The Love You Make (56 page)

Surprisingly, John was elated over the performance. He remembered the thrill of performing live again, and this time the speaker systems were advanced enough to be heard. He was so happy with the experience that on the plane ride home he decided he was going to formally announce to the press that he was leaving the Beatles and starting his own band with Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman.

Allen Klein, who had joined John and Yoko in Toronto for the plane ride back to London, dissuaded him from this. The new recording contracts Klein had negotiated for the Beatles with EMI and Capitol weren’t in effect just yet, and the huge advances hadn’t all been paid. Klein asked John to wait until the contracts were finalized before he started talk that the Beatles were disbanding.

But that didn’t keep John from enjoying the satisfaction of telling Paul. Shortly after John’s return from Toronto, he demanded a meeting at Apple. Paul arrived, his usual magnanimous self, full of plans for new Beatles projects. But no matter what Paul suggested, John kept saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or “No, I’m not interested.” The discussion finally dissolved into a mean argument, which Paul finally recovered from by launching into one of his Beade pep talks, one of those “Toppermost of the Poppermost” things. “When everything is said and done,” he summed up, “we’re still the Beatles, aren’t we?”

“Aw fuck,” John said, “I ain’t no Beatle.”

Paul wouldn’t hear it. “Of course you are—”

“I’m not!” John shouted, “Don’t you understand? It’s over!
Over!
I want a divorce, just like the divorce I got from Cynthia! Can’t you get it through your bloody head?”

The meeting ended shortly after with John rushing down the stairs, Yoko right behind him, shouting, “It’s over! Finished!”

Still, John said nothing to the press, and when he and Yoko left Savile Row that afternoon in their white Rolls-Royce, Paul still somehow believed that John would calm down and there would always be the Beatles.

On October 9,
the day of John’s twenty-ninth birthday, Yoko was rushed to the King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill, London, for a series of emergency blood transfusions. Four days later it was quietly reported in the daily papers that she had miscarried again.

Depressed and exhausted from this second loss, John and Yoko took a Greek vacation with Magic Alex. They rented a yacht with a small crew and set out into the Mediterranean, with no destination except to get away from the rest of the world. John and Yoko vowed to use the ten-day cruise to purge their bodies of all the poisonous drugs and alcohol they had been using, and they went on a total fast except for water. Instead of improving their health, this radical approach only seemed to do more damage to their bodies and their temperaments. Alex was witness to all manner of physical violence between the couple and substantial damage to the boat. More than a few times John hauled off and gave Yoko a good walloping—just as he had done to Cynthia years before:

Upon returning to London, John released
The Wedding Album
on Apple. This was another experimental album, consisting of some recordings made at their Amsterdam bed-in, including a long selection in which John and Yoko repeat each other’s names in a chant. The expensively boxed album, which sold for nine dollars at a time when most LPs cost four dollars, contained newspapers clippings, a plastic facsimile of a piece of wedding cake, and a copy of their marriage certificate. The release of this album was quickly followed by the release of the single “Cold Turkey.”

On the morning of November 26, while reading stories in the daily papers about the war in Vietnam and the starving children in Biafra, John decided that he was ashamed to be an MBE and that he would return the award to the Queen in protest. He ordered his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to drive to Bournemouth and fetch the MBE from where it sat on top of Aunt Mimi’s television set. Mimi later said, “If I knew what John wanted it for, I never would have given it to him.”

John dictated a letter to the Queen on Bag Productions stationery, saying, “Your Majesty, I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts. With love, John Lennon of Bag.”

The mention of “Cold Turkey” was added as an afterthought, one that John would seriously regret. It cheapened the whole gesture of returning the MBE, turning it into another John Lennon publicity gimmick. John and Yoko delivered the medal themselves to the tradesmen’s entrance at Buckingham Palace. A spokesman for the Palace told the press that it was ironic “that he should return the medal, as the first MBEs that were returned were from people protesting that Mr. Lennon… was given the award in the first place.”

“I don’t think the Queen will be embarrassed,” John said.

“The Queen is above embarrassment,” replied the spokesman.

