sam would duck out of the hotel to meet with the head of the secret police, who, he was convinced, knew the whereabouts of the mysterious dig. He also kept hammering away at the telephone operators in the basement of the hotel, trying to get a line to New York as well as bugging his local travel agent to obtain flights to the States. Often he bumped into Yoko in the telephone room.

Talking with the apathetic Lennon. "The little woman has it all planned," John assured the fuming Sam Green. "There's no point in not going along with her. I tried, and it doesn't work - believe me! And she's more often than not right. So I just sit back and wait for what the oracle says next." That was Lennon's basic rationalization. He could apply it to particular moments, like the present, or he could extend it to cover his whole life. "The big plan is that I do nothing for the next four years," John told Sam one afternoon. "Yoko says that everything I do is doomed to failure until the year 1982. That year, according to the numbers, I'll conquer the world again. Before that, if I try anything, I'll just fall on me face."

[quote] There might be several sources.

Then he could list them.

This is just a robot troll posting over and over again.

"For days John and Sam sat in their banquette, John drinking endless cups of coffee while Sam sipped cocktails. Meanwhile, Yoko kept watch by the phone in her room, sitting for hours on end with the dead instrument in her hand, as she burned the split ends of her hair with the tip of a cigarette. Sam sought time and again to distract John by offering to show him around the city. He pictured the delights of horseback riding near the pyramids, an exploratory walk through the ancient necropolis or a visit to the Great Museum, which stood just across the street.

Lennon would have nothing to do with anything that demanded the slightest physical exertion. He was a prisoner of apathy. In fact, he was a bound prisoner. One of his habitual mannerisms was binding his wrists with a bit of string, a rubber band, a robe tie, whatever lay at hand. He also wore a pin whose design was a butterfly caught in a spider's web.

The only thing John would do is talk, in the manner of a monologist, rambling on from one theme to another, often reaching back to the years with the Beatles. One day he drifted into his recollections of Brian Epstein. He conceded that he had loved Brian "more than he could love a woman." John was intent, however, on making clear that he had never been sexually intimate with Brian. He admitted that he had almost wanted to try it, but he just couldn't - and didn't. Sam - whom John regarded as gay - got the impression that John wanted to put on record that he was no fag

"Green called Yoko and began a heavy reading, in the course of which he identified a dangerous presence in her vicinity. "There is someone near you who will obstruct your purpose and betray your intentions," he intoned as if he were the voice of the cards. "Tom Hoving!" gasped Yoko.

Immediately Green read on Hoving. Yes, it was clear now. Hoving was on assignment for the Egyptian government. He would detect them and denounce them to the Egyptian police. They were in grave danger. They must flee -immediately!

August 1979:

"Unlike Yoko, Lennon had developed such a loathing for himself, according to John Green, that he applied his enormous powers of determination to getting off heroin- and he succeeded. To keep himself from relapsing, John began employing a sensory deprivation tank located in the attic of the house he had recently purchased on Long Island. Lennon would climb inside this big cedar-wood box, resembling a coffin, and close the lid. Floating for up to half an hour in the dark, buoyed by the warm saline solution, he experienced a sensation that reminded him of getting high.

While John was spacing out, Yoko was, as usual, gunning her engine. Her latest obsessions were the Broadway theater and the real estate market.

"Once John got off heroin, his natural strength began to revive, and with it his yearning to get back to work. Yet Yoko would not lift the ban on making music. No matter how restless he became, she kept warning him that if he tried to work against the stars, he would fall fiat on his face and suffer a humiliating failure. Hence, his long silence ..."

Paul McCartney ' Japan drug Bust :

When Fred Seaman reported for work on the morning of 15 January 1980, he was dying to ask John about a call that had come through the office the day before from Paul McCartney. Paul had rung up from the Stanhope Hotel, where he was staying with Linda and the kids prior to taking off for a tour of Japan with Wings. Yoko had taken the call, and Paul had told her that he had scored some "dynamite grass," offering to bring some to John. When Yoko blocked this move, Paul retaliated instinctively by boasting that he and Linda were going to occupy the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Okura - the Lennons' official residence in Tokyo.

This jab had a shattering effect on Yoko. She told Sam Green that she felt that Paul and. Linda were invading her home. Immediately she informed John, who became just as upset as she. He was still upset, his head turtled into a bowl of shredded wheat, when Fred entered the kitchen that morning. Inquiring with feigned casualness about Paul's call, Fred met with a blank response at first. But the thing lay so heavily on John's mind that he couldn't remain silent for long. Bit by bit he disclosed the story, revealing finally, what most troubled him. "He's going to spoil our hotel karma," complained John. "We've had really excellent hotel karma so far, and I'd hate to see them contaminate it for us. If Paul and Linda sleep there, we'll never have peace when we go back in that room." Fortunately all was not lost. "I already talked to Mother," said John. "She and Charlie Swan are working it out." Indeed, they were!

Next morning, while watching the seven-o'clock news, Fred was startled to hear that Paul McCartney had been busted in Tokyo for drugs! Rushing to the Dakota, he was greeted by Richie, who smiled sarcastically and said: "Isn't it funny the way Paul got busted in Japan today? Especially since he called yesterday asking if he should bring over some smoke?" As the day wore on, hourly reports were received from Japan on the McCartney case.

On the afternoon of the bust a holiday mood prevailed in the Land of Lennono. John told Fred Seaman to get every paper he could lay his hands on, particularly the British papers. He was determined to relish every crumb of Paul's misfortune. When Yoko's informants reported that Paul's jailhouse guards were making him sing "Yesterday" over and over again, Lennon's joy knew no bounds. Slapping his thigh with glee, he burst into song himself, howling the line about how Paul's troubles had seemed so distant. John boasted to Fred: "We could get him off like that!" snapping his fingers. "Mother's got all these connections... But of course, he'd never call to ask for help. It would be beneath him."

The day after the bust Fred drove John and Yoko to Suffern, New York, to inspect yet another house. John loaded a pipe with Thai stick and crowed: "This is dynamite weed!" Then, smoking contentedly in the back of the station wagon, he uttered his last word on the subject of Paul's arrest: "You know, it's Paul's arrogance towards the Japanese that screwed him. I just know it." Yoko chimed in: "That's right!"

A year later John Green told Jeffrey Hunter: "She claimed to have made the arrangements by telephone, telling undisclosed Japanese authorities that McCartney had a low opinion of the Japanese."

Sam Green corroborated this statement, adding: "She had a cousin over there who runs customs. One call from Yoko and Paul was finished." "

"While Yoko was having Paul busted for drugs in Japan, she was sinking herself into the terminal phase of heroin addiction. Her skin was green, her cheeks were hollow, her speech was slurred, and her hips and legs were black and blue from bumping into things. She would wear the same clothes for days and never bathe. When Sean would go to her for a kiss, he would recoil and cry: "Mommy! You stink!" Sam Green was now very concerned about Yoko. He asked constantly: "Where will this end?" It was obvious that matters could not long continue upon such a disastrous course. Yet nothing changed until the first week in April 1980, when Yoko finally summoned up the courage to confront her addiction.

At that moment the Lennons were at Palm Beach. They had arrived with Julian on the day before Yoko's birthday, 18 February. John had celebrated the occasion in a highly ambiguous manner. He had sent Fred out to purchase hundreds of white gardenias. When Yoko awoke and saw the flowers, she was horror-stricken. In Japan gardenias are the flowers of death. They are always banked around the corpse at funerals. Presumably John had acted without knowledge of this fact, but it is also possible that he had learned it and forgotten it and was subconsciously rebuking Yoko for sinking into the living death of heroin addiction.

The holiday in the sun, which entailed such pastimes as a boat cruise and much lolling about in El Salano's two swimming pools, came to an end just before Julian's birthday. John took the boy back to New York to see Beatlemania on Broadway and gave him an expensive Rolex watch, which Julian promptly lost, quaking with terror at the thought of his father's wrath. On the day of his birthday, 8 April, he was put aboard a plane to England. Now, her immediate responsibilities discharged, Yoko faced the sour music of detoxification

Though Yoko had persuaded herself - against all reason - that John did not suspect her of being addicted, she was not so foolish as to think that she could go through the Sturm und Drang of heroin withdrawal without revealing her secret. Clearly her first move had to be getting John Lennon out of the house. She instructed John Green to give Lennon a tarot reading and then send him off to some distant place, promising him that he would be vouchsafed great spiritual revelations. Green refused to cooperate. He told Yoko that she should confront John with the fact that she was hooked and work out a solution with his cooperation. Yoko took matters into her own hands and told John that he must leave immediately for the house at Cold Spring Harbor because she was about to be initiated into a secret society and the rites demanded absolute privacy. Gullible as ever, Lennon allowed himself to be bundled off on 9 April with Fred, Sean, and the indispensable housekeeper..."

"John Lennon had no idea what was going on at the Dakota during this period because he could not make a telephone call. Just before she had begun her cure, Yoko had gone out to Cold Spring Harbor and persuaded John to take a ten-day vow of silence. For a compulsive talker like Lennon, this was a terrible ordeal. Soon John became so irascible that people at the house spent their days figuring out how to avoid him. He sustained himself by reading Gordon Liddy's best seller, Will, whose theme is how to triumph over adversity through the exercise of willpower

Lennon identified deeply with Liddy, particularly in the most dramatic episodes, as when Liddy tied himself to the top of a tree during a lightning storm or when he awed the black prisoners in jail by holding a burning match under his outstretched palm. Every time John would run into Fred, Lennon would mime the act of striking a match, holding it under his hand, and writhing in pain

Though Fred had been told when he first reported for duty in February 1979 that he would be expected to help John "cook brown rice," he soon discovered that his real job was to drive around most of the day in a green Mercedes station wagon with a pocket crammed full of cash for buying all the toys and delicacies Lennon craved. Every Monday Fred would go to the Bank Leumi on Broadway and 66th Street and withdraw $3,000 for his errands and $1,000 each for John and Yoko. By the end of the week his money would be gone, but John often squirreled his away for some really big blowout, like taking Sean to F. A. O. Schwarz, New York's most lavish toy store.

Another precaution John adopted was imposing on Fred an absolute ban on picking up local girls. Apologetically but firmly Lennon demanded that Fred find a steady girl and then swear her to secrecy.

"The night that John embarked on the Megan Jayne, Yoko and Sam Green entertained John Cage and Merce Cunningham at supper. Sam was startled when Yoko presented herself and Sam as a couple. At the end of the evening, Yoko asked Sam to come to Cannon Hill the following day to offer suggestions for renovating the house. Sam said that he was going to his place on Fire Island, but he would stop along the way - if he could leave in time to make the last ferry. When he reached the house the following afternoon, he ordered the limousine driver to wait. No sooner was he engrossed in his examination of the property than Yoko sent word to the driver to go back to New York.

When Sam realized that he was stuck at the house, he began to get apprehensive - even more so when it came time to retire, and Yoko started coming on strong. Sam sought to avoid a showdown. They argued back and forth for hours. "She harangued me," Sam recalled. "'Why not?' she said. "'We're friends."

Sam recoiled. "No, it's too complicated," he insisted. "I don't want to do it. I love you - but not that way! And I don't want to get involved with you."

No matter what he said, she had an answer.. "This went on till four o'clock in the morning," Sam recollected, adding ruefully, "By that time my resistance was nil."

When they got into bed, there was a lot of kissing and fondling. Sam felt that Yoko did not desire vaginal intercourse. "She actually fears penetration," he explained.

Creative Again :

"No sooner did Lennon get a minute alone with Fred than he revealed the amazing fact that his adventure aboard the yacht had revived his creative powers. He had actually composed two songs during the cruise and now was hot to write some more. What he needed was privacy and good working conditions. Fred was to get rid of the boat people immediately and then rent John a fine waterside yilla. Money was no consideration. When Fred remarked that Tyler Coneys would be hurt by such an abrupt dismissal because he regarded himself now as a friend, John snapped: "I don't have any friends. Friendship is a romantic illusion."

John was listening to Bob Marley's soulful album Burnin' when suddenly he was inspired. Explaining excitedly to Fred that one of the tracks, "Hallelujah Time," had been going around in his mind for years, John said that he had just realized why this tune had always obsessed him. It was the line about not having long to live. That was precisely how John felt - so that should be his first song! Instantly he started improvising on the line from the Marley album, which became "Living on Borrowed Time." Signaling Fred to fetch the recording gear, John sang and strummed, while Fred beat on a guitar case, until Lennon was satisfied he had gotten down what was in his head. Then, lighting up a joint, he kicked back contentedly and began to paint in rapt tones his vision of his great comeback album.

As John went on that evening, projecting his dreams upon the overarching night sky, Fred Seaman was thrilled. After more than a year of watching his hero live like a man in the grip of a wasting disease, Fred was witnessing the rebirth of the real John Lennon - the greatest songwriter of modern times.

But the rocket flight of Lennon's imagination was disrupted the very next morning when he picked up his phone and poured out his vision to Yoko. Alarmed by this unforeseen development, she scrambled to get him back under control, according to Sam Green, who became henceforth a reluctant observer of Yoko's efforts to steer her husband onto a course that accorded better with her designs. The stages in this turnaround were many and the process long; in fact, the most decisive step was taken after the album was out of John's hands, which was appropriate in view of the fact that the record originated not with John Lennon's creative revival in June but with Yoko Ono's in May..

"Once Yoko had a stack of new songs, she had to figure out some-way to turn them into a hit album. Long experience had taught her that solo albums were of no avail. What's more, if she cut an album on her own, John would demand the same right; then the fans would leave her record on the shelf while they bought Lennon's. So it was vital to Yoko's success not only that she yoke John to her album but that some way be devised so that the fans could not listen to his songs without also hearing her songs.

