Lesley-Ann Jones - The Search for John Lennon: The Life, Loves, and Death of a Rock Star

THE SEARCH FOR JOHN LENNON

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 W. 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Lesley-Ann Jones

First Pegasus Books cloth edition December 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Front cover image PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive Alamy Stock Photo Jacket design Studio Gearbox

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-672-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-673-8

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

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To Dad:

The fighter still remains.

Kenneth Powell Jones

11 October 1931 26 September 2019

IN MEMORIAM

JOHN WINSTON ONO LENNON

9 October 1940 8 December 1980

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me.

DYLAN THOMAS

Blessed are the weird people

Poets, misfits, writers, mystics, heretics, painters and troubadours

For they teach us how to see the world

through different eyes.

JACOB NORDBY

It is better to go out in a blaze of glory, young.

SIMON NAPIER-BELL

T he rhythms of mind and memory are like tides. They change shape constantly. Even those who were there, who knew and experienced John Lennon first-hand, can be inclined to forget things. Some rewrite history to stopple the gaps, for which they might be forgiven. Forty years is a lifetime. It was to John. Yet he hardly seems distant. In 2020, a milestone year the fortieth anniversary of his murder, the official fiftieth of the Beatles demise, the sixtieth of the band in Hamburg and when John would have turned eighty years old it feels like time to reconsider and to retrace him. If you are under fifty, you hadnt been born when the Beatles broke up. If you are younger than forty, you werent alive when John died. Unimaginable? Does it seem to you, as it seems to me, as though hes still here?

There are as many versions of his story as there are those of a mind to tell it. Where truth is a point of view, facts and figures can be an inconvenience. When reminiscence is distorted by supposition and theory, it can lead to confusion. If assumption is the root of all blunders, speculation is the thief of rational thought. All of which gets in the way. John coined it (or did he?) in a lyric line for Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) on the final album released during his lifetime, Double Fantasy: Life is what happens to you while youre busy making other plans.

John said a lot of things in his crammed, contradictory half-life. He went back on his words, re-writing his own history and thought processes constantly. His propensity for doing so confounds the chronicler as surely as the conflicting accounts and shifting recollections of those close to him, or who crossed his path. Keeping em guessing is so John. Confused? But Im not the only one.

We know the ending. It happened in New York on Monday, 8 December 1980. A gusty night, otherwise uncommonly mild for the time of year. John and Yoko were driven home by limousine from an evening session at Record Plant recording studio, reaching the Dakota apartment building at around 10.50 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. They were confronted by a Texan-born itinerant clutching a Charter Arms .38-caliber pistol and a copy of J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye. The twenty-five-year-old, Mark Chapman, had been waiting for them, and calmly fired five bullets at John. Four hit him. He was conveyed by cops to the Roosevelt Hospital on 59th Street and Central Park, where a twenty-nine-year-old third-year general surgeon, Dr David Halleran, held Johns heart in his hands, performing cardiac massage and pleading silently for a miracle.

Doctor who? Dont previous accounts acknowledge the efforts of Stephan Lynn and Richard Marks for having operated to save Johns life? Dr Lynn has granted many interviews, his recollections ever more embellished. Lynn also claimed that Yoko lay smashing her head repeatedly on the hospital floor. But, in 2015, having listened for years to other physicians taking credit, David Halleran came forward for the sake of historical accuracy. In an interview for a Fox TV Media Spotlight Investigation, he said for the record that neither Lynn nor Marks had touched Johns body. His statement was supported by two nurses, Dea Sato and Barbara Kammerer, who worked alongside him in Room 115 that deadly night. Yoko stepped up, too, denying hysterical head-banging. She insisted that she had remained calm throughout for the sake of their five-year-old son, Sean. She has supported Dr Hallerans version of events. Why didnt he pipe up sooner?

It just seems unseemly for professionals to go out and say, Hi, Im Dave Halleran, I took care of John Lennon, he said. At the time I wanted to crawl under a rock, I just wanted to go home. I was distraught, I was upset, you feel somewhat responsible, on what you could have done different.

Were you in America at the time? Were you one of the twenty million viewers at home watching the New England PatriotsMiami Dolphins game on ABCs Monday Night Football that commentator Howard Cosell interrupted to deliver the bombshell that John had been shot? Were you among millions more who picked up the newsflash on NBC and CBS? Might you have been one of the thousands who headed for the Upper West Side to join the vigil? Or were you stuck elsewhere in the world, tuning in during the aftermath, to watch throngs of grief-stricken fans sinking in mud in Central Park, threading flowers through the Dakota railings, wailing Give peace a chance? Did you hear that a background-music version of All My Loving was playing out over the hospitals sound system, around the time Yoko was informed that her husband was dead? TV producer Alan Weiss heard it. He happened to be lying on a trolley in the hospital corridor at the time, awaiting treatment after a motorbike accident. Are there coincidences?

If you were born by then and were in England when it happened, you were probably sound asleep. John died at around 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on 8 December (reports vary with regard to the precise time of death), which equated in the UK to about 4 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Tuesday, 9 December. The news was buzzed across the Atlantic by New York-based BBC reporter Tom Brook, who heard it from former pop mogul and songwriter Jonathan King, at that time based there. Brook tore to the Dakota. He called Radio 4s Today programme from a sidewalk phone booth. There was no breakfast TV in those days, most people listened to morning radio. They told Tom to ring back at 6.30 a.m., when the show, co-presented that day by Brian Redhead, would be live. Brook unscrewed an office telephone receiver and wired in a lead to transmit his taped vox pops no Internet, no email, no mobiles and was interviewed on air by Redhead. By the time we got up for school, college, work, the dog, the unthinkable was everywhere.

Where were you when you heard?

That is the question. Echoing the opener of Prince Hamlets eternal soliloquy, it is arguably the question of our times. The Silent Generation, born mid/late 1920s to early/mid 1940s, together with post-war baby boomers, tend to recall their whereabouts and what they were doing when they heard about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The subject came up in conversation with my three children as I was beginning to research this book. What you have to understand, I said, is that John Lennon was our JFK. Why? said my student son. Whats an airport got to do with it?