Soon after returning his MBE, John stepped up his peace activities. This was launched with an international billboard campaign, in which billboards in twelve major cities around the world carried the message: “War Is Over—If You Want It—Happy Christmas From John and Yoko.” This campaign was kicked off with a charity concert for the United Nations Children’s Fund held at the Lyceum Theater in London. The day after the concert, John and Yoko were off to Toronto again, this time to help instigate plans for a mammoth free “peace concert” to be held at an as yet undetermined site the coming summer. The concert was to be promoted by John Brower and his partner Ritchie Yorke, who had arranged John and Yoko’s appearance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Festival. More than thirty billboards blanketed Toronto for John and Yoko’s arrival. The Canadian press covered their every move from the time they entered the country, and John and Yoko kept them busy. They held a press conference at the Ontario Science Center to announce the peace concert would incorporate a worldwide “peace vote” in which the audience would vote for peace or war on a ballot, and then John and Yoko would “give [the ballots] to the United States.” John and Yoko were also filmed during a meeting with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto. They then hired a glass-roofed observation train to take them to Montreal, where their Rolls-Royce had already been shipped for their use. In Montreal they had an hour-long meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, which gave their campaign enormous credence and energy. “If there were more leaders like Mr. Trudeau,” John told the assembled press corps after their meeting, “the world would have peace.” Yoko added, “It was a beautiful meeting. We got good incentive.”

John and Yoko returned to Tittenhurst Park for Christmas, then jetted on to Aalborg, Denmark, on December 29, where Tony Cox had moved with Kyoko and his new wife, an American girl named Melinda. For several months now Tony had been reluctant to let Yoko see her daughter. There had been no specific custody agreement when they were divorced. Tony knew of John and Yoko’s drug addiction and didn’t like the idea of Kyoko being exposed to them in that state. Also, he was now very angry about the car accident in Scotland in which Kyoko was injured. At first Cox said that it could have happened to anybody, and that it was Kyoko’s “karma” that she was hurt, but now he was complaining that she was permanently injured and had difficulty breathing at night. John and Yoko insisted they wanted her to spend the spring with them at Tittenhurst and went to Denmark to convince Cox.

When they got to Cox’s farmhouse in the frozen wastes of Aalborg, they found that Cox was on his own trip. He was vehemently opposed to the use of any drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol, and they were forced to empty their pockets and luggage of any of these evils before being allowed into his farmhouse. Cox was also involved in a group called the “Harbingers” who were some sort of cosmic commune, and two of the members named Hamrick and Leonard were fetched to hypnotize John into giving up smoking. John, who was rarely without a cigarette in his hand, agreed to this ritual, in part to please Cox. Then, to make the event seem even more surreal, John and Yoko agreed to have all their hair cut off by a woman barber in Cox’s barn. The haircuts were skinhead short, and the two of them never looked more awful and waiflike. The clippings were saved in plastic bags for later use.

In the interim, concert promoter John Brower and his partner Ritchie Yorke flew to Aalborg to get John and Yoko’s official approval for the plans for the upcoming peace concert. Allen Klein, who had appeared in Aalborg to help negotiate Kyoko’s move to Tittenhurst, presided at the meeting. Brower and Yorke were ordered to empty their pockets at the door and then were led into Cox’s simple country kitchen to find John and Yoko, practically bald, with a bewildered Kyoko pulling at Brower’s jacket and whispering, “I’m a girl, I’m a girl.”

John and Yoko were reading over the advertising material about the peace concert that Brower and Yorke had brought with them, when John came across a flyer that said, “Free (for one dollar) John Lennon Peace Festival. Toronto, July 3, 4, 5, to celebrate the year 1 A.P. War is over if you want it.”

“No! No! No!” John shouted. “Free means free, man! Not one bloody dollar!” Brower and Yorke argued that it wasn’t feasible to set up a concert to be attended by hundreds of thousands of people without some way to pay for sanitation and portable toilets. They said that a business office called Karma Productions had already been set up to sell tickets. John flew into one of his more vicious rages. He refused to give the concert his sanction or authorization unless Brower and Yorke could come up with a positively one hundred percent free concert for people dedicated to peace. Hamrick and Leonard, the hypnotists from the Harbingers, were appointed as John’s liaisons with Karma Productions.