Since Lennon had taken off on what he assumed would be a solo album, Yoko's first challenge was to find some way to cut in on him. Her solution to this problem was the concept of the "heart play," a dialogue between married lovers. In presenting Lennon with this idea, she put him in a bind because if he rejected the concept, he would incur the guilt of rejecting the myth of John and Yoko, to which they both had dedicated their lives. If, on the other hand, John embraced Yoko's proposal, he would have to reverse the whole orientation of his projected album by substituting an anniversary waltz for a swan song. It took scores of long-winded long-distance phone calls and, later, some highly explosive face-to-face exchanges in New York before Yoko prevailed. Eventually, however, Lennon was persuaded to abandon his vision of a reggae album with a tango attitude in favor of a record on which two people employing discordant musical idioms sing alternately, but never together, at cross purposes

The ultimate irony of Double Fantasy was that Yoko came off sounding better than John. For while he, deprived of his original inspiration, fell back timidly on the cliches of his earlier work, she was clever enough to jump on the bandwagon and exploit the style of the late Seventies. What made the irony even more exquisite was the fact that it was Lennon who launched Yoko on the New Wave

Christ, the two of them ...... U G L Y

If Yoko Ono made enormous demands on her lover, insisting that he share every one of her thoughts and impulses, she was also extremely generous to him. Just as she had showered gifts on David Spinozza at the outset of their relationship, so now she bound Sam Green to her by the prodigality of her presents.

"On the night of 26 June Yoko took Sam to the Hit Factory, where she had arranged to demo her songs with a seven-piece band. She wanted him present because he had inspired these love songs and she wished to sing them directly to her lover, exactly as John had sung to May Pang in the studios of L.A. "I'm Your Angel" describes perfectly Yoko's attitude and behavior toward Sam, the birthday greeting in the last stanza having been inspired by Sam's birthday on 20 May, the approximate date of the song's composition

"When John and Fred left the house for the airport, they had so much time ahead of them that they dismissed their driver and had a beer in a tavern near the field. The prospect of seeing Mother turned John on high. He got into a long rap about how, until he met Yoko, he had always seen sex essentially as rape. The conversation would have gone on much longer if Fred had not glanced at his watch.

That night John was on his best behavior with Yoko. He brought her into the sun-room and serenaded her. Then he played the tape of his first new songs in five years. Yoko, squatting on her feet, said nothing and exhibited no emotion. When John started importuning her to go with him for a day to Jamaica to check out the studios, Yoko said that it was impossible because she had to return to New York on Sunday. That news so shocked and angered John that he suddenly turned on Yoko and began berating her for her neglect of both him and Sean.

He warned Yoko solemnly that she would pay in the future for neglecting the boy. He told her, too, that her excuse - that she lacked the maternal instinct - was just a cop-out for not doing her job. Finally, winding up on a peak of contemporary rhetoric, he denounced her for being "macho."

Yoko was not concerned. She told John that as soon as the album was finished, she would buy him a house in Bermuda and the whole family would be able to relax. Even though he was hurt, frustrated, and offended by Yoko's behavior, he allowed himself to be consoled by this empty promise.

"After Yoko left Bermuda, John began to worry about her behavior in New York. He told Fred that Mother was spending a lot of time with Sam Green and Sam Havadtoy. He even made some references to drugs at the Dakota. One day in early July, after days of failing to get Yoko on the phone, John went into his room and wrote in a couple of hours the best piece on Double Fantasy, "I'm Losing You." The song acted like a catharsis. The moment it was complete, he became calmer and stopped trying to reach Yoko. He was determined, all the same, to find out what was happening at home. He told Fred to fly up to New York, an act that Yoko sought to block. When Fred was ready to depart, John gave him a cedar-wood box in which John had put a lock of his hair wrapped in a fresh handkerchief. The idea was to work a little of Yoko's magic on Yoko herself.

When Fred arrived at the Dakota on 4 July, Yoko was spending the four-day holiday with Sam Green on Fire Island. The sight that greeted Fred's eyes when he walked into Studio One spoke volumes about the sort of life Yoko had been leading in John's absence. "Her office," he recalled, "was strewn with papers, her dirty clothes were all over the floor, and there were half-eaten plates of sushi in advanced states of decay on her table." Upstairs he found many bottles of scotch and vodka, Sam Green's favorite drinks. When Fred tried to pump Myoko, all he could learn was that Sam Havadtoyand Luciano were bringing Yoko "envelopes."

What really rocked Fred was the rumor that Yoko was planning to divorce John and move all his belongings into Apartment 71. Then she was going to marry "Sam." Fred assumed this meant Sam Havadtoy. Naturally none of this gossip was reported to John because Fred did not want to start a war"

"Researching and planning the divorce were not enough to satisfy Yoko. She wanted to enjoy her new status immediately. Just as John put Cynthia out of his life without troubling to notify her, now Yoko did the same thing to John. She ordered Luciano to take all of John's possessions - his clothes, guitars, hi-fi gear, books, etc. - and remove them to Apartment 71. Yoko explained that when John returned, he wanted to have total privacy, even from his own family. The orders were carried out, but when Sam Green learned of the move, he was appalled at its cruelty. "You can't do it!" he protested. "You simply can't do it!" After a heated exchange John's things were brought back and restored to their normal places.

This attempt to push John out of the apartment raised the question of what was to become of Lennon when Yoko divorced him. After years of infantile dependency, John was little more than a child. Abandoning him would be like abandoning a little boy. At the age of forty he would experience again precisely what he had suffered at the age of five.

Yoko anticipated John's return with an anxiety bordering on hysteria. He had been away for nearly five months, while she enjoyed total freedom.

Yoko prepared herself for the coming encounter with the aid of Luciano, whom she enlisted to style her hair and advise her on makeup and costume. When he arrived on the big day, she had yet another task for him to perform. That night, while she and John were sitting at a table under a big umbrella in the back garden of Barbetta, a restaurant in the theater district, Luciano popped out from behind the fountain, where naked putti poured water from jars on their shoulders, and took several flashlit snapshots. "What are you doing?" demanded the astonished maitre d’.

"I'm doing fine!'" huffed the mad-looking hairdresser as he dashed out the door and jumped into a waiting car. When he got home, his phone was ringing. It was Yoko. She was thrilled at how well her sneak attack had worked

Luciano couldn't see the point of the stunt until the next day, when he read Liz Smith's column. She wrote that the night before a "Mafiastyle" photographer had harassed the Lennons while they were having a quiet dinner in a restaurant. Luciano was enlightened: "That was my introduction to the art of creating incidents in one's private life to promote one's business interests."

The day after John's return, Yoko was scheduled to do some glamour shots with photographer Brad Martin. Luciano was styling her hair when John walked into the room. Impressed by his wife's appearance, he quipped: "How much do you charge?" Yoko identified Luciano as the mystery photographer. John's mood changed abruptly. "Why didn't I see you?" he demanded sullenly.

Luciano, furious at being put in a false position, shot back: "Why didn't you know about it in the first place?"

By the following day Lennon's anger had subsided. When Luciano entered the kitchen of Apartment 72, having been sent up by Yoko to fetch a pair of boots, he found John lounging on a sofa in the nude. "So, it's you!" cried Lennon humorously.

"Yes, it is!" snapped Luciano testily. "But you can't break my camera now." John laughed and then fetched a long sigh, saying, "Oh, well, I guess Yoko has been up to her old tricks again."

At that moment Luciano noticed that one of the young gay men who were employed as workers about the flat was in the room. This set Luciano to thinking about, and later investigating, John's sexual preferences. He concluded: "John was quite frankly bisexual. His tastes were for hookers and young men about seventeen or eighteen."

"Soon Luciano was enjoying the confessional intimacies of a hairdresser with his client. Yoko complained of John's weakness and apathy. She lamented her lack of fulfillment as a woman. Once when Luciano was going on about how Sam Havadtoy never finished anything he started, Yoko told Luciano that he should be doubly happy: first, because he had an active sex life; second, because his lover was not a famous man. She went on to say that her sex life with John had all but ended. "Let's face it," she remarked resignedly, "after eleven years of marriage the fire dies." Yoko also told Luciano that she and John were at odds over the issue of having more children. John wanted a daughter, but Yoko was opposed to the idea. Though pregnancy test kits were strewn all over her office and the Lennons indulged in superstitions, like putting scissors or eggs under the bed. Yoko's obstetrician had written to tell her that she was beyond the age for bearing children. What was most interesting to Luciano was the discovery that Yoko had made up her mind to divorce John as soon as work on the new album was completed. She told him: "I need to free myself of the Lennon name."

"The plan was for John to work while Yoko and Sam played. It failed within its first hour of execution, for no sooner did John and Yoko wade ashore from the seaplane than they learned Sam was on the ocean side of the narrow barrier island with Sean. When John came striding down to the beach and saw this man whom he regarded as "one of Yoko's fags" with his son, he displayed his extreme displeasure. [Lennon's reaction was perfectly in character, but it raises a difficult question. The previous November John had redrawn his will, naming Sam Green as Sean's guardian in the event of Yoko's death or her refusal to assume responsibility for the child. Why had Lennon appointed as Sean's potential guardian a man whom he couldn't even bear to see playing innocently with his son on the beach? Granted, Lennon was notoriously indifferent to legal matters and had grown accustomed to acting as a rubber stamp for Mother. But it is still astonishing, even if it was her idea, that he left his child in the care of someone he disliked.

Two weeks later Sam spent the weekend with the Lennons at Cold Spring Harbor. John had just completed his first week in the studio. He was very unhappy because he had no confidence in himself or his material. It was at this delicate moment that Yoko started unveiling her demands for 50 percent of the album. John exploded with rage. "If that's what you want," he shouted, "there's not gonna be an album!" With that, he marched out of the room and stomped up to his bedroom, where he slammed the door. He remained in seclusion for the balance of the weekend, communicating only by slipping messages under the door.."

"Though Lennon acted confident, he was very unsure of himself after five years of exile from the studio. His anxiety was most apparent in the ways he sought to mask his voice. As he told Fred: "The more insecure I am, the more instruments I put on a track." With Double Fantasy,- Lennon's anxiety reached unprecedented heights, which meant that so many additional sounds had to be piled onto the tracks that eventually Jack Douglas ran out of space. At that point, all recording stopped for a couple of days while the producer and his engineer exercised their utmost ingenuity in attaching to their twenty-four-track tape console another twenty-four-track machine.

When it came to recording Yoko, a far greater effort had to be made. John had made it clear to Jack Douglas from the start that the goal of the album was to make Yoko a star. That meant that the musicians had to exercise all their creativity in the development of her songs and the engineer had to employ the most advanced techniques in the recording of her voice. Douglas knew from long experience that Yoko's problems were that she had no voice and could not sing on key. His solution was to record her at such high gain that if she swallowed, it would practically blow the monitors off the wall and to reserve ten of his twenty-four tracks for her vocal on the assumption that "she couldn't possibly go flat in the same place every time." Then, when everybody went home, Jack would stay up till dawn, selecting the best note from each take and assembling these scraps by hand, one syllable at a time, into phrases. To assure himself that he got that one good note on every syllable, he would make Yoko repeat her songs endlessly. Finally, she would get it right, and he would announce: "That's a print!"

"Though John was averse to giving endless interviews because he had to do virtually all the work, Yoko knew that once he was faced with the press, he would rise to the occasion. Yet she wasn't relying simply on John's wit and eloquence to push the album - Yoko had a lot of tricks up her sleeve. As Cohen observed, "She's very, very shrewd," so shrewd, in fact, that he told her that if she ever wanted to go into the PR business, he would be delighted to make her a partner in his firm. As an illustration of Yoko's shrewdness, Cohen offered her technique in leaking information. "She never wanted to be quoted directly," he recalled. "If an item had to go to Suzy or Lisa Robinson or one of those people, it always had to say: 'A source close to the Lennons.'" The reason for this indirect ascription was that "Yoko never wanted to look as if she was shoving and triggering off all this PR." Likewise, she was clever at inventing beguiling rumors. Cohen might be instructed to tell the gossip columnists: "A mystery person is sending white roses every day to the Hit Factory." The "mystery person" was, of course, Yoko Ono, but it made no difference in its effect on the public. Cohen was amazed at how the hungry media gobbled up all this malarkey. "I was getting thirty or forty calls a day for five months," he said. "I had to hire an extra man just to take the Lennon calls."

The interviews, designed to hype Double Fantasy, proved to be far more important than the album because it was they, not the album, that actually projected the Lennons' theme - the interplay between John's and Yoko's imagined selves. The interviews also provided the last great demonstration of John Lennon's unrivaled ability to make even his most preposterous notions sound completely plausible.

The game of gulling the public began on 9 September, the day Playboy's interviewer, a naive young man - actually a typical fan, obsessed with the possible reunion of the Beatles - sat down with John and Yoko in the kitchen of Apartment 72. "John leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped tightly around the cup of tea," wrote David Sheff, all agog because he felt that he and his Sony were about to record a historic moment. "He watched the steam float upward," Sheff reported. Then Lennon delivered. "I've been baking bread." "Bread!" exclaimed the astonished interviewer. Without turning a hair, John continued calmly: "And looking after the baby." Having launched his account of his hidden life on this startling note,

John went on to develop with obvious relish the theme of himself as "housemother" or "housewife." Sometimes he got so carried away by this fantasy that the whole story teetered on the edge of the risible. There was a clear note of self-parody in his account of how he would receive Yoko in the evening, simpering, "Did you have a hard day at the office? Would you like a little cocktail?" That was laying it on pretty thick, but Lennon wasn't daunted because he had learned from a lifetime of experience that there is no lie easier to swallow than the "big lie," the whopper so fantastic that nobody could possibly invent it - or forget it

"As Lennon's monologue continued through the next nineteen days, extending eventually to a 193-page book, it soon became clear that though ten years had elapsed since John last revealed himself to the public, virtually nothing had happened during all this time. Most of his rap, apart from the sex-reversal routine, concerned the distant past, whose most celebrated episodes, like his meeting with Yoko, had grown threadbare through constant retelling. What John was really intent upon in his final interviews was not revealing himself but making propaganda for his wife. "She's the teacher and I'm the pupil," he insisted, adding shrilly, "She's taught me everything I fucking know... she was there... when I was the Nowhere Man."

"At the same moment that Yoko was promulgating the idea that she and John were beyond concern for money, she was struggling to cut a new deal with a record company that would put millions of dollars in their hands. When Bruce Lundvall, president of Columbia Records, called the studio one day, John remarked: "I wouldn't take a penny less than Paul got - or the other son of a bitch [i.e. Mick Jagger]."

Yoko seconded John vigorously, vowing, "I'm going to destroy Paul! I'm going to get more than him." (Paul received, reportedly, $22.5 million.) When Yoko sat down with Lundvall and explained that the album would be half John's songs and half her songs, he said such an arrangement was completely out of the question. He was willing to offer Lennon a big advance, but it would be contingent on his delivering a Lennon album, not a John and Yoko medley.

If publicity stood at the top of Yoko's agenda, the matter that stood at its bottom was security. Back in February 1980, Yoko had begun to employ an ex-FBI man, Douglas MacDougall, to advise her on how to protect Sean and secure the houses she was purchasing. As MacDougall came and went at the Dakota, reporting on his progress in protecting homes that John rarely, if ever, visited, he observed that his client's principal residence had virtually no security. Yoko would answer the door if the desk announced a delivery, and there had been occasions when fans had gotten not only into the building but even into Apartment 72. In one instance they walked into John's bedroom! What made the security man blow his stack, however, was not these familiar dangers but the special risks to which the Lennons were exposing themselves by their enormous press campaign for Double Fantasy.

One morning MacDougall picked up the Daily News and read an interview with Yoko in which she gave the name of the studio where they were working and even the approximate hours of their departure and return. Snatching up the phone, he got through to Yoko and gave her an ultimatum. "Yoko," he began, "I don't really care if you want to get yourself killed... but I really don't want you killed... And also, it's gonna hurt my reputation if you're killed. Because people know that though I'm not handling your security. I'm involved with it in some way. I quit!" Yoko replied: "I know what you're saying is right, but I have to sell records!"

That evening John Lennon was talking on the phone to Jesse Ed Davis. "I just fired my bodyguard," Lennon reported. "Why?" demanded Davis

It's my rationale," replied John, "that if they're gonna get ya, they're gonna get you anyway. First, they kill the bodyguard."

Midway through the sessions Yoko recognized that John was bonding with the men in the studio. Although she stood guard every night in the booth, she often fell asleep on the sofa with her head on a white satin pillow and her body covered by a white satin quilt. (John blew up a photo of her in this condition which he taped over the console as a symbol of Yoko's contribution to the album.) The moment the cat's eyes would close, the mice would start to play. John would reach inside a hollow standing ashtray for a bottle of Jack Daniel's. After a couple of good snorts he would excuse himself and go into the machine room, where he would gobble down a pizza or a Whopper, which he relished after years of being compelled to eat "shaved fish." Sometimes Yoko would go home, leaving John behind. Then he would send out for some coke, and everybody would get high and happy.

John Lennon was a misogynist, elitist jerk like Brando. All of the idols are being defiled.

John' confidence reborn :

"At the party that afternoon John Lennon looked as if he had been reborn. Cutting the album had done him more good than any treatment could have achieved. Jack Douglas and his woman, Christine Desautels, recall that the more the album advanced, the stronger John became. Though Lennon complained to Jack that he had never once gotten laid during .the whole course of the sessions, one of his favorite lines being "Has anyone seen my wife?"

he was now starting to betray an interest in other women, asking Christine, for example, "Do you think women would find me attractive?" He was especially taken with the striking-looking Swedish movie actress Maud Adams. Christine, who knew Adams was tight with Ringo's ex-fiancee, Nancy Andrews, called her and learned that the Swedish beauty was between boyfriends. "Tell her," said Christine, "that John Lennon is very interested in meeting her." Maud Adams was soon on her way to New York - but not soon enough.

tAlong with Lennon's mounting self-confidence came his natural sense of humor. Peter Boyle, whom Yoko had permitted to develop a relationship with John because his wife, Loraine Alterman, stood high on Yoko's "Friendly Journalist" list, was taking pictures of the party. He called out to Marnie Hair, telling her that he would give her ten dollars if she would kiss John. Lennon turned to Boyle and said archly: "Here's a picture that's worth a lot more!" With that, he planted a kiss firmly on Fred Seaman's mouth

"As soon as Double Fantasy was completed, Yoko unleashed a series of surprise attacks on her closest associates. Her first victim was Sam Green. On 23 October Sam was obliged to repay a $100,000 loan from his bank. Yoko had assured him that she would cover the note. "It's a gift,"

The man Yoko most wanted to put in his place at this moment was her husband. The combination of his steadily mounting self-confidence and his increasing consumption of food, booze, and drugs was making him impossible to manage. Marnie Hair remembered a night when she and Yoko were sitting in Studio One eating chocolates. Yoko was having a fit. "She was screaming and hurling invective," recalled Marnie. "She was going to do something about him. He was 'delusional.' She was going to get back at him and show him who was the boss. He had started thinking that he was going to start taking some things over again. She said she'd 'fix him.'... It may have been his not wanting to have her around because of her effect on the fans and the press.

She saw herself as the man behind the throne - and I use that word advisedly. She had the balls. He cottoned on to that, but at the same time he resented it. He resented a lot of stuff - the running interference for him that she always did. But it was so tangled, that relationship. Such a hate thing going on... It was no secret that sooner or later there was going to be a divorce.

When "Starting Over," the first single from Double Fantasy, was released in mid-October, it performed as desired, soaring to the top of the chart. A contrived and campy throwback to a style of long ago, the song was merely a bit of fluff, but it provided the thrill of hearing a new John Lennon record Lennon was suffering at this time from doing too much coke. His ravaged appearance in his final days - the big blue bags under his eyes and the death 's-head boniness of his face - was underscored by the hole he had burned through his septum, which he was scheduled to have repaired (by grafting tissue from the roof of his mouth to the damaged divider) the week following his death.

tWhat made John's lot even harder was Yoko's demand that he fashion a hot new solo single for her that could be released at Christmas. One day, when the battle over this record was at its height, Fred Seaman walked in upon his employers. He heard John say: "When I wanted to put out a solo album, you wouldn't let me because it always had to be 'John and Yoko'! Now you want to do a Yoko Ono thing. And if you do one, I want to do one!"

tYoko had a ready answer to that childish argument. "OK," she said, "you can do one later. But for now I just want to get this single out." Thus was born "Walking on Thin Ice," a six-minute disco mix of a song recorded earlier but laid aside for further work. John Lennon would spend the last two weeks of his life laboring day in, day out to make this track a big hit for Yoko.

Inside the Dakota, John Lennon was having a banner day. In the morning, anticipating a photo session with the top rock photographer Annie Leibovitz, who had been commissioned to shoot a cover for Rolling Stone, Lennon had slipped over to Veez A Veez on West 72nd Street to have his hair styled short in front, almost like bangs, and long in the back. Leibovitz, who likes to lay her celebrities bare, had heard that John and Yoko had been filmed feigning coitus. She had come with a drawing of them entwined in the nude. When John saw what was wanted, he snapped: "Fine, no problem" and stripped down immediately. Yoko refused to go beyond removing her black top. Leibovitz told her to keep her shirt on because she preferred the contrast of a completely clothed and a totally naked figure. Then John got down on top of Yoko, who was lying on her back with her hands behind her head and a faraway look in her eyes, as if she didn't even notice the mad-looking nude man who had curled up on her in the fetal position and was pressing a passionate, closed-eye kiss against her unresponsive cheek. When the photographer

showed Lennon the Polaroid, he responded: "That's great! That's really our relationship. Promise it will be on the cover." When it ran the following week, it blew everybody's mind because it reduced the marriage of the rock world's most celebrated lovers to the image of an impassive bitch and her blindly sucking whelp.

tAt 1:00 P.M. John gave his last interview. Dressed in a red T-shirt with a blue sweater and his black leather "ruffian" jacket, he talked to Dave Sholin, a San Francisco DJ, in Studio One. Lennon sounded coked up as he ran out the familiar party line for the last time, his enthusiasm so forced at moments that he became strident. He was still in full cry at 5:00 P.M., when he recognized that it was time to leave for the Record Plant. Since the Lennons' car had not arrived, Sholin offered John and Yoko a lift in his limo. When they stepped out on the sidewalk in front of the building, Paul Goresh rushed over with Mark Chapman in tow.

"Before the session ended, during a period when Yoko was out of the studio, John leaned back against the tape machine, where he had delivered so many monologues during the past four months, and said to Jack: "Don't repeat to Yoko what I'm going to tell you." Then he went into the same rap that he had laid on Fred that night he conceived the album in Bermuda. John said that his days were numbered and that he was living on borrowed time. He didn't allude to assassination, but he appeared completely resigned to dying. He even discussed what would happen to his legend after his death, boasting that he would become much more famous than Elvis. Jack had heard Lennon speak of death before - but never with the sense of its imminence that he conveyed that night.

tWhen Yoko reappeared and the Lennons began to discuss their supper plans, John's mood reverted to normal. Announcing they were going over to the Stage Deli to grab a bite, John assured Jack that he would be at the studio at nine o'clock the following morning to master the new single. Normally Jack would have ridden home with the Lennons, but this night he had to remain behind to work on another record. He walked John to the elevator, where they said good-night. His last recollection of Lennon is a smile, a wave, and a cheery "See you tomorrow morning, bright and early!"

Mark Chapman :

When the limousine stopped in front of the building, the hour was 10:50. Yoko hopped out first, followed by John, who was carrying a tape recorder and some cassettes. As she passed Chapman, he said, "Hello." When John walked by, he gave Chapman a hard look. As Chapman said later: "He printed me."

tAll that night Chapman had been praying alternately to God and to the devil -the one to lead him out of temptation and the other to give him the strength to complete his mission. Now, at the critical moment, he heard a voice in his head saying: "Do it... do it... do it!"

tTaking two steps into the carriage way, he pulled the snub-nosed pistol from his pocket and dropped into the combat stance, knees flexed with one hand holding the gun for sighting while the other supported the shooting hand at the wrist. He spoke no word. His gun spoke.

tThe first two shots caught Lennon in the back and spun him around. Two of the next three shots hit him in the shoulder. One bullet went astray. The sound of regular firing was echoed by that of shattering glass as the bullets passed through Lennon's body and smashed into the wood and glass windbreak. When Chapman had emptied his gun, he stared at the driveway, expecting to see John Lennon's body lying there. He saw nothing.

Chapman was so out of it as he shot Lennon that he failed to see his man open the door of the windbreak and stagger up the five steps to the office, where he fell flat on his face. Jay Hastings, the young, longhaired night man, was reading a magazine when he heard sounds of breaking glass followed by footsteps. "John Lennon stumbled in, a horrible, confused look on his face," recollected Hastings. Yoko followed, screaming, 'John's been shot!" For one crazy moment Hastings thought the whole scene was a gag. Then he saw Lennon collapse, the tape recorder and cassettes in his hands clattering across the stone floor.

Hastings pressed an alarm button under the desk, summoning the police from the nearby 20th Precinct station house. Then he rushed to John's side to remove his shattered glasses, which were gouging into his nose, and to cover him with his uniform jacket. When Hastings pulled off his tie to apply it as a tourniquet, he recognized for the first time how desperate were John's wounds. Blood was pouring out of his mouth and chest. "His eyes were open but unfocused,' reported Hastings. "He gurgled once, vomiting blood and fleshly material." Yoko was screaming now for a doctor. Hastings jumped up and punched out 911. Returning to Lennon's side, he murmured: "It's OK, John, you'll be all right!"

When Lennon was brought into the emergency room, he had virtually no pulse. The two bullets that had hit him in the back had pierced the lung and passed out through the chest. (One of them was discovered in his black leather jacket.) A third bullet had shattered his left shoulder bone and exited. A fourth bullet had hit the same shoulder but ricocheted inside his chest, where it severed the aorta and cut his windpipe.

tA team of seven medical men labored to save Lennon with every device and technique. "It wasn't possible to resuscitate him by any means," reported Dr. Stephen Lynn, the hospital's director of emergency services. "He had three holes in his chest, two in his back, and two in his left shoulder. He'd lost three quarts of blood from the gun wounds, about 80 percent of his blood volume."

tThe official cause of death was shock produced by massive hemorrhaging. Off the record, some of the staff said it might have been better if Lennon had been left undisturbed and the resuscitation attempt had been made by the ambulance crew. They also expressed astonishment at Lennon's wretched physical condition

Yoko had been brought to the hospital by Tony Palma, who discovered now that the man he had found bleeding to death was John Lennon. Palma recalled taking Yoko to a little room where she could use the phone. She called David Geffen, who appeared shortly thereafter. When he saw her, he picked her up like a child.

t"Someone's shot John!" she babbled. "Can you believe it? Someone shot him!" At that point Dr. Lynn entered the room.

Yoko demanded: "Where is my husband? I want to be with my husband. He would want me to be with him. Where is he?"

tLynn braced himself and announced: "We have very bad news. Unfortunately in spite of massive efforts, your husband is dead. There was no suffering at the end." Yoko replied: "Are you saying he is sleeping?"

t Officers Palma and Frauenberger took Yoko back to the Dakota, stopping first at the Hotel Pierre, where Geffen was staying. When they returned to the Dakota, they slipped into the building by the back door. The moment Yoko got home, she picked up her phone and started making calls. She claimed subsequently to have called the "three people John would have wanted to know: Julian, Aunt Mimi, and Paul McCartney." There is no evidence that any of them received such a call

Soon Fred was summoned to Apartment 72. When he entered the kitchen, he found Yoko in a pink silk nightgown seated on a sofa with her head in her hands. She was flanked by David Geffen and Inspector Richard J. Nicastro, the Manhattan borough commander. The police official was trying to interrogate Yoko, but the only response she would make was to moan: "The shock is too great! I can't, I can't do this now!" Finally, she looked at Fred and told him to send up Havadtoy. When he received Yoko's summons, he practically ran to the service elevator.

tAfter the departure of Inspector Nicastro, Yoko retired to her bedroom with Geffen and Havadtoy to focus upon her immediate problems. The first and most urgent task was making the funeral arrangements. John Lennon had anticipated receiving the customary rites, making provision for them in the first item of his will; yet only a few hours after his death, Yoko announced through Geffen that there would be no funeral - only a silent vigil to be held at a time set later.

tHer next concern was the prompt execution of the will. After a night spent mostly making phone calls, she was up and about at seven o'clock, ready to meet with her lawyers and financial advisers. After she had conferred with them for some hours in Studio One, the will was sent down to the court district for probate that very afternoon. The will itself was a simple four-page document that had been drafted by David Warmflash and signed by Lennon about a year before he died, on 12 November 1979. It deeded to Yoko 50 percent of the estate, valued in excess of $30 million, and put the other 50 percent into a trust whose provisions did not have to be publicly declared. The trust makes some provision for John's children and perhaps even Kyoko, whom Yoko had always urged John to adopt, but what amounts the children were to receive and how the balance of the estate was allotted are matters only of rumor,

The only provision of the will that appears odd is the appointment of Sam Green - who was not even consulted about the matter - as Sean's guardian in the event that Yoko chose not to serve in this capacity.

All this information is from "The Lives of John Lennon" by Albert Goldman. There was an outcry when this book came out, because it portrayed Lennon in such a bad light, and of course Yoko came across ever worse. But after all was said and done, it was found it be largely accurate. Although everybody expected Yoko to look bad it was quite a shock for Lennon's fans to find out that their idol was such a prick.

On Tuesday evening, less than twenty-four hours after Lennon

tYoko had already come up with an audacious idea for hyping her new record to the top of the chart, but it all turned on the cooperation of Jack Douglas.

tOn Wednesday, when Douglas picked up his phone, on guard against a prankster, he had asked suspiciously, "Who's this?"

t"It's Yoko" came the answer. "Go to the studio tonight. I've booked time. We're working."

t"OK," intoned Jack resignedly. "I don't know what you have in mind, but I'll be there."

tWhen he arrived, Yoko presented him with two reels of Lennon's conversation and another tape of David Spinozza playing classical guitar. She ordered Jack to cut up Lennon's speech and insert certain phrases into the flow of the music. Jack worked ten hours straight that night with the chain-smoking Yoko at his side. So deeply troubled was he that the tears sometimes coursed down his cheeks. The other people at the studio were so freaked out by the sound of Lennon's voice that they sealed off the tenth floor. Only Yoko appeared unaffected. As the work progressed, she would order, "Give it more of this!" or, "Give it that!" Douglas assumed that the tape was to be used during John's funeral service. In fact, it was destined to be the flip side of "Walking on Thin Ice." Yoko planned to give her record an extra boost by coupling it with a sentimental souvenir of the dead star

That afternoon she had called up Spinozza for the first time in years. When he came on the line, the first thing he heard was Yoko saying, "Can you believe that! Can you believe that shit!"

Shocked by her tone, Spinozza had gasped: "Yoko! Are you OK?" "I'm OK! I'm OK!" she snapped. A few days later they met to talk business. She offered him $100,000 for the track on which he played guitar, probably the highest fee ever earned by a studio musician

"Yoko's primary motive in taking Havadtoy back into the fold can be described in the account in Seaman's journal of a meeting she conducted earlier that same day. As her people sat on the floor at her feet, Yoko had gone into a long rap, comparing John Lennon's death with that of John F. Kennedy. "In many ways John was more powerful than Kennedy," Yoko had explained, because "music is more pervasive than politics... it goes into people's living rooms, bedrooms, toilets." Yoko had gone on to compare herself with Jackie Kennedy, remarking that "Jackie at least had the Kennedy family to fall back upon for support, and later Onassis, but I have nobody... I can still barely manage... the shock of John's death has made me very weak." Hence, it made good sense for Yoko to take back Havadtoy at this moment because after the dismissal of all her key men she desperately needed help.

Though Yoko enjoyed no further success as a recording artist after "Walking on Thin Ice," which was nominated for a Grammy (a belated tribute to Lennon's prowess as a producer), she succeeded much better at the more congenial task of promulgating her new image as a celebrity widow. Every month for years after John's death, an item would appear in the press or on a TV or radio show that informed the public of Yoko's current condition: her lasting grief, her withdrawn and lonely life, her widow's rituals, like cutting off a thirty-inch lock of hair, and her close and affectionate relationship with her son. Credited with being a master of public relations, Yoko owed much in this area to the labor of her dedicated and capable public spokesman, Elliot Mintz.

Life after John :

Marnie Hair was one of the first to recognize that Yoko had finally found what she was seeking. Invited a year after John's death to a little midnight supper on Christmas Eve as Yoko and Sam's only guest, Marnie found her friend a different person. Yoko behaved with all the graciousness and charm of a woman of high breeding, preparing the feast with her own hands and feeding it to her guests with chopsticks.

Sam presented Yoko with a beautiful pre-Columbian necklace that Yoko removed at one point in the evening and hung about Marnie's neck so that she, too, could share in the pleasure. "They were like puppies," Marnie enthuses. "They fondled each other. That was the happiest I had ever seen her. She was genuinely happy. She was joyous and young and tension-free. She wasn't taking anything either. She looked marvelous!"

Lennon and Yoko took a car to the Plaza and rode the elevator to George's room. It was the first time the now recently ex-Beatles had seen each other in months but they acted like two teenage brothers, gently razzing one another other with playful ease. Yoko stood off to the corner, pretending not to be interested in their conversation but holding onto every word. "So tell us about this big cock and roll show of yours. You're going to feed Baltimore then?" cracked Lennon, knowing full well George's Concert For Bangladesh was scheduled in three short days. George complained about the logistics, the stress, a hundred different things but there was a determination in his weariness, he was going to make this concert - the first live show he himself headlined - a massive success.

Lennon poured himself three fingers of Dewars into a dirty coffee cup and listened and nodded and drank. Finally, he cut George off. "What time do you want us there then?" George looked uncertain, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. Then his eyes widened. "We've got Billy (Preston) and Leon (Russell). Dylan is a definite possibility. Me and my songs. It's gonna be a long night." The junior Beatle gave John his answer. Thanks but no.

Lennon was so shaken, he actually stuttered. "Wh-what the fuck are you talking about? Yoko and I want to play!" George sighed, he knew this was not going to end well. "This is a straight rock and roll show, John. I can't have you and Yoko taking a shit in a bag or something. I dunno, maybe if you alone played some guitar, sang a song or two -- " Lennon jumped out his seat, getting right into George's face. "Don't you understand? We do everything together! It's 'JohnandYoko' now! One word!" George was neither intimidated nor moved. He didn't even flinch. In his drollest Scouse accent, he said "Then I'll comp JohnandYoko a couple of third row seats." John muttered every expletive he knew - and some he made up on the spot - and bounded toward the door. Yoko followed, turning to George and mouthed the words "Me so horny. Me love you long time."

R109 is NOT one of OP' posts.

[R110] You're welcome!

I cannot stop reading this shit. More more more!!!!

He reminds me of KANYE!! And the manipulation and domination is similar to KK and Krew! Maybe Yoko mentored Kris.

Give peace a chance, indeed.

To be continued..(More from John' early days)

Photos of John and Yoko in Egypt :

In Egypt 1979

another one :

Thank you OP

these stories are entertaining and scary at the same time!

I know at least some of it comes from "The Lives of John Lennon" by Albert Goldman for those of you asking for sources. It was rather controversial

R121, it was only controversial because it went after the rock critics hero. Rolling Stone magazine had published excerpts from Goldman's Elvis biography but as soon as he went after Lennon they turned on him.

In R102's excerpt when he died Lennon was in a "wretched" physical state, apparently he was bulimic.

I hate the drunk Harry Nielsen era. He comes off as such an asshole.

Those two brought out the worst in each other but it all emanates from him wanting a mother not a wife.

Yes, he wanted a mother/protector; he even called her "Mother." She ruled over him and he liked that. A very sick relationship.

Damn, that was dark.

I 've always found the beattlers way overrated and they were not even good looking.

"anov acted next as family counselor. When John disclosed his extreme ambivalence toward Julian, whom he hadn't seen since the previous July, Janov urged the delinquent father to pay a visit to his son. If the therapist had known more about the family situation, he would have recognized that this was a suggestion fraught with danger.

Yoko objected vehemently to John's visiting the boy, saying, "It isn't fair for you to be able to see Julian when I can't see Kyoko." She may also have feared that with the marriage running on the rocks, John might take it into his head to go back to Cynthia. After all, nobody knew better than Yoko Ono how suggestible was John Lennon. Actually, there was nothing to fear. John had no eyes for his former wife; in fact, now that he had finally gotten away from her, he could hardly believe that he had lived with her for so many years. What's more, Cynthia was about to marry Roberto Bassanini, who would shortly open a restaurant in London.

tJulian must have been terrified that day when his father came climbing up the stairs in Cyn's new house in Kensington. When John came downstairs again, it was tea time. He was sitting with cup in hand, describing primal therapy, when the phone rang. It was Val Wilde, the housekeeper at Tittenhurst. Highly alarmed, she reported that Yoko was threatening to take a fatal drug dose because John was spending so much time with Cynthia. John slammed down the phone and dashed out into the street, where he shouted to Les Anthony, "Quick, let's go! The silly bugger's threatening to commit suicide!"

tWhen John and Les reached the house, they dashed upstairs to the bedroom. "She was lying in bed, looking as if she were at death's door," recalled Anthony, adding, "Personally I thought she was putting it on - but it wasn't a bad performance, and it stopped John from going to see Cynthia again."

Yoko on John Lennon : "I did primal therapy with him. I watched him go back to his childhood. I know his deepest fears."

That sums up everything

Primal Therapy : Epic Fail

John and his father

"To be opened only in the event I disappear or die an unnatural death." So ran the inscription on the envelope that Freddie Lennon deposited with his solicitor after his terrifying encounter with his son on his thirtieth birthday. For months after that traumatic event, Freddie and Pauline went about in fear of their lives because John had threatened to have Freddie shot and his body dumped at sea. "His countenance was frightful to behold," reported Freddie in the letter, "as he explained in detail how I would be carried out to sea and dumped 'twenty, fifty, or perhaps you prefer a hundred fathoms deep?' The whole loathsome tirade was muttered with glee, as though he were actually participating in the terrible deed." Helpless in the face of such insane rage, Freddie had done the only thing in his power. He had written out a complete account of the incident and put it into the hands of his lawyer. If worse came to worst, at least there would be this mute witness to John Lennon's patricidal designs.

t"Malignant" was the right word for John's behavior. For first, he had called his father, to whom he had not spoken in more than a year, and sweet-talked the old man into coming up to Tittenhurst for a family birthday celebration.

Freddie and Pauline sat down at the long dining table, putting the baby on the floor so that it could crawl. Again, Freddie got that weird feeling - actually going so far as to say to Pauline: "This place positively reeks of evil!" At that moment John and Yoko made a startling entrance, circling down from the ceiling like a pair of bats, as they descended a spiral staircase.

tJohn looked grim, and the pupils of his reddened eyes were dilated. The moment he sat down, he fixed his father with an angry look and growled: "Start worrying Go on! Start worryin’! Get your fuckin' cards! [National Insurance cards, the British equivalent of "Get your walking papers!"] Keep your fuckin' self and get out of my life!" The last words were torn out of John's throat like a convulsive scream. They so drained him that he fell back in his chair, shaking from his exertion.

tAs Freddie stared at his son, shocked as much by his appearance as by his tone - John was wearing a fiery red beard and appeared to be completely demented -Pauline broke down and started crying. Between sobs she sought to explain to John that his rage against his father was unjust. Her efforts to defend her husband only succeeded in further infuriating Lennon, who sneered between clenched teeth, "Mind your own business, you stupid cow!" Then he brought his fist down on the table with shattering force. Yoko sat through this violent scene stone-faced, saying nothing.

tFinally, Freddie found his tongue and sought to placate his son, conceding that he was partly to blame for what had happened when John was a child. Far from pacifying John this concession only fanned his flames afresh. Now he embarked on an incoherent account of his recent treatment in America, where, he explained, he had spent a vast amount of money to be taken back again to his childhood so that he could experience all over again the horrors of his earliest years. As he recounted this ordeal, his voice rose time and again to the same horrible scream, his face going to pieces from the force of the emotions he was pumping up. Soon it became clear that he was not only enraged but possessed by a terrible fear.

"He compared himself to Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin, all of whom had recently died unnatural deaths. John insisted that he, too, was destined to an early grave. Finally, at the peak of one outburst, he roared: "I'm bloody mad! Insane! "

tNow that John's rage had been ignited, it ran like a powder train from one target to another. He denounced his mother as a "whore," shocking Freddie deeply. He ranted against Mimi. Finally, he lit into Paul McCartney. Little David Henry, alarmed by the uproar, was clinging anxiously to his mother's legs. Suddenly John pointed at the child and screamed: "See what will happen to him if you lock him away from his parents and shut him up with a fuckin ' mad woman! He'll end up a raving lunatic, like me! "

t"I sat through all this completely stunned," wrote Freddie, "hardly believing that this was the kind, considerate, happy Beatle John, talking to his father with such evil intensity - but much worse was to follow. It was when I alluded to the fact that I had never asked him for financial help and was quite prepared to manage without it that he flew into another abominable outburst, accusing me of using the press to force him to help me. He threatened that if I were to speak to them again, particularly about our present discussion, he would have me 'shot.' There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that he meant every word he spoke."

tTerrified, Freddie and Pauline fled from Tittenhurst. The week following they were informed by Apple that they would have to vacate their little house at Brighton, which had been put in their name for tax purposes but which John now wanted to repossess. Freddie was only too happy to comply because by so doing, he would sever the last tie to his mad son. Not till he was lying on his deathbed did Freddie Lennon hear again from John."

"John Lennon's Psycho attack on his father was the climax of all the primaling he had done in Los Angeles. Through therapy he had dug down to the deeply impacted rage that had been smoldering inside him since childhood. Now his wrath came spewing out on precisely those people who had the greatest claim on his love and compassion. No one was immune to his mad-dog attacks, nor were any of his assaults provoked by their victims.

tReleasing Lennon's anger meant that a lot of people caught hell, Determined to smash the myth once and for all, John set to work with a vengeance. He exposed the legendary tours as drug-debauched orgies organized by the Beatles' poncy staff and protected by the police. The charming Brian Epstein was characterized as a tantrum throwing "fag."

The Beatles' authorized biography by Hunter Davies, published in September 1968, was dismissed as "bullshit," all its home truths deleted at Aunt Mimi's insistence. Paul was the villain of the piece. He is portrayed as a scheming, self-aggrandizing show-biz hustler, who timed his announcement of the Beatles' breakup to "sell an album." As for the Beatles' fans, John depicted them as "an ugly race" and their successors, the hippies, as "uptight maniacs going around wearing fucking peace symbols." His final judgment of his days as a Beatle was summed up in one phrase: "I resent performing for fucking idiots."

"John Lennon took a totally negative view of Bangladesh, characterizing it as "caca."' He had always detested benefits of any sort, which helps explain why the Beatles in the course of over 1,400 public performances played for free only once or twice. In John's eyes, benefits were like blow-out patches on old tires: If you do one today, you'll have to do another one tomorrow.

John had been consumed with jealousy ever since the astonishing success of "My Sweet Lord" and George's four-record album, All Things Must Pass, released in November 1970, just a month before the Primal Scream Album, which collected a lot of respectful notices but did poorly in the stores. For months John couldn't turn around without hearing George's goony hymn coming out of the nearest loudspeaker. Now here was little George, whom neither John nor Paul had ever regarded as a peer, stealing the limelight again - just at the moment when John was about to release his own chart topper! What's more, even if John were to be big about it and get out there on the stage with George and Ringo, what would happen if Paul showed up? Everything John had said against the Beatles for the past two years would be wiped out in a single afternoon. The myth would be reborn! So the answer had to be no.

but could Lennon resist Yoko? Only two or three times in all his years with her was John able to prevail over his wife on a major issue. In fact, the only way he could say no and make her swallow it was by working himself up into a violent fit - precisely what he did around dawn on 31 July 1971, the day before the concert. That morning Dan Richter was jarred awake by the ringing of the phone at his bedside. It was John announcing that he was leaving for the airport immediately. Richter threw on his clothes and rushed next door to the Lennons' suite. The moment he entered the sitting room, he saw what had happened.

tJohn had wrecked the place. He had thrown everything that was loose against the walls and overturned all the furniture. He had also attacked Yoko, who had evidently fought back savagely, just as she used to do with Tony. John bore a deep gash over one eye that had probably been made when his glasses were torn off and thrown on the floor, where they were discovered later twisted up like a pretzel. After Dan assured himself that Yoko had not been hurt, he left the Park Lane with Lennon. Stepping out onto Central Park South, they found the city being lashed by a violent rainstorm, whipped up by an offshore hurricane. It was hard to get a cab, but finally Dan flagged down a beat looking hack that carried them out to JFK. Lennon was so intent on making his getaway that he jumped on the first plane leaving for Europe, a flight to Paris.

tWhen Richter got back to the hotel, Yoko informed him that she was going onstage the next day without John. Dan tried his best to talk her out of this unseemly act, but finding that he could not bend her will, he gave up and called Allen Klein, who soon had his hands full making Yoko see how bad it would look if she were to make a solo appearance. For one thing, it would drive George crazy; for another, it would enrage the fans, who would see it as a confirmation of their worst fears. Klein finally got Yoko to agree not to go onstage, but then he had to start all over again to persuade her to return to her husband in England. "What for?" she demanded. "I love it here!"

At that moment, for the first time in his entire relationship with John and Yoko, Allen Klein got the basic message of their marriage: "He needed her a lot more than she needed him." Eventually Yoko allowed herself to be convinced that it would be in her own best interests to fly home that night. After all, she didn't have to stay there any longer than it took to cool out John and turn him around again.

John with Harry Nilsson and May Pang - 1974

"When the Lennons really wanted to ingratiate themselves with a journalist, they could do even better. Jill Johnston of the Village Voice recalled that John and Yoko sent her a dozen roses, invited her to their room at midnight, and took her shopping one afternoon on Eighth Street, where they insisted on buying her a pair of shoes. The proffered intimacy boomeranged, however, because the more Johnston saw of the Lennons, the less she liked them. "Yoko played the greedy grande dame, going from store to store, demanding, 'Gimme this, gimme that!'" Johnston reported, while John "appeared to be courting attention, as if he needed a shot of it between limo rides."

Yoko selected Henry Edwards Why? Because Yoko had turned up a statement by Edwards that the three outstanding Minimalist artists were Tony Smith, Robert Morris - and Yoko Ono. What the humorless Yoko failed to perceive was that Edwards's use of her name was not intended as a compliment but as a joke.

Edwards' s first appointment with Yoko was scheduled for the supper hour. When he arrived at the Lennons' suite, he found her lying abed with the sheet up to her chin and her long black hair down the bedclothes. She was in shock after having just learned that Simon and Schuster was not going to give her a four-color jacket for its edition of Grapefruit. Lennon was sitting atop the bed cross-legged, watching an oldie-goldie rock 'n' roll show on TV. Totally oblivious of Yoko's suffering, every once in a while he would exclaim with juvenile fervor: "That's a song I used to play, Yoko!"

After forty-five minutes of absorption in the TV screen, Lennon picked up the phone and ordered supper from room service. He asked for three steaks, without troubling to ask Edwards if he wanted to eat steak. When the waiter rolled the meal into the room and lifted off the silver covers, instead of serving the steaks on plates he began to slice them, acting obviously on orders from the kitchen. John stopped the man and instructed him to cut the meat up into little squares. When the steaks had been piled up in bowls, like Alpo, the Lennons fell to eating them with their hands

Edwards spent a month conducting his interviews. During that time he got a pretty clear idea of how things stood between John and Yoko. When Yoko desired to converse with him, she would say: "Let me give John something to do, and then we can talk." Often this distraction was not necessary because John would nod off and sleep through the evening. Edwards concluded: "There is a public out there and that public has substituted the myth of John and Yoko for the vacuum in their own lives. The Lennons are a mythic couple and they love it. They love having their pictures taken; they love publicity; they love success." He also recognized, as he wrote later "for the press and for anyone who would listen, John and Yoko spoke with total conviction about how much they loved each other, how much support they gave each other, and how wondrous was their devotion to each other. They said it; they meant it; they believed it - they were on!"

But when the camera was switched off or the tape recorder stopped rolling, the stars sank back into their normal selves and exhibited a marked indifference to each other.

The interview that emerged from Edwards's lengthy commerce with Yoko was just what she ordered. It was Ono Remembers. Though she was on her best behavior, this lengthy screed is full of her undisguisable self. At one point she discusses Janov's views on physical defects, which had inspired John to say that his myopia was a product of his childhood sufferings. Yoko's version of this same delusion is even more bizarre. Speaking of her diminutive stature, she fumed: "I am a small woman because people repressed me when I was young. My bones stopped growing because of the repression that surrounded me. Did you ever realize that the great aggressors in the world, Napoleon, Hitler, are all physically small people who have been repressed." Think about it!"

"Howard remembered distinctly the night he got this surprising call. "John says you're the only one who's honest with me," Yoko began. "I know I haven't been good to you lately. [When Howard left his hotel room the night of John's birthday party, he had been steered by a group of policemen past the door of the Lennons' suite and ushered into the elevator. This made him so angry that he left the hotel immediately and went to a friend's farm nearby.] What I want to know is, what is it that people don't like about me?" To John, in another part of the room, she called out, "John, is that right? Did I ask the question right?" Then, turning back to Howard but shifting to the third person, she repeated: "Why don't people like Yoko? John and I have been arguing about this. He said you would tell me truth. You knew me before I was John's Yoko."

tHardly believing his ears, Howard replied: "You really wanna hear, Yoko?" Breathlessly she answered, "Yes, yes, yes!" adding: "Especially the museum! Why everybody hate me when I was so nice that I let everybody come to my wonderful event?" Howard took a deep breath and plunged.

t"Yoko," he said, "nobody likes to be strangled by the person they're talking to. When people talk to you about art, music, whatever it is, you feel you know more about it than any human being on the face of the earth - which you may! Let's assume you do! Let's assume you're as good an artist as Michelangelo. Nobody wants to have Michelangelo's hands around their neck, squeezing their windpipe until they admit you're Michelangelo! And that's what it feels like, talking to you about art. Even me, who's a fairly strong-willed person, feels like I have to flee from your presence. You're choking me' You have me in a hammer-lock! You're gonna gouge my eyes out unless I admit that you're the greatest artist..."

tYoko cut him off at this point, screeching, "I am a fantastic artist! You mean I 'm not a good artist! "

Suddenly Howard recognized that he had stepped into the steel-jawed trap that he had just been analyzing. As his lips tightened with exasperation, he could hear Yoko yelling at Lennon: "John! John! Howard says I'm nothing but a lousy shwew [shrew]. I am not! John, am I loud shwew that chokes people? "

tJohn hadn't the faintest idea of what had inspired this outburst, but he yelled back: "No, you listen to Howard. He's telling you the truth!" Yoko screamed. "Ahhhh, John! You ganging up on me!"

"it is apparent that John Lennon's sudden disillusionment with his political guru followed the pattern established by his sudden disillusionment with his religious guru, his psychiatric guru, and all the other saviours in whom he had placed his faith. A man perpetually in search of help, John focused his quest instinctively on charismatic father figures - precisely what the fans did to him

investing him with the wisdom and spirituality that they were seeking. Needless to say, Lennon's saints were not all they claimed to be, but the greater truth is that they did fulfill Lennon's expectations so long as he kept the faith. What most disillusioned him was not the discovery of some deceit they had practiced on him but rather his recognition that they were men, not demigods, and that they were making demands on him.

It was also typical of Lennon that once he had enjoyed the thrill of bailing the squares by playing the radical, he should not only abjure his political commitments but pour scorn over the whole idea of himself as a political man. In 1980 he summed up his radical phase in devastating terms: "I dabbled in so-called politics in the late Sixties and Seventies more out of guilt than anything else. Guilt for being rich and guilt for thinking that peace and love isn't enough, and you have to go and get shot or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts." He stopped doing it, however, the moment it went against his interests. In the spring of 1972 John Lennon turned his back on politics to focus on the two most distressing features of his private life: the loss of Kyoko and the burden of drug addiction

John and Brian Epstein :

"What was engrossing him during this period was not the little dates he was playing in the provinces but his burgeoning relationship in London with Brian Epstein. Brian was introducing John into the gay world of the West End theater crowd, which took to the young rocker instantly.

tPeter Brown, Brian's intimate friend, offers a good account of what John was about while Cynthia was bearing his son: "First, Brian kept John by his side while Brian opened the NEMS office in London, a very busy week, during which Brian probably did a lot of partying. John was later to recall that he enjoyed going to Brian's gay parties because they offered him a glimpse of a world with which John was totally unfamiliar. Feeling very out of place, he would stand in a corner with eyes screwed up and look tough. Naturally, all the men assumed he was rough trade and were all the more attracted to him. Once he had gotten John this far, Brian sought to complete his conquest. He proposed to John that they take a brief trip to Spain, a country with which Brian was always enamored and where he later courted a number of young bullfighters. John agreed to go, but first he made a flying trip home to Liverpool to see the baby." John's flight from the responsibility of parenthood began now to assume the form of a flight from manhood, as he prepared to slip away with a homosexual who he knew was intent on seducing him

John and Brian went off alone to Barcelona, where night after night, according to Peter Brown, they would sit at sidewalk cafes, playing a peculiar game. "John would point out some passing man to Brian, and Brian would explain to him what it was about the fellow that he found attractive or unattractive. 'I was rather enjoying the experience,' John said, 'thinking like a writer: "I am experiencing this.""'

tSoon John was experiencing it not as a writer but as a man. He and Brian had sex. Naturally John was not eager to avow this fact or to explain his motive, but when challenged by Pete Shotton, John came up with an explanation that echoed the line he had taken with Cynthia. "Eppy just kept on and on at me, until one night, I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him: 'Oh, for Christ's sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse, then.' And he said to me, 'Actually, John, I don't do that kind of thing. That's not what I like to do.' 'Well,' I said, 'what is it you like to do, then?' And he said, I'd really just like to touch you, John.' And so I let him toss me off ... Yeah, so fucking what! The poor bastard. He's having a fucking hard time anyway. So what harm did it do, then, Pete, for fuck's sake? No harm at all. The poor fucking bastard, he can't help the way he is."

"John Lennon the humanitarian, offering his body to the afflicted - a sympathetic picture but one that does not ring true. Far more convincing is the account of the matter that John offered Allen Klein many years later. John told his new manager that he had jerked off Brian because "I had to control the man who had control over our lives and careers." That sounds right, and it conforms with the subsequent history of the relationship, for John and Brian did not confine themselves to a single sexual experiment in Spain.

They were sexually involved for the balance of Brian's life, and their relationship was a controlling one, with John playing the cruel master and Brian the submissive slave. As for who did what to whom in Spain, Brian told Peter Brown the real story: He had given John a blow job. Lennon couldn't afford to acknowledge that sort of intimacy because it would have stigmatized him as a queer. Indeed, the first time someone got on John about his trip with Brian, John nearly killed the man.

John was unrepentant. "The bastard was saying I was a bloody queer, so I smacked him one," snarled Lennon

"The principal reason Lennon was so reluctant to have his wife with him in London, where John, George and Ringo shared a luxurious three-bedroom flat on Green Street, Mayfair, was that he was now in the first flush of his affair with Brian Epstein. Peter Yolland recalled that every night after the Christmas show John went off with Brian. As a lifelong member of the British theater world Yolland knew the score. "There was a slightly strange thing going on between Brian and John," he remarked, adding that though they were lovers, "there were others who were being groomed for stardom," an allusion to the other boys in Brian's stable who were paying the customary price for being "brought along.

John Lennon's liaison with Brian Epstein was not confined to sexual dalliance. From the start, Brian took pleasure in showing off his famous rude boy to all his gay friends in the West End theater world. Soon this company included a circle of S/M freaks centered upon a depraved peer who rubbed shoulders with the most dangerous criminals in the kingdom. Brian's guide down the queasy slopes of this hell-bent underworld was the glamorous David Jacobs, lawyer for many prominent homosexuals in the capital. As Mario Amaya, art journalist, museum director, lifelong S/M queen, observed: "Jacobs was the lawyer you called if you got into trouble for drugs, sex, etc., the rescue lawyer, gay and show biz, highly popular and successful." Also very kinky

"All through the year 1963, Cynthia Lennon saw very little of her famous husband. Not only was she kept out of sight at Brian's behest, but she was supplanted by the appearance of a new woman at John's side - the raven-haired, blue-eyed Stevie Holly. Stevie's relationship with Lennon was just the reverse of Cynthia's because she behaved in the opposite manner. When, on her first date with John, he had unzipped her dress "down to the bum," she had spun about and slapped his face. That act won his respect, for, as she soon discerned, he was accustomed to dividing women into two categories: those who offered themselves, whom he called "slags," and those who demanded respect, like his Aunt Mimi, who the perceptive Stevie recognized was "his barrier, his protection, his shield."

Stevie's relationship with John did not involve sex, but even so it quickly reached a crisis when she confronted him with the fact that he was secretly married, which she had learned from her irate father, who was threatening to expose Lennon in the press. John's reaction to being found out was loutish defiance. When he heard the word "married," he snarled: "What's that! A fockin' piece of paper!" Then he conceded ruefully, "I had to do it."

1963 was a glorious season for the Beatles and the only time when Lennon experienced the full intoxication of being a star. Songwriter Peter Sarstedt recalled driving around London one night in a Jag with the sunroof open and Lennon standing bolt upright shouting "I am the King of London!"

While Lennon was boasting to the press that the Beatles' weekly income was £2,000, Cynthia was living again with her mother at Hoylake after a spell in a dingy bed-sitting room whose weekly rent was £5.

"What made the pregnancy even more miraculous was the fact that it was produced by only a single act of intercourse."

That's how it happens. Once once is enough.

John and Bob Dylan :

"Already a legend in America, Dylan was just beginning to get through to the Beatles, who had first asked for his records while playing at Paris. Lennon's initial reaction had been violently negative, as the American journalist Pete Hamill had discovered just a couple of months before the American tour, when he was taken to the Ad Lib by Al Aronowitz. Hamill recorded:

tJohn Lennon came in with Brian Epstein and sat down next to me. Aronowitz was telling them they had to listen to Dylan, and McCartney was nodding, agreeing with Aronowitz, -while Mick Jagger got up to dance with a young blonde wearing too much makeup. "To hell with Dylan," Lennon said. "We play rock 'n ' roll." "No, John, listen to him, "Aronowitz said. "He's rock 'n ' roll, too. He's where rock 'n ' roll's gonna go. Listen." Lennon's mouth became a tight slit. "Dylan. Dylan. Give me Chuck Berry. Give me Little Richard. Don't give me fancy crap. Crap. American folky intellectual crap. It's crap."

He was snarling and bitter and hard. He didn't want to talk about music. He didn't want to talk about writing. He looked down the table at Keith Richard. "What the hell are the Yanks here for?" he said. Richard smiled and shrugged. McCartney reached over and touched John's hand. "Ach, come off it, John, " he said. Lennon pulled his hand away and turned to me. "Why don't you fuck off?" he said. "Why don't you just get the hell out of here?" "Why don't you make me?" I said. "Hey, come on," Aronowitz said. "Let's just have a good time." "What?" Lennon said to me. "I said you should try to make me get out of here." He stared at me and I stared back. [Hamill is a stocky ex-boxer.] The Irish of Liverpool challenging the Irish of Brooklyn.

Then, as if he had seen something he recognized, he smiled and broke the stare and peered into the bottom of his glass. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said quietly, and the moment of confrontation passed. John Lennon left with Brian Epstein.

"Now John saw Dylan standing before him, looking just as lorn and waifish as on the cover of his first album. As Lennon sat staring fixedly at the man he recognized instinctively as his greatest rival, Brian inquired graciously what the great singing poet would like to drink.

"Cheap wine!" rasped Dylan. When the Beatles offered the yellow Dexies the band took in America instead of their customary white Prellies, Dylan grimaced with disgust and suggested that they smoke some pot. The Beatles confessed that they had never "had" marijuana. (Hashish was easier to get in England than grass.) Dylan was astonished. "What about your song?" he demanded. "The one about getting high?"

tMystified, John asked, "What song?" Dylan started singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand," jumping in just before the famous octave leap, which he rendered: "I get high! I get high! I get high!"

t"Those aren't the words!" exclaimed John, like Oliver Hardy correcting Stan Laurel. Then he enunciated the correct wording, which was Dylan's cue to be amazed because whoever heard of a guy hiding from a girl who turned him on?

tHaving straightened out the Lyrics, the party plugged the cracks under the doors with wet towels, while tootin', tokin' Bob rolled up a bomber. When Dylan handed the fuming joint to Lennon, he passed it directly to Ringo, whom he dubbed "My royal taster." Ringo smoked the joint down to the butt, then went off in a laughing jag. From that night on the Beatles were vipers - the kind who smoke a joint when they roll out of bed at the start of day

John and ELVIS :

"Ironically, it was right in the middle of Lennon's "fat Elvis" period that he came face-to-face with Elvis. The Beatles had been looking forward to this encounter since their first arrival in the USA. When the famous telegram was read out to them on the eve of the Sullivan show, they were disappointed that it did not include an invitation to Graceland. "But where's Elvis?" cried John.

That line became a running gag among the Beatles during the following year, as they clocked all the times that ol' E eluded their embrace. Colonel Parker, however, was just as intent on having his boy meet Brian Epstein's boys as Elvis was on avoiding this humiliating confrontation. when he found himself eyeball to eyeball with the Beatles on the night of 27 August 1965.

tAs the Fab Four pulled into the parking space in front of Elvis's doughnut-shaped pillbox on Perugia Road, overlooking the fairways of the Bel Air Golf Club, they were surprised to see a crowd of fans being held at bay by the local cops. Who could have leaked the news of this top secret sit-down? Entering the countersunk pad, shaped like a sheikh's tent, they were saluted by the sounds of their latest hits alternating with Elvis's latest misses. The King was holding court, as usual, in his Jukebox Room.

t"Oh, there you are!" exclaimed John

tElvis, ensconced on a long sofa amid the chorus line of the Memphis Beef Trust, was wearing his Hollywood regimentals: red shirt, black windbreaker, and skintight gray trousers. Formal introductions were made all around by the beaming triple-chinned Colonel. Then everyone sat down. Instinctively the Beatles assumed the positions of a backup band: John and Paul on E's right, and, on his left, George and Ringo. As the Seabury Salute to the Sons of Memphis and Liverpool continued at high gain, nobody said a word. Elvis, sullen in the presence of those "sons o' bitches" who had toppled him from his throne with their faggy haircuts and Tinkertoy tunes, was not about to make the first move. The Beatles, for their part, felt that youth should defer to age. Finally, the Dream King could take it no more. "If you damn guys are gonna sit here and stare at me all night," he blustered, "I'm gonna go to bed!"

That broke the ice, but now the party sank into the chill waters of disillusionment, for no sooner did John get into conversation with his old hero than he made a terrible gaffe. He said that Elvis should cut some records like his original sides on Sun. To Elvis that suggestion implied that in the Beatles' eyes his career had progressed from its stunning beginning straight downhill! John, from his end, got the impression that Elvis was not just stoned but completely out to lunch.

tWhen the attempt to raise the dead failed, the Beatles bopped back inside their limo. As the car pulled away, John turned to look at the other boys. With a droll expression on his face and his voice gliding up the scale like a water beetle, he demanded: "Where's Elvis?"

John , Cynthia and Julian :

"The other inhabitant of Kenwood, little Julian, was characterized by the women who cared for him as bright, friendly, intelligent, and highly assertive, even bossy. Wendy Hanson was delighted by Julian's Lennonesque way with language. Once when she gave her name on the phone, Julian responded: "Is that like 'windy in the trees'?" And then there was the time he brought home from Heath House Infants' School a watercolor of a blond girl with stars behind her and identified it as "Lucy in the sky." Cynthia never disciplined the boy, so he behaved like a brat, telling his mother that she was "stupid" or shouting at her, "Shut up!" He was mimicking John, of course. When he was in his father's presence, however, Julian underwent a radical change.

John Lennon had a profound intolerance of children, being too much of a child himself to tolerate any rivals. When Julian would approach his recumbent dad with a request, Lennon would glare at him balefully arid growl: "I'm not gonna fix your fuckin' bike, Julian!" Wham! The child would shrink back in terrified silence. That silence, that frozen-faced fear, that shrinking became habitual to Julian when with his father Ironically, his silent withdrawal was interpreted by John as a sign that there was something "wrong" with the boy. "He's a bit of a dope," John would tell Mimi, adding, "Like mother, like son," while tapping his finger against his forehead.

Cynthia observed John's cruel behavior to their son with her customary resignation because the thing she appeared to fear most was an emotionally charged confrontation.

Unfortunately she could never gain the attention of her husband, who would go for days without addressing a single word to her. John's emotional withdrawal made him a master of the freeze-out. He wasn't totally out of it, however, because from time to time he would rouse himself and step out into the garden, where he would hail the gardener or the chauffeur or whoever was about, chatting him up and demonstrating how much goodwill he bore to everyone in the world - save his own family.

If John Lennon had not been so childishly dependent on women, he might have ended his marriage at this time. He hadn't wanted to marry Cynthia in the first place. By now he wanted to kill her. He had plenty of money to make provision for her and Julian. He also had the Beatles to fall back upon, as well as the whole world waiting to take him into its arms. So what was he waiting for? John himself couldn't answer that question, but he often asked it.

John and Yoko :

"As John reported years later, "I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego; and I did... I destroyed myself."

tWhat Lennon meant by this alarming confession was clarified by another passage in the same interview in which he explained how he recovered his ego -two years later! "I started fighting again and being a loudmouth again, and saying, 'Well, I can do this and fuck you!'" In other words, the ego Lennon killed was that rebellious and hostile self that was already crumbling as he lay upon his sofa at Kenwood. What acid did was give that old John Lennon his deathblow, for though he did regain his former aggressiveness when he abandoned the drug, he was never again the same man.

When the famous night - Monday, 7 November, 1966 - rolled around, John Lennon was out of his mind. He'd been without sleep for three days, all that time on acid. Yoko was laying for him. "Yoko took one look at John and attached herself to him like a limpet mine - with much the same destructive effect," recalled Lennon's driver, Les Anthony. "She clung to his arm while we went around the exhibition, talking away to him in her funny little high-pitched voice until he fled." he excused himself, saying that he had to go to the studio. "Take me with you!" begged Yoko, No, we're too busy!" snapped the anxious Lennon as he jumped into his Mini and took off. (Lennon rewrote the encounter extensively in later years, as he did every episode in his widely publicized relationship with Yoko)

When Yoko reported this encounter to Tony, he urged her to press on and take advantage of this first nibble. Yoko needed no urging. She set her sights on Lennon and within a couple of days had conned her way past the guards at Abbey Road and gotten inside Studio 2. Shown the door, she took to hanging out in front of the building with the Apple Scruffs, the young girls who spent every night, even in the coldest weather, camping outside the studio in the hopes of seeing a Beatle or exchanging a greeting.

tOne night, when John and Cynthia stepped into the back-seat of their limo, Yoko threw herself between them. Promptly deposited at her own door, she shifted her beat next to Kenwood, where she hung about in such dreadful weather that Mrs. Powell took pity on her and admitted her to the house so that she might call a cab. Yoko took advantage of the opportunity to plant a ring, which she could return later to reclaim. She also began bombarding John with notes, begging for money to present her art and threatening, "If you don't support me, that's it! I'll kill myself!" Cynthia, who had already begun to brood about this strange little Oriental, was shocked one day when she and her mother observed John opening a parcel addressed to him by Yoko, inside which he discovered a Kotex box containing a broken cup smeared with red paint.

Some men would have been turned off by Yoko's tactics, but John Lennon was titillated. He was accustomed to being the prey not the hunter; yet most of the women who had chased him had been types he scorned: groupies, show girls, whores, and little fans sent up to his suite like a steak from room service. Never in all the years since his passionate affair with Cynthia in art school had he been in love or even seriously involved with a woman. His passion, the strange amalgam of love and hate that was the essence of his being, had long been focused on Brian Epstein, whom he confessed years later he had "loved more than a woman."

"For a woman to stir John deeply, she clearly had to possess a strong masculine component. Here is where the aggressive Yoko began to tip the beam, which she inclined further by being an Oriental, Lennon's favorite type, and further yet by embodying the New York avant-garde scene, which meant a lot now to John since he had become the leader of the rock avant-garde. In fine, John Lennon was a man upon whom Yoko could work her spell. What's more, he could rationalize that he ran no risk because he held all the cards. He was accustomed to picking up women and boffing them in the back seat of his limo. Why shouldn't he give Yoko a toss?

t"John began to weaken," reported Les Anthony. "Came the day when Cynthia went off to the north and Yoko arrived at their house in order to discuss John sponsoring some art show. A business meeting, they said it was. But she didn't go back until the morning, and after that John couldn't leave her alone... In those first days, before John left Cynthia, he and Yoko used to do their courting, to put it politely, in the back of the car while I was driving them around."

How different is this eyewitness report from the Hollywood fantasy that John and Yoko labored for years to impose on the public! According to that account, eighteen months elapsed between the first meeting of these lovers and the consummation of their passion at Kenwood. According to Les Anthony, who was certainly in a position to know, the time between meeting and mating was exactly three weeks.

Tony posed no problem; he encouraged Yoko to go after Lennon. As Adrian Morris observed, "Tony outfoxed himself." Yoko, however, was distressed by John's overbearing macho manner. Accustomed to being treated by Tony as a little princess, Yoko found herself involved now with a very touchy and hostile superstar, who was constantly flying on drugs. "Any woman I could shout down," Lennon remarked years later.

"Most of my arguments with anybody used to be a question of who could shout the loudest. Normally I would win the argument, whether I was right or wrong, especially if the argument was with a woman - they'd just give in. And she didn't! She'd go on and on and on, until I understood it. Then I had to treat her with respect." Yoko's greatest strength, however, was not tenacity in argument. Her real attraction for John Lennon arose from the fact that she was ideally suited to play the starring role in his fantasy system.

By this point Yoko no longer had to be aggressive in her relationship with Lennon. She could revert to a more subdued but no less forceful technique for exploiting the great star's fame and fortune in order to advance her all-important career.

Yoko's cousin Hideaki Kase visited her one night early in January 1967, discovering her lying on a big bed supported by several pillows and wearing a white negligee. She had told him over the phone that she didn't want to see any Japanese, but as he was her cousin, he could come around and chat. Tony was sleeping on the sofa, wrapped in blankets. He roused himself when Kase entered the room and then sank back to sleep. Yoko said to her cousin in Japanese: "Don't bother with this man." Then, for the next two hours, they talked.

Yoko denounced Japan, remarking, "It's such a worthless country, isn't it?" The Japanese, she complained, were hopelessly unsophisticated and shallow in matters of modern art. Most of the talk consisted of Yoko's boasting of her achievements as an artistic pioneer. She claimed to be the inventor of Flower Power, the founder of the Happening and a lot of other aesthetic innovations then fashionable. Undoubtedly this was the same line that she was feeding John Lennon during those long discussions that got him higher and higher. John had discovered a fellow genius.

Another Japanese who encountered Yoko at this time was Tanaka Kozo, who lived in the same hotel for ten days. Yoko told him that she was sick of the life she was leading and longed to be living in a deluxe hotel. She also spoke disparagingly of Tony, condemning him as a "little man" and admitting that she longed to leave him. But this proud, boastful woman, always contemptuous of men and their pretensions, would not make a move on her own behalf until she had secured a new man who could provide her with everything she coveted: wealth, power, and fame.

John and Brian Epstein :

Being privy to the gossip of the gay world, Napier-Bell probably knew about this relationship before he met Brian. Even if he did not, Brian's conversation during supper would have told the tale. At one point he confessed that he "feared he had lost John forever." He did not disclose, however, what had inspired this despairing and lovelorn mood.

Yoko Ono told Marnie Hair that just before Brian's death John had come around to Chapel Street. Something had aroused his passion, and he had behaved in his accustomed manner, seizing Brian's arm and twisting it up behind his back as he bent him forward. John was preparing to bugger Brian - or was actually flagrante delicto - when Queenie, hearing the sound of a tussle, walked into the room. Horrified to behold her son being sexually molested, she rushed out and called the police. When John heard the call going out, he panicked. Dashing out of the house, he jumped into his car and ordered Les Anthony to drive around to Peter Brown's place in Mayfair. Bursting in upon the Beatles' man of affairs, John demanded that arrangements be made immediately to get him out of the country.

tMeantime, the police arrived at 12 Chapel Street - as they had done on many past occasions for similar reasons - where they were met by Brian. Speaking with his best West End accent, he assured the officers that the call had been a false alarm. His mother, in delicate health owing to the recent demise of his father, had discovered her son in a playful tussle with an old friend and had misconstrued the situation entirely. Brian offered the officers his apologies and showed them to the door.

tWhen he was confronted by the press after Brian's death, John parroted for public consumption the maharishi's line: that death was the gateway to a better life. In his heart Lennon felt fear. For Brian had functioned like a mother to John, coddling him, shielding him and getting him out of trouble. Now John's surrogate mother was dead. "I was scared!" Lennon confessed later, adding, "I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it!"' More likely what he felt was: "I've fuckin' had it!" For the pattern was all too familiar. Once again, as in childhood and youth, John had been abandoned and left to fend for himself by the person to whom he had looked for love and protection. A clear sign of how closely Brian was identified with Julia in John's mind is the fact that Lennon did precisely the same thing after his manager's death as he had done after his mother died: He held a seance conducted by a medium that was attended by all the Beatles, who, as was their wont, never disclosed what transpired"

"At such a critical moment it was natural that John should turn to Yoko because he had already developed a grand illusion about her wisdom and powers, regarding her as an almost magical being who could fulfill his every need and solve all his problems. Now his need of her became so great that he could no longer allow their relationship to exist in limbo; instead, Lennon demanded that Yoko make a commitment to him.

Up to this time John and Yoko had been simply having an affair, taking their pleasures covertly in the back seat of a limousine or wherever opportunity offered and enjoying long heart-to-heart talks. After their abrupt elopement their relationship was established formally as a kind of menage a trios in which John was recognized by Tony as Yoko's lover and John, in exchange, provided the money to support Tony and Yoko.

Any more stories, OP?! Thanks anyway

That was very interesting read!

I think John was the happiest at 1974/75 when he was with May Pang, May was an enabling cure for what ailed Lennon at the time, mainly fear and loathing of his life at the Dakota. Yes, he got drunk and stupid, but he was suddenly let out of his repressive cage. He got drunk and stupid before and during the Beatles. He got stoned and stupid at the Dakota.

I thin he was being himself, Not affected, fake and programmed like with Yoko. If i wan to see a real interview of Lennon, i watch his few ones during he period of 1974/75. This was the real john talking, Not the angry stoned one during the beatles or the programmed Fake one during his time with Yoko,

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Yoko and John's behavior reminded me of a line from The Great Gatsby:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Depressed lost stoned Lennon - audio diary in 1979

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Lennon wresting with Harry Nilsson.

"Lennon looked TRAGIC in his last days (years)"

ANOREXIC. And he hasn't even reached 40.

I do agree with his initial evaluation of Bob Dylan though.

R162 DRUGS and Anorexic

Bump

What book did all these stories come from?

Yoko and John deserved each other.

""As Paul McCartney walked in," Spanish Tony recollected, "everyone was leaping around to Beggars' Banquet, which - with tracks like 'Sympathy for the Devil' and 'Street Fighting Man' - was far and away the best album of the Stones' career. Paul discreetly handed me a record and told me, 'See what you think of it, Tony. It's our new one.' I stuck the record on the sound system, and the slow, thundering build up of 'Hey Jude' shook the club. I turned the record over, and we all heard John Lennon's nasal voice pump out 'Revolution.' When it was over, I noticed that Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him."

The birthday party turned quickly into a drug bacchanal as everyone, including the staff, became deranged on the potent hash cakes and brain-searing punch. Late in the evening Lennon, "looking as though his eyes were going to pop out of his head," staggered over to Tony Sanchez and asked him to call a cab. Sanchez promptly dispatched a doorman on the errand, but when he didn't come back, it became necessary to send out another man. Meantime, Lennon got angry and started shouting, "What kind of doorman takes half an hour to find a taxi on Tottenham Court Road?" Frantically Sanchez sent off his third and last man. When he, too, failed to return, Actually, the doormen were so stoned that when they got out in the street, they forgot what they had been sent to do and wandered off. One of them woke up twelve hours later in a rose bed in St. James's Park.

tLennon was bellowing like a mad bull when Mick Jagger asked him what was the matter and instantly produced the keys to his midnight blue black-windowed Aston-Martin DB6. Sanchez told his cousin to drive John and Yoko home. The lad, an ardent Beatles' fan, ran to accomplish his mission. Once behind the wheel of the highly sophisticated automobile, the poor boy discovered that he couldn't even find the ignition keyhole. While he sweated over the dashboard, Lennon fumed in the lavishly upholstered back seat.

Suddenly he was startled by the sound of a knocking on the window next to his head. Squinting through the tinted glass, he beheld a huge policeman standing at the curb. John was carrying in his pocket a vial of cocaine. Terrified of being busted, he eased the bottle out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor of the car. As it turned out, the bobby was simply trying to be of service. He showed the driver how to switch on the ignition, and the party sped off into the night.

tJohn started scrabbling around on the floor, trying to find his coke. "This is Mick Jagger's car," he muttered. "I can't just leave my coke rolling around on the floor of his car. It isn't fair!" Just at that moment a sudden acceleration sent Lennon sprawling off the seat. Flashing with fresh rage, John yelled: "Stop the car! We're getting out! I'll walk home, if I have to. You find the coke and keep it."

Heroin Honeymoon

Long before John and Yoko had obtained their freedom, they were enslaved by heroin. Yoko told Marnie Hair that John had been on the drug for a long time before he hooked her, adding that he could withdraw from anything, but she could not. To the press, she offered another story,

t"Spanish Tony" Sanchez, a hustler intimate of the art dealer to the rock stars Robert Fraser (imprisoned for heroin after he was busted with the Rolling Stones in May 1967), spent a lot of time that summer with John Lennon, watching him get high with Brian Jones and Keith Richard, both notorious addicts. "John, I feared," wrote Sanchez, "seemed to be following Brian into a world where drugs dominated everything. [Lennon was using heroin, cocaine and hashish, as well as LSD, marijuana, and Biphetamine pills.]

He called almost daily to see if I could help him get hold of dope... Once he aggressively insisted I supply him with heroin. He sent his chauffeur to my apartment to get it. I was so annoyed at the way he was pressuring me that I accepted the $200 proffered by the driver and gave him a stash containing two crushed aspirin. That, I thought, should stop him pestering me once and for all. Next day John was back on the phone asking for more. 'What about the last lot?' I said. 'Oh, I didn't think very much of that,' he said. It hardly gave me a buzz.'"

Ringo's flat in Montagu Square had witnessed plenty of drug craziness even before John and Yoko moved in. Decorated by Ken Partridge as a honeymoon nest, it had been trashed by Jimi Hendrix, who went out of his mind one night and threw cans of paint all over its watered blue silk hangings. Ringo had scrapped the original decor and painted the place stark white. Now it got another dose of junkie squalor.

"They lay in the basement of Montagu Square almost all July that simmering summer, submerged in self-inflicted stupor," recalled Peter Brown. Soon the apartment appeared a "pigsty, a junkie's haven of rumpled sheets, dirty clothes, newspapers and magazines heaped all over the floor." The most striking object was a collage by Richard Chamberlain composed of newspaper clippings of the Rolling Stones' bust. As John and Yoko lay stoned, gazing at this minatory montage through the smoke of joss sticks, they were contemplating unwittingly their own doom.

John Lennon could be laughably stupid. He read some dumb book that said that sugar was poison and believed it; he refused to let Sean have anything with sugar in it and avoided sugar like it was arsenic. Yes, he thought sugar was hugely damaging to one's health; in the meantime he smoked like a chimney and lay around all day stoned. As for food...well, he and Yoko adhered to a "macrobiotic" diet, which consisted of mostly rice and bean sprouts. That's one of the reasons he looked so bad; his awful diet. An awful diet, compulsive smoking and drug addiction. The medical personnel who examined him after he was shot were amazed at his terrible physical condition.

John, Cynthia and Yoko:

" Cynthia got home, she had an experience straight out of a horror movie.

t"It was eerily silent," she recalled, as she approached the house with Alex and Jenny. Nobody was about: not Julian or Dot or the gardener. The first thought that went through her head was that there had been an all-night party and everybody was dead asleep. Seizing the knocker in the shape of a woman's derriere, she knocked loudly on the front door. There was no response. Finally, she opened her purse and took out the magnetically coded card that activated the special lock. At that moment Cynthia discovered that the door was unlocked. Entering hesitantly, followed by her friends, she stood in the dark, wood-paneled foyer and shouted up the stairs: "John! Julian! Dot! Anybody home?" There was only silence and the weird light that came through the closed drapes on the windows in the lounge. Turning to the right and making her way through the dining room and kitchen, Cynthia stepped into the sun-room - and froze!

tSitting on the little Queen Anne sofa in a green and white terry-cloth robe, his hair disheveled, a cup of tea in his hand, was John Lennon. Facing him, with her back to Cynthia, was a tiny woman with a great bush of black hair, her body shrouded in a black silk kimono. "It was like walking into a brick wall," Cynthia said, adding: "It was as if I didn't belong anymore." The truth was that she didn't belong anymore. Without her knowledge she had been eliminated

After a silence that seemed to last forever, John said, "Oh, hi!" coolly taking a puff on his cigarette.

tCynthia was now so freaked out that she opened her mouth like an automaton and began to recite a little speech that she had prepared on the plane. "I had this great idea!" she gushed. "We had breakfast in Greece, lunch in Rome, and Jenny and Alex and I thought it would be great if we all went to dinner in London to carry on the whole holiday."

tImpassively John Lennon replied: "No, thanks." At this moment, Yoko turned around and gave Cynthia "a positive, confident look."

It took my breath away," said Cynthia. "I wasn't angry. I was just absolutely shattered... So instead of starting a battle and asking questions about what was going on, I felt I had to get out of there immediately."

"Rushing upstairs, Cynthia started packing as if for a trip, even though her luggage was still in the car. Passing the guest bedroom, she spotted a pair of Japanese slippers on the carpet.

tFifteen minutes after arriving home, she was going out the door. "I took John's silence," she observed, "as saying: 'Don't interrupt this fantastic situation. Get lost! You're spoiling things."' Having received John's tacit command, Cynthia thought only of obeying. Without a murmur of protest, she abandoned home and husband to another woman and left in the company of two people whom she knew only socially.

t Alex and Jenny offered to put up Cynthia in the little mews house they shared as friends in central London. After her first day as guest, according to Peter Brown, "Cynthia sat up with Magic Alex most of the night, drinking wine and talking at a candlelit table in his apartment. She had never trusted Magic Alex before, but she needed someone to talk to desperately that night and she poured her heart out to him. Many bottles of wine were finished by dawn, when she crawled into bed with Alex and made love to John's best friend."

Three days later Cynthia phoned Dot and announced her intention of returning to Kenwood. When she arrived, she found John awaiting her. Yoko had vanished. "I can't understand why you went off," protested Lennon, who acted very "warm and welcoming." "What have you been up to?" he demanded, as if Cynthia's abrupt disappearance had been some utterly inexplicable event. Cynthia challenged John immediately to explain what he had been up to with Yoko.

tJohn was well prepared for the question. He explained with a show of complete unconcern that his relationship with Yoko was purely intellectual. When Cynthia sought to probe a little deeper into the liaison, John clammed up and refused to say anything more about the matter, save for assuring Cynthia that she had nothing to worry about

Cynthia was not satisfied by his assurances. "I see a great similarity between you and Yoko," Cynthia insisted, and noticed John blanch. "John, there's something about her that's just like you. Look, you may say these things about Yoko, that she's crazy, just a weird artist, but there's an aura about her that's going to click with you."

tNo matter how much Lennon protested his lack of love for Yoko, Cynthia remained unconvinced. As she said, "I knew I had lost him."

tThis conviction explains what happened next. When Cynthia asked John if she should cancel the family holiday, which was to be spent with Mrs. Powell and Julian at Pesaro, John replied: "No, no, you go ahead and have a lovely time." Somehow Cynthia persuaded herself that her absence would not have a decisive effect on her marriage. She rationalized that it would be a terrible thing to disappoint Julian.

Yoko had meanwhile gone back to Tony to work out the final arrangements for their separation. "She owed Tony a lot," observed Dan Richter, who was present at this moment. "He got her out of the mental hospital. He kept her going, raised money for her shows, promoted the tickets to London, went after all the publicity, found backers for her films, borrowed money from the banks." The payoff Tony demanded was a flat 50 per cent of everything she got out of Lennon. A contract embodying this demand was drawn up by Tony and signed by Yoko. "She felt she owed him," explained Richter, who served as a witness: "I think she also felt she could break the agreement later if she wanted to."

"Once Tony had been placated and Cynthia had left for Italy, Yoko was free to return to Kenwood. Lennon considered his marriage at an end, save for the legal formalities. Without troubling to warn his wife, he started stepping out with his new woman. Lennon was suddenly stopped in his tracks by the cries of the reporters, who came surging in from all sides accompanied by flash-popping photographers. "Where's your wife? Where's Cynthia? What happened to your wife, John?" shouted the newsmen, snapping like dogs at their cornered prey

Another woman would have rushed home to confront her husband and save her marriage. Cynthia, who dreaded emotional confrontations, took to her bed, where she remained for days. Finally, one night she went out with the owner's twenty-eight-year-old son, Roberto Bassanini, a big, hearty, handsome man of whom she had become fond during a previous visit. Next morning, when they returned to the hotel, they found Magic Alex awaiting them.

When Alex had Cynthia alone, he told her that John would be very interested to learn that she was not moping about like a rejected wife but carousing with a handsome young bachelor. Having thrown her on the defensive, he announced next that John wanted a divorce in order to marry Yoko Ono. If Cynthia made a fuss or didn't cooperate, John had vowed to "take Julian away from you and send you back to Hoylake."

tEven Cynthia could not tolerate such threats. "Suing me for divorce!" she burst out. "On what grounds is he suing me for divorce?"

t"John is claiming adultery," Alex replied coolly. "I have agreed to be co-respondent and testify on John's behalf." Then he reminded Cynthia of that night when she had crawled into his bed, drunk at dawn. Having dropped that bombshell, he left at once for London.

" Cynthia returned the next day, within five minutes of her arrival she was served with a divorce petition. Calling Apple, she asked to speak with John. She was told it would take two weeks to arrange a meeting with her husband. Impulsively she grabbed her mother and son and drove down to Kenwood. She was met at the door by John and Yoko, dressed identically in black. John, who had been delighted to play the spy-master from the security of his home, was totally unprepared for a face-to-face encounter with his wife. When Mrs. Powell told Yoko, "I think you should go in the other room and leave these two together," John cried out like a frightened child: "No, Yoko! You stay here!"

Cynthia broke down immediately and began to weep. What was distressing her was the prospect of being publicly branded as an adulteress. She insisted that she had never liked Magic Alex, and that far from wanting him to make love to her, she had been bewitched by candles and black magic. John kept explaining that he had no choice but to sue on grounds of adultery if he were to avoid the sort of publicity that would damage his career. After arguing for fifteen minutes over who had committed adultery with whom, Cynthia finally made the point with which she should have started. "You're totally unjust in putting me on the spot when you're the one breaking up the marriage," she cried.

tLennon, desperate to end the scene, answered only: "We better put it in the hands of the solicitors and get it all sorted out." John suggested also that Cynthia move back into Kenwood with her mother and Julian, leaving the Montagu Square flat for his use. When Lillian Powell insisted that her daughter should not be left entirely on her own, Lennon shouted, "This is my house! You get out!"

"Cynthia knuckled under and allowed John to sue her for adultery. Having made this painful concession, she was entitled to demand a generous settlement. Instead, she conspired against her own interests by calling John up on the sly and telling him they should reach a private agreement because her attorneys planned to "screw him out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Once John recognized what this divorce could cost him, he disavowed his earlier offer and started beating Cynthia down, shouting, "My last offer to you is £75,000. What have you done to deserve it? Christ, it's like winning the fucking pools!"

tStill, the divorce would have proceeded smoothly if Yoko had not become pregnant in September. This event made a mockery of Lennon's charge of adultery. So the parties were obliged to exchange roles, and Cynthia wound up suing John, which gave her the whip hand.

Needless to say, she never put the leather to John's tender hide. He got off lightly with a settlement of £100,000 plus £2,400 annually for Julian's maintenance. The trust fund established for Julian was just as ungenerous. It provided for the payment of £100,000 when his son reached the age of twenty-five - provided John Lennon begot no more children. In the event John had another child, Julian's provision was to be halved. John did surrender all his custody rights to Cynthia, but that was a welcome sacrifice.

On 8 November 1968, just two weeks after John Lennon announced publicly that Yoko Ono was pregnant with his child, Cynthia Lennon was granted a divorce. "Cynthia was amputated from the Beatles with ruthless speed and precision," wrote Peter Brown, who added: "Few Beatles' employees or friends dared to show her support or speak out against Yoko, lest the wrath of Lennon fall on them."

tThe only old friend in the Beatles' circle who offered Cynthia any support or sympathy was Paul. "I was truly surprised when one sunny afternoon Paul arrived on his own," recalled Cynthia, adding: "I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare and even more moved when he presented me with a single red rose accompanied by a jokey remark about our future: 'How about it, Cyn? How about you and me getting married?"

"Julian Lennon and Kyoko Cox were victims of the divorce. Henceforth John ' saw his son only rarely and Yoko made absolutely no effort to see Kyoko. At first, the child spent a lot of time in the home of a sympathetic friend, Maggie Postlewaite, who was provided by John with a telephone number to call in the event of an emergency.

But the one time Maggie dialed the number, it proved useless: a telephone answering service took the message but refused to call the Lennons. Neither John nor Yoko called back. Kyoko was terribly hurt when she discovered that she could not talk to her mother, even on the telephone. Maggie had to call Tony, who came around the next day to collect his daughter.

tYoko's divorce from Tony cost John Lennon more money than his divorce from his wife. John agreed to pay all the joint debts of Yoko and Tony, which came to a whopping £100,000. The extent of Tony Cox's individual payment is unclear, but Tony's brother, Larry, recalled that Tony had a "lot of money" when he left England.

"Yoko was rushed to Queen Charlotte Hospital on 7 November, when it began to appear that she might lose her baby. John moved into her room, sleeping upon an air mattress laid on the floor and hardly leaving the building for two weeks. When it became apparent that the fetus would die, John obtained a stethoscopic microphone and recorded the final heartbeats of the unborn child, whom he named John Ono Lennon II. (The recording was included in Life with the Lions.) John's extreme concern about Yoko and his distress at the loss of the child were deepened by guilt.

As Yoko told her assistant, Arlene Reckson, years later, the miscarriage had been triggered by a beating she received from John. On 23 November the dead fetus was removed.

"Actually, John and Yoko were not occupying the whole house. "The two of them lived in the bedroom," reported Les Anthony. "They'd even built a small kitchen upstairs. Not that Yoko ever cooked. She'd never wash a cup, even if there wasn't any staff downstairs. In the early days they used to eat a lot of rice, but even cooking a bit of that, she'd burn it. When I went to pick them up, they'd say: 'Do us a favor and wash up.' And what a job it was with everything burnt."

tLike most junkies, John and Yoko preferred to spend their lives in bed. They camped on John's eight-square-foot pad. Around them was a Sargasso Sea of books, magazines, and newspapers, tapes and records, dirty underwear, and discarded clothing. With a color TV and a film projector, they had plenty of images on which to batten. For decor they stuck up their nude photos framed in a couple of condoms filled with stale piss. In this condition they hibernated until Christmas."

Poor Julian. What's he up to?

R178 Julian turned out to be a good human being despite his difficult childhood ,his asshole father and a golddigging stepmother

WTH? he looks so emaciated

R180 His body gone downhill starting from 1977 till his death from his increasing Heroin addiction and bad dieting . May Pang said in her memoir when she last saw John in late 1978 (and slept together) she was so shocked by how extremely thin he was comparing to the last time they were together in 1976.

I'm impressed at how well Yoko (and John) were able to hide their addiction (especially his). I imagine that still happens though.

If he hadn't been murdered, it seems doubtful he'd have made it to 50. I was in high school when Lennon died, and like most I assumed Goldman was the devil. Now I get the feeling his portrait of Lennon is pretty accurate. Paul on the other hand seems to be a relatively decent person.

[quote]If Yoko Ono made enormous demands on her lover, insisting that he share every one of her thoughts and impulses, she was also extremely generous to him.

He brought 7/8 of the pie to the table. Of course, YOKO possesses eXtraordinary gifts.

R183 People make Gods and heroes out of celebrities, they refuse to believe anything bad about them and if anybody dare to say the Truth and debunk the Myth (like Goldman for instance) they're liars and devils and their career is probably over.

All these heroes are frauds and were very flawed people like anybody else

John and Yoko' MYTH...very interesting video

"The moment Marnie sees that she has upset John, she locks her lips and returns to her customary role, sitting across the table, her eyes fixed on John as he stares off into space, talking as if he were broadcasting. As Marnie listens to the lecture, her gaze wanders to Yoko, sitting at the end of the table, her face impassive, her hands folded across her belly. Feeling still the effects of her wake-up taste, she's disposed to nod out. Yet behind her expressionless mask, an imp of mischief is alert and active.

tAs John drones on, Marnie sees Yoko reach out slyly to nudge John's tea mug or his ashtray beyond his reach. When he extends his hand to grasp the mug or flick off the ash from his cigarette, he finds himself seizing air or soiling the tabletop. Some mornings, when Marnie and Yoko are sitting in the lounge drinking tea and talking, Yoko will suddenly raise her head as she catches the sound of John's footsteps thudding down the hallway. Quick as a cat, she jumps up and darts over to the cat box, where she seizes a little turd that she plants in John's path. When the master of the house makes his big entrance, he puts his foot squarely in cat shit.

tThere are those mornings, however, when Yoko is a bit too slow and John catches her in the act! Then there's hell to pay. John seizes Yoko by her great mop of hair and hauls her, screaming and scratching, to the stove, where he threatens to set her hair afire! That's why there's never a match in this kitchen. Sometimes, when Marnie arrives in the morning, she looks down and discovers that the whole floor is strewn with Yoko's torn-out hairs"

Compelling and repelling.

This is almost, but not quite, as skeevy as the tales of Marolon Brando as told by Carlo Fiore.

John was tubby in his youth (below). Jesus, with all of the drugs and anorexia, if he hadn't been killed, Lennon would have died an early pathetic death of his own making.

Drugs took their toll on George Harrison too. What does he weigh here, 130 lbs?

......

"I'm impressed at how well Yoko (and John) were able to hide their addiction (especially his). I imagine that still happens though."

Actually, from their appearance and behavior it was pretty obvious they were drug addicts. But things like that just weren't talked about back then.

Were you "around" back then R193? I was and I maintain that you are right to the extent that we didn't have phones to record every moment of one's life, but I maintain that to the public it wasn't "pretty obvious" that they were drug addicts. Maybe it was just the social media phenomenon but still, John Lennon was considered a "god" and certainly not a heroin addict.

"I was and I maintain that you are right to the extent that we didn't have phones to record every moment of one's life, but I maintain that to the public it wasn't "pretty obvious" that they were drug addicts. "

Just looking at them you could tell they were addicts. And I'm not saying I was there to look at them but people who did see them back in those days knew immediately that they were druggies. But things like that were never written about or publicized the, which is why it wasn't all over the place that they were addicts. And John Lennon was never considered a "god." He was admired as a Beatle and worshipped as a rock star, but after his involvement with One he made a laughingstock of himself. He was never a "god."

R195 I totally agree with you, John was a joke in the 1970s , he made a fool of himself when he was parading around with Yoko everywhere and babbling non sens . he became a hero in the eye of the public after he had been shot. Mark Chapman made junkie weak minded John Lennon a Hero/God!

People weren't aware of what drug addicts (OR anorexics) looked like in the 1970s because we rarely came across them in real life., or so we thought. I actually thought all of the Beatles looked like hell in the 1970s (Paul for the mullet), but then I was only 20.

More, please OP.

It was also considered 'youthful' to be ridiculously thin back then. The 'swole' look only became the common thing post-HIV when all the gays wanted to show how healthy they were. Being anorexically thin was considered a positive effect of drug use. (I remember a quote about Debbie Harry that you could tell when she was using because she was gorgeous, but when she wasn't she looked like a frau housewife.)

No, r199; "ridiculously thin" as we know it today was not the "in" thing. Only the RARA AVIS Twiggy fit that bill; everyone else looked normal-sized.

And r195, what do you think we call beings who are "worshipped," "as a rock star" or otherwise? That's right: "gods." Same with Eric Clapton. Moreover, if you don't think the Beatles, collectively or singly, were idolized, emulated, and desired (even Ringo got Barbara Bach!), then you simply don't know whereof you speak.

Ricky Nelson in the 1970s: nose job and 20 pounds lighter

"That's right, "gods."

No, not right. I've heard of rock stars being referred to as "gods" but I don't it's meant to be taken seriously, as you seem to be doing.

You remind me of Shelley Duvall, the spaced out Rolling Stone reporter in "Annie Hall": "he's God....I mean this man is God." She was talking about a Maharishi; I guess you feel the same way about rock stars.

R200: Off the top of my head: Lorraine Newman, Gilda Radner from NY SNL 70s. Men: Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, (thin white duke phase), Eric Idle.

Yes, all these '70s people were likely on coke and/or heroin, but it was considered a 'youthful' positive to be insanely thin pre-anorexia - and not a fat, alcoholic 50-something or fat Elvis. These were John Lennon's '70s peers. Jagger was one of the first on the fitness craze and started working out at least by the 80s.

Bad editing. Meant Bowie (thin white duke phase).

Also 70s Patti Smith.

O.M.G. OP, don't do this to me! I've been looking forward to this all day!!! Have mercy!!

Drunk John Lennon and Harry Nilsson Tossed From Troubadour for Heckling

Another one of drunk Lennon thrown out

He looks pathetic

........

Drunk buddies John Lennon and Harry Nilsson

John Lennon made May Pang his sex slave

Please add some more stories OP, I'm finding all of this so very fascinating!

He must have had a thing for ugly Asian women. Yoko certainly was nothing to look at and neither was May Pang.

Lennon and Nilsson liked Brandy Alexanders; they called them "milk shakes" because they tasted like chocolate and went down so smooth. But its primary ingredient is brandy. They would get drunk as shit on their "milk shakes." Ringo liked them too, but he advised to always make it a double brandy; have a chaser of brandy and then the Brandy Alexander. Then you're got a "proper drink", he said.

R213 you can also read the other Lennon thread with more stories

John Lennon Singing Drunk

R216 This was painful to listen to! i wonder if this was the night when Phil Spector tied him up?!

Not to derail this wonderful thread but how come no one mentions that John looked Asian. Nothing wrong with that, I have always thought the other 3 Beatles looks English and John, well, looked different. Surely there is Asian in his ancestry somewhere?

"Listen," snapped Yoko, "we're gonna treat him like the fungus he is - keep him in the dark and feed him horse-shit!"

LAMO

This fungus of a thread is a Top 5 DL treasure - thank you OP!