A month later John was back smoking cigarettes and taking drugs at Tittenhurst Park; Kyoko was still with Cox; and the peace concert was dead. Brower and Yorke could find no plausible way to give a free concert, and Leonard of the Harbingers was giving press conferences saying that flying saucers would appear at the peace concert as a featured event and that John and Yoko would arrive in an “air car” that ran on psychic fuel. John shot off a telegram to Brower and Yorke in Toronto saying, “We do not want to have anything to do with your festival. Please do not use our names or our ideas or symbols. John and Yoko Lennon.”

That was the end of the nonviolent peace campaign for John and Yoko.

On the morning of January 26, John wrote a song called “Instant Karma.” This was a little warning from him that all those bad people he kept running across were going to be punished for their deeds. Phil Spector produced the song for him, which was released on Apple and credited to the Plastic Ono Band. The song was a substantial commercial success, particularly in America, where it sold over a million copies. Most of the credit, however, was given to Phil Spector for broadening and enriching John’s sound. As a gesture of gratitude, John gave Spector the raw
Let It Be
tapes, which had been sitting on a shelf in a vault, and asked him to make an album out of it.

 

 

John was willful, he was brilliant, and he was lost. There are men who at times are in need and who have kind and loving friends who come forward to give them aid and advice and encouragement. John was such a man with friends like these, but John was also unapproachable. Endowed with enormous wealth and power, there was no control over him, not a chance of affecting his behavior by good advice. His wife really had that responsibility, but Yoko seemed only to egg him on. In some odd way, John enjoyed the pain of being the outcast, it fed his martyr complex, as well as the Quarry Bank Ted in him.

Unfortunately, there was a point in early 1970 when John became such a pathetic and silly figure that he destroyed his last shreds of credibility with the press. The coup de grace was a press conference that John and Yoko called to announce the opening of the Black House. This was a black cultural center in Camden Town, sponsored by Michael Abdul Malik. Malik was better known to the public as Michael X, one of the controversial and feared leaders of the Black Panther movement in London. John and Yoko had befriended Michael X and taken him to their bosoms, agreeing to help raise money to support the Black House. With Derek Taylor’s coaxing, the press dutifully assembled on the roof of the Black House to witness a short ceremony during which John and Yoko would present Michael X with the bags full of hair they had cut off at Tony Cox’s farm in Denmark. Michael X intended to auction the clippings at Sotheby’s auction galleries and turn the proceeds over to his “brothers.”

The ceremony would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so sad. The press watched in silence, John obviously in a bad way, his hair still short from the severe haircut, his eyes glassy little marbles. Derek Taylor looked around the crowd of journalists and could see that there wasn’t one person present who didn’t know exactly what it was that John was stoned on. The next morning, for the first time in Beatles history, not one photograph of the event appeared in any of the London papers.

By the middle of March of 1970, Yoko was pregnant again. The doctors quickly remanded her to the London Clinic, an exclusive private hospital, for treatment. This hospital visit was a top-secret matter, unknown to the other Beatles and Apple employees. As top secret as the hospital stay might have been, it didn’t stop John and Yoko from having a few trusted friends visit them, including Magic Alex, journalist Ray Connolly, and Michael X, who brought to the hospital with him as a gift a suitcase full of marijuana. Yoko insists this hospital stay was purely for medical reasons connected to her pregnancy, but Magic Alex remembers Yoko being given methadone, a heroin substitute used in withdrawal treatment. At one point when Ray Connolly was in Yoko’s room, the doctors arrived to give Yoko some medication, and John stopped them, shouting, “Don’t give her that! She’s a junkie!”

Yoko’s difficult pregnancy continued back at Tittenhurst Park. With Yoko confined to bed in poor condition, John felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Extensive renovations were still underway at the house, and there was the constant noise of hammering and sawing. They began to have violent arguments, none of which did Yoko’s health any good. “We’d been together twenty-four hours a day,” John said of this unhappy period. “That was our love, to protect our love—we were really beginning to choke each other … We were in danger of being, I don’t know, Zelda and Scott … We would have blown up in a few years, couldn’t have kept up the pace we were going at